Special Circumstances

Bloom by Wil McCarthy

In the year 2000, Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, famed techno-guru and recent media hound aired publicly his prediction that the new century will have to deal with the dangers and benefits of nanotechnology as the last century had to deal with nuclear fission. He must have finally caught up with his sf reading list, since this particular area of scientific research has fueled famous disasters in hard-sf stories since the 60s. Novels like "The Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem, for example, prefigures this notion of microscopic automatons acting on simple rules which combine to form complex forms of emergent behaviour (usually deadly to humans).

For Lem, this was an oppurtunity to tear down human hubris towards scientific understanding, but since that novel appeared the mathematical understanding of cellular automata has grown so much that it is a ripe time to explore these issues again. Wil McCarthy's "Bloom" is an excellent hard-sf treatment of nanotechnology, chaos, cellular automata and emergent behaviour.

The story deals with the sudden explosion of nanotech entities called mycora in the near future, the exponential self-replication of this fungus forces the evacuation of the entire inner solar system by humans to the moons of Jupiter and the asteroid belt where it is too cold for the mycora to take hold.

The plot follows the usual hard-sf disaster/adventure story arc, but for once the ending in this type of a novel is not intellectually bankrupt. The ideas used in this book are informed by a lot of science that has explored these technological issues. The post-human societies are well-realized and Wil McCarthy pays close attention to the engineering of human habitats in strange places.

You will need a German-English dictionary to understand the recurrent use of German words in this book. For example, rather than use the word reporter, Wil McCarthy uses the word berichter and some of the nanotech beings are termed `schlädlings'. It was serendipitous that I happened to read this novel on a flight over to Germany.

Some interactive java programs that might be interesting after reading this book are: Exploring emergence using the Game of Life, Avida and Tierra are computational environments for exploring artificial life.

Related to: "The Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem and "Permutation City" by Greg Egan.

%T Bloom
%A Wil McCarthy
%I Del Rey
%D 1998
%G ISBN: 034542654 (pb)
%P 303
%K science-fiction

Date written: 2000/08/15

History of India by Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund

A serious single volume history of India that covers within 400 pages a time-span that includes the Indus Valley Civilization from 3000 BCE and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 is so ambitious that it is bound to fall short of expectations. Surprisingly, it succeeds in its primary mission to provide the grand sweep of Indian history. In particular, to highlight the large ancient empires and the various regional kingdoms in medieval India. These parts of Indian history get lost in most published books on the history of India which either concentrate on the later period of the Mughal or British empires or dwell only on pre-Buddhist India mostly for jingoistic rhetoric.

The book starts off strongly with two well-written chapters: `Early Civilizations of the Northwest' and `The Great Ancient Empires'. The first chapter discusses the Aryan migration into India, with a precise discussion of the evidence and why certain things are generally believed by contemporary historians about this topic. There is also a nuanced discussion of the Aryan `invasion' and a modern view on that topic.

The next two chapters on medieval India and the Middle Ages are more muddled, perhaps due the the confusing morass of the actual history of the period. The only interesting part was the discussion on the reasons for the spread of Indian religion and culture to Southeast Asia in this period.

While the Central Asian invasion of India and the subsequent Mughal empire in India are more familiar historical topics, the struggle for power between the various Indian parties during the fall of the Mughals are detailed here. Particularly interesting was the relationship between Shivaji and the sultan of Golconda, his Muslim ally, who supported his campaign in South India and the future negotiations between the chief minister (vezir) of the Mughal empire, Nizam-ul-Mulk and Baji Rao of the Marathas (Shivaji's grandson). Baji Rao, in the mid-1700s captured Delhi in a surprise cavalry attack, but left within a few days showing that while the Marathas could have defeated the Mughal empire, they were unable to hold it on their own.

The remainder of the book is a quick look at the colonial rule of the British and the subsequent formation of the Indian republic. This period has been the topic of many history books. The discussion of the Bombay Presidency and the Madras Presidency was a useful counterweight to the usual discussion of Oudh as an example of the rise of British influence in India. The overview of the politics of the freedom movement was particularly well represented even though many of the details were necessarily left out.

There are minor issues that were inconsistently represented in the book. For example, there is no discussion of India before the Aryans and Dravidians when there is ample linguistic evidence of such a previous people (there is book on the topic called "Pre-Aryan and pre-Dravidian in India" by Sylvain LÈvi). Also, the exclusion of the history of Pakistan, Bangladesh after the Partition except where they intersect with events in India was jarring but expedient.

Table of Contents:

1. Early Civilizations of the Northwest
   • Prehistory and the Indus Civilization
   • Immigration and settlement of the Indo-Aryans
2. The Great Ancient Empires
   • The rise of the Gangetic culture and the great empires of the east
   • The end of the Maurya empire and the northern invaders
   • The classical age of the Guptas
   • The rise of South India
3. The Regional Kingdoms of Early Medieval India
   • The rise and conflicts of regional kingdoms
   • Kings, princes and priests: the structure of Hindu realms
   • Gods, temples and poets: the growth of regional cultures
   • India's impact on Southeast Asia: causes and consequences
4. Religious Communities and Military Feudalism in the Late Middle Ages
   • The Islamic conquest of northern India and the sultanate of Delhi
   • The states of central and southern India in the period of the sultanate of Delhi
5. The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Empire
   • The Great Mughals and their adversaries
   • Indian landpower and European seapower
   • The struggle for supremacy in India
6. The Period of Colonial Rule
   • Company Bahadur: trader and ruler
   • Imperial structure and the regional impact
   • The pattern of constitutional reform
7. The Freedom Movement and the Partition of India
   • The Indian freedom movement
   • The partition of India
8. The Republic
   • Internal affairs: political and economic development
   • External affairs: global and regional dimensions

%T History of India
%A Hermann Kulke
%A Dietmar Rothermund
%I Routledge (first published in 1986 by Croom Helm: Australia)
%D 1998
%G ISBN: 0415154820 (pb)
%G ISBN: 0415154822 (hc)
%P 395
%K history

Date written: 2000/10/12

Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge

`Across Realtime' is a bound edition of two Vernor Vinge novels: `The Peace War' and `Marooned in Realtime'. Each is discussed below in turn.

The Peace War

If you ripped off the cover of `The Peace War' and asked me to guess the author after reading it, I would not hesitate to say Clifford D. Simak. The style of writing and some of the themes explored in this novel are strongly reminiscent of Simak. However, there is a lot of material that is also particular to Vernor Vinge. In part, it is a war story, but one that is smart enough to know that wars are won because of superior technology and with codes and cryptographs. The accent is on the software rather than the heroics. There is action as well, particularly in the fast and furious endgame.

It is also a Cold War novel, and the plot deals with the abolition of nuclear weapons and biological warfare from the world by a `benevolent' dictatorship called the Peace Authority establised to prevent humans from destroying themselves. The Peace Authority gains its dominance due to a weapon that is even more powerful than nuclear weapons and uses it to enforce a peace based on ignorance of technology. Anyone outside the Authority is forbidden to develop any technology that is large enough to be detected. The Authority also impose the status quo on themselves since they have little need for further research. They already have the most advanced weapon ever created.

On the other side are the Tinkers: who are planning the forcible obsolesence of the Peace Authority. They depend on a cottage industry of low power electronics and the mathematical abilities of a young recruit called Wili W\`achendon and his aging mentor Paul Naismith. The post-apocalyptic West coast is realized nicely, as are the well-planned plot twists. Definitely a must-read for Vinge enthusiasts.

I'm positive that the computer game Celest that is described in this game was a tribute to the game "Space Travel" which was written by Ken Thompson in 1969 in his spare time. The game simulated the motion of planets in the solar system. A player could cruise between the planets and land his/her ship on the planets and moons. Thompson wrote this game on Multics (the precursor to Unix).

Marooned in Realtime

This book is not a sequel of `The Peace War' but rather set in the same conceptual universe and with some characters from the previous novel making surprise entrances into the plot.

How far into the future can a science-fiction author reasonably go before you cannot reasonably predict the future anymore? The answer to this question is directly related to the amount of progress humans can reasonably make without hitting some hard limits. The answer to such questions are explored in this novel. Using the technology of bobbling (a bubble where time stands still) introduced in `The Peace War', Vinge can put his characters arbitrarily far into the future, even exploring time in the span of geological changes to the Earth, directly observing evolutionary changes to life on the planet.

The plot involves a detective and an unsolved murder in the far future. The murder itself was perpetrated by intentionally leaving behind a single person while the rest of the human population bobbles up as part of a mass-migration to the future (hence the title). The detective himself was a victim of a similar crime which transported him into the far future by an unknown criminal.

The denouement itself is not particularly interesting. If you want a murder mystery, don't read this book. What is interesting is the depth of the scientific speculation. Of particular interest is the gradual description of the notion of Singularity that Vernor Vinge is best known for in his later sf work.

This is the first book where he introduces the concept of the Singularity and through his characters he explores this idea in great detail. If you have read Vernor Vinge's later work and want to know more about the Singularity, you have to read this book.

Other zoologies and geographies of the future cited in this book:

• "After Man" by Dougal Dixon St. Martin's Press, New York, 1981.
• Christopher Scotese and Alfred Ziegler, as described in "The Shape of Tomorrow" by Dennis Overbye, Discover, November, 1982, pp. 20-25.

%S Across Realtime
%A Vernor Vinge
%T The Peace War
%D 1984
%T Marooned in Realtime
%D 1986
%I London: Millenium Paperback
%G ISBN: 1857981472 (pb)
%P 533
%K science-fiction

Date written: 2000/08/19

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

A character in this comic-book, a teenager who is reading his pirate comic for the second time explains, `'Cause they don't make sense, man, that's why I gotta read 'em over.'

There are many excellent science-fiction novels that were influenced by the universal madness behind the Second World War and the subsequent descent into the Cold War (a history still being repeated all over the world). This book is part of this genre but is also grasping at weighty topics of morality and human destiny. It is appropriate that a `comic'-book is the medium for such a grim discussion.

In places, the allusions to the entire pantheon of comic-book superheroes is overwhelming. A childhood reading superhero comic books now becomes an advantage rather than a liability. With inhuman mastery, Moore and Gibbons take that entire mythology and combine it with appropriate references to Western philosophy, literature and pop-culture to create one of the best examples of the data-compression of brilliant ideas I have seen in any form of literature. A small example of this is in the distributed discussion of Gordian Knot throughout this book: the so-called `genius' of aggression perpetrated by Alexander of Macedon.

Before reading this comic-book I would recommend reading up on Rameses the Second and then reading "Ozymandias" a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, listening to "Desolation Row" and "All Along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan, and reading up on Cold War politics, especially the Tower Commission Report about the Iran-Contra affair and the usual favorite of comic-book writers, "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon.

There are far too many details to discuss within the context of a brief review. There are places on the internet where this discussion already exists (cited below).

• Watching the Detectives
• Watchmen Annotations
• The Annotated Watchmen

Also highly recommended is "V for Vendetta" by Alan Moore. There are various links between these two works (particularly with the obsessive use of the number five to denote a `Fearful Symmetry').

%T Watchmen
%A Alan Moore
%A Dave Gibbons
%I DC Comics
%D 1986
%G ISBN: 0930289234 (pb)
%P 412
%K graphic-novel

Date written: 2000/07/22

Ronin by Frank Miller

Created, written, and drawn by Frank Miller; paints by Lynn Varley; lettered by John Costanza.

This book is a collection of the five-issue limited series published in 1983 and 1984. Frank Miller takes a 13th century dishonored samurai warrior and places him along with his demon nemesis in a dark 21st century dystopic Manhattan where neo-Nazis roam the streets. Here he comes in violent contact with a sentient computer Virgo, a paraplegic telekinetic named Billy and a cyberpunk heroine Casey McKenna.

The most intriguing part of this story-arc was how Casey McKenna's husband, who starts off as a fairly minor character becomes a crucial part of the plot and raises the most important question behind it.

Frank Miller's art in this book is not at the level of his later work in Dark Knight and Sin City. However, some panels clearly prefigure his style in later comics like Sin City. If the art is disappointing and colors washed out in places the book more than makes up for it with an exceptionally strong and intellectual storyline.

The art in the initial, Japanese parts of this book are clearly lifted almost directly from the art of Gozeki Kojima who along with Kazuo Koike are the authors of the famous manga "Lone Wolf and Cub" from the 1970s (for those who are fans of this manga, there is kid who appears on a few panels who looks exactly like Daigoro).

The character of Billy and the flavor of Miller's future Manhattan is also similar to the work of Katsuhiro Otomo in manga like "Akira" and "Domu", although the influence is not entirely clear-cut to me.

Frank Miller is best known for his work on the Daredevil comics and is the author of what is easily the best Batman limited series: "The Dark Knight Returns".

%T Ronin
%A Frank Miller
%I DC Comics
%D 1987
%G ISBN: 0930289218 (pb)
%P 239
%K graphic-novel, science-fiction

Date written: 2000/07/22

Sin City by Frank Miller

Somewhere between The Maltese Falcon and John Woo: Frank Miller has resurrected the quintessential hardboiled character. Of course, don't expect it to be a sentimental return to the same old stuff. This is comic book: expect something smarter.

If you feel disappointed with the beginning, don't stop reading. Frank Miller starts the story in the middle and then goes in two directions at the same time after the explosive start. The backstory is filled in with spades and the plot moves as if on magnetic rails.

It seems as if after years of studying manga, Frank Miller has internalized so much of the samurai manga genre (in particular Kozure Okami, "Lone Wolf and Cub" by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima) that it is clear that this comic book series owes at least part of its existence to this exposure. Of course, closer and more obvious thematic cousins of "Sin City" include the famous Hollywood gangster movies of the 1930s like "Little Caesar" and "Public Enemy".

The part about the twins was a bit misplaced, and the finale seemed like a tribute to Alan Moore (see "V for Vendetta"). But overall a comic book destined to be a classic.

The theme of this book can be glimpsed by reading the names of the sequels: "A Dame to Kill For", "The Big Fat Kill", among others.

%T Sin City
%A Frank Miller
%I London: Titan
%D 1993
%G ISBN: 1852864680 (pb)
%P 208
%K graphic-novel

Review written: 2000/08/16

Stanislaw Lem by Richard E. Ziegfeld

One of the first books (the first book?) in English about Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science-fiction author. Unfortunately, this book does not rise above the level of a hagiography (as the author himself admits in the introduction: `the goal is to share a sense of enthusiasm about Lem's virtues and, in the process, to assist in the facilitating greater American awareness that Stanislaw Lem is one of the outstanding writers in the twentieth-century letters').

The result is several chapters describing the plots of the Lem books that have been translated into English accompanied by a brief and mostly superficial analysis of the themes underlying the plot of ecah book. An analysis of some published reviews of each book usually by noted reviewers or authors is also included.

The books discussed here are only the ones that have been translated into English. It would be nice to have a book discussing Lem's works in Polish which are out of reach for readers in English.

The biographical information is new and worth having for a Lem fan (I think I qualify) but there is little else to recommend this book to the general sf audience. The contents are underwhelming even for a rabid Lem addict. On the other hand, it is a short book and perhaps a good read if you read all the original books and are impatient for any discussion of their contents.

The discussion in this book about Lem's honorary admission and subsequent dismissal from the SFWA (an American organization of SF authors) helped me understand the issues involved.

In my opinion, a better book on Lem's work is "A Stanislaw Lem Reader: Rethinking Theory" by Peter Swirski which includes interviews with and some contributions by Stanislaw Lem.

Stanislaw Lem books reviewed in Special Circumstances

%T Stanislaw Lem
%A Richard E. Ziegfeld
%I New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing
%D 1985
%G ISBN: 070446992X (pb)
%P 188
%K biography, science-fiction

Date written: 2000/07/17

The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod

It was like the old Civilization game, Myra sometimes thought, with a new twist: Barbarism II. Nobody was going to wipe the board, nobody was going to Alpha Centauri. They were all going down together, into the dark ... Just as soon as enough major players decided to contest the incontestable, and put the simulations to the audit of war.

As in 'Civilization 2', the classic Sid Meier game, this novel is dedicated to the mechanisms of war, diplomacy and politics. It is also an apocalyptic novel. The novel starts a few centuries after a catastrophic Deliverance. A young historian Clovis colha Gree is studying the life of Myra Godwin-Davidova, the woman who is called 'The Deliverer'. The other thread of the novel is from Myra's perspective leading upto the Deliverance. She is the de facto leader of the International Scientific and Technical Worker's Republic (ISTWR) whose borders lie within those of Kazakhstan.

Parts of the story feel very skeletal as if MacLeod expects you to be already familiar with his constructed universe. This might be because some of the characters and political entities also appear in blurbs for his earlier books: "The Stone Canal" and "The Star Fraction".

Ken MacLeod is known for being one of the few socialist-anarchist science-fiction writers. I don't think he actually believes what one of the characters in this book says: 'there's either socialism or barbarism'. While he seems to dismiss the notion of capitalism simply as being imperialism without much discussion, this is not to say that he engages in simple advocacy for some abstract socialist utopia (a common strategy among a different brand of libertarian sf authors). Instead he is only concerned with working out the various aspects of socialism and exploring its problems and its interactions with other political phenomena like capitalism (Myra Godwin, while being a Trotskyist engages in selling options for nuclear deterrence) and labor unions (the ISTWR is engaged in war with the Sheenisov, a worker's collective with mechanical computers and a mysterious allegiance to a military AI in Earth orbit).

The plot mostly dry as if describing some computer game, but it some places it becomes compelling especially when it concentrates on the first launching of a satellite after the Deliverance (the eponymous `Sky Road'). But most of the book reads like an extended dialogue that Ken MacLeod seems to be having with himself about war and revolution in relation to socialism and anarchist society via his characters. The novel has a pessimistic perspective on human societies, but perhaps it will also appeal to readers who are interested in political sf, in particular, those who want a bit more Left in their future dystopias.

By pure chance, I happened to read "The Peace War" by Vernor Vinge around the same time that I read this book and I was struck by a number of similarities in the basic plot structure (but not in sensibility). Both take place in a post-apocalyptic world where the use of nuclear weapons has been abolished. This, in itself, is not interesting since a lot of the cold-war sf books had similar plots. It is interesting that Ken MacLeod is writing a cold-war sf book in 1999. As in Ken MacLeod's book, "The Peace War" has a class of technocrats that emerge from the chaos of the apocalypse. This class is also called "tinkers", whether this name has a common ancestry for both books or this is just a coincidence, I'm not sure. The similarities end there, but the overall notion of a benevolent dictator (The Peace Authority in "The Peace War" and The Deliverer in "The Sky Road") is common. Then again, this idea dates back to "Dune" by Frank Herbert who in turn takes this idea from the Bible.

As mentioned earlier, there are several computer games with a similar focus on war, diplomacy and society although the classic 'Civilization 2' has yet to be rivaled by a new favorite.

%T The Sky Road
%A Ken MacLeod
%I London: Orbit
%D 1999
%G ISBN: 1857239679 (pb)
%P 291
%K science-fiction

Date written: 2001/01/28

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

On November 19, 1835, a ship carrying 500 Maori armed with guns, clubs and axes arrived on the Chatham Islands, 500 miles east of New Zealand. The Moriori people who lived on those islands were brutally slaughtered over the next few weeks by the Maori.

Jared Diamond's claim in this book is that this outcome was entirely predictable. Not just in proximate terms: that the Moriori were a small, isolated group of hunter-gatherers, equipped with only the simplest technology and weapons, entirely inexperienced at war, and lacking a centralized leadership; while the Maori invaders (from New Zealand's North Island) came from a dense population of farmers, used to warring among themselves, with more advanced technology and weapons, and operating under a strong leadership. Jared Diamond's claim goes deeper: that the history of different peoples can be predicted to follow certain courses because of differences among peoples' environments. Crucially the answer does not lie in biological differences among peoples themselves.

He also states his motivation for answering this question as the final repudiation of the usual racist biological answer or the assumption of superiority of one culture/religion over another as an explanation for the dominance of certain human societies over others. Despite incontrovertible evidence presented by varying scientific fields, these kinds of explanations are most commonly held to be true by the general population and the non-scientific intelligentsia. In particular, cultural superiority is still supported as being a central explanation of dominance of one society over another by many reputed and clearly non-racist historians. Thus, Jared Diamond's teleological exercise in this book, if true, would mean that instead of an accidental or mysterious rise of certain human societies, their dominance can be explained by a hidden (and inexorable) design.

This is a history book, but unlike one you have read before. It examines history's broad patterns unfolding on each continent in the world over the last 13,000 years. It's contention is that in order to explain the conquest of the Americas by European powers in 1492 AD requires us to examine how societies everywhere evolved from their common preliterate hunter-gatherer backgrounds since 11,000 BC. Jared Diamond presents a breathtaking view of this kind of history with help from fields considered mundane and boring such as agriculture, animal domestication and simple geography. He also uses as evidence facts from the more traditional fields of archeology and historical linguistics. Each chapter deading with a different continent systematically goes through facts from each of these fields to support the book's eventual conclusions.

In other words, whether you ultimately accept the conclusions of this book or not, if you are remotely interested in human history, you have to read this book. In my opinion, the approach taken in this book was utterly compelling. There are literally so many facts stated in this book that even without the over-arching goal of the book, reading this book for just the facts is rewarding enough. Parts 3 and 4 of this book are the best non-fiction chapters I have read in a long time. They reveal so many surprising and new facts that it is a damning indictment of the usual histories that are peddled in schools and colleges. Particularly compelling are the parts about the history of the Pacific Ocean islands which were colonized by the inhabitants of South China without ever colonizing New Guinea and Australia. Also interesting was the history of Bantu agricultural societes replacing Khosian hunter-gatherers in Africa.

This is not to say that this book will provide you with *all* the answers to questions in human history. It would be pointless to attempt that goal. The book concentrates on particular cases which bolster the main thesis but does not talk about the more difficult cases. For example, the Mongol invasion of Eurasia which started from several nomadic bands and chiefdoms going on to conquer several established agricultural societies (see "The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757" by Thomas J. Barfield for more on the complex interaction between agricultural and nomadic societies of China and the Mongols). Also curious is the exact nature of the Indo-European expansion into India which as far as we know is a similar case of a nomadic peoples replacing an established agricultural society that flourished along the Saraswati River forming the so-called Indus Valley civilization. Also issues about over-population and similar Malthusian factors on human society are not considered. An attractive idea for a sequel to this book would be a discussion of such issues.

The main problem I had with the tone of the writing was that it seemed to want some kind of Kuhnian revolution in the field of history (Thomas Kuhn might have changed the tone of all scientific writing because of his book). This is problematic for two reasons. The first is that Jared Diamond does not actively participate in the fields which form the backbone of this book and he uses existing research to make many of this points and so it seems that his popularization of these discoveries can be been as a hijacking of ideas from those fields which he then wants to reform. The second is that many competent historians already practice what Jared Diamond is preaching in his Epilogue. Read some representative books on history like "History of India" by Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund to see that the revolution argued for in this book has already happened (even if it is unevenly distributed).

Those familiar to the world of computer gaming will know that the most popular turn-based or real-time strategy games are the so-called 'God games', where you direct a small band of people into a state and subsequently into an empire. Jared Diamond's theory of the growth of human society from hunter-gatherer bands to chiefdoms to states and then to empires is enough inspire a talented game programmer to incorporate these ideas (especially see Chapter 14 'From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy') into a radically expressive and realistic real-time strategy game. I await the development of such a game with suspended excitement.

Such a game will also serve a serious purpose of providing a computational model of the growth of human societies which will go a long way in fleshing out the kind of `historical science' that Jared Diamond proposes in the last chapter of this book (Epilogue 'The Future of Human History as a Science'). Just as the relatively new field of cognitive sciences which includes as sub-fields neuroscience, linguistics and psychology also includes a computational component in artificial intelligence, this new field of viewing human history as a science should also include computational modeling of societal evolution in conjunction with the sub-fields of biogeography, crop cytogenetics, microbial evolution, animal behaviour, archeology and historical linguistics.

Search the archives of the New York Review of Books web site for William H. McNeill's (mostly complimentary but grumbling) review of this book (May 15, 1997) and Jared Diamond's subsequent answer (June 26, 1997) to the issues raised in that review and a follow-up response by McNeill.

Update (2005-07-26): This book has been adapted for television as a 3 episode documentary series. The series aired on PBS during July 2005. I haven't had a chance to watch it but here is a review of the Guns, Germs and Steel television series by Michael Balter.

%T Guns, Germs and Steel
%T :the Fates of Human Societies
%A Jared Diamond
%I New York: W. W. Norton
%D 1997
%G ISBN: 0393317552 (pb)
%G ISBN: 0393038912 (hc)
%P 480
%K history, science

Date written: 2000/07/17

America's War in Vietnam by Larry H. Addington

In his review of twelve books about the Vietnam War, Jonathan Mirsky says about this book,

If there is such a thing as an objective account, this is it. ... If you want to read one book about Vietnam, read this one.

("The Never-Ending War" by Jonathan Mirsky. New York Review of Books. May 25, 2000)

From my (admittedly limited) perspective, this is indeed a remarkable book. Its contents are distilled from the author's classes on America's war in Vietnam that he taught for many years before his retirement from The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. The narrative inexorably presents fact after fact about the war in Vietnam. The text never bogs down under an analysis of any particular incident.

Addington starts his book with a description of French colonial rule in Vietnam, where even by the standards of other European colonies before 1939, Vietnam was known as the "Colony of Cruelty". He gives particular attention to the resistance of the Vietnamese even at that time to a division of their country and their armed resistance against any such intentions by foreigners.

On 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh's speech to his countrymen in Hanoi started with a citation of the American Declaration of Independence. But American attitudes at the time were concentrated on bolstering the French economy and ironically under the Truman Doctrine which was meant to "assist free peoples to work out their own destinies" money from the Marshall Plan was used by the French to purchase arms and equipment to subjugate once again their colonies in Indochina including Vietnam. The French (and consequently the Americans) backed unpopular dictators to retain their influence in the region. Addington points out that while this is the first misstep that America took on its long road to war in Vietnam, it was an inevitable step given how the world was perceived by America after the Second World War.

Particular prominence is given in this book to the description of the Gulf of Tonkin incident which was manipulated by Lyndon Johnson in order to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through the Congress. The same resolution was lated used to justify the increase of American intervention in Vietnam. Addington also describes the pre-war construction of the Diem regime in South Vietnam as a matter of American policy and then the inevitable support of each new general that succeeded Diem -- the result of the many coups that followed his regime.

Enthusiasts of military history should be more than satisfied with Addington's lucid descriptions of the various military operations that were undertaken throughout the Vietnam war by both sides. The aftermath of the war not only in Vietnam but also in the other countries involved, especially Cambodia, is also carefully considered. A book worth reading, indeed.

America seems to have learnt something from its military experience in Vietnam. This is evidenced in the use of reserves in Operation Desert Storm by George Bush, and also a narrow escape from a repetition of the mistakes made in Operation Rolling Thunder when America bombed Serbia in order to make them negotiate with the Kosovo Liberation Army. Unfortunately, American foreign policy so far has been ineffectual in replacing conflict with diplomacy when dealing with so-called "rogue states".

Contents

1. The geography of Vietnam and its history to World War Two
2. The career of Ho Chi Minh to 1939
3. World War Two and America's collaboration with Ho
4. America and the Indochina War, 1946-1954
5. Eisenhower and the road to America's war in Vietnam, 1954-1960
6. Kennedy's war: Counter-insurgency and the fall of Diem, 1961-1963
7. Johnson's war, I: To the brink, 1964
8. Johnson's war, II: The year of the plunge, 1965
9. Johnson's war, III: Moving towards defeat, 1966-1967
10. Johnson's war, IV: The turning year, 1968
11. Nixon's war, I: The strategy of withdrawal, 1969-1970
12. Nixon's war, II: The final round, 1971-1972
13. The Paris peace accords and the fall of Indochina, 1973-1975
14. Aftermath and summing up

%T America's War in Vietnam
%T :a short narrative history
%A Larry H. Addington
%I Indiana University Press
%D 2000
%G ISBN: 0253336910 (pb)
%P 191
%K history

Date written: 2000/06/20

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

First of all, this book is very long (update: dwarfed, however, by Stephenson's more recent offerings). At over 900 pages, it will be quite an investment of time. It does have some pages that could have been easily edited out, but considering the size of this tome, the signal to noise ratio is high enough to recommend this book.

Stephenson makes a strong departure from his previous novels like "Snow Crash". This is his first supposedly `serious' novel. However, the strength of this novel is the same as that of his earlier novels: his inspired descriptions of technology. It does not matter that in this novel the technology described is either contemporary or dating back to the Second World War.

This book has been described and promoted as a historical novel and not really as a science-fiction novel. In my view it is really an alternative history novel which is similar, at least in spirit, to some of the novels written by Connie Willis and others by Philip K. Dick, both of whom have both feet firmly planted in the sci-fi genre.

As the book eventually makes clear, there are good guys and bad guys in this book and they are categorized as such. This would be fine if the bad guys were not uniformly ill-defined, unmotivated and permanently hidden from view. The villains provide most of the impetus for the action but little is known about any of them; from General Wing (corrupt PRC honcho) to Andrew Loeb (a lawyer, no less). Some villains (like The Dentist) appear and then vanish without purpose.

But the book makes up for this by providing the most interesting heroes to populate the pages of a thriller: a bunch of nerds including Randy Waterhouse in a high-tech startup to build a data haven to keep governments off of encryption and privacy software while at the same time introducing their own currency; a group of cryptographers including Alan Turing and Randy's grandfather cracking codes in the Second World War and a conspiracy (implausibly) forged in the chaos of that war.

The ending is hopelessly inadequate but the book remains interesting right until the last page. In this sense, this book reminds me of Neal Stephenson's earlier books. The detailed depiction of each sub-culture and craft and the style of presentation is so engaging that it does not matter that the big picture in the background is plainly kooky.

For example, Stephenson is most lyrical when describing the details behind 'van Eck phreaking' (first proposed by Wim van Eck, van Eck's paper). Eating a bowl of Cap'n Crunch; connecting countries by laying fibre-optics on the ocean floor; and the distribution of family heirlooms by solving a generalization of the Knapsack problem are some of the other things examined under the Stephenson's microscope.

Stephenson, however, sometimes loses control of his writing style. In some places the prose reads like a Unix man page. But the strangest part has to be when Admiral Yamamoto's thoughts use a language that one would expect to hear from an American teenager.

Some parts are less than original. Neal Stephenson's theory about the universal nature of the Hacker character is filched from his earlier book "The Diamond Age". It wasn't compelling then, and it remains a bit strained even now.

More information:

• More details on the engineering behind laying fibre-optic cables onto the ocean floor can be found in Neal Stephenson's Wired article: Mother Earth Mother Board.
• Also, Neal Stephenson's Wired article about the growth of the internet in China: In the Kingdom of Mao Bell.
• About Rudy:

  Rudy (Rudolf von Hacklheber, a German mathematician in the WWII storyline) was not a real character, he is totally made up, but I think that he is a reasonably realistic sample of the kind of guy you might have seen running around Princeton at the time Turing was there, immediately before the war.

  Neal Stephenson, irc interview. Apr 29, 1999

• Stephenson also states that Alan Turing spent some time during the war in Greenwich Village (New York City) working on voice encryption for Bell Labs. Later in the novel, Stephenson describes Turing using such a device which combines speech with white noise from a accompanying phonograph which is cancelled out at the receiver's end who has an identical phonograph playing.

%T Cryptonomicon
%A Neal Stephenson
%I London: Arrow Books
%D 1999
%G ISBN: 0099410672 (pb)
%P 918
%K science-fiction

Date written: 2000/08/26