Mmxxery

Posted on 3 January 2021 by Henry Gee

Being the contrarian that I am, I shall defy convention by saying that 2020 has been a year that’ll stand in the anals annals tale of years as historical and transformative, for good reasons as well as bad.

True, millions have suffered, in all sorts of ways. Some of them — including people I knew — have died, horribly. Isolation has taken its toll on mental health. Personal relationships have suffered. There has been an increase in domestic violence. Indeed, it would be tasteless to be optimistic without qualification. I am one of those who have stood to benefit from lockdown, and when I think of the blessings I enjoy, my mind plays an as-yet-unmade film by someone like Ken Loach about a single mother on the 17th floor of council tower block, with a baby, a toddler, no employment, a defective elevator, and stairwells full of druggies and smelling of wee.

However, I think that for all these things, tragic and agonizing though they are for those concerned, there are a number of reasons to be cheerful.

— I represented my Alma Mater, Leeds University, in Christmas University Challenge, and, not only that, we won the competition, the first non-Oxbridge team to have done so. To be sure, it was filmed in 2019, but the final was broadcast on 3 January 2020, so just makes the cut. You can watch the final match here.

The Leeds Alumni, paying attention. And sitting up straight.

As you’ll see if you watch the clip, we had a lot of fun, and I made some good friends in my fellow team-mates.

— I managed to get publishers for my next book. I am very excited about this, though at the moment it’s still in the editing phase. I should add that I had expert help in the form of my brilliant agent, who closed a UK/Commonwealth deal with Picador and a US/Canada deal with St Martins Press. At time of writing, rights have been acquired for translation into Chinese (simplified), Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian and Russian. It should be in the proverbial All Good Bookshops in time for Christmas (2021).

— Lockdown has meant, for me, that working from home has become something I do all the time, rather than almost all the time. I am fortunate in that I am already tooled up for remote working, so my working life changed little. However, the absence of browsing and carousing away from home meant that I saved £££. I learn that I am not the only person to be in such a happy state, such that when the economy bounces back, the bounce might well be both vigorous and high. As shopping was almost completely limited to online ordering, I have perforce been on a diet and have lost weight. People started noticing the new, slimline, go-faster Gee around August, and since then I have lost a(nother) 5 kg.

— Back in the day I played music live very often in my beat combo. I haven’t played a concert with the band since March, Instead, I have become interested (and tolerably proficient) in home recording. Like many in lockdown, I have acquired a new skill. I have even put this to use beyond the comfort and safety of my own luggoles. Working entirely from my home studio, I added some accordion to a friend’s folk song, and also contributed some Hammond organ to the forthcoming single of a band well known in blues circles. So now I am a proper session musician! More news on that as it arrives.

— Just before Lockdown we acquired a new dog. Here she is.

Dog.

This meant that I got a lot more exercise than I usually do, encouraging me to be more At One with Nature Nature. Again, I am not the only person to have felt the benefits of getting out into the open air.

Turning to more general matters: it is a fact universally acknowledged that pandemics have marked effects on historical trends. The Black Death of 1351, for example, killed so many people that the consequent shortage of labour effectively brought the Feudal System to an end. Thankfully the current pandemic is nowhere near as serious as that, but the effects will resonate in the ways we do things for years to come.

We have learned, for example, that working from home is much more practicable than many had thought, and does not result in a loss of productivity. As a result, we have learned that one’s home address doesn’t need to be within commuting distance of one’s place of work. This puts much less strain in public transport, the environment and worker performance, and might even mean that London — that tumor that sucks a disproportionate amount of  resources into its never-satisfied maw, to the detriment of the body of Britain as a whole — will become less important, and that local economies (and property prices) will become more equable across the nation, offering more hope and opportunities for younger people, especially.

Taking a longer view, the pandemic should revolutionize education. With the increase in remote learning, educationalists should be asking themselves whether the traditional methods of classroom teaching really are as necessary as people have thought. They should also be asking themselves whether traditional school curricula are effective means of fitting young people for adult life. Consider: who, as a teenager, really needs quadratic equations? Wouldn’t it be better to teach people what an APR is; how to count their change; and how to fill out a tax return? I do not think that all education needs to be remote, or even should be. After all, there is (so people tell me) some benefits to socialization. As Asimov wrote in this ancient story, school life can be fun.

But perhaps the most important thing we have learned is that it’s possible to create and deploy a vaccine to a hitherto unknown disease within months, rather than decades. In the wake of this pandemic, funding structures will be in the spotlight, and there will (or should be) a bonfire of unnecessary admin. And it’s no bad thing that science has been brought to the fore as a matter of public discourse — and that scientists are being hailed as heroes.

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Squintlepiece

Posted on 31 December 2020 by Henry Gee

The Turkey City Lexicon is a document from the SF Writers of America that offers advice to would-be authors of science fiction, pointing out the pitfalls that snare the unwary novice.

A Pitfall for the Unwary Novice: from https://www.starwars.com/databank/sarlacc

A problem peculiar to SF is striking a balance between ordinary domestic events and the otherworldly happenings with which the protagonists are confronted. Says the Lexicon:

It’s hard to properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of Dad’s bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city.

It calls this problem ‘Squid-On-The-Mantelpiece’. The mantelpiece part comes from a rule attributed to Chekhov, that anything mentioned in a piece of writing should be there for a reason. Specifically, if a pair of dueling pistols is seen on a mantelpiece in Act One, it should be used by Act Three. Otherwise, it shouldn’t be there. When applied to SF, it’s the giant writhing kraken that should be the focus of our attention. Unless Dad’s financial problems have a direct bearing on the elimination of the be-tentacled menace, they should be omitted.

A Giant Be-Tentacled Menace. Some time ago.

Notwithstanding inasmuch as which we all seem to be living through what seems to be the plot of a SF story in which the business of the world is brought to a halt by a peculiarly contagious virus, I had reason to conjure a mental picture of this squid while listening to a number of podcasts lately, although for clarity I listened to them sequentially, not simultaneously, and here, if you’re interested, or even if you aren’t, are some reviews.

I’m fairly new to podcasts — they have been, for me, a syndrome of the current crisis — and I tend to listen to them while walking the dogs through the blasted post-apocalytpic dystopia pleasant woods and fields within a few miles of my house. I chose a few drama podcasts that dealt with horror and the supernatural, because at my age one needs a certain amount of spice to excite my jaded palate. So, what follows are brief spoiler-free reviews and links to the podcast series that impinged, via mes oreilles, to the auditory cortex. I shan’t rate them individually, but the order reflects my preference, from least worst to most worst. As you’ll see, I didn’t rate any of them as especially stellar. Another reason for not giving ratings, I suppose.

The Lovecraft Investigations (BBC Sounds) is a three-series podcast, which should be listened to in order. The series are The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Whisperer In Darkness, and The Shadow over Innsmouth. Each of the three series gets its name from a novella by the late hack writer and unrepentant racist snob Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), but tricks it out in modern dress —  more or less, what Mark Gattiss and Steven Moffat did with Sherlock. Lovecraft was one of those authors that kept the guttering flame of the gothick burning into the age of modern conveniences, and his lurid tales tend to make up for in atmosphere what they lack in stylistic prowess. That is to say, they remain long in the memory even when one has forgotten their execrably over-wrought style, and their cast of demons with names which, as Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove remarked (in Trillion Year Spree, their compendious history of SF), read like anagrams of breakfast cereals. As my correspondent Professor P. A. of Uppsala has it — start each day with a bowl of crunchy Nyarlathotep with ice-cold milk. Many Lovecraftian tales involve the efforts of a banished cadre of trans-dimensional beings to impinge themselves on our reality, mainly through the incantations of witchy types who’ve stumbled across moth-eaten books of Forbidden Knowledge. In short, this is what The Lovecraft Investigations is all about. The framing device is a podcast — so this is a podcast-within-a-podcast — run by mild-mannered Brit Matthew Heawood (Barnaby Kay) and plucky, go-getting American investigative reporter Kennedy Fisher (the excellent Jana Carpenter). There’s also a lot of info-dump from Eleanor Peck, an academic who knows a lot about the occult (Nicola Walker). Heawood and Kennedy take in Lovecraft and go beyond it, to X-Files-style Secret Government Departments, flying saucers and so on, and the relationship between the co-leads does remind one of Agents Scully and Mulder in that venereal venerable emission. Fun fact: this is a family show, in that Barnaby Kay and Nicola Walker are a real-life couple, as are Jana Carpenter and writer-director Julian Simpson, and this folie-a-quatre contrives to keep the squid on the mantelpiece.

The Harrowing (Storyglass: from Apple Podcasts) stars Joanne Froggatt (you know, the Lady’s Maid from Downton Abbey) as Sgt. Jackie O’Hara, who is posted to a remote Scottish Island called Toll Mòr [Tip for Aspiring Writers of Horror: Scottish islands are great locales, the remoter the better — Ed] Matters overwhelm this exiguous police presence when a once-in-a-generation storm hits the island at the same time that a grisly murder is discovered in the most remote homestead on the already remote island (did I mention that it’s remote?) The murder has ritual content which signals the imminent arrival of … well, that would be telling. The fact that any self-respecting trans-dimensional threat should make its presence felt first on a remote Scottish Island rather than, say, London, is by-the-by. The Daleks always get these things right [I hear that Cardiff is lovely at this time of year — Ed]. Overall it’s an involving, fairly fast-paced single-series adventure. The sound design is eerily good. Squid remains nailed to mantelpiece.

Tracks (on BBC Sounds) is a conspiracy thriller that runs over five seasons. They need to be listened to in order, and they are Origin, Strata, Chimera, Indigo and Abyss. It concerns the life of a GP called Helen Ash, and it’s fair to say that if it weren’t for bad luck, she wouldn’t have no luck at all. The conspiracy — or conspiracies — involve Big Pharma, illegal genetic and reproductive experiments, and a superfluity of abandoned military bases in Wales. Dr Ash has a nasty habit of getting anyone she meets killed, but that doesn’t deter her longtime co-conspirator, Freddy Fuller (played by Jonathan Forbes) who can’t seem to stay away, despite his protestations; the fact that Ash behaves in a perfectly horrible way towards him; and the fact that (in the later series) he has a very understanding wife back home. Which is a plus, as the by-play between Ash and Fuller provides the only humor in the entire wearisome enterprise. Certainly, the whole thing could have been made shorter. The frequent digressions into cod-science and speculations about Life, the Universe, and … er that Other Thing do add to the brooding, self-important atmosphere — spoiled when Romola Garai (who plays Helen Ash for two of the five series) pronounces ‘nuclear’ as ‘Nucula‘. Damn, those Molluscs of Mass Destruction. Apart from that, Dr Ash’s personal problems really are key to the plot, so the squid does just about manage not to slither off the mantelpiece.

Children of the Stones (on BBC Sounds) is a single-series podcast set in a village called Milbury that’s completely surrounded by a stone circle [Tip for Aspiring Writers of Horror: if you can’t manage a Scottish island, stone circles are always a winner — Ed]. Almost all the adults in Milbury have been brainwashed into a state of mindless cheeriness (‘O Happy Day!’ is their constant refrain) that reminds one of what might happen to Royston Vasey were Prozac piped into its water supply. The children and the remaining adults try to work out the reason for this indiscriminate happiness. The protagonist is a young girl who has been transplanted by her father, an archaeologist who’s been hired to investigate the stone circle. You’ll not be surprised to learn that she’s key to unlocking the mystery, which involves a mad scientist and some kind of implausible astronomical conjunction, and after a long, slow start, the series collapses into a swamp of hooey. Apart from the baddie, who would have seemed dated even when Christopher Lee or Vincent Price were in their pomp, the characterization is sketched just sufficiently this side of caricature, so the squid remains ascendant.

The Piper (BBC Sounds), in contrast, could certainly have benefited from some cheeriness. Like Children Of The Stones it runs over just one season (any more would have been intolerable). It is set in a deprived seaside town in Kent in which children hear strange sounds and then disappear. At various times all the as-yet-undisappeared children in the town stop what they are doing and act in unison (very Midwich Cuckoos, that), warning that the eponymous Piper is about to strike. Tamzin Outhwaite stars as an overworked police officer struggling to balance work commitments with home life, specifically attending to the needs of her much less ambitious sister. The series is so worthy you wonder whether the social issues are overplayed at the expense of narrative logic. Too much mantelpiece, not enough squid. What squid there is, is definitely undercooked. Although fleeting references are made to historical visits by the Piper, these are never pursued: the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is not mentioned at all, which is a shame. The Piper, for reasons unexplained, also has a love-hate relationship with electricity. And, not to spoil things, the denouement is pulled out of nowhere by one of the female leads, not through any logical inference, but because she’s a Mother, and therefore Knows Things. It follows from this that the social stereotyping is wearisomely familiar: working-class women are gritty, shrewish and shouty, whereas their menfolk are feckless layabouts (if white), or well-spoken but ineffectual (if ethnic). Only the children and teens are likeable, if barely. The dialogue and absence of humor are pure EastEnders (with a modish splash of Jafaican) and you expect some harridan to shriek ‘Git orf mar mantoo-piece!’ to some shivering mollusc before serving it, battered into unrecognizability. With chips.

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AdHederance

Posted on 27 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Over the festive period I’ve been ploughing through a volume of some vastness entitled 65 Great Tales of the Supernatural (ed. Mary Danby). I bought this grimoire secondhand a long time ago. It contains many well-anthologised old chestnuts such as The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson; Lost Hearts by M. R. James; The Red Room by H. G. Wells, and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe (a particular favorite). Naturally, no such anthology can call itself complete without The Signalman by Charles Dickens, and this is no exception.

One of the stories with which I was not familiar was The Hollies and the Ivy by Elizabeth Walter. This festively appropriate tale concerns a young couple who buy an old pile called The Hollies. Their intention is to renovate it. The building is, however, in the process of being totally submerged by ivy that no amount of poisoning or pruning can remove.

This spurred me into action against my own ivy problem. I have neighbours who adore ivy so much that it covers their entire house. The mountainous shape in the background here, indicated by the red arrow, is, in fact, my neighbours’ house (the Maison Des Girrafes is in the left foreground).

This ivy pours over the neighbouring fences, and seeds itself further afield. As you can see it has established itself in our front yard and I have spent some hours attacking it. I especially enjoyed doing this while listening to a festive edition of Gardeners’ Question Time on the radio. It (the ivy, that is) had completely submerged a panel of our front fence, circled in yellow here:

The ivy in, on, around (and through) this fence was as thick as a fist in places, and had created a microclimate in its dense foliage sufficiently still and damp for fungi to thrive. As a result the panel is rotten and will have to be replaced.

Some months ago I contracted a tree surgeon to remove some ivy that had seeded itself on the other side of the house, and to cut back some of the impinging ivy elsewhere. The tree surgeon told me he’d been in touch with my neighbours who, apparently, wanted their own ivy to be cut back. I don’t know what became of this. I suspect that the infestation is terminal. If my front fence is anything to go by, the ivy will have extended tendrils so far into the house that the vine is all that’s holding up the building. I dread to think about the state of my neighbour’s roof, guttering, drains, pointing, windowframes … Elizabeth Walter would have understood.

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Litreview

Posted on 20 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Yes, it’s that time again, when I list the books in the year just passed that I have most enjoyed. I’ve been doing this since 2014. That’s when I started noting authors and titles of books I’d read in a small notebook given me one Christmas by my friend H. F. of Edgefield.

This is an interesting exercise. Looking back, I find titles I enjoyed immensely at the time, but forgot about more or less immediately after I’d read them, rather in the manner of the sex life of the Brachiosaurus, its tiny brain being so far from its generative organs such that if it had sex it forgot about it afterwards.

This is no reflection on the books, but, perhaps, my ageing mind; that I read an awful lot of things; and that my mind is always full of  extraneous clutter. However, some of these books were both enjoyable and memorable, and books need to be both to make the list.

This year I have read 41 books. Here, in no particular order of appearance, as they say on  the game shows, are the ten I’ve most enjoyed — and remembered. It’s spoiler-free, in case you want to read them yourself. I have included links that allow you to learn more. At the end I’ll reveal the overall Best Read. Now, I have to say that this is my opinion. Please feel to disagree.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens – Something or other by Neil Gaiman usually features on my end-of-year list, and this year is no exception. This is a first appearance by Pratchett, however. I read The Colour of Magic, his first Discworld novel, many years ago, and enjoyed it. But when I looked up there seemed to be a superfluity of other such novels. So many books, so little time.  That, and the peculiarly ardent nature of its attendant fandom, put me off. I was stimulated to read Good Omens by the imminence of a rather good televisual emission, and I managed to get the book in first. Gaiman and Pratchett wrote the book before either author had become famous. You’d never know this, however: for all its freshness, it is achieved with consummate skill. It started with an idea from Gaiman who mused, as only Gaiman can muse, about what would happen if one of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories crashed into the Book of Revelation, with all the opportunities for humor that such a collision would engender. Wickedly, laugh-out-loud funny. And while on the subject of Neil Gaiman…

Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys – Another of Gaiman’s books in which real gods come down to Earth, and mayhem ensues. But where American Gods is cinematic, Anansi Boys is a sitcom, with both sit and com. Here’s the sit: you are a regular klutz of a bloke whose aim in life is to be conventional and quiet. One day, though, your long-lost brother appears. He looks just like you, but is much more fun. He steals your girlfriend and turns your life upside down. That’s the ‘com’ part. For, you see, you are both the sons of Anansi, the African trickster God, who has lately been spending his retirement quietly fishing in the West Indies. Until…

Bram Stoker, Dracula – You’ll both realize by now that I am as fond of a good gothic yarn as the next man shuggoth person, but I had never read this one. Less a good read than an exercise in peeling away all the accumulated layers of schlock and hoar that have submerged it. All the elements are there, however: a crumbling castle in Transylvania; a bloodsucker that accretes the souls and personalities of its victims; and Van Helsing, the charismatic vampire-hunter recruited to hunt it down and destroy it. What is perhaps unexpected and surprising is that it’s written as a series of letters and journal entries from a cast of more or less unreliable narrators. And what a lot of old tosh it is. Dated, sexist, over-written, but, like many in the gothic genre, for all its literary faults it exerts a residual psychological power.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five – Many writers who served in war became so traumatised by their experiences that they could only get it out of their systems by resorting to the fantastic. From the Great War there was, of course, Tolkien (The Fall of Gondolin) and Stapledon (Star Maker). From World War Two there was Kurt Vonnegut, and Slaughterhouse Five. The novel tells the story of a war veteran, witness to the bombing of Dresden, and his entire later career as a humble small-town optometrist, written as if all his life experiences were lived at once, which is the perception of time experienced by an alien race. That it is weird one can take for granted. That it was published in 1969, during the Vietnam War, pegs it as an anti-war novel. It is therefore a product very much of its age, but despite its subject matter it has a lightness of touch that’s almost ethereal.

Samanth Subramanian, A Dominant Character – Every so often I have the privilege of being asked to review a book for the Literary Review, and this was one such. It’s a biography of John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964), pioneering evolutionary biologist, consummate and prolific author, and, in his time, a popularizer of science as well-known as Alice Roberts or Neil DeGrasse Tyson are today. He was also a complex character. Born into the Scottish aristocracy, he became an active member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and eventually quit Britain to set up a research institute in post-independence India. Haldane’s life was such a Boy’s-Own ripping yarn — and lived so much in public — that it’s amazing that he’s rarely been the subject of a biography. This is only the second (the first was a hagiography written by one of his final students, in India) and is likely to be definitive. And while we’re on the subject of biography …

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton – Offspring, eh? When they are small they are a sauce tzores source of effluvia comfort and joy. When they get older, they enthuse about the various manifestations of popular culture with which they come into contact. If it hadn’t been for the Offspring, I might never have experienced the unalloyed delight of such things as Lady Gaga, The Mandalorian, Peaky Blinders, Game of Thrones, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure or the DirtyFilthySexy club night, to name but nine three six. One of the most enduring of such discoveries is Hamilton, the hip-hop musical written and initially performed by the remarkable songwriter and human being that is Lin-Manuel Miranda. The idea came from this book, which Miranda had taken to read on the beach. And what a great read it is. Hamilton came from the storm-wracked island of Nevis (‘A forgott’n spot’n the Caribbean’, as the musical has it) to become one of the Founding Fathers of the U. S. and A. He was a revolutionary, soldier, statesman, autodidact, founder of the United States Treasury, creator of advanced financial systems of debt and credit, Washington’s right-hand man, husband, father, lawyer, philanderer, heart-throb, dandy, social climber, abolitionist, prolific essayist, newspaper magnate, pamphleteer, founder of the U. S. Coastguard, duelist, and, for all I know, the winner of the Mrs Joyful Prize for Most Advanced Student in Knitting. These days we take the founding and rise of the U. S. for granted. It is easy to forget that at the beginning it was weak, fragile, and its system of government was a loose ball, up for grabs by anyone brave to pick it up and run with it. Hamilton’s idea of an advanced, aspirational, industrial, centrally controlled federal nation was in opposition to Jefferson’s dream of a loose association of agrarian states supported by slave labor (indeed, Jefferson comes out of this story as a complete sh1t). Many of the divisions in modern US society might be traced to this mutual antipathy. I learned a great deal about the early history of the U. S. from the musical. I learned even more from this book. If Mr Miranda is reading this, I suggest that his next beach read should be The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate by Toby Appel. Just a thought. And while on the subject of things introduced to me by the Offspring…

Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea – Morgenstern’s debut novel The Night Circus was my top read of 2014 and would still get a place in my all-time top ten. This, the follow-up, has been a long time coming. It has the same richly evocative atmosphere as The Night Circus, but is both darker and much harder to unpack. It’s very hard to describe, but if forced to do so in a phrase, it’s a fantasy spy thriller about books and reading. Think of a cock-eyed mashup of Borges, James Bond, and The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas, but set in Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, if Mr Magorium had set up an extensive library. In a sweet shop. Underground. With bees. This is one I shall enjoy re-reading. And while on the subject of re-reading…

Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker – This is one of my favorite books, which I had occasion to re-read this year as I needed to quote it in my fifthcoming forthcoming tome A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth. It’s arguably the boldest, most ambitious work of speculative fiction ever penned. For all that the book is quite short, it covers no fewer than 400,000,000 years of cosmic evolution. The entire story of humanity occupies a couple of short paragraphs. But it’s no space opera. Stapledon, a lifelong pacifist who served in the Friends’ Ambulance Service on the Western Front, wrote it in 1937 as the world once more slid into war, as a philosophical exegesis on the significance of individual action that might seem hopeless or negligible when measured against the scale of the cosmos. Absolutely unforgettable.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life – As the autumn closed in and fungi started popping up everywhere, this book landed on my desk: another commission from the Literary Review. It’s an engaging tour of fungi and how they shape our lives. Sometimes it’s so exuberant that one suspects that the author has been at the psilocybin, but it’s never less than entertaining.

… And the Overall Winner goes to …

… roll of drums …

Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy – This cyclopean doorstep had been glaring down at me from the shelves for years, but I had been daunted by the sheer size of it. It’s more famous for being one of the longest single novels ever written in English than for anyone actually having read it. I was prompted to try, as I sometimes am (qv. Good Omens) by a televisual emission, in which this sprawling edifice had been condensed into six one-hour episodes. Although the drama was gorgeous to look at, it was sometimes hard to keep track of who was related to whom, but by the end I had gotten the gist. With some vague idea of the story, I pitched in. And, do you know what? The water was lovely. The story starts in 1951 and is set over a period of eighteen months or so, in India, which has just become independent and has undergone the trauma of partition. It starts with the many worries of Mrs Rupa Mehra, who is trying to find ‘a suitable boy’ for her student daughter, Lata. The daughter is as mild-mannered as her mother resembles a spiced-up Mrs Bennet. But the story broadens out to encompass the lives of Lata’s cousins and their friends, whether Hindu or Muslim, to give a bright yet occasionally bewildering picture of a society of immense complexity built on ages of tradition, which is, at the same time, trying to find its place as a new and modern nation. Given its place in the literary canon it is a surprise to learn that it is as easy to read as, say, a large fantasy novel, though better written than most. After all, Seth gives no quarter to any reader who, like me, knows no more than the basics of Indian food, festivals, religions, castes, languages, history, geography, climate, politics, styles of dress, musical instruments, and so on, so I found myself having to look things up constantly. One is often confronted by such culture shock reading a large and complex novel set in some imagined world, and, once I had grasped that, I sailed along. It was one of those books that I raced through, and mourned once I had turned the last page. And, who’d have thought it, the televisual emission grasped the essentials extremely well.

Greatest Hits of the Past
2014 (45 books read) – Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
2015 – (41) Dan Simmons – Drood
2016 – (43) Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall
2017 – (34) Ursula K. Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness
2018 – (56) J. R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Gondolin
2019 – (18) Brian Catling, The Vorrh

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Naturistical

Posted on 14 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Thirty-three years ago today Sgt Pepper taught the band to play I started work at Nature. I joined as a junior news reporter on a three-month contract. It’s the longest three-month contract anyone has ever had.

Because I am a monster of vanity and arrogance people sometimes ask me how I got to be where I am today, I have decided to write this as a kind of public service. So pay attention. And sit up straight.

My journey to the dark side science journalism began when word got round that I really didn’t want to continue in research after I finished my Ph.D. My advisor put an advert from Nature on my lab bench — Nature was looking for an assistant editor. So I applied.

Much to everyone’s surprise, not least mine, I was called for an interview with two senior members of staff whom I shall not embarrass by naming. The exercise was one of mutual incomprehension. I was sent away and asked to sub-edit a paper and mail back the results. The paper was an absolute pig, all about messenger-RNA processing, concerning which I knew not from an hole in the ground. Even more to everyone’s surprise, I was called back for a second interview. This was with the then editor, the late, great John Maddox. As I recall, this was a cozy chat in which Maddox was polite enough to feign interest in my research project.

Some time later, Maddox phoned. My subbing test wasn’t very good, apparently. But there was, it seemed, another opening. ‘Can you write?’ asked Maddox.

‘Yes’, I replied (well, I wasn’t going to say ‘no’, was I?)

‘Send me something you’ve written’.

My bluff was called. I’d written a lot for my college magazine. I was the editor of the Graduate Union magazine. (The writer, too. I even compiled the crossword). I’d written a review of a Motörhead concert for a local arts magazine (A fellow graduate student, who came with me, described the group to his rock-averse supervisor as ‘A Quartet playing Contemporary Music’). None of this was remotely suitable. So I sent an article I’d sent on spec to New Scientist about mammoths, which they chose not to publish.

Time passed. Autumn drew on. As I’d heard nothing from Nature, I started to see about securing a short-term grant that would allow me enough time to finish writing up my thesis. I had nothing planned after that.

It was 10 am on Friday 11 December, 1987, when the phone went in the basement of the Zoology Museum where I was writing my thesis on one of the department’s BBC Microcomputers. The technician answered the phone. ‘It’s for you,’ he said. ‘It’s the Editor of Nature.’

‘I’m offering you a job,’ said Maddox.

‘Great!’ I said. ‘When does it start?’ I thought it would be after Christmas, or maybe later in the Spring, when I’d finished my thesis.

‘Monday morning,’ he said, ‘at nine-thirty.’

The weekend was spent extricating myself from the tentacles of the University and research council and organizing a sudden move to London — where, thankfully, I had a place to stay.

At 9:30am on Monday 14 December, 1987, I turned up at the Nature office and was attached to the news correspondent. I was given a story to write. It was all about new radiological protection guidelines, of which I knew even less than messenger-RNA processing. ‘When do you want the story?’ I asked. ‘No hurry,’ said my new colleague. ‘about noon’. That’s when I started to learn the craft of journalism – to write authoritatively on something you know nothing about, usually at a moment’s notice. Amazingly, my story was published.

All this was practice for what was to come. My real job, it turned out, was to write and edit Nature‘s contributions to a popular science column that appeared from January 1988 in The Times, six days a week, on the op-ed page. I wrote about everything, from high-temperature superconductors to cave paintings, AIDS to exploding galaxies. I wrote more than 470 of the more the 700 articles over the subsequent three years or so, sometimes three pieces a day. For an essentially completely inexperienced writer to be picked to write on the op-ed page of the Times was rather like being chosen to start for Norwich City Spurs after a few Sunday kick-arounds in the park. To call this the luckiest of lucky breaks doesn’t really do it justice.

After three months, Maddox called me into his office. I wasn’t good enough, he said. So he gave me another three-month contract.

After six months, Maddox called me into his office. I still wasn’t good enough, he said. So he gave me another three-month contract.

Sod it, said Maddox after seven months, you’re still not good enough, but you’re here now, and offered me a permanent position.

Over the years I’ve been a features editor, science-fiction editor, proof-reader, roving news reporter, sub-editor, and press-release writer. I even had a photo on the cover (Volume 362, issue 6419, 1 April 1993, since you’re asking). Not long after I joined I begged the biology manuscript team to throw me some bones, and so added palaeontology editor to my portfolio. Essentially, I asked for (and got) the job for which I’d initially failed to qualify. Those were more relaxed times, when we received many fewer manuscripts than we do nowadays, so for a period I managed to handle the entire evolutionary biology beat part-time, while writing (and editing) popular science stories for worldwide syndication. After the Times contract lapsed, my writings turned up in places as varied as Le Monde and El Pais, The Hindu and the New Zealand Herald. Nowadays I’m a full time editor, handling evolutionary biology.

My path into Nature was not typical, and relied, very much, on my hitting it off personally with John Maddox. I like to think I understood what made him tick — his gleeful iconoclasm, his contrarian nature, his sense of humor. That he would sometimes do things just for devilment. We remained firm friends until he died.

Back then, Nature was a cottage industry operating from two floors of a rather small building just off Fleet Street surrounded by several pubs and a small club called the Electric Banana (don’t look for it, it’s not there any more).

That was before the internet, even before dial-up; before online publishing; before free-access; when authors would send four copies of their manuscript, on paper; when subscription to a printed magazine was the only way to receive Nature;  when, if you were in (say) California, you had to wait two weeks for the latest issue to land in your mailbox; when we communicated by snail-mail, telephone or fax; when ‘pasting up’ really did involve glueing pieces of text together, and when ‘typesetting’ was all about hot metal (if only just). There were these things called ‘typewriters’. The office’s only computer was a green-screened, cathode-ray-tuberous monstrosity in Maddox’s office.

During my time at Nature the world of science has changed utterly, for which I can claim no personal responsibility whatsoever. In December 1987, the only genomes that had been sequenced were of viruses. The first bacterial genome was years away — the huge gnome human genome, a distant dream. The only planets known orbited our own Sun. Dinosaurs didn’t have feathers. Would we ever discover real-world equivalents of hobbits, or yetis, wondered nobody, ever.

The publishing world has also changed, and changed radically. Indeed, it’s changing very fast just at the moment. So, if you want to join Nature, my experience is hardly typical. You might need to ask someone else…

So, thirty-three years. Almost a third of a century. On 14 April, 2021, though, I’ll celebrate thirty-three and a third years – by then I really shall be a long-playing record.

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Misterious

Posted on 10 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Yesterday I drove Mrs Gee, a student nurse at the University of East Anglia, to UEA where she had to do some necessary admin that couldn’t be done remotely. While she was doing that, Posy the Golden Retriever took me for a walk in Earlham Park, which is just across the road. Earlham Park is lovely. Huge swathes of grassland punctuated by the occasional stately tree. Posy was delighted.

Fun In The Park, recently.

As we walked, a thick mist fell. It might have been a fog. What’s the difference between a fog and a mist? A mog and a fist? Either way, it looked like this:

Earlham Park, Norwich. Possibly.

In the fog mist murk, the self-similarity of the landscape increased — grass, grass, and more grass, with the occasional half-seen tree. I very quickly became lost. If it hadn’t been for the Ordnance Survey app on my smartphone, which showed me where I was, and, crucially, told me which way I was going, I might have wandered round for hours.

Most worrying was how much I had become disoriented. My innate sense of direction was skewed by more than ninety degrees. I was often quite surprised to learn of the directions indicated my my phone. Only by trusting it completely, and ignoring what my brain was telling me, did I find my way back to UEA and Mrs Gee, who had finished her business and was waiting for me. Time, it seemed, had passed. More time than I had expected. It’s chilling how quickly one can become lost without cues to tell us where we are.

I did, though, have one cue — a half-dismembered bicycle abandoned behind a bush, noted on my way out, greeted me on my way back. It was a waymarker, reassuring me that I was going in the right direction.

It reminded me of a time when I became lost in a similar way, in a similarly self-similar but otherwise very different landscape.

The Turkana Region of Kenya, Summer 1998.

I had joined Meave Leakey and her field crew on the western shores of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya in the summer of 1998, where I spent a fascinating fortnight learning what palaeontologists actually do in the field. I wrote about some of my experiences in a book. A couple of the finds from this region eventually made their way into a well-known science magazine. I should say that I played no part in their discovery. Indeed, I could have walked over (or past) them several times without knowing they were there. Finding fossils and artifacts requires you to get your eye in.

But I digress.

Each morning we would walk from our field camp to where we would prospect for fossils. This wasn’t a single site, but an entire landscape that looked very much like the picture above — a self-similar scene of gullies, mounds and the occasional small bush or tree. Each person would spend their time largely alone, wandering around and looking at the ground to see what had weathered out. We would, however, try to remain more or less in sight of one another, and bright clothing was encouraged (I took a small collection of aloha shirts). When the time came to go back to camp, we’d always go in pairs, or as a group.

I discovered why when, one day, I foolishly decided to walk the few hundred yards back to camp alone. I thought I knew the way, but I soon wandered off course and got lost. One tree came to look much like another. These were the days before smartphones and GPS, so I had no artificial aids. The sun was not much use, either, as I was more or less on the Equator, and, at nearly noon, it was standing overhead. I was saved only when I saw a glint of metal under a tree, some hundreds of yards to my left — it was one of the field vehicles in the camp.

Meave was rather concerned, when I told her what had happened, and warned me sternly not to do this again. In foggy, doggy Earlham Park, even without a GPS, one will find civilization sooner or later, or at least another dog-walker, and there is little in the way of banditry or wildlife to interrupt one’s quest for safe harbour. The remote desert of northern Kenya is another matter entirely. I could simply have disappeared in its sandy immensity and never have been seen again.

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Dreamages

Posted on 3 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Oh, these dreams. I don’t know whether it’s the present situation, or the drugs, but I do have the most vivid dreams these days. Sometimes they are photo-realistic … except that the reality is not as one might expect.

Some years ago when these drugs were just recent invaders of my system I dreamed I was in conversation with a close colleague. I’d have sworn it was real except that I knew for a fact that the colleague in question had died some years before.

I recall another in which I was a sculptor, one of five who’d each been given an entire floor of a converted warehouse near King’s Cross Station(1) to display their works. All agreed that David Bowie’s exhibits were the best.

Last night’s though, took the madeleine. I was in a tour group visiting Fallingwater, the famous house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. This was designed in 1935, in Pennsylvania, as any fule kno, for a Mr and Mrs Kaufmann  (HT Wikipedia). In my dream, though, F. L. W. created it as a retirement home for Abraham Lincoln, just outside Springfield, Illinois. In this reality, Abe didn’t get shot at Ford’s theater, and lived to a ripe old age. One of several surprises was that apart from the famous concrete cantilevered bit over the waterfall, most of the dream house was wooden, like a giant shack, which was rustic, and, given its age, a bit rickety.

In my dream (oh, do keep up at the back)  Lincoln’s later political life was bitter and for some reason or another the burghers of Springfield really didn’t like him at all, so to irritate him they built the State Capitol in exactly the right place so it could be seen from the house — lined up directly with the cantilevered bit over the waterfall — forever reminding the Aged President of political turmoil, in the very place he’d come to forget. Later in the dream the tour group visited Springfield itself and went to dine at a Portuguese restaurant (no, me neither).

The biggest surprise for me, though, was that in my dream I just knew that Springfield was the Capital City of Illinois, which turns out to have been the only part of the dream that matched reality, though, for all I know, there is a choice of Portuguese restaurants in Springfield, a city I have never visited. I’ve never been to Fallingwater, either. I must have learned that Springfield was the capital of Illinois once upon a time and my subconscious recalled it.

This retrieval of random bibelots, tchotchkes and netsuke of knowledge has served me well in my waking life, as it did last year when with my fellow alumni of Leeds University, we conquered all comers to win Celebrity Christmas University Challenge — the first non-Oxbridge team to win this particular iteration of the show, and the first time Leeds has won any version of the show. I learn that it’s going to be repeated on BBC4, though you can find all the episodes on YouTube, if you want to.

A University Challenge. Last Year.

Our victory brought much joy to Leeds University, though I notice that I still haven’t been awarded an honorary degree. In my dreams…

(1) It’s a little known fact that the name of King’s Cross Station has nothing to do with trains, nor indeed crosses, though it is very much connected with royalty. The name is a corruption of that given to the place where, in about 1790, King George III had salt-water ponds created so he could have a fresh supply of Cromer crabs and lobsters for the royal table. Whether this contributed to his famous madness is unknown, but the area soon became known as King’s Crustacean.

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Differetail

Posted on 2 December 2020 by Henry Gee

News has reached Cromer that the Pfizer vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, has been approved for use in the UK. This information followed the news yesterday that Debenhams, a department store founded well over a century ago, had collapsed; and, before that, that the business of the Arcadia Group, a retail concern that owns many fashion stores, was now under the aegis of the Official Retriever Receiver.

The Official Retriever, recently.

It might not entirely irrelevant to this discussion to note that following the news of the collapse of its retail outlets in meatspace, the hitherto neglected Debenhams website was deluged with online shoppers.

The retail model that news outlets call the ‘High Street’ has, in fact, been dead for years. It is predicated on the idea that people do their shopping in different stores all located close together, and that customers will live close enough to them that they can do it all by walking, or a short bus ride. The model started in medieval market squares and worked well enough when towns were small, and before people had cars.

It was still working fifty years ago when my mother, clad in a thigh-length orange coat and high boots and toting a trolley basket, just like Sophie’s Mum in The Tiger Who Came To Tea (published 1973) took the Infant Gee on the bus to the shops, back in the day when plastic bags were new-fangled (even back then we were discussing the problems of biodegradability – the idea that we did things without a care for the environment is a conceit of thunbergistas, who think anyone over the age of about sixteen cannot possibly have anything of interest to say, except if they are David Attenborough) and Sainsburys was a store where you still had to shop at separate counters.

While women shopped (it was almost always women) their useless husbands would commute to an office or be parked conveniently in a street-corner pub where they would drink beer. As evidenced from The Tiger Who Came To Tea, drinking beer is an exclusively male pastime, pace the existence of sentient tigers. Young people, they’d never believe it.

The big change came with the car; the modern superstore; and the switch to malls shopping centres that offered easier parking and accessibility for both shoppers and wholesalers with their large trucks, and a shopping environment with plenty of room to move around and not be rained on. That was when ‘The High Street’ started to die. Symptoms worsened with the advent of internet shopping. Even before COVID-19, shopfronts that offered services, rather than goods, were starting to do their work remotely. Witness the closure of High-Street bank branches, given that it’s much easier to do business online, or through an app. COVID-19-inspired restrictions have exposed the flaws in the High-Street business model.

What does this mean? It means that even after we’ve all been vaccinated, the world is not going to return to normal. And however many times people will talk about ‘the new normal’, one can never, to mix metaphors (and hang on in there baby, I haven’t finished yet), step in the same river twice. Prediction, as someone once said, is very difficult — especially about the future.

Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, one can start to see some signs of how things might turn out. The growth of internet shopping has revived the lost art of the delivery of goods – not just from Amazon, but from local shops, and even restaurants. What’s good for Snoop Dogg will be fine for the rest of us. Did somebody say ‘Just Eat’? Some shops are already reporpoising repurposing as distribution centres. It is perhaps worth noting that in the Heyday of the High Street, shops (takeaways too) used to deliver direct to homes much more often than they do now. In The Tiger Who Came To Tea, Sophie’s Mum expected regular weekly supplies from The Butcher’s Boy or The Baker’s Boy, delivering goods on their bikes. Perforce risking for a second time the strained quality of mercy credulity of younger readers, is my childhood memory of the Onion Man, a (supposedly) French person with a striped matelot jersey and a beret and one leg who pedalled asymmetrically around our neighbourhood, strings of onions pendulant from his handlebars.

In the New Normal, people will realise how liberating it is to work from home and have all their shopping come to them. Shops will still exist, but they will be leisure-time destinations rather than daily necessities. Even now, shopping centres combine retail outlets with dining opportunities, cinemas, and other attractions. On those occasions when I Get Down With The Kids (increasingly rare, as after I Get Down, I can’t easily Get Up Again — It’s the knees, you know), they tell me that they go to shopping centres to socialise rather than shop, and to department stores for clothes for special occasions, or just to try things on that they’ll buy later online. Meatspace shops, then, will become more like show-rooms — Apple Stores (where you buy computers, not apples) — already work like this.

The question arises of what will happen to those vacant shops, and, notwithstanding and moreover, commercial properties in city centres. The answer is relatively simple – they could become anything, if local politicians and planning departments have the imagination to be flexible about zoning. If shops and offices aren’t needed, or needed much less, homes definitely are. And schools. And walk-in health centres. This will lead to a much more mixed environment in which shops and people will be closer together once more, and, with the decline of the car, local shopping will become attractive and feasible again. The increasing locality of shopping and nonlocality of work should level out inequalities of property value, business rates and local taxation, so that living in a city centre will be less different than in a small town than it is now. If it’s no longer necessary to go to London to find all the high-paying gigs, equality of opportunity should increase.

Shopping centres (and their huge car parks) would be redeveloped as homes, parks, or even dug up and rewilded. A future pop hit will be called Big Yellow Uber: the chorus would run ‘Create Paradise/ Rip up a Parking Lot’. So, even if they do most of the regular shopping online, Sophie and her parent (both/either/all three of them will work at home) will once along go shopping along the future equivalent of the High Street.

This is predicated on the idea that politicians and planning departments have any imagination to start with. It’s not really their fault. Once at a science-fiction conference I asked a futurologist whether people in the future would work from home, only for this notion to be pooh-poohed: no more than 15 per cent of people would ever do this, he said. And this was a person who spent a lot of time thinking about future trends, rather than managing the present. It takes a global pandemic to jolt management structures and ingrained habits out of their slough of inertia. The SF writer William Gibson wrote words to the effect that The Future is already here, just not widely implemented. To take a specific example — we already have the technology for self-driving cars. What’s holding up their adoption is (I suspect) questions about liability when one of them is involved in an accident. The things that hold up the future are not so much the absence of technology as the under-development of imponderables such as legislation.

All the preceding reminds me of the story of the mohel who works from a storefront. The municipality decrees that all storefronts should have an attractive display in the window to entice passers-by. Initially at a loss about what to do, the mohel gets a job lot of pocket calculators and arranges them tastefully in the window. Nobody takes any notice because, you know, those who know, know, no? Until one day a large tiger a man enters his shop and asks to buy a pocket calculator.

CUSTOMER: I’d like to buy a pocket calculator please.
MOHEL: I’m very sorry, I don’t sell pocket calculators.
CUSTOMER: I rather like that nice Texas Instruments model. Or the Casio.
MOHEL: As I said, I don’t actually sell pocket calculators.
CUSTOMER [puzzled]: Really? But there is a  tasteful arrangement of pocket calculators in your window.
MOHEL: It’s like this. I’m a mohel. What do you want I should put in my window?

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Covinfamy

Posted on 28 November 2020 by Henry Gee

Are you frightened of COVID-19? Being frightened is not good enough. If you are one of those who dismiss lock-downs as an over-reaction, or an infringement of civil liberty; or a person anxious about the cancellation of Christmas; or who subscribe to some conspiracy theory or other — or, perhaps, one of the seemingly large number of people who seem to think it could never happen to them — you should be a lot more than just frightened.

You should be terrified.

The core symptoms of COVID-19 — that is, infection with the SARS-C0V2 virus — are a persistent dry cough, high temperature, breathing difficulties and general respiratory distress that could become pneumonia. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One reason why you can can carry the virus for so long without apparent symptoms — and therefore spread the virus widely — is that the virus initially dampens your immune system, as if sending the guards off to sleep. When your body realizes it has an interloper, it’s too late: the virus has already made itself at home deep in your lungs.

As if to make up for its earlier lapses, your body then over-compensates. Normally, your body responds to an infection by releasing substances that alert the immune system, causing inflammation. With COVID-19, though, the body overdoes it, creating what’s ominously known as a cytokine storm. This is a kind of immune-system chain reaction that can lead, in some cases, to multiple organ failure and death.

In the meantime, infection can cause serious disorders to your blood’s natural clotting system. This can lead to anything from your blood failing to clot where it’s meant to — and clotting where it’s not meant to. Blood clots in your arteries and veins can lead to anything from deep-vein-thrombosis to angina and stroke. A long-term effect is damage to all the blood vessels in your body, which has the potential to lead to symptoms associated with diabetes, such as long-term damage to nerves, loss of sensation in extremities, and, especially, acute kidney damage, that could require you to have dialysis and even transplant. Your heart muscle may also suffer long-term damage.

Your brain and nervous system may also be affected. Neurological symptoms range from loss of taste or smell, to headaches and dizziness, to blackouts and seizures. The virus has been implicated in encephalitis (infection of the brain), meningitis, stroke, as well as Guillain-Barré Syndrome (a disorder in which the immune system attacks the nerves); Miller Fisher syndrome (which can cause various forms of paralysis) and assorted psychiatric complaints (including hallucinations). There is at least one case of COVID-19 associated with parkinsonism.

Now, SARS-CoV2 is not the first virus to be associated with these acute, horrible and life-threatening conditions. What’s unique about the virus is how easily you can spread, it, especially during the long period when you might have the virus but be unaware of it. To make matters worse, it seems likely that the virus can be transmitted through the air, not just in drops of spit.

Although I am an editor for a well-known science magazine (and, needless to say, so I’ll say it, I’m writing here in a personal capacity), all this information is freely available, to anyone. I found it during a casual hour on the net this morning. None of this information is obscure, and if there are terms you don’t understand, Google is always happy to help.

Ignorance is no excuse.

People really need to wake up and smell the coffee (and if you can’t smell the coffee — it’s too late).

Fretting about getting the family over at Christmas? Good. Chances are, if you get the virus, it’ll pass off after a week or two in which you feel ghastly, but you’ll get better — although you will have spread it to your vulnerable relatives. Nevertheless, those long-term consequences should give you pores paws pause for thought. To be sure, some of the more disastrous results of viral infection are, it has to be said, very rare. But, well, just think. Is a seasonal knees-up worth any risk, however small?

If you think it is, have another mince pie.

Go on, punk. Make my day.

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Linnean

Posted on 22 November 2020 by Henry Gee

This picture, which I have shamelessly stolen liberated stolen liberated from the Twitter account of the Linnean Society of London, is of Charles Darwin’s study at Down House. It reminds me of an anecdote that Twitter is too small to contain, so I shall recount it here.

Darwin’s Study. Some Considerable Time Ago.

Many years ago when the world was young, and definitely BC (Before Children) I was one of several Vice-Presidents of the Linnean Society of London. Each year the Society would hold a reception knees-up Conversazione at some historic location associated with natural history. One year Down House was to be the venue. It fell to the President of the Society to welcome guests at the door, but that year the President was doing fieldwork thousands of miles away. The next available Vice-President was unable to attend for personal reasons, so the Executive-Secretarial Finger moved down the list until it got to me.

So it was that me and Mrs Gee hared it down to Down, were ushered into an upstairs room so we could change into our Posh Frocks, and were stood in the vestibule of that historic residence, where we could shake hands and make small talk with the arriving multitudes. The multitude was indeed multitudinous, and took most of the evening to arrive, so that by the time we could leave our posts most of the food and drink had gone and we only had time for a quick tour of the house — including, of course, the famous study.

Then we drove home.

By the end of the evening, our feet ached from standing on that hard Victorian tiled floor. Our hands ached from having shaken so many others. Even our faces ached from the effort of smiling.

The last thing I remember before floating off into sleep was Mrs Gee saying ‘now I know what it must feel like to be the Queen’.

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