I asked Chat GPT: Please recast the argument between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a scene from a play by William Shakespeare.

It came up … er … ‘Trumps’

A Scene from The Tempest of Tech and Throne
Act III, Scene II
A courtyard in the realm of public opinion. Enter DONALDUS, the exiled King, and ELONIUS, a merchant alchemist and master of flying chariots.

DONALDUS
What rogue is this that mounts the stars in steel,
Yet scorns the hand that lifted him aloft?
I made thee, knave! When Fortune’s tide ran low,
‘Twas I who lent the gale to fill thy sails.

ELONIUS
Thou err’st, great Trump, for I did chart my stars
Long ere thy golden tower cast its shade.
Thy boast is but the echo of thy pride,
Not coin from which I forged my wondrous works.

DONALDUS
Aye, silver-tonguèd serpent! In days gone past,
Didst thou not whisper praises in my hall?
“Most noble Donaldus,” thou didst proclaim,
“The sun itself doth envy thy bright reign.”

ELONIUS
In truth, I flattered where I feared thy wrath,
As courtiers do when kings grow tempest-toss’d.
Yet now the realm hath eyes to see thy guise—
A jester crowned, whose crown sits much askew.

DONALDUS
Thou art but a knave in merchant’s garb,
A peddler of toys and tongues of flame.
Thy wagons fly, yet still thou canst not flee
The ire of kings nor truth of loyalty.

ELONIUS
Better to craft new worlds than serve a fool.
Thy realm is tweets, thine armies bots and boasts.
Wouldst wage a war of words? Then have at thee—
But know, my ships reach stars thine eyes can’t see.

DONALDUS
Ingratitude! A sin most foul and deep!
Go then, false Elonius—fly far and fast!
Yet mark me well: no throne awaits in space,
Nor shall the people crown a lord of code.

ELONIUS (aside)
The stars are silent, yet more just than kings.
This play of power ends—I’ll write new scenes.

Exeunt, their feud echoing through the digital wind.

Once again I apologise for being late. I make no excuse for this, partly because there are too many reasons to mention. Oh all right, here’s one —  my desire to participate in the online world is waning. The same empty vessels  with the same prejudices still resonate  as loudly as they ever did. I am very tempted to leave them to it and do something more useful instead. Partly for this reason I haven’t added the usual pictures and links, and I am wondering whether I shall continue much more in this vein. Time will tell.

Paul Cooper: Fall of Civilisations I was prompted to read this as there was a glimmer of a joint book event with the author given that my latest book is similarly fin d’espèce. The event never happened, but I got the book all the same. It’s a very readable account of the decline and fall of different civilisations through the ages, and seems to be a spin-off of a podcast called Fall of Civilisations. The book definitely has that episodic feel. Each one of the fourteen chapters is a case history of the rise, decline and fall of a civilisation, from Sumer to Easter Island. It was refreshing to find details of civilisations far from the usual beaten track, such as the Khmer; the southern Indian civilisation of Vijayanagar; and the Songhai of the African Sahel. It is engagingly written, but – perhaps because of its derivation from a podcast – doesn’t quite have the coherence of, say, Collapse by Jared Diamond. So, what causes civilisations to fall? Well, it’s a number of things. Climate change (whether natural or human-caused); the exhaustion of land required to support a large population; but, mostly, the endless capacity for human societies to bash themselves in the face with their own stupidity, cupidity and vainglory.

Mark Rowlands: The Happiness of Dogs In which a professional philosopher and avocational Dog Person takes issue with the Socratic ideal that only the examined life is worth living. In the course of his exploration (and I use the word course advisedly, because one acquires in reading this book a great deal of knowledge about the current thinking on matters such as morality, motivation, sentience and so on) Rowlands shows that dogs, lacking the human ability to reflect upon themselves and their place in the world, have a more fulfilled life. It is the unexamined life, contra Socrates, that is worth living. Humans sometimes achieve a nirvanic state in which they can fleetingly ‘lose themselves’ , if, for example, they are playing sport; indulging in some hobby or activity that they love; or during sex. To quote from the Guide to Jewish Buddhist Wisdom – there is no self. But if there is no self, whose arthritis is this?  Dogs, though, find themselves in this state as a matter of course, and can do things routinely that many humans struggle to achieve even for a moment, such as full, honest love and commitment. So pupperino, so prelapsarian, and who, really, is the better off?

Jonny Sweet: The Kellerby Code is what might have happened had P. G. Wodehouse tried to write Brideshead Revisited but ended up with Vile Bodies. It concerns Edward, our mashup of Jeeves, Charles Ryder and Tony Last, who would do anything for his ungrateful friends Robert and Stanza. Collect their dry-cleaning. Get them tables at a restaurant. Be There for them at any time of day or night. And all because he has a burning and unrequited love for Stanza, whose ancestral pile of Kellerby stands in for Brideshead. Without wishing to spoil anything from this brittle, pin-sharp satirical froth, Edward – unlike Tony – laughs Last.

Tom Michell: Penguin Lessons The true story of a young Englishman who finds himself teaching at an English-style boy’s public school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1970s. On vacation across the estuary of the River Plate in Punta dal Este, Uruguay, he becomes the unlikely saviour of a penguin, the only one left alive after a colony has been fouled by an oil slick. Smuggling the penguin into Argentina where it becomes a kind of school mascot, the penguin – named Juan Salvado – provides inspiration for one and all, mostly by being a good listener. The book is charming and reminiscent of such tales as Tarka the Otter. I have heard that it is to be adapted into a magic-lantern presentation starring Steve Coogan as Juan Salvado.

Mouthy Al-Rashid: Between Two Rivers I have long been fascinated with the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, ever since I did a school project on Sumer almost half a century ago, reading the works of Samuel Noah Kramer and Georges Roux and becoming entranced with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Al-Rashid became entranced on her very first exposure to cuneiform writing, and offers a guide to the rises and falls of Mesopotamian civilisations through a unique lens. One of the many discoveries was a collection, all in the same stratigraphic level at Ur and in a palace that might have been the residence of a princess, of a series of Mesopotamian artefacts of widely divergent dates and uses. This, says Al-Rashid, could have been the earliest known museum. Al-Rashid uses these objects to tell the story of ancient Mesopotamia. I find my schoolboy interest rekindled.

James Rhodes: Instrumental The author is a renowned concert pianist who is unusual in that he came to the instrument late in life, and indeed for a period of ten years didn’t touch a keyboard at all. In this searing and very sweary memoir, the author recounts how his mind and body were scarred by sustained physical and sexual abuse from a gym teacher over a period of five years between the ages of five and ten. This led to a very uncertain life in which his deep psychological trauma remained — and still remains — unhealed. It also led to back problems caused by the spinal damage resulting from the repeated violent penetration of the anus of a five-year-old by an adult male penis. This is occasionally a very difficult read (or listen) and leaves one recoiling with rage at those adults who violate the young and the defenceless, and how society repeatedly fails to do much about it. Oh, and there’s some lovely music.

Natasha Pulley: The Bedlam Stacks Another month, another highly imaginative novel from Natasha Pulley. This one is set in the same fictional universe as The Watchmaker of Filigree Street but apart from a couple of scenes with the main protagonist of that book, the setting is very different. The scene is the early nineteenth century, and an British expedition is sent to Darkest Peru to steal cuttings of the cinchona tree for transport to Ceylon, so the quinine can be used to treat malaria ravaging the Indian subcontinent. The expedition makes its way over the high Andes into a region of dreamlike fantasy, where people with various disabilities and disfigurements live in New Bethlehem (hence Bedlam), a colony set on three tall islands (hence Stacks), set in a wide river, where magic is real and statues appear to move. The style is very much the Boy’s Own Adventure of tales such as King Solomon’s Mines (though with more modern sensibilities) with nods to Heart of Darkness and — dare I say it — the chilling Weeping Angels from Dr Who. Each one of Pulley’s novels has its own flavour, even if some are set in the same fictional setting. Whereas The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was crisp and telegraphic, The Bedlam Stacks is richly weird. The Half-Life of Valery K takes place in the Soviet Union of the 1960s — and The Mars House is set on, well, Mars. There are, however, things in common. The characterisation is sensitive; there is quite often a bromance between the two male leads; and all the novels feature at least one mention of an octopus.

I apologise to you both for the late arrival of this post. I have been otherwise preoccupied with promoting my latest book Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way as well as contending with a great deal of business at the Submerged Log Company, after which Mrs Gee and I enjoyed a short break. And, like Jenny, I am of the age where one begins to wonder why one bothers, realising (not for the first time) that I appear to be one of the few greyhounds in the stadium to realise that the hare they are chasing is only a toy. But I’m here now, and here is what I read in April.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Shroud In my opinion few writers can match Adrian Tchaikovsky in his evocation of alien life and its struggle towards intelligence (see his magisterial Children of Time, reviewed here). Here he has a crew of a spaceship forced to crash-land on the eponymous moon of a gas giant. The moon is optically dark but radiates vast quantities of radio chatter. The novel — mainly a two-hander between the surviving crew members of a crippled escape pod — concerns the meeting between humans and the alien life-forms on the moon that have evolved a kind of distributed intelligence based on radio chatter, during which the aliens seem to understand much more about the humans than vice-versa.

Travis Elborough: Atlas of Unexpected Places I had expected this to be as charmingly liminal as a superficially similar book, Off The Map by Alastair Bonnett (reviewed here) but it turned out to be less a meditation on the subject of topophilia (a love of place) as a compendium of more or less random find spots on the globe with interesting anecdotes about them, from an ornate but largely unused railway station in Spain to the caves of Lascaux in France. It’s the sort of book of short but amusing stories one would  put in the lavatory of  one’s guest wing to entertain visitors while they are on the throne..

Jess Kidd: The Hoarder This rambling mystery comes from the rich haul of authors I ran into while reading The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) and whose wonderfully gothic Things In Jars I reviewed here. Whereas that was Victoriana, The Hoarder takes us up to the present day with social care worker Maud Drennan who is sent to look after the cantankerous Cahal Flood in a decaying mansion crammed full of rubbish. Like Bridie Devine in Things in Jars, Maud is both Irish and psychic, forever accompanied by one or more saints, quick to advise her on what to do with her difficult charge. Maud is convinced that there’s a mystery in the House of Flood. Which of course there is. I love Jess Kidd’s writing. The prose is charming; the characters, beautifully realised  (Maud’s landlady, a transvestite retired magician’s assistant is especially memorable); and the dialogue exceptional. I’d be surprised if this didn’t make my end-of-the-year selection, though what with other rich pickings from The Winter Spirits it will have stiff competition.

Adam Roberts: Lake of Darkness A somewhat schizoid author who when not indulging in Tolkien-related silliness writes sere, biting and award-winning SF such as the very wonderful Jack Glass, about a criminal with igneous ingenious and incarnadine ways of breaching containment. Lake of Darkness is set in a post-scarcity future in which the crew of one of two spaceships exploring a black hole is murdered by the captain, Raine, who appears to have gone rogue. A historian specialising in 21st-century serial killers who interviews the imprisoned Raine is infected with what seems to be the same contagion (echoes of Silence of the Lambs). Whatever it is has — impossibly — escaped from the black hole. But what? An alien menace? Satan himself? What starts out as an everyday SF locked-room mystery turns into a tough, uncompromising exegesis on the physics of black holes… and the nature of good and evil. Not everyone will enjoy this. I found it mindbendingly brilliant.

Andrew Michael Hurley: The Loney Yet another author from The Winter Spirits, to which the author contributed The Old Play, a story about a drama performed as a traditional community ritual whose continuity appears to depend on the commission of a kind of  human sacrifice. These themes echo in The Loney, in which the devoutly Catholic Smith family goes on an Easter retreat to a remote part of the Lancashire coast, where there is a shrine to St Anne. Their story is told through the eyes of the unnamed teenage younger Smith son, protector of his older brother Andrew who is mute and has learning difficulties. The family hopes that Andrew’s exposure to holiness will cure him. And, well, he is cured (no spoiler – this is made clear in the Prologue) but what appears to be a miracle has not quite the holiness that the family imagined. The novel gets much of its power from the things that are left unsaid, the grown-up conversations that the narrator cannot quite understand, so that the horror dawns slowly on the reader who is ever eager to learn how Andrew’s miracle comes to pass. I’ll give no further clues, but there is a parallel in Ursula Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.