Special Circumstances

The Great Game: the struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk

Now I shall go far and far into the North, playing the Great Game.

"Kim", Rudyard Kipling

The mention of the words `cold war' brings to mind the mostly latent conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union which involved many other countries in its wake. That, however, can be considered to be history repeating itself. The original cold war was fought throughout the 19th century including the early part of the 20th in Central Asia between the British Empire and the Russian Tsarist government. The effects of this imperialist struggle are still around today even after the fall of the British Empire and the Soviet Union. This book is a chronicle of that period of history.

`The Great Game' was a term first used by one its protagonists: Captain Arthur Conolly but it only became famous as a term describing the cold war in Central Asia after it was used by Rudyard Kipling in his novel "Kim". I highly recommend reading (or re-reading) "Kim" after reading this book.

It amazes me that India was the land that ignited the entire conspiracy of the Great Game with both the British and the Russians trying to control the `immense riches' of India. A changing economy and a few hundred years of British rule have taken care of that particular tempation towards colonialism and completely changed the image of India in the world.

The time covered by the Great Game is expansive, starting with the treaty between Napolean and the Russians in 1807 all the way to the British invasion of Tibet in 1904. The cast of characters is similarly numerous, but this is not much of a problem as the Game is divided into many individual acts with their own protagonists. The stories themselves are compelling:

• Stoddart and Conolly's internment in the infamous Pit by the Emir of Bokhara;
• the various missions by the many British and Russian spies trying to infiltrate khanates like Khiva, Bokhara and Merv in disguise;
• the `foreign devils' like Aurel Stein stealing treasures on the Silk Road;
• the Russian annexation of Merv which eventually resulted years later in the Russian expansion into the rest of Central Asia;
• the British invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent struggle for power in Central Asia against the Russians;
• the massacre of Tibetan soldiers by the British at Guru during the attack on Gyantse.

The books reads like a contemporary political thriller with spies, treachery, rabble rousing, lies, the politics of greed and all the other good stuff.

Despite his claim earlier in the book that `I have tried, when describing the deeds of both Britons and Russians, to remain as neutral as possible', Peter Hopkirk's sympathies clearly lie with the British and he often apologizes for their actions while condemning equally reprehensible acts by the Russians. However the bias is overt and easily discounted by the aware reader.

Until recently, this book was the most comprehensive chronicle of the Great Game and along with Peter Hopkirk's other books was a comprehensive history of the times. A new book has appeared which covers the same period of history with a broader scope: "Tournament of Shadows" by K. E. Meyer and S. B. Brysac.

"Trespassers on the roof of the world" also written by Peter Hopkirk is a chronicle of various explorers and spies that have tried to infiltrate Tibet which also featured in the Great Game but to a lesser extent and as such was mostly left out of this book.

%T The Great Game
%T :the struggle for Empire in Central Asia
%A Peter Hopkirk
%I Kodansha International
%D 1994
%G ISBN: 1568360223 (pb)
%P 565
%K history

Date written: 2000/04/30

A Good Old-Fashioned Future by Bruce Sterling

... like coffee struck by lightning.

This is a collection of short stories by Bruce Sterling, all of them published in the 90s. Like many other science fiction authors, a many of Sterling's most imaginative ideas go into his short stories, a spark that somehow gets smothered in the novel-length treatment of the same ideas.

The book begins with "Maneki Neko" is a smartly written tale which draws on Sterling's cyberpunk roots; it takes the gift economy that Eric S. Raymonds (esr) keeps parading as the economy behind free software and extrapolates it into a marvelous dystopian vision.

"Big Jelly" is written with Rudy Rucker: who like Sterling is a distinguished cyberpunk alum. It is an odd tale about a high-tech biotech startup in the near future. The jargon is set on high but the ideas are sloppy and it eventually just peters out. There is a character in this story that I could swear is a thinly disguised Esther Dyson -- which made me smile.

"Taklamakan" is aggressively written and suitably hip tale about a pair of freelance hackers gathering intel in a Central Asian desert. Ultimately, it turns out to be an amalgam of two unrelated and untenable ideas, but it somehow works even if it is excessively cynical about the current political situation in Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan).

The other stories "The Littlest Jackal", "Sacred Cow", "Deep Eddy" and "The Bicycle Repairman" are all vignettes from a common futurist perspective mostly set in a anarchist future. Most of them use a European setting although strangely transformed as in "Sacred Cow" where the Indian `Bollywood' industry shoots all its movies in England to save money.

Even if some of the stories in this collection do not satisfy completely as short stories, they are entertaining for the detail with which Sterling paints each scene from the future. The best part of the futurism written into this book is that in Sterling's mind, the future as depicted in these stories is supposed to be *cool* which is better than utopian anyday.

%T A Good Old-Fashioned Future
%A Bruce Sterling
%I Bantam Books
%D 1999
%G ISBN: 0553576429 (pb)
%P 304
%K science-fiction

Date written: 2000/05/01

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William E. Burrows

William Burrows does not explain exactly what he means by "The First Space Age" until the last chapter of the book. He is referring to the militaristic space race between the two cold-war rivals: America and the Soviet Union. Even pure scientific endeavours had to be funded by exploiting politicians who feared that the other side would do it first. That history still colors most of space research today and this long arc of time is the main focus of this book.

The main appeal of reading a detailed history of spaceflight is that you get at least a glimpse at the thousands of people other than the astronauts who were behind the scenes in the many missions to space undertaken around the world. It takes a book like this to help us appreciate the real scale of each effort in spaceflight.

Despite the relatively short time that humans have had spaceflight, there are far too many historical details for even a 700 page book to cover exhaustively. Fortunately, where some of the details are lost in this book (for example, the Apollo missions after Apollo-11) there are entire books that deal with these subjects. Hence, despite its length, this book serves only as an essential introduction to the history of spaceflight. Don't read this book if you want a detailed description of any particular mission to space. However, by sacrificing details of particular missions Burrows makes room for a more comprehensive description of human endeavours in space -- not just concentrating on the more glamorous manned missions, but also describing in deserving detail the unmanned missions. Burrows also is careful enough to present the stories of many of the engineers and managers without whom no space program would exist.

If you consider yourself an enthusiast of space exploration this book is a must-read. You are likely to find many new facts here including many surprising ones. However, it is not just for the facts that one should read this book. Burrows also tackles the philosophical issues involved in the rationale for spaceflight. Burrows is careful not to dismiss out of hand those voices that were opposed to space exploration (mainly because of the costs involved). Rather, Burrows gives voice to the many scientists who have argued for the importance of space as a human endeavour. These arguments, both pro and con, are spread throughout the book and helped to sharpen my own opinion about the reasons for space exploration.

Apart from the engineering and science history, Burrows also tries to document the politics behind the thrust into space by the United States and the Soviet Union. The now infamous military-industrial nexus that drove space research in both of the superpowers is documented and discussed in great detail. Personally, I found this to be less interesting than the science history.

Burrows' writing is at its best when he tries to convey the amazing feat of flinging manmade objects out into space. However, there are also quite a few annoying aspects in the writing. In many places, only the last name of a person is mentioned and one is forced to go through the index to find the full name and description of this person. This happens far too often and should not have overlooked by the editors. Also, there is some repetition of facts, but that is to be expected in a book of this scope.

Due to the focus of Burrows' books, there is very little discussion about the space programs of countries other than the US and Russia. Apart from a few references in Chapter 17 ("The Second Space Age"), there is no information about whether or not countries other than the superpowers could develop a viable space program in the future. Such information would have been fitting in a book that has such a wide breadth about space exploration.

Another book that seems to tread the same ground is "Countdown: A History of Space Flight" by T. A. Heppenheimer. Unfortunately, I haven't read it and so am unable to compare their content.

%T This New Ocean
%T :The Story of the First Space Age
%A William E. Burrows
%I Modern Library Paperback Edition
%D 1998
%G ISBN: 0375754857 (pb)
%P 723
%K history, space exploration

Date written: 2000/04/10

Flux by Stephen Baxter

Post-human. Hard-SF. Look no further: this is the book. Hard-sf often does not attempt to look too far into the future to keep the speculations rooted in hard science. Stephen Baxter does not need to follow these rules to mould his flavor of hard-SF. He takes us far into the future; a future which is realized with (apparently) solid scientific speculations. The choice of location determines everything in this far-future story.

The protagonists of this novel are submicroscopic humans composed mainly of tin nuclei engineered to live in the superfluid mantle of a neutron star. This is science-fiction so hard, it's supercarbon.

Baxter is perhaps the ideal ubergeek built to tackle such a daunting project. His meticulous attention to detail in building this world pays off -- everything seems to fit together. The nagging doubt in my head was that this was perhaps a One-idea book whose inventiveness will fizzle out after the first few chapters. Surprisingly, this was not true. Long after the novelty of the constructed universe begins to wear off, the story is still compelling.

Baxter, unfortunately, fumbles in the last few chapters as he struggles to tie up all the threads in his epic. The pseudo space-operatic finale is disappointing. However, the book is still worth reading for the rest of the ride.

%T Flux
%A Stephen Baxter
%I HarperPrism
%D 1993
%G ISBN: 0061008370 (pb)
%P 409
%K science-fiction

Date written: 2000/04/12

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.

Flann O'Brien

Flann O'Brien is considered one of the giants of Irish literature. The Third Policeman invites comparisions with the work of Lewis Carroll, Borges, Stanislaw Lem, Richard Brautigan and Jonathan Swift but it is important to consider that `Flann O'Brien' (a pseudonym for Brian O'Nolan) had finished this book in 1940, but didn't find a publisher until 1967. Some say it was the whiskey drinking that got in the way.

There are good reductionists and bad ones forming the foundation of good and bad scientific inquiry. O'Brien pokes fun at all reductionists in this book. The protagonist spends quite some time in a two-dimensional police station arguing the finer points of `Atomic Theory' with his interrogators. The theory turns out to have surprising consequences for the makeup of bicycles and men.

Anyone interested in Borges' work should read this book just for the footnotes which expound in great detail on the works of de Selby (according to the protagonist, the most brilliant physicist, ballistician, philosopher and psychologist who ever lived). The footnotes sometimes also quote the various annotations and critiques of de Selby's work. The footnotes at the beginning of the book span the usual one or two lines, while towards the end of the book span several pages (at one point engulfing the main text itself).

Like Stanislaw Lem (in "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub") and Borges (see e.g. "Ficciones"), O'Brien compares the criticism of some of de Selby's writings to cryptography. Especially the several decryptions of the `Codex' ostensibly written by de Selby in such bad handwriting that no one can decipher its message.

Some parts are far more inventive than others, and since most of the novel is either biting satire or surreal wandering, your mileage might vary. Here is an example of what O'Brien can accomplish in this genre:

The Sergeant looked at me incredulously. `That is a great curiosity,' he said, `a very difficult piece of puzzledom, a snorter.' He sat down by the turf fire and began jawing his knuckles and giving me sharp glances from under his bushy brows. ...

I was unwilling to give any lead to the direction of the talk and there was complete silence for five minutes. Then his expression eased a bit and he spoke to me again.

`What is your pronoun ?' he inquired. `I have no pronoun,' I answered, hoping I knew his meaning.

Like his later book "The Dalkey Archive", this book is a `study in derision'. The satire is so laden with invective and is so dense that I wish there was an annotated version of this book to read which would make it much easier to read. Although sometimes annotations are a liability, as is the case with versions of "Gulliver's Travels" annotated with copius amounts of historical details.

What is your pronoun?

%T The Third Policeman
%A Flann O'Brien
%I Dalkey Archive Press
%D 1967
%D :First Dalkey Archive Edition, 1999
%G ISBN: 156478214X (pb)
%P 200
%K fiction, literature

Review written: 2000/03/16

Earth Made of Glass by John Barnes

It is surprising to find an author in the late 90s writing a story that intellectually is the successor to the old 'humanistic' science-fiction authors. This is a tale of social engineering, at a scale more modest than the Psycho-Historians in Asimov's Foundation, but more carefully realized.

After centuries of slower-than-light travel humanity has colonized several worlds, each one effectively developing independent of each other and the homeworld. This isolation suddenly evaporates as a new technology arrives (called a `springer') which lets individuals instantaneously transport from one world to another. This brings together the Thousand Cultures, testing each culture's xenophobia.

This book follows two bureaucrats (who are also spies) married to each other on their assignment to the recently settled world of Briand. Briand was settled by two groups of people, each of which are living out some historical fantasy of the extremely rich. One colony is made up of Mayans living in a culture imagined as being in their Classic Age before the arrival of the Spanish at their shores. The other colony is dedicated to reviving the ancient culture of Tamil Nadu (in South India) responsible for the classical texts of Cankam (Sangam) poetry (the poetry is generally dated to 100-500 AD).

This odd juxtaposition and clash of two cultures like the Mayans and the Sangam-era Tamils is just strange. They are cultures that are neither similar nor opposites and the depiction of their conflict is perhaps the best reason to read this book. Each colony has access to modern technology but they are both dedicated to the purpose of reviving their respective ancient culture. The arrival of the springer has thrown these two colonies into hostile conflict as they attempt to share the meagre resources on their planet. The bureaucrats are sent into this situation to find a peaceful solution.

As the plot develops you realize that as many of the events unfold, it is not clear which of them occur naturally and which are engineered by the people that govern. The most chilling effect of this book is perhaps how easily societies might be manipulated. However, the pacing of the book is extremely meditative and might turn off most sf readers. The length could have been cut at least by a third to form a more effective book, but as it stands this book will be interesting to readers who seek out carefully constructed fictional worlds.

A common method of understanding the relationship between countries is to compare it with the relationships between people. John Barnes tries to juxtapose the troubled marriage of the two bureaucrats to the hostility between the two colonies. However, this thread did not impress me as much as the world-building and the other subplots in this book.

This book is a sequel of sorts to an earlier book by Barnes set in the same fictional universe: "A Million Open Doors". At the time I read this book, I hadn't read the earlier book but it did not seem a pre-requisite at all.

%T Earth Made Of Glass
%A John Barnes
%I Tor
%D 1998
%G ISBN: 0812551613 (pb)
%P 416
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2000/03/15

Chaos by James Gleick

Chaos is a term given to a particular brand of non-linear mathematics useful in the description of natural phenomena that saw its first light, according to this popular science exposition to the topic, in the mind of a meteorologist in the 1960s. Subsequently taken up by a biologist, several mathematicians, and then a whole set of physicists, and ultimately even by economists, ecologists and heart surgeons. It was only in the 1980s that chaos theory caught on as a legitimate field of study in the various scientific communities.

The chaotic properties in a simple root-finding method like Newton-Raphson is usually covered in most modern calculus textbooks, but this behaviour is often something to be avoided, leading us away from nice convergence properties. The history of how this behaviour turned from being something to work around, to something useful is an interesting story.

Gleick presents a concise and approachable guide to the math behind chaos theory and also a good history lesson in the forming of a new subfield within physics and other disciplines.

There are some nitpicking issues that I had with the book, none of which detract very much from the content of the book but are worth laying down nonetheless. As a necessary simplification for a general audience some of the math is simplified, however some parts were too watered down, especially the discussion of Feigenbaum's bifurcation theory. Also, I wished Gleick had given some more details about the Lyapunov exponent and its relation to entropy. Some of color plates were completely dissociated from the text. Direct pointers to those pretty fractals from the text would have been helpful.

If you're addicted to science books, pick up this short and eminently readable book and enjoy the bizarre tale of fractals and strange attractors.

%T Chaos
%T :making a new science
%A James Gleick
%I Viking Penguin
%D 1987
%G ISBN: 0670811785 (hc)
%P 354
%K science

Review written: 2000/02/07

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

Clifford Simak has pioneered his own brand of `rural' hard-sf, written in a style so natural that it seems simple. "Way Station" is considered to be his most famous novel in this genre.

As the novel begins, in the 1960s, a CIA agent discovers that veteran of the Civil War seems to be still alive in a small village in Wisconsin and appears to be about 30 years old. The man lives in a house that is impenetrable, and in the family cemetery behind the house, next to the gravestones of his mother and father, is a third gravestone with an inscription written in a script nobody can identify.

(Minor spoilers ahead)

As the novel progresses you meet the protagonist: Enoch Wallace who is the caretaker of a device which allows instantaneous transport over a distance of several light years. This galactic way station sits in his home, where he tends to it alone, his occupation shared only with alien visitors on their way to their eventual destinations. His contact with the station makes him immortal. However, his isolation is under threat from his fellow humans and everything in Enoch's sedentary life is about to change.

There is some overshadowing nervousness, typical in a cold-war novel, about the danger of human aggression going too far. References to a `spiritual force' which permeates the universe and other such Taoist metaphysics (in my opinion) does not mix well with hard-sf. There is also an unfortunate deus ex machina used to push the book to its close. But apart from these minor distractions the novel does carry its philosophy consistently to its satisfying (and surprising) last chapter.

This book was the winner of the 1964 Hugo Award. "A Choice of Gods" is another good example of Simak's writing.

%T Way Station
%A Clifford D. Simak
%I Manor Books Inc.
%D 1964
%G ISBN: 0837604400 (pb)
%P 190
%K science-fiction

Review written: 1999/11/30

Jejuri by Arun Kolatkar

Bronze figurine of Khandoba with Mhalsi and Banai, 18th century, Maharashtra.
(Image from the Lowe Museum web site)

Arun Kolatkar was born in 1932, in Kolhapur, where his early education was at the Rajaram High School. He enrolled in the J. J. School of Art, Bombay in 1949, and after attending this and other art schools in Kolhapur and Pune, in 1957 he took his Diploma in Painting from the J. J. School of Art. He published his first book of poetry, Jejuri, in 1976, and in the same year he published Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, a collection of poems in Marathi. He turned to poetry full-time 15 years ago: before that, he wrote while working as a graphic artist in the Bombay advertising industry.

The setting and imagery in Jejuri is taken from the temple town of the same name near Pune in western Maharashtra. Khandoba is one of the primary deities of the temple complex at Jejuri and the collection was published with the image of Khandoba on the cover. However, religion is not the main focus of the book. As Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (see below) argues: the object of Jejuri seems to be the act of observation.

Here is an excerpt from Jejuri:

A Scratch

what is god and what is stone
the dividing line if it exists is very thin at jejuri
and every other stone is god or his cousin

there is no crop other than god and god is harvested here
around the year and around the clock
out of the bad earth and the hard rock

that giant hunk of rock the size of a bedroom
is khandoba's wife turned to stone
the crack that runs right across is the scar
from his broadsword he struck her down with once
in a fit of rage

scratch a rock
and a legend springs

The bilingual aspect of Kolatkar's output is highlighted in this excerpt from The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, from his introduction to Arun Kolatkar's work:

Few would know that some of Kolatkar's early poems in English appeared in Anthology of Marathi Poetry: 1945-1965 (1967), edited by Dilip Chitre. (Chitre makes some very perceptive comments on them in the introduction to the book.) Though both `Woman' and `Suicide of Rama' say `English version by the poet', their Marathi originals were never committed to paper. This bit of deception, by itself a minor biographical fact, raises a host of complex issues centered around the idea of the poet, especially in our century, as a wanderer across language. Kolatkar himself operates across the two he writes in, sending out, as we have just seen, occasional false signals.

On the other hand, certain of his poems are dually located. The Marathi texts of `Irani Restaurant Bombay', `Crabs' are to be found in Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita, while, simultaneously, they are poems in English, smuggled into the language through the unmanned checkpoint of verse. ...

Not only is Jejuri among the finest single poems written in India in the past forty years, few books of verse published here have been so successful. It won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and quickly went into three editions. But the editions were small and the distribution limited.

My favorite Kolatkar poem is written in the Bombay Hindi vernacular:

Generated using itrans with this text as the source.

Arun Kolatkar passed away last week, on September 25th, 2004, succumbing to intestinal cancer. Kolatkar’s latest works, published in 2004, include ‘Kala Ghoda Poems’ and ‘Sarpa Satra’ in English.

%A Arun Kolatkar
%T Jejuri
%I Peppercorn Publishing, UK edition
%P 58
%D 1978 
%G ISBN: 0330492365
%K poetry