The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire is now available in paperback in a land run by criminal gangs with no respect for democracy, human rights or the rule of law universally applied, where disease runs unchecked across the burning land, and advocates for reason, science and truth are persecuted by star chambers as if they are witches.
Also, Canada.
I wrote somewhere that there is no surer sign of an unwillingness to write than an untended blog. I should perhaps qualify that statement, because blogs might remain untended for all sorts of reasons, chief of these being, in my case, that no-one cares what I think, but coming a close second is that one is far too busy writing something else. So it has been with me for the past few weeks.
I have been contracted to write another book. As it’s in the early stages let’s pretend it’s a popular work on moral philosophy called The Only Way Is Ethics, even though it’s neither. Getting the synopsis right was hard work. In the early days it would take a year to get the synopsis into a state that my agent would not feel embarrassed showing it to a publisher. Even today, with a substantial oeuvre on my shelf, publishers still like a synopsis, and they are still hard to get right, though they don’t take as long as a year.
Eventually the synopsis passed muster but two things happened.
First, my UK publisher bought it, and I have a contract, but my editor announced that he was leaving for another publisher (editors do this) which was a shame because he is in my opinion something of a wunderkind and his ideas for reframing the synopsis were on point. I’m sure he’ll go on to do great(er) things. Happily his replacement is highly experienced and well-thought-of, but different editors have different opinions.
Second, my US publisher declined the option to publish The Only Way Is Ethics, citing poor sales of my earlier works (publishers often say this) but it reflects a declining market for popular science in the US, perhaps as that country lurches into a new Dark Age.
The third thing, out of these two things, was that a book appeared with a similar theme and title to mine. The publisher didn’t think this was a problem, but I felt I had to recast things somewhat. And that’s what I’ve been doing.
One of the subjects in The Only Way is Ethics, which I tackle in the first chapter, is something I know (or knew) very little about — too little even to make a kind of plan. I had to research the subject from the ground up. Writing was postponed until I was practically OMT on it and was ready to start writing. This was an amazing experience as I like learning new things, but one chapter became two, and I ended up writing the equivalent of a scholarly Annual-Reviews type article on this subject, though with more jokes. (The abbreviation ‘OMT’ is Gee-family slang and not suitable for polite use).
During the course of this I thought some more and got a richer, deeper appreciation of what the book should be about, so having drafted these chapters I drafted a prologue – which acts as an overture to all the chapters – as well as writing chapter summaries and a new statement of intent. Phew! So, almost 40,000 words later, I have a document I’m happy with, which I have sent to my agent; my editors old and new; and the foreign-rights department of my UK publisher who want to start hawking the idea abroad.
During this process I avoided AI for the actual writing. I’m a writer, dash it all, and people actually pay money for words put together, in some sort of order, by me. I didn’t use AI to correct anything. I did use AI, though, as a kind of search engine when I wanted to look up papers, using specific prompts such as ‘is there any evidence that Southend Pier is made of toenails and treacle?’ and then I’d take it from there. For the final check, before sending, I had the computer read the text to me at a slow pace, while I followed along. This picked up the kind of mi$takes it’s easy to miss when reading silently to oneself, as one often skips across things without noticing.
So, there we are. I might take thirty minutes off, or even half an hour, before I start researching for chapter 3, during which break I can catch up with this untended blog.
Featuring the struggle to reach the top of coming up to, notwithstanding inasmuch as which I just about manage to summarise the books I have read listened to consumed before the relevant month is out. The first two and the last were audiobooks, my regular accompaniment while walking dogs. The third was, you know, an actual book, a birthday gift from fellow bibliophile Offspring#2, and read while on vacation in Wales (where we visited Hay-on-Wye, because, you know). In other news, I now have an account on TikTok, so help me, where I plan, if time permits, which it usually doesn’t, to review some of the titles I read in video format.
Stella Rimington: Dead Line the latest in the seemingly innumerable adventures of MI5 agent Liz Carlyle as she and her crew foil an attempt to disrupt a Middle-East peace conference held in Scotland.
Stella Rimington – Present Danger Liz Carlyle is posted to Belfast, to keep her from forming an office romance with her recently bereaved boss. There she uncovers a plot to smuggle arms to a Republican splinter group.
Lucy Mangan – Bookish The news says that there has been a steep decline in the number of people who read books. Whether or not this is really true is perhaps a subject for another day, but in Bookish columnist and critic Lucy Mangan celebrates her love of reading, and how books have helped her through life’s crises. It’s a sequel to Bookworm, in which she reflects on her reading childhood, and picks up at the point where our teenage protagonist has to read stuff for her GCSE exams. (You don’t have to have read Bookworm to enjoy Bookish – I haven’t read it either). Mangan’s thoughts and reflections only occasionally intersect with my own – and why would they? Different people like different things, and it’s interesting to learn what others enjoy. She is, as always, a great writer (though extended parenthetical comments (some of which are nested (like this one)) that go on far longer than they should really have done for comfort might have benefited from a firmer editorial hand, or a footnote). On that subject, some of her footnotes are great: here’s one.
It remains my firm belief that if you have a teenage daughter obsessed with Wuthering Heights you should send her to her room now and not let her down until she’s thirty. Save you a lot of bother overall.
She also reflects on some perhaps unexpected reading choices, such as the comfort, while as new mother, afforded by Lee Child’s novels featuring Jack Reacher, a man built like the proverbial outhouse who settles scores with fists ‘the size of supermarket chickens’.
Do you know how many times a day the mother of young children longs to beat the shit out of someone?
Wonderful stuff.
Andy Weir – Project Hail Mary If you’ve read The Martian by the same author, you’ll know what to expect. Well, almost. The set-up is similar – an astronaut is marooned, a long way from home and with no hope of rescue, but being a natural optimist and not prone to woe-is-me despondency, seeks survival and solace in being able to ‘science the shit’ out of the situation. To start with the protagonist wakes from a coma with no memory at all – not even his own name – but his memory returns in flashback as the story progresses, so we finally understand why he is there and what he is doing. Along the way he receives help from a most unexpected quarter. This is a good old-fashioned science fiction book, based more or less firmly on science, of the kind that people wrote in the Golden Age of SF before writers incorporated much in the way of social or political commentary. In which case you’ll either love it or loathe it. As for me, I found it refreshing.
Oh, gosh, I wrote somewhere that a sure sign of unwillingness to write is an untended blog. I really ought to have qualified this. I’m just about to almost fast approaching coming to the top of another book deal – more about that anon – which will indeed involve a lot of writing, but first it requires a great deal of reading. Being the kind of person (that is, a trained scientist) who when making a statement about anything without a reference will feel as if venturing out of doors in a state of deshabille, I will always go back to the sauce tzores source, take notes, and follow up further references, which accumulate faster than I can read them. This has generated a large pile of light reading amid which I currently find myself.
Some light reading, recently. This box contains almost 200 references on a subject people know almost nothing about. Exhausting but not exhaustive.
This means that I don’t have much time to write this blog, in particular to update my list of books read in the preceding month, which is becoming every two months. So here is what I read (or, mostly, listened to) during the past couple of months. Apologies for the brevity.
John Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders – The human habit of drawing lines on maps seems no more strange than when one is flying above the ground in an airliner, or even in a spacecraft, revealing that these borders don’t really exist. For all that they are so insubstantial, they do cause a great deal of trouble. This entertaining read reveals the secret plans of Britain and France to carve up the Ottoman Empire (and we all know how well that went) to revealing why Bolivia has a navy, even though it’s landlocked. And other stuff.
John Le Carre: Smiley’s People – the conclusion of the trilogy that began with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and continued with The Honourable Schoolboy in which self-effacing spook George Smiley finally gets … well, that would spoil it. The writing is gorgeous, stately, measured. The character studies precise and detailed. You can practically smell the raincoats and cigarette ends and see the haloes of smog round the lamp posts.
Stella Rimington: At Risk When I discovered that my longtime friend Professor A. L. of London shares my new-found love of spy thrillers he recommended the works of former real-life spy chief Stella Rimington as easy reads that go down without touching the sides. Or, in my case, easy listens while walking the dogs. At Risk is the first of several novels featuring MI5 agent Liz Carlyle. Lots of twists and high drama, well plotted and straightforwardly delivered. I objected to one thing – the author’s habit of dividing sentences to show that the character is doing two things at once. As Dr Gee took another swig of his coffee, he noticed a spelling mi$take. But that’s really just a matter of taste.
qntm: There Is No Antimemetics Division This was a recommendation from Natasha Pulley, one of my favourite authors of modern fantasy, so was not to be missed. And it’s a doozy. Weird, sui generis, inventive to a degree, I’ve come across nothing remotely like it, the closest (and for weirdness rather than setting) is The Vorrh by Brian Catling (which made my Book Of The Year some years back). The premise is simple – we all know about memes – that is, ideas that propagate themselves, perhaps to a greater degree than their inherent worth deserves. But what if there are antimemes? Ideas, concepts or even objects that hide their own existence, and even compromise the memories of those who come across them? Compelling, thought-provoking, terrifying – this will be a contender for my best book of 2026. Thanks, Ms Pulley, for that recommendation.
Stella Rimington: Secret Asset Here our heroine Liz Carlyle is worried about her agent working to foil an Islamist plot, but is taken off the case to expose a mole in MI5.
Adrian Tchaikovsky Children of Strife This is the fourth in the increasingly inaccurately named Children trilogy (Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Children of Memory). Tchaikovsky bows to no-one in his ability to get inside the minds of aliens, and Children of Earth deservedly won awards. But the problem with sequelae of books with long, complex plots and vast casts of characters is that it’s increasingly hard to move the plot along without losing people, unless you can constantly revisit past lives and past contexts. Children of Strife suffers rather badly from this. The story is great, but moves with the speed of an arthritic sloth. And it’s not helped by the fact that many of the characters are really, really unsympathetic.
Stella Rimington: Illegal Action Liz Carlyle goes undercover to protect Russian emigre, art connoisseur and Putin critic Nikita Brunovsky, who MI5 think is at risk of assassination by a Russian secret agent. But is he?
‘Why don’t you go into Angel Aquatics and get some more angel fish?’ said Mrs Gee, thinking that our very large (136-litre) tank was down to just two fish – one Plecostoma, and one large angel fish, so was looking rather bare. I needed no encouragement and soon found myself in the Fish Room but there were rather few angel fish, all rather small. Perhaps small enough to be snaffled by the Plecostoma, which goes round the tank like a Roomba, snarling up anything small enough to fit into its mouth. But then I saw this:
This. Recently.
This is a Senegal bichir (Polypterus senegalus), a freshwater fish from western and central Africa, and I fell in love. Why? Because, as a palaeontologist (recovering), I appreciate extant signs of a lost world. The bichir is a member of an ancient lineage (it includes sturgeons and paddlefish) that extends right back to the Palaeozoic Era. Like all fish once did, it has functional lungs (in most fish this has since evolved into a swim bladder) and the pectoral fins are like stumpy little legs. Bichirs can even survive and move around quite well out of water. Mrs Gee, on being told this, wondered if Steve (it is called Steve) might make a break for freedom and will be seen scuttling down the garden path to the pond.
Here is Steve from the front, showing a rather smiley face like an axolotl (we used to keep axolotls a long time ago, they are now exolotls), and the resemblance is not a coincidence. All fish once had faces like this, before the highly evolved jaw mechanisms found in more recent fish — the teleosts, a group that evolved much later and which mow includes virtually all fish you can name, from swordfish to seahorses, from trout to turbot). Tetrapods – a group of fish that came ashore, have faces rather like this, though this does not reflect close relationship, more that tetrapods have retained the ancestral fishy face that most extant fish have now lost.
Steve. Front view.
Despite its seemingly happy demeanour, a bichir is a fierce predator and would soon denude a tank of all other fish unless I gave it, as protection money, a fresh (defrosted) mussel each day. At the same time I bought three golden cichlid-like fish as its backing group. They all came from the same community tank as Steve, so I hope it’s learned more peaceable ways than its fellows in the wilds.
UPDATE: Sadly, Steve started to nibble at the other fish so I had to take him back to the shop. I got three more cheerful cichlids instead.
Nowadays most people have the computing power in their pockets to summon, at will, the entirety of human knowledge, but, people being people, they use it to have arguments with complete strangers and post pictures of their cats. I have got over the tendency to the first impulse, but am still in thrall to the second, and with that in mind I celebrate, with this post, the recent 16th birthdays of Ted (on the left) and Elvis (on the right), brothers and littermates, who joined the menagerie in the Spring of 2010.
They came to us from a rather ramshackle establishment points east of Kings Lynn and were sold to us as girl cats. A subsequent visit to the vet revealed that they had fleas, worms, lice and testicles, all of which were humanely removed at a price. Here they are (the cats, that is) not long after their arrival:
Since then they have become the most sociable and affectionate cats imaginable. Although retired from outdoor pursuits (Elvis tends to forget where he is), Ted adds his great intellect to mine when I am reading heavy scientific tomes, and Elvis is Mrs Gee’s Diabetes Support Cat, alerting her to high blood sugars by sitting on her head and purring. We attribute their sociability to their having been raised by Heidi, our late Golden Retriever, who acted as Nanny/Climbing Frame/Playmate for the then-new arrivals. Here they are sitting for a family portrait.
Less than a week after the death of my friend, the palaeontologist Hans-Dieter Sues, I learn today that another friend, the zoologist Alan Wilson, has also passed. Hans died at home — peacefully, but unexpectedly.
Alan died in a plane crash in Namibia, with two other people. I am told that Alan wasn’t the pilot at the time, but the plane was one he had built himself — he flew to Cromer from London once to meet me for lunch (he bought cake).
Hans was a few years older than I am. Alan, a year younger.
So, my friends, seize the day. Don’t put off that project. That thing you wanted to do but keep postponing. Tell those you love how much. And hug your dog (other pets may be available). Do it every day. You never know, it may be your last.
If my three regular readers noticed the absence of my usual monthly book blog, they did not see fit to remind me. If any apology is necessary, I have been very busy elsewhere, promoting The Wonder of Life on Earth; getting ready for the imminent release in paperback of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire; working hard at the day job (by day I’m with the Submerged Log Company); and also developing a synopsis for what I hope will be my next book, working title The Taylor Swift Diet Workout. On occasion I have wondered why I continue this blog, as nobody reads it, except me, and, arguably, God. I am wondering if blogs are old hat, and I should reinvent myself as a substack, if I could only think of it as anything other than a variety of club sandwich.
But I digress.
Given that I spend much of the day staring at text for a living, it takes a lot for me to stare at more text for pleasure, even if I had the time. So I listen to audiobooks. especially during the hour or so each day when my dogs drag me out for a walk. Only two of the seven six seven titles below appeared before mes yeux as print on paper. The rest were imbibed via mes oreilles. So here goes.
Mark Gattiss: The Man In Black The Complete Series 1-4. Mark Gattiss is a gifted writer, actor and connoisseur of old-fashioned horror stories. Here he is the sinister compere of a number of radio dramas mainly set in modern times and I suspect originally broadcast on the wireless. None of them really did it for me, but I suspect that what with all the alpha-male shouting and female shrieking (the misogyny of some of these stories does tend to wear thin rather quickly), these tales are best listened to in small doses. I also listened to a precursor of this, a series called Fear on 4, in which the compere was Edward De Souza, which was rather similar but also dredged up some of the old classics including one of my favourites, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, narrated by Anna Massey, which was a treat.
Steve Brusatte: The Story of Birds Following his books on dinosaurs and mammals, the man known affectionately chez Gee as ‘Dinosaur Steve’ has written this page-turner on the amazing and improbable story of the evolution of birds. Bird evolution is a hot issue in science right now so it’s great to have an up-to-the-minute popular account, written with Brusatte’s usual brio. DISCLAIMER: Steve is a personal friend and the publisher sent me a pre-release copy for a puff quote. It’s published in June.
John Le Carre The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Having become rather fond of Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers last year, I sought to imbibe directly from the fountainhead. Set in the early 1960s very depths of the Cold War, veteran spy Alec Leamas poses as a defector to East Germany in order to infiltrate the East German apparatus and murder their brutal spymaster Hans-Dieter Mundt, who is apparently responsible for killing several British agents. While still in the UK Leamas forms a relationship with Liz Gold, a young British communist idealist, who also finds herself in East Germany as part of a Communist Party exchange mission. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the labyrinthine plot, except to contrast Liz’s naive idealism with the pragmatism of Leamas and his handler, the self-effacing spymaster George Smiley and especially Smiley’s boss, the mysterious Control, through whose character we see that the methods used by Western and Eastern secret services are equally horrible. Excellent, if somewhat dispiriting.
John Le Carre Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Here the action takes place in 1973. Control is dead, Smiley has retired, and the Secret Intelligence Service is in a state of collapse. Karla, the Soviet spymaster, has broken every British spy-ring behind the Iron Curtain. Suspecting a mole at the heart of the Service, Smiley is brought out of retirement to plug the leak. The discovery has devastating consequences for all concerned, Smiley not the least.
David Mitchell Number 9 Dream This is an author whose works defy categorisation, though if I were forced to try, they would be fantasy. I have enjoyed two so far – The Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks. Number 9 Dream is set entirely in contemporary Japan, and concerns Eiji Miyake, a twenty-year-old from an out-of-the-way island, who travels to the Big Bad and Bonkers city of Tokyo in search of the father he has never met. Thoroughly enjoyable, very funny and occasionally ultraviolent (Miyake gets mixed up with the yakuza) it is so intense that I could only manage a few pages at a time. If ever there were a novel that deserved the epithet ‘picaresque’, this is it. Mitchell does love his literary games, and the ‘Number 9’ in the title makes its appearance in several forms, either as nine, or 333, or in other ways. Loved it? I pitched headfirst into my ramen.
John Le Carre The Honourable Schoolboy This is the second novel (after Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) in the so-called ‘Karla’ series, but it can be read quite happily in isolation. The mole in the Secret Intelligence Service has been exposed, but at terrible cost: the credibility of the SIS is forever ruined, and the CIA (known as ‘The Cousins’) is muscling in. Everywhere the SIS is in retreat, which comes to the notice of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, which discovers that the house where the spooks used to inhabit is deserted. One of the journalists is Jerry Westerby, occasional newshound, failed novelist, broke aristocrat (he is the ‘Honourable Schoolboy’ of the title) and undercover SIS agent, who George Smiley brings out of retirement to investigate the business of Hong Kong high-roller Drake Ko, OBE. who seems to be in receipt of a large amount of Soviet money. It also turns out that Ko has underworld connections throughout Southeast Asia — including a very highly placed source in ‘Red’ China that the SIS and the CIA would both love to get their hands on. It’s set just as the Vietnam War is ending, and in many locations — Tuscany, Cambodia (where the Khmer Rouge is in the ascendant), Laos and Thailand, as well as Hong Kong and dismal early 1970s London, and the settings are very evocative. Smiley is once again brought in to sniff out the target, but his relations with the Cousins are nearly as problematic as those with the erratic Westerby, the result being somewhat mixed. I’ve been listening to all the Smiley novels narrated by Simon Russell Beale, and they are a joy, making sense of an occasionally dense and over-elaborate style, transforming what might have been a hard read into an immersive experience. The Honourable Schoolboy is the best so far, nd I’d be surprised if it doesn’t make my end-of-year list.
Against the remote possibility that neither of you has heard that I’ve written a book called The Wonder of Life on Earth, which is out next week, well, you know now. Or, rather, I co-wrote it. I did the text, but an artist called Raxenne Maniquiz painted the pictures. They aren’t attempts as realism so much as stylish and impressionistic. The book is aimed at pre-teens, who I’m sure will appreciate the pictures more than the text. In an afterword, I wrote that Raxenne’s illustrations ‘remind me of a book I read as a small child called The First Days of the Earth. That was a long time ago, and you can’t get it any more’.
Indeed, you can’t. I tried. I could find no trace of its ever having existed.
Then I had an epiphany.
The book was actually called First Days of the World, and I have just taken delivery of a paperback copy I bought on eBay. It was 
published by Scholastic in 1958. The text was by Gerald Ames and Rose Wyler, the impressionistic illustrations by Leonard Weisgard. I am sure the copy I had as a small child back in the mid- 1960s was hardback, but after almost 60 years, my memory isn’t what it was.
But as for the pictures — looking them now, the wonder of them came flooding back in a wave of nostalgia that feels almost like physical vertigo. The power of these pictures took me back to my infant self. I hope that The Wonder of Life on Earth will have such an impression on a young mind that they’ll feel the same when they come across it again more than half a century later.
The death is announced of Saffron ‘Ronnie’ Gee, Jack Russell Terrier on Friday 16 January, after a long illness, aged eighteen.
Ronnie came to us in 2011 aged about three, from a family that was moving into accommodation where pets weren’t allowed. It must have been a huge wrench for them, as Ronnie was a fantastic dog, a real live wire.
At first I was told that we were adopting a crossbreed between a Jack Russell and some other dog such as a dachshund. But when I met her my impression was that she was the most Jack-Russelly Jack Russell that you could possibly imagine. Sparky, cheeky, occasionally very fierce, great fun to be with and indestructible. As one of our guests observed, she was a ‘little rascal’.
With her great friend and playmate Heidi the Dog
Her recreations included chasing motorcycles and mobility scooters; running at very high speed in circles on the beach around her great friend Heidi the Golden Retriever (also no longer with us), teasing her with a ball, and vanishing down holes. Heidi was an internet sensation, having starred in a movie (scroll forward to 2’19”). Ronnie was never one to be outdone, though, and joined Heidi in a blog post about writers and their dogs. She was also part of a book project. Field research for Heidi and Saffron’s Guide to the Dog Friendly Beaches of North Norfolk saw us exploring beaches and their facilities from Sheringham to Happisburgh, but it was one of those things that never materialised. In later years she became a regular at the North Sea Coffee Company where she enjoyed her eighteenth birthday party with her many friends, canine and human.
At Her 18th Birthday Party
It was there that she finally achieved stardom, a few weeks before her death, in the North Sea Coffee Dog Nativity Tableau, as Baby Jesus.
Finally, a Starring Role
When Ronnie came to us she’d just weaned a litter of puppies. We wonder what came of them. They would be extremely old by now, but we like to think that they in turn had many descendants. Perhaps, even now, Norfolk is alive with Ronnies — running, tumbling, jumping, getting up to mischief and enjoying life as much as their ancestress once did. Ronnie is survived by three other dogs, three cats, two hens, a royal python, two fish and her grieving human family. May her memory be a blessing.
