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Ginge Fullen: Sic Diximus

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Cover of Sic Diximus, by Ginge Fullen

Within 500m I was stopped by an Army patrol. To cut a long story short, I was stopped three more times by the Army and twice by the Police in the space of the next hour. I fobbed them off each time. Two policemen followed me back to the hotel. My local guide Menpong arrived the next morning and I was glad to get out of town and heading to the mountains but I wasn’t too confident that my troubles would stop there.

I’ve written about Ginge Fullen, and my involvement in his Africa’s Highest Challenge expedition, in my post about his previous book, Finding Bikku Bitti. That one described the gruelling conclusion of Africa’s Highest Challenge, when Ginge managed to climb Bikku Bitti, the highest point in Libya—having already spent five years climbing the highest point in every other African country. Conquering Bikku Bitti took three separate Sahara expeditions, during the second of which Ginge almost died.

This book is an altogether more sedate affair, describing his quest to climb the highest point in Bangladesh. Like Bikku Bitti, it required three separate attempts—but this time because there was so much disagreement about where the highest point in Bangladesh actually was.

I not only get a mention in Sic Diximus, my name’s on the cover, along with that of Ginge’s local guide, Menpong. That’s typical of Ginge’s generosity—I’ve mentioned before that he tends to downplay his own achievements while punctiliously acknowledging the contributions of those around him. But I certainly don’t deserve to appear as an author on this one—the adventure is Ginge’s, the story is Ginge’s, the words are Ginge’s, and the (often beautiful) photographs are Ginge’s.

Cover of World Tops and BottomsMy involvement started back in 1996, when I was compiling a set of tables called World Tops and Bottoms for Dave Hewitt’s TACit Press, listing the highest and lowest points of every country and dependency in the world. There were various “problem countries”, and Bangladesh was one of those—no-one seemed to be entirely sure what the highest mountain in Bangladesh was, where it was, or how high it was. One frequently mentioned name was Keokradong, but that name was associated with at least three different hills in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and with a variety of altitudes from 927m to 1230m. Another was Reng Tlāng, on the border between Bangladesh and India, with quoted heights from 957m to 1003m. I couldn’t lay my hands on any useful national mapping, so checked the 1:500,000 Tactical Pilotage Chart of the area—which showed absolute nothing over 1000m in eastern Bangladesh, except for an unnamed point of 3454ft (1053m) on the border with Myanmar, far from Reng Tlāng and any of the Keokradongs. That point therefore found its way into World Tops and Bottoms— rather dubiously associated with the name “Mowdok”, which seemed more likely to be the name of the whole border range, rather than the specific highest point.

Now we roll forward to 2005, when Ginge was interested in knocking off the highest point in Bangladesh. By that time, a Survey of Bangladesh photogrammetric survey of the region in 2003 had brought up a new name, or rather several new names for one new hill—Tazing Dong, Tajingdong or Bijoy had been announced (with some fanfare in the Bangladeshi press) as Bangladesh’s real highest point, with a height of 987m. (This was almost immediately inflated to over 1000m in popular accounts—Banglapedia briefly topped out at 1280m.) By this time I was in contact with Jonathan de Ferranti, another mountain data-cruncher, who had given me a copy of an early version of the data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), and who had checked the Russian 1:200,000 military topographic maps of the area. We were still seeing no ground over 1000m anywhere in eastern Bangladesh except for the 1053m point marked on the Tactical Pilotage Chart, which corresponded to a spot height of 1052m on the Russian topo map and a highest cell of 1049m in the SRTM dataset. It all looked pretty solid, but no-one seemed to be seeing it but us.

Saka Haphong: TPC, Russian topo, SRTM
Click to enlarge

Got all that? Good. So, at this point, enter Ginge, who just wanted to climb the right mountain. The folks at Guinness World Records were telling him he needed to climb Keokradong *. The Survey of Bangladesh (and surely they should know) were telling him he needed to go up Tazing Dong. And two increasingly irritated cartophiles in Scotland were telling him needed to hop over to the Myanmar border to climb something without a discernible name.

Being Ginge, he climbed all three. And that’s what this book is about—Ginge sitting down for tea with Aung Shwe Prue Chowdhury, Rajah of the Chittagong Hill Tracts; Ginge blagging his way past a military checkpoint and browbeating a Bangladeshi general into giving him a lift; Ginge pitching up at the Survey of Bangladesh head office to tell them they’ve got it all wrong; Ginge betting the army major who conducted the photogrammetric survey that he’d missed a higher mountain … and Ginge nearly dying again, but this time from a dodgy chicken curry.

Climbing Keokradong turned out to be relatively easy—the other two summits required machete work on the way up, and to clear enough space on the summit for a good GPS reading. I’m probably not giving too much away if I tell you that the 1053m point on the Myanmar border turned out to be the highest. For a while after Ginge established “ground truth”, it even seemed as if he might get the chance to name the mountain. We gleefully came up with Sic Diximus, as close as we could get to “We told you so!” in Latin. (The translation came courtesy of my brother-in-law George, who is freakishly still able to speak Latin more than four decades after studying it at school.)

But it wasn’t to be. Unsurprisingly, the Tripura people who live in the remote valley below the mountain did have a name for it—Saka Haphong, meaning “Peak of the East”. And, in true Bangladeshi style, there’s at least one other name, too—topographic maps prepared in British India in the 1930s and 1940s label it as Mowdok Taung.

Since Ginge blazed the way in 2006, the way to Saka Haphong has turned into a popular trekking route, and the summit area is now kept clear by the feet of frequent visitors. Here’s a video impression of what the area looks like nowadays:

It’s a remarkable story. As with his previous book, it’s copiously illustrated with photographs clearly printed on good quality paper. You can have a look at the first few pages (which include a photograph of yours truly) on the Blurb site at blurb.co.uk and blurb.com.

* This sort of out-of-date advice was a recurring theme with Guinness during Africa’s Highest Challenge—their alleged experts seemed just to be pulling up the CIA World Factbook on their computers, rather than looking at, you know, a map or anything. I’m sure (well, I hope) the CIA World Factbook is just chock-full of actual facts when it comes to important geopolitical matters. But among people who are interested in the highest points of countries (and yes, actually, there are several of us) it is wearily referred to as the CIA World “Fact” Book.

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Rodney Russ & Aleks Terauds: Galapagos Of The Antarctic

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Cover of Galapagos Of The AntarcticThese islands not only play an important role in the Southern Ocean ecosystem, they also have a rich human history—from their discovery around 200 years ago, through an era of exploitation, until finally today, when they are treasured for their intrinsic value as wild and beautiful places.

I picked a copy of this book off a shelf in the small library of the Professor Khromov, the ship we travelled on during our recent trip to Wrangel Island, and was struck by its content and presentation. I made a mental note to track down a copy when we got home to the U.K. I somehow managed not to notice that is was co-authored by the man who was coordinating our trip—Rodney Russ, the founder of Heritage Expeditions, not only owns the Khromov but was on board, running the expedition. His association with the scattered islands south of New Zealand goes all the way back to the 1970s, when he took part in expeditions to the Auckland Islands and to Campbell Island, where he re-discovered a supposedly extinct bird, the Campbell Island Flightless Teal. How cool is that? His co-author, Aleks Terauds, is a biologist and conservationist who has worked extensively in these islands. They wrote Galapagos of the Antarctic together in 2009.

Here are the seven islands and island groups they write about. (For orientation, the large landmass at top centre is the southern part of New Zealand’s South Island.)

Location of New Zealand Outlying Islands
Click to enlarge
Based on a public domain source

Cover of Sub-Antarctic SanctuarySo they’re out in the middle of nowhere. I’ve long been interested in places like that, and over the years I’ve built up a bit of a reference library dealing with remote sub-Antarctic and cool temperate islands—but I have nothing dealing with this part of the world except Mary Gillham‘s Sub-Antarctic Sanctuary, the story of a summer spent on Macquarie in the 1960s.

The book’s a hefty hardback, nicely printed on heavy paper. The layout is beautiful—Fiona Stewart is rightly given a prominent credit for her work on the design. Each chapter is introduced with a pretty shaded-topography map of the appropriate island(s), decorated with some natural objects (leaves, feathers) and a painting of a representative bird—the Campbell Island chapter is graced by one of Russ’s flightless teals, for instance. Below the chapter heading, you’ll find a latitude and longitude, an area, and the altitude of the highest point. Each chapter is split into sections dealing with Geography & Geology, Flora, Fauna and History, and is copiously illustrated with photographs. And the photographs are gorgeous—there were some full-page images of albatrosses that I just sat and stared at for while, smiling gently. Photo credits go mainly to Terauds and to Russ’s sons, Nathan and Aaron, and a very fine job they’ve made of it.

Almost all these islands have gone through an initial period in which they were discovered (usually by Europeans), exploited by the sealing and whaling industry, sometimes colonized by marginal efforts at farming, and then a period in which intensive efforts have been made to restore them to their natural status.

The Chathams are an exception, having been colonized by a Polynesian group, the Moriori, in the fourteenth century. And they now support a population of a few hundred people of European, Maori and Moriori descent. My favourite story from the Chathams is of its Black Robin, which was rescued from extinction during the 1970s, when chicks from a surviving population of just seven birds were “fostered out to other species so that productivity could be increased.” I’d like to have heard a bit more about that, to be honest.

The Bounties are a group of rocky islets, home to seabirds and seals and not much else. With them, we first read about the New Zealand government’s practice of setting up “castaway depots” on their remote islands—huts containing supplies to keep any shipwrecked mariners alive for long enough to be rescued by a navy ship. For a while before the invention of radio, New Zealand made regular checks on all these uninhabited islands—otherwise castaways could spend years waiting for rescue.

The Antipodes Islands were originally named the Penantipodes—they’re not quite on the opposite side of the globe from London. (I, for one, mourn the dropped syllable.) They’ve benefited from having very few introduced species—the only successful European invader has been the House Mouse, which is presumably damaging the native invertebrate population, but is no danger to ground-nesting birds.

Campbell Island wasn’t so lucky—it was big enough to attract an effort at sheep farming (which failed to be economically viable). Once the farm was abandoned, introduced sheep and cattle died out in the harsh climate—as did a population of feral cats. But rats remained a constant danger to birdlife until they were eradicated in 2001. Campbell also hosted a French expedition to observe the 1874 transit of Venus—but it was (almost predictably) too cloudy for good observations to be made.

The Auckland Islands are mountainous and deeply dissected by inlets, so can play host to a wide variety of flora and fauna. They seem to have been visited by Polynesians half a century ago, but were uninhabited when the first Europeans came across them. Perhaps that Polynesian legacy was the stimulus for a doomed colonization attempt by Maori and Moriori from Chatham Island in 1842 (they were joined later by Europeans), which left a legacy of feral pigs and cats that are still disrupting the natural ecology. Russ and Terauds mention plans to eradicate the pigs and cats, which still seem to be progressing slowly. The islands also hosted a German transit-of-Venus expedition in 1874, which experienced “the most wretched imaginable” weather—the scientists certainly don’t look very cheerful in the photograph in the book.

The Snares are a paradox—despite their proximity to New Zealand, little effort was made to exploit their resources, they acquired no invasive species, and so are nowadays a teeming and pristine environment with strictly controlled access. My favourite picture from this chapter is of albatross nests in the Snares forest—the only place in the world you find albatrosses nesting under trees.

Macquarie is a long ridge of an island, the farthest south of all the places discussed here, and the only one that belongs to Australia, rather than New Zealand. It has had a permanent research base since the 1940s, run by ANARE—Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions. (This is the place that played host to Mary Gillham during the visit she describes in her book.) Along with its long human presence, it has a long list of invasive species, and a long list of eradication programmes. The last cat on Macquarie was killed in 2000. Russ and Terauds describe the huge problem that 100,000 rabbits were causing, stripping entire hillsides of vegetation. Since their book was written, rabbits have been successfully eliminated and the overgrazed vegetation is making a recovery.

That’s been a whirlwind tour of the seven locations that Russ and Terauds spend 224 pages describing and illustrating in detail. The book finishes with a ten-page bibliography for anyone who wants to hunt down more information.

My only complaint is how inexplicably hard this book is to get hold of—it crops up on the webpages of a few New Zealand booksellers, but no farther afield than that. I had to order my copy directly from Heritage Expeditions. I’m glad I did, though.

  • If you’re interested in tracking down a copy, you can order one from Heritage Expeditions via the book’s webpage.
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Christoph Baumer: The History Of Central Asia

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Covers of The History of Central AsiaSima Qian found himself personally affected by China’s wars against the Xiongnu in quite unintended fashion, for in 99 BCE he was castrated on the orders of Emperor Han Wudi …

If I’ve been quiet on the reading front for a while, it’s been because I’ve been working my way through these gorgeously produced volumes. They’re big—almost a foot tall and over 350 pages each—but a lot of that is taken up by colour illustrations. There are beautiful pictures of artworks from dozens of cultures, produced over millennia; landscape photographs of Central Asia’s forbidding scenery; images of archaeological digs (some rather beautifully photographed); and occasional paintings that reconstruct ancient settlements from the archaeological evidence. I.B. Tauris have done the illustrations justice, reproducing them brightly on thick, glossy paper. And they’ve maintained a uniform style over four years and three volumes, resisting the urge to mess with the layout and style, so the three books have the feel of being a single entity.

Christoph Baumer is a Swiss explorer with an interest in the archaeology and history of Central Asia, and over the last decade and a half he has produced a series of books on those topics, both in English and in German.

He has taken on a huge task, trying to distil down such a vast sweep of  history. To sort things into manageable chunks, the books are divided into chapters, sections and sub-sections, proceeding in roughly chronological order. The chapters have very broad themes, like “The Iron Age”; the sub-sections deal with specific aspects of specific cultures. This can make things a little repetitive at times—we see the same alliances and battles several times over, as they are discussed from the viewpoint of each culture involved. But that means the books are good reference sources, because each sub-section is largely self-contained.

Overall, he succeeds. But I think the books would definitely have profited from a glossary, for those of us unable to keep our Sogdians, Bactrians, Scythians and Sarmatians straight, or who aren’t entirely sure where Fergana, Gansu, the Hexi Corridor or the Iron Gates might be. And although there are good maps, there needed to be more good maps—as the borders between regions shift, as nomadic groups migrate, there’s a need for outline maps every century or so, or at least at key historical moments. Trying to puzzle out the current borders of Bactria on a summary map that shows only geographical features and major towns is a bit of trial.

Volume One (published in 2012) is subtitled The Age Of The Steppe Warriors, and it takes us from the first wanderings of prehistoric man up to around 200 BC, by which time the fringes of Central Asia were settling into an established pattern of nation-states. There’s a summary of the current knowledge of human arrival in Central Asia during the Palaeolithic—which species of hominins passed through, and to what extent they either supplanted each other or interbred. When the archaeological evidence kicks in, there’s an eye-watering succession of cultures to deal with, and a degree of speculation about who influenced whom, and which languages these people might have spoken.

Cover of The Tarim Mummies
More about the Tocharians

After that, we begin to encounter cultures known to history, and see how Central Asia would draw in migrants when the climate was favourable, and then pump them back out again when the weather deteriorated. I’ve always been interested in the Tocharians, a little island of Indo-European apparently stranded in the Tarim Basin—Baumer places them in the larger setting of Indo-European migration into, and then out of, Central Asia.

My favourite anecdote from this period describes a legend among the Ossetian people of the Caucasus. It tells of a king who, as a boy, drew a sword from a tree-root, and who, on his death, had his sword thrown into the sea to be claimed by a water-deity. The parallels with the story of King Arthur and Excalibur are obvious. Why do the British and the Ossetians share this story? Baumer points out that the Ossetians are descendants of the nomadic Sarmatian Alans, and that Marcus Aurelius sent 5,500 Sarmatian cavalrymen to Britain in 175 AD, to guard Hadrian’s Wall. So maybe one of Britain’s founding myths originated among the nomads of Central Asia.

Volume One finishes with the incursions of the Greeks into Central Asia—the campaigns of Alexander, and the founding of the exotic and obscure Greco-Bactrian Kingdom.

Volume Two (2014), The Age Of The Silk Roads, takes us up to the end of the first millennium AD. As the subtitle suggests, it deals with the economic and cultural importance of the Silk Roads linking China to Europe and India. The cosmopolitan nature of these trans-continental routes was perfectly illustrated for me by one archaeological find Baumer describes—in the eighth century, in a Buddhist city in the Taklamakan Desert near the southern Silk Road, someone wrote (or perhaps received) a business letter in the Persian language, using the Hebrew alphabet.

Cover of Attila King of the Huns
More about the Huns

My favourite Indo-Europeans, the Tocharians, appear again, under their Chinese name, Yuezhi. Having been driven from the Tarim Basin into a long folk-wandering, they finally turn up in India as the founders of another exotic and obscure kingdom, the Kushan Empire. The book also describes how Buddhism evolved as it spread along the Silk Roads, how the Hunnic and Turkic nomads established kingdoms in Central Asia long before they came to menace Europe and the Near East, and how the Arabs, Tibetans and Chinese had a three-way struggle to control the region.

My favourite story from this volume is of the mysterious “fish-scale battle formation” adopted by the Xiongnu defenders of the fort of Zizhi Chanyu, besieged by the Chinese in 36 BC. This formation had not previously been seen by the Chinese, and the surviving description is oddly reminiscent of a Roman legionary testudo. Now, there were 10,000 Roman legionaries captured by the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC. The Parthians probably put these soldiers to work on their eastern border, well away from the temptation to escape back towards Rome. Is it possible that some of these men eventually percolated right across Asia to sell their services to a group of steppe warriors on the borders of China? Well, maybe. It’s an old hypothesis, but the modern genetic evidence isn’t supportive.

Volume Three (2016) is subtitled The Age Of Islam And The Mongols, and takes us up to about 1500. It does exactly what it says—describing the Islamic Arabic and Turkic empires that occupied the region at the turn of the millennium, the splintering of Islam into multiple sects, and how all of it was eventually overrun by the Mongols.

Cover of The Court Of The Caliphs
More about the Abassids

I could have done with a little more about the flowering of (mainly Persian) science under the benign (to science!) rule of the Abassid caliphs, but there is of course a lot to get through in a work of this sort. Sometimes too much—Baumer is occasionally forced to produce head-melting passages like the following:

While the 1150s and early 1160s were marked by conflicts with the invading Karluks, who killed Ibrahim III ibn Muhammad Khan, towards the end of the twelfth and in the early thirteenth century the western Karakhanid khans increasingly came under the influence of the religious caste of the Sudur. At the same time they were confronted with the aspiring military power of their western neighbours, the Chorasm-shahs, who were also the vassals of the Qara Khitai. The Qara Khitai for their part were hard pressed by the nomadic equestrian warriors of the Naiman under Prince Küchlüg, who had to flee to the west from Genghis Khan.

Got all that? Me neither.

Cover of Tamerlane
More about Tamerlane

The narrative settles down in the second half of the book, as Baumer no longer has to deal with so many competing kingdoms, and is able to settle into the overwhelming dominance of Mongol culture in Central Asia. The narrative ends with the disintegration of the pax mongolica, and the brief but devastating ascendancy of the truly ghastly Timur ibn Taraghai Barlas, known to history as Timur-e Lang, Timur the Lame or Tamerlane.

My favourite story from this volume is of how the Buddhist Qara Khitai’s assault on the Seljuk Turks in Central Asia filtered back to Christian Europe. The knowledge that there was a non-Moslem group out there, somewhere, fighting the Moslems, was probably the origin of the legend of Prester John—a powerful and wealthy ruler of a Christian kingdom in Central Asia, who was going to come to the aid of the Crusaders.

A fourth volume, subtitled The Age of Decline and Revival,  is planned, bringing the story up to the present day. I’m looking forward to it, but if the current publishing schedule is maintained, it’ll be 2018 before we see it.

Update: And indeed, The Age of Decline and Revival was published in 2018. I review it here.

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Paul McAuley: The “Jackaroo” Short Stories

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Paul McAuley "Jackaroo" stories

Ever since first contact, when the Jackaroo kicked off a global war on Earth, and swindled the survivors out of rights to most of the solar system in exchange for a basic fusion drive and access to a wormhole network linking a couple of dozen lousy M-class red dwarf stars, aliens had been tricking, bamboozling, and manipulating the human race. In the long run, humans would either kill themselves off or stumble upon the trick of ascendancy and go on to wherever it is the Elder Cultures have gone, but meanwhile they were at the mercy of species more powerful than them, pawn in games whose rules they didn’t know, and aims they didn’t understand.

Paul McAuley “Winning Peace” (2007)

Paul McAuley has been writing science fiction since the 1980s, originally as “Paul J. McAuley”. Although his stories feature science-fictional backgrounds that have been intricately worked out, the human story is always front and centre. He works in a variety of sub-genres—writing alternate histories (like Pasquale’s Angel, set in an alternative version of Renaissance Italy), near-future techno-thrillers (like Whole Wide World and The Secret Of Life), cyberpunk (like Fairyland) and stories of far-future humanity (like the Confluence and Four Hundred Billion Stars trilogies). The Quiet War sequence of novels and short stories recently explored the human future of the solar system and nearby stars.

Now, McAuley has produced two novels with a new setting, usually referred to as the “Jackaroo” series—Something Coming Through (2015) and Into Everywhere (2016).

In the Jackaroo universe, the near-future Earth undergoes an escalating series of environmental disasters, economic crises and terrorist attacks that ends in a limited nuclear exchange. In the aftermath of these events, collectively called the Spasm, alien spaceships arrive, piloted by the alien Jackaroo, who announce that they’ve come to help. In exchange for rights to exploit the planets of the outer Solar System, the Jackaroo gift the survivors of the Spasm with the design for a spacecraft fusion drive. and fifteen wormhole connections that give access to the planetary systems around fifteen widely scattered red dwarf stars. Other aliens soon turn up, prominently the !Cha*, an aquatic race who move around in water-filled travel pods that resemble small versions of H.G. Wells‘s Martian fighting machines. The !Cha collect interesting stories, for reasons I won’t reveal here, and their importance increases as the novels progress.

The fifteen new planetary systems prove to be something of a disappointment, though they are littered with the relics of previous alien cultures—ruins, technological fragments, altered biospheres, junk-yards of spacecraft. The wormhole network itself is an artefact of some long-vanished “Elder Culture”, and has been reused by many successor races. Some of the remains of these Elder Cultures are useful to humanity, some are dangerous, and some are merely incomprehensible. These now-vanished cultures appear to have been previous clients of the Jackaroo. The Jackaroo say that they have departed by achieving “ascendancy”, though they never get around to describing quite what ascendency is.

Indeed, the Jackaroo are blandly evasive about almost everything apart from their supposed desire to help. There’s a rumour that they may even have covertly contributed to the onset of the Spasm. The other alien races have various opaque agendas of their own. And access to remnants of Elder Culture technology is both a boon and a menace to the Earth and its colonies.

And that’s pretty much where the stories start. it’s a rich source for potential story lines—the exploration of new worlds, the secret motives of alien races, and the mixed threat and reward of Elder Culture artefacts all provide potential plots. There’s also the appeal of the unusual—these are, in the main, stories of interstellar colonization set in a near-future society. The new worlds are being opened up by people who drive recognizable makes of car, visit chain restaurants we know about, and who share our cultural references. This mixture of the familiar and the alien is compelling, and to some extent it lets McAuley economize on that great bug-bear of science-fiction writing, the data-dump. His Earth is recognizably our Earth, albeit a little altered by war and global warming; his colony worlds have societies that resemble our own in most respects, with a little Wild West frontier spirit stirred in.

Before the novels appeared, McAuley worked out the background to the Jackaroo universe in a series of short stories that appeared in various publications from 2006 onwards, and that’s what I want to talk about here. These eight short stories are pretty widely scattered (across three anthologies, three magazines and one collection, pictured at the head of this post). They’ll probably be issued as a themed collection fairly soon. But at present I suspect I may be one of the few people in the world (apart from McAuley and his agent) to have read them all, which is what motivates this little dissertation.

Short stories are intrinsically difficult to review—too easy to give away the plot. I will note the plot briefly for each story, but what I find most interesting is watching the process by which McAuley generated the core ideas that underpin his two Jackaroo novels so far. There are interesting inconsistencies between the stories. Some are trivial—the number of planetary systems in the Jackaroo gift shifts from a dozen to two dozen before settling down to fifteen, for instance. Some are sorted out when the novels sketch in a more detailed chronology. And others are more revealing, I think, showing the author tweaking the setting to produce the richest vein of potential story lines.

“Dust” (2006) and “Winning Peace” (2007), unusually for the series so far, are both set some considerable time after the initial colonization of the Jackaroo gift worlds—a period that won’t be returned to until the events of the second novel. In “Dust”, humans have acquired advanced medical technology—cloning, hibernation, the ability to adopt a neuter gender. In “Winning Peace” an interstellar war has recently been fought between human factions. In both stories, humans have advanced beyond the original planetary systems of early colonization—these old worlds are referred to as the First Empire in “Dust”. Both stories involve the search for Elder Culture technology. In “Dust”, the captain of a spacecraft is convinced, against her will, to mount a mission to rescue an archaeological team who have been exploring Elder Culture ruins on an inhospitable planet; the rescue goes wrong, in surprising ways. In “Winning Peace” a prisoner-of-war, sold into slavery after the interstellar war, is forced by his owner to carry out a mission to retrieve a piece of Elder Culture technology from a brown dwarf star. What he finds and how he tries to escape his owner are the drivers for the story.

These two stories also establish a background in which the fifteen gifted planetary systems of the Jackaroo are intrinsically unsatisfactory for humans—only one contains a habitable world, called First Foot. Elsewhere, people live in “asteroid reefs” and on the moons of warm jovian planets.

In “City Of The Dead” (2008), we move back to the time period of early colonization. The action takes place on the planet First Foot, where a small-town law officer rescues an elderly biologist from the local criminal organization, who are trying to force the biologist to reveal the location of a potentially valuable Elder Culture artefact. This one establishes the sort of setting that will be returned to in future stories—the recognizable present-day technology, punctuated by a few exotic oddities, and the sense of a new frontier, with all the opportunities and hazards that brings. (It’s also available as a stand-alone e-book for the Kindle.)

“Adventure” (2008) also takes place on First Foot during the colonization era, but it’s barely science fiction—it’s essentially a story about how middle age sneaks up on you, until one day you suddenly realize that youth has gone.

“Crimes And Glory” (2009) was published in Subterranean Online, a magazine published by Subterranean Press from 2005 to 2014. The story used to be freely available on-line, but at time of writing Subterranean seems to have taken down the  magazine section of their website, so my link takes you to the Wayback Machine’s copy of the now-deleted page (which loads slowly, but does eventually appear). The story starts as a police procedural on First Foot, in which a policewoman investigates a pair of murders, and it expands to a climax that marks an important transition-point in human access to the Elder Culture wormhole network, the opening of what’s called the New Frontier in the second novel.  In this story McAuley also introduces a couple of concepts that will be important in his later writing. By accessing Elder Culture computer code, humans have been able to get some ancient, derelict spacecraft working again; but they have also found that the code is able to infect the human nervous system, with potentially unpleasant results. As an introduction to the Jackaroo universe, you couldn’t do much better than reading “Crimes And Glory”, so it’s useful to find it freely available on-line. Human knowledge of the “abandoned spacecraft sargassos” and how to utilize them puts this story a little later than the early colonization phase, when humans were reliant on Jackaroo transport shuttles.

“The Choice” (2011) is set on post-Spasm, early-colonization Earth. Elder Culture and alien technology is being used for environmental clean-up. Two teenage boys are accidentally exposed to a piece of this alien technology. Typically of McAuley, the story is as much about the family life of the two boys as it is about the science fiction element †.

“Bruce Springsteen” (2012) takes us back to First Foot, and a barman who starts a relationship with a girl he meets in his bar, and who ends up involved in a crime spree. The girl is a Springsteen fan, and the story of the doomed protagonists would certainly make a good Springsteen song. This one also puts in place another important idea—that some Elder Culture technology might have needs and desires of its own.

“The Man” (2012) introduces us to a new world, Yanos. It is tidally locked to its parent star, and humans inhabit only the twilight zone between its hot and cold hemispheres. An elderly woman lives near the ruins of an Elder Culture factory, and scrapes a living by searching for scraps of Elder Culture materials that wash up on a nearby beach. One day, a naked man turns up at her door …

The striking thing about this one is that the fifteen disappointing planetary systems gifted by the Jackaroo in the first seven stories have morphed into fifteen planets, of which Yanos is one. McAuley has apparently felt the need for more worlds on which to set his  stories, without wishing to move the action away from the rich possibilities of the colonization era setting.

And that’s the set-up with which the novels start—multiple worlds being colonized simultaneously, just a few years after the Spasm and the Jackaroo intervention. Within the first hundred pages of Something Coming Through, we hear of several new worlds: Mangala, Hydrot, Nya Loka, Syurga and Tian. So there’s a hint of a great deal more to come.

Several of these stories have appeared in more than one collection. If you’re interested in tracking them down, you can find a list of publications for each story at the ever-useful Internet Speculative Fiction Database, here. Just click on the title of the story to bring up its publication summary.

Addendum: Just a week after I made this post, another Jackaroo short story appeared, at Tor.com—”Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was” (2016). This is the first “post novels” short story. It’s set on First Foot after the opening of the New Frontier, and references characters and events from both novels and “City Of The Dead”. It’s freely available on-line at the other end of my link. (Thanks to Mike for posting a comment to let me know about it.)

Further addendum: After a six-year silence, a new Jackaroo short story, “Maryon’s Gift”, has been published by Asimov’s Science Fiction, in the March/April 2022 edition. This one is narrated by a !Cha, who (it transpires) is swapping interesting stories around a campfire. The events take place very late in the Jackaroo timeline, when humans have established themselves all across the galaxy—the New Frontier has become the Second Empire. It’s the story of how the titular planet is discovered in the Large Magellanic Cloud by an explorer who has followed a previously unsuspected wormhole link—the first such link to connect outside our home galaxy. The planet subsequently falls into the possession of a sect of “Gaian monks”, who forbid all attempts at landing or colonization. The story eventually transforms into a philosophical meditation on the tension between two conflicting human desires: to maintain “pristine wilderness”, and to explore and utilize new resources.

* You might wonder about those names. The exclamation mark in !Cha suggests one of the phonetic symbols for a click consonant, and McAuley has now confirmed this in Into Everywhere—the name of the !Cha is pronounced with a “click consonant, halfway between a sneeze and the sound of a cork pulled from a bottle”. He hasn’t so far explained the derivation of Jackaroo. Any connection to the apprentice Australian sheep-men called jackaroos is (so far) obscure.
† “The Choice” was also published as a stand-alone, a tiny paperback and e-book in French translation, Le Choix. Because this preceded the publication of the Jackaroo novels, the Goodreads website has adopted the name The Choice for the Jackaroo series as a whole, a name also used by Wikipedia. But McAuley uses the name Jackaroo for this series on his own website, so I’ve followed his lead here.

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Reading, Walking

Two Books About The Mounth Roads

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Two books about the Mounth passes

Robert Smith: Grampian Ways
Neil Ramsay & Nate Pedersen: The Mounth Passes

It is clear enough where the Grampians begin; no-one is certain where they end. The limits of the range have been as elastic as the whims of cartographers, so that the word “Grampian” has become an uncertain scrawl on many maps.

Robert Smith Grampian Ways (1980)

These books are about the old Mounth roads—traditional mountain crossings in the southeast Highlands of Scotland, used by cattle drovers (and raiders), soldiers and travellers for centuries. Some are now covered in tarmacadam and have become major roads; some have been so far abandoned that they’re difficult to find on the ground, let alone the map.

I’ve written already about the origin of the mountain name Grampians, and the variable extent of the mountain ranges to which that name has been applied. Both these books tie it fairly firmly to those Scottish hills that have been called “The Mounth”—south of the Dee, east of the Cairnwell pass. And both are careful to mention the names “Grampian” and “Mounth” in their titles—Smith’s book’s full title is Grampian Ways: Journey Over The Mounth; Ramsay and Petersen call theirs The Mounth Passes: A Heritage Guide To The Old Ways Through The Grampian Mountains.

Smith casts his net a little beyond this strict definition, extending his travels as far west as Drumochter, and straying north of the Dee on either side of the Cairngorms—taking in the Minigaig connection to Glen Tromie, and the old tracks connecting Braemar and Balmoral to Tomintoul. Ramsay and Pedersen, on the other hand, keep to the traditional Mounth area, but find more routes to write about—the minor routes of the Elsick, the Stock, the Builg and the Kilbo Path don’t feature in Smith’s book.

That’s not the only difference between the two books. Smith’s was published in 1980, Ramsay and Petersen’s in 2013; Smith’s is a conventional paper book, Ramsay and Petersen’s an e-book that looks to be self-published (it has no ISBN or publisher listed in the colophon); Smith’s is a chatty personal account, running to 260 pages, Ramsay and Petersen’s is almost telegraphic by comparison (56 pages, containing many photographs, on my e-reader).

Robert Smith was a journalist who lived in Aberdeen. He wrote Grampian Ways while he was still working as the editor of the Aberdeen Evening Express. After his retirement in 1984 he went on to write  much more about the history of the area around Aberdeen, which he clearly loved. His obituary, which appeared in the Scotsman newspaper in 2008, gives a good summary of his life and works.

Grampian Ways is personal. Smith had been walking these hills for many years before he wrote it. Although each chapter describes a specific journey on foot over one of the Mounth passes, they’re full of reminiscences about other days in the same hills, too. Smith often stops along the way to chat—we learn not just the names of two children he encounters, but also the name of their dog. He tells us the story behind ruined cottages, fallen bridges, standing stones and old place-names as he goes. He quotes at length from the writings of others who travelled here—Robert Burns, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Queen Victoria prominent among them. And he embeds the tracks in history—where the cattle drovers came from, why they travelled, and where they stopped along the way; which army crossed which pass, and what the result of that was; and where exactly Queen Victoria stopped for a picnic. His writing radiates warmth and affection for the area, its people and its history. He also has an ear for memorable quotations—among other sources, he picks lines from a pseudonymous 1880 essay in the Aberdeen Journal, written by “Dryas Octopetala” and “Thomas Twayblade”*, describing an ascent of Lochnagar, during which “the gale would not permit the uplifting of an umbrella, even on the lee side of the cairn” and “the rain, when you faced it, hit in the face like showers of pease”.

The book is illustrated with some rather muddy black-and-white photos (pretty standard for the date of publication), and by some nice full-page maps.

Neil Ramsay and Nate Petersen worked on the Heritage Paths project in Scotland, Ramsay as Project Officer and Petersen as a volunteer. (I’ve already had occasion to link to the excellent  Heritage Paths website when I wrote about the Steplar path recently.) They have previously written about the Mounth roads for Leopard magazine, and they revised and assembled those articles to produce this book. The book also features photographs of the Mounth routes taken by Graham Marr, who maintains a rather gorgeous Flickr page featuring Scottish hill photography.

Each route is described in two ways—first with a potted history of its use over the centuries, topped and tailed by a couple of Marr’s photographs; and then by a brief “route survey”, giving the grid references of the start and finish points and a short text describing the route, illustrated by more photographs. The photographs are excellent, but on my e-book reader are too small to appreciate fully; the same applies to a coloured map of all the routes at the start of the book.

The history necessarily covers much of the ground already trodden by Smith, but there is also a lot of new material. For instance, with reference to Jock’s Road, between Glen Doll and Glen Callater, Smith writes: “There has never been any explanation of how it got its name, or if, in fact, there was ever a Jock at all.” But Ramsay and Petersen report: “Considering the age of Jock’s Road, which has been used for centuries, the name is actually quite recent. A local shepherd in the 19th century, John ‘Jock’ Winter, lent his name to the pass and it stuck.” While Smith refers only to a “bothy” on Jock’s Road, Smith and Petersen give the history of various shelters at that point, culminating in the present bothy which glories in the name of Davy’s Bourach†. Ramsay and Petersen are also better at tracing the history of the Mounth routes as record in maps of the area over the centuries—taking advantage, I suspect, of easy access to the National Library of Scotland‘s magnificent on-line map archive, which has featured more than once on these pages.

The “route surveys” are very brief—single paragraphs, in the main, providing no more than the dots to be connected when consulting a large-scale map.

So these are very much complementary works—Smith has the wider scope, a leisurely approach, historical and personal digressions, apt quotations, and more detailed maps. Ramsay and Petersen are more up-to-date, fill in some gaps in Smith’s history, cover routes in the core area that Smith doesn’t mention, provide grid references, and of course have the benefit of being able to easily reproduce Marr’s colour photography.

Glen Clova from Bachnagairn
Bachnagairn in Glen Clova – described by Smith, but not Ramsay and Petersen

* According to the Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, “Dryas Octopetala” was Alexander Copland, and “Thomas Twayblade” was Thomas R. Gillies. They both turn up listed as members in the Transactions of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in the late nineteenth century—Copland as a “merchant” and Gillies as an “advocate”. Presumably both were amateur botanists—Dryas octopetala is the Mountain Avens; the Twayblade is an orchid.
† Ramsay and Petersen don’t explain what a bourach is. It’s a Scots word meaning “a complete mess, a shambles”. There’s a Gaelic word, buarach, which refers to a fetter tied around the hind legs of a cow during milking. if you picture the process of milking a stroppy cow with its rear legs tied together, you’ll get the idea of what a bourach looks like.

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James Shapiro: Contested Will

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Cover of Contested WillThere is nothing in the writings of Shakespeare that does not argue the long and early training of the schoolman, the traveller, and the associate of the great and learned. Yet there is nothing in the known life of Shakespeare that shows he had any one of these qualities.

“James Corton Cowell (1805)”

James Shapiro is a Shakespeare scholar and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Contested Will is his fourth book about William Shakespeare.

This one is about the “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” conspiracy theory. Shapiro deals mainly with two of the most prominent alternative candidates, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. He follows the evolution of “Baconian” and “Oxfordian” thinking on this topic. The story involves some pretty famous people: Mark Twain was a Baconian; Sigmund Freud an Oxfordian.

Anonymous film posterHe tells the story well, making considerable effort to put himself in the shoes of the original Baconians and Oxfordians, mindful of the level of historical evidence that was available to them at the time they were thinking and writing about the topic. The whole is leavened with a touch of dry wit. Unfortunately, the book was published too early (2010) to have caught the apotheosis of Oxfordian thinking—a Holywood movie, Anonymous, which was released in 2011. But Shapiro expressed his view on that in an op-ed piece for the New York Times. In a subsequent Huffington Post interview the film’s director, Roland Emmerich, accused Shapiro of “just outright lying” about the level of evidence that supports Shakespeare’s authorship (and undermines the claims for Oxford). Maybe he hadn’t read this book, which sets out the case in detail.

Why do people feel they need to go looking for alternative authorship for Shakespeare’s plays and poetry? The quotation at the head of this post pretty much says it all. Shakespeare’s life is poorly documented, and what is available is often rather dull and petty—bills and court cases. There’s no hint there of the man who produced the works of epic imagination that have come down to us.

I have scare quotes around the name and date of James Corton Cowell for a very good reason—he didn’t exist. The University of London’s Senate House Library contains the text of two lectures allegedly delivered by Cowell to the Ipswich Philosophic Society in 1805, setting out the Baconian case for the first time. Unfortunately, as Shapiro shows, these documents are a hoax, referring to details of Shakespeare’s life that came to light only decades after the lectures were supposedly delivered. But, hoax or not, the words attributed to Cowell set out the “Shakespeare authorship problem” very succinctly.

Shapiro points out the logical errors from which this supposed “problem” has been concocted.

1. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

For instance, the fact we don’t have documentary evidence that Shakespeare attended school doesn’t mean he never attended school—Shapiro points out that we have no evidence of anyone attending school in Stratford at that time, although we do have evidence that several of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the town went on to university. Presumably they had some schooling before that!

The fact we don’t have any documentation of the books Shakespeare owned doesn’t mean he owned no books. (How many of us alive today could seriously expect to leave a list of our books that could be retrieved four centuries from now?)

2. You don’t need to experience something to write about it

There is a perception today, born out of the demands of readers and the teachings of creative writing classes, that authors should put their personal experiences into their writing. Many people have read Shakespeare with the expectation that his writings say something about him—that the sonnets reveal deep details of his emotional life, and that the plays draw on a wealth of experience of travel. But sometimes authors just do some research and then make stuff up. Shapiro reports that there is very little evidence of any author inserting autobiographical information into their text in the Elizabethan age, and no evidence that readers or audiences expected such stuff.

And anyone who insists that Shakespeare had to have experience of everything he wrote about should deduce that he was a noble, love-lorn, teenage, vicious, scheming, murdering, fat, drunken, woodland sprite, among other things. So any attempt to reconstruct the man from the writing is selective, and the writings are so copious that everyone gets to choose the bits that fit their personal theory best.

3. It’s difficult to fit another author into the historical constraints

We know, for instance, that Shakespeare’s contemporaries saw no inconsistency between the man they socialized and worked with, and the works he claimed as his own. We can see how Shakespeare’s plays were carefully tuned to the buildings in which they were to be performed, and the actors who were to perform them. And we can watch Shakespeare’s style evolve during the course of his career. These are significant problems for anyone who wants to finger Edward de Vere as the author of the plays, for instance, since de Vere died before many of the plays were first performed. Quite a remarkable conspiracy is required if de Vere is to have produced a stock-pile of plays that fit comfortably into the detail of Shakespeare’s later life.

Shapiro lays all this out in detail. Of course, none of it proves that Shakespeare wrote the poetry and plays attributed to him; but then, the burden of proof rests with those who claim he didn’t.

And, on the matter of burden of proof, one of the most remarkable things recorded in this book is that the authorship question has actually been debated in front of judges on more than one occasion. Shouldn’t judges be out, you know, listening to real legal stuff?

In 1987, three US Supreme Court judges heard opposing arguments from Stratfordians (for Shakespeare) and Oxfordians (for de Vere)  in a moot court before a thousand spectators. And one of the first things the Oxfordians were told was that the burden of proof rested with them. There was a unanimous verdict in favour if Shakespeare.

In 1988, three senior judges of appeal in the UK were persuaded to hold another moot court examining the same question, in front of an audience of five hundred. There was another unanimous verdict for Shakespeare.

That about wrapped it up for the Oxfordians’ enthusiasm for (mock) legal recourse. However, in 2014 another authorship trial was staged, this time in Canada, at the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario. One Supreme Court and two Appeal Court judges gave their time. It was a light-hearted affair, and the lawyer representing Edward de Vere contented himself with trying to cast doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship, rather than advancing specific arguments for de Vere. It was broadcast by CBC Radio, and the recording is still available on-line from CBC. If you have 54 spare minutes and want to hear some of the pro and con arguments rehearsed (along with a few good jokes), you might want to give it a listen.

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Stephen Baxter & Alastair Reynolds: The Medusa Chronicles

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Cover of The Medusa Chronicles

“The Apollo Moon programme is cancelled,” the man behind the desk was saying. “But the good news is you two good old boys are gonna get the chance to save the world.”

This is a slightly odd one.

In 1971 Arthur C. Clarke wrote a novella entitled “A Meeting With Medusa”, which won the Nebula Award for best novella the following year, and which has been reprinted in many collections ever since. It told the story of a balloon flight through the clouds of Jupiter, during which the lone pilot encounters huge sentient creatures, like giant jellyfish (the “medusae” of the title), floating in the upper levels of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds are British science fiction authors who are in many ways natural successors to Clarke, albeit slightly more melancholy in outlook. Baxter, in particular, shares Clarke’s penchant for “sense of wonder” stories based on new scientific ideas, and he has co-written a trilogy of science fiction novels with Clarke, collectively called A Time Odyssey.

Now, forty-five years after “A Meeting With Medusa”, Baxter and Reynolds have joined forces to produce The Medusa Chronicles, a novel “inspired by” Clarke’s novella.

Cover of The Medusa EncounterStrangely, this isn’t even the first novel to be based on that novella. In 1990, Paul Preuss gave us The Medusa Encounter. It was the fourth of a series of six novels based on Clarke short stories (the Venus Prime series), which had started life in the 1980s as a draft for a computer game. The novels take the settings from six Clarke stories, and incorporate them into the adventures of a young woman travelling around the solar system. Clarke’s name featured prominently on the covers, and the primitive wireframe graphics from the cancelled game were incorporated as illustrations. I have the first three novels in the Tor edition, and the second three from Avon. The difference in choice of cover art is striking, with each of the Tor covers (example below) depicting a head-and-shoulders view of a young woman in reflective mood, illuminated by hi-tech lighting. Avon, on the other hand (example above) obviously decided to pitch straight for teenage boys of all ages.

Cover of Breaking Strain

Anyway, back to Baxter and Reynolds. This book sticks tightly to the content of the original novella. In fact, the novella is essentially the missing first chapter of the novel, which picks up the threads of Clarke’s story a few months later, and continues it into the indefinite future. Clarke’s central character, Howard Falcon (the pilot of the Jovian balloon expedition) is again the central character of the novel. There’s a Big Reveal concerning Falcon at the end of Clarke’s novella which I’m reluctant to disclose, although it’s necessarily given away in the opening chapter of this book. Clarke closes his story by hinting at what Falcon’s future will be, and Baxter and Reynolds have set themselves the challenge of fleshing out Clarke’s hint in a way that’s faithful to the original story and Clarke’s particular vision of the future of humanity.

I think they’ve been pretty successful. They’ve picked over the novella in detail, lifting minor characters and making them into major players in Falcon’s later life. Tiny details from the novella are revisited and expanded upon in the novel. A single incident from Clarke’s story (in which Falcon saves the life of a “simp”—a “super-intelligent chimp”) is taken as a defining moment in Falcon’s life and revisited in several ways. There’s also a moment of gentle retconning, in which Baxter and Reynolds explain away Clarke’s dated mention of a “surface” below Jupiter’s clouds that we now know isn’t there.

The story involves Falcon (now almost immortal as a result of medical technology) as he participates in the further exploration of the solar system, and becomes a mediator in humanity’s eventual conflict with the machine intelligences it has created and over which it has lost control. There are long sense-of-wonder passages that seem like exactly the sort of thing Clarke would be writing if he were still with us—the detailed description of a descent all the way to Jupiter’s mysterious core, for instance.

Interestingly, Baxter and Reynolds seem to have decided that they can’t depict Clarke’s 1970s vision of mankind’s future expansion into the solar system as realistically arising from our disillusioned and largely space-indifferent world of the 2010s. Their novel is set in an alternate future, in which the Apollo program didn’t just go to the Moon and then suffer the onset of public indifference—instead, the Apollo technology was used in the late ’60s to save the world from an asteroid impact, after which public enthusiasm for establishing a human presence in space was guaranteed.

For Clarke aficionados, many little affectionate nods to his work are smuggled into this story. The robot manufactured in Urbana, Illinois; mention of György Ligeti‘s haunting choral work, Lux Aeterna; Discovery-class spacecraft; a Clavius Base on the Moon; an organization named Spaceguard; even an astronaut in the novel’s alternative Apollo era who goes to see “… a new space movie, some damn science fiction thing. Opens with ape men beating each others’ brains out with clubs made of bone.”

So it’s a solid story and also good fun, though I occasionally had the sense I was watching Baxter and Reynolds play some sort of parlour game—”Look what we’re doing now!” I would recommend it if you want a fix of Arthur C. Clarke nostalgia, but all in all I think I’d have preferred an entirely new novel by either Baxter or Reynolds.

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Jack McDevitt: Ancient Shores & Thunderbird

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Covers of Ancient Shores & Thunderbird, Jack McDevitt

April sipped her drink. “You really want to know? I don’t see how anyone could have built the yacht.”
Max listened to the fire and watched April struggle with her thoughts.
“I know how that sounds,” she said.
“What exactly do you mean?” asked Max.
“It’s beyond our technology. But I knew that before I came here.”
“Our technology?” said Lasker.
“Way beyond.”
“So you’re saying, what?” said Max. “That the boat was built in Japan? Or on Mars?”
“Maybe Mars. Or a pre-Native-American super-high-tech civilization in North Dakota.”

Jack McDevitt has been writing science fiction novels for thirty years. He has a style you might call “simple”, until you tried writing it yourself. He lays out his story in short sentences. He tells you exactly what his characters are seeing, and what they’re thinking. He doesn’t use language to play with your emotions—he lets clearly described events do that instead. Stephen King has written, “Jack McDevitt is that splendid rarity, a storyteller first and a science fiction writer second.” I think that’s absolutely right. He uses science fictional settings, but he’s actually always writing about people and society.

There are a couple of trademark features that crop up over and over again in his novels. The action generally takes place in a wider social setting—the lead characters have adventures with political repercussions, which attract the attention of journalists. Most of his books include imagined extracts from the writings of political pundits, or excerpts from chat-show interviews with protagonists and experts. It’s a handy tool—the journalists ask the questions the reader might be asking; the political pundits raise the objections the reader might by making. And it allows McDevitt to make unobtrusive little data dumps into his stories, so that the reader assimilates the details of the science-fictional setting without really noticing. He also has a tendency to leave plot-lines open—as with real life, not everything in a Jack McDevitt story ties up with a neat bow. His characters (and his readers) often have to deal with just not completely understanding what happened to them.

Since the turn of the century, McDevitt’s novels have largely alternated between two series: the Academy series, a set of adventures featuring space-pilot Priscilla Hutchins; and the Alex Benedict series, mysteries built around the activities of the eponymous far-future antiquities dealer. Both series now stretch to seven novels and an assortment of short fiction.

But before he got under way with the series, McDevitt wrote a number of stand-alone novels, including Ancient Shores in 1996. This had one of McDevitt’s characteristic open endings—a satisfactory conclusion was reached to the main story arc, but many mysteries remained. Then, in 2015, he wrote a sequel, Thunderbird. This prompted me to pull Ancient Shores off the shelf and read the two novels back-to-back. They’re both fine demonstrations of Stephen King’s point, examples of what’s been called “situational” science fiction—the science-fictional scenario is only there in order to poke the characters with a stick and see what they do.

Ancient Shores starts small and gradually expands. It begins with a North Dakotan farmer finding something in his field while digging a trench for a water pipe. There’s a pole sticking out of the ground. He tries to dig it out, and ends up with a thirty-foot deep hole, containing a yacht. The yacht is in pristine condition, and seems to have been built all in one piece—there are no joints anywhere. Its bow is marked with writing in an unknown alphabet. It is made of a synthetic material that is almost indestructible. And a sample taken from one of its ropes shows that it had once been tied to a piece of spruce wood—ten thousand years ago.

Whoever built it seems to have been using it to sail on prehistoric Lake Agassiz—an ice-dammed lake that covered a huge area of southern Canada and the northern USA during the last ice age.

By tracing the nearby prehistoric shoreline, another underground structure is found, in a nearby Sioux reservation. Dubbed “the Roundhouse”, it is excavated and found to give access to a kind of interstellar transport system.

McDevitt describes the ramping journalistic interest; the invasion of the excavation site by tourists and souvenir-hunters; a stock-market crash as rumours of indestructible materials, free energy and effortless transport spread; and growing international pressure on the American President to simply make the problem go away—to shut the exploration down. The president’s position is made more awkward by the fact that the Roundhouse is on Sioux land—he might be able to confiscate land belonging to some random farmer for the good of the nation; but taking land from Native Americans is altogether a different matter, politically. And there are religious and New-Age nutters, deluded bombers, a graffiti artist intent on tagging the Roundhouse, and something that may (or may not) have come to Earth through the newly active transport system. McDevitt tells it all with a straightforward, almost prosaic narrative—there are very few big special effects. The market crashes after a scientist uses a single phrase in a TV interview—predicting that, if we can learn how to reproduce the indestructible material and cheap compact power sources in the alien technology, we won’t need to buy new stuff every few years:

“I think we could give you a pretty durable toaster.” He sat back in his chair, looking quite pleased. “In fact, I think we could give you the first multigenerational toaster.”

I think few other writers would have gone for that option when all sorts of other marvels might have been promised. But as killer concept flagging the end of consumerism, the “multigenerational toaster” takes some beating.

The story ends with mounting political tension and a tense, last-minute resolution. But in typical McDevitt style much is left unexplained. The exploration of the transport system is just beginning. It connects to an odd selection of places, and its purpose is far from obvious. The reader is left with an open-ended potentiality.

And then, twenty years later, comes Thunderbird, which takes up almost exactly where Ancient Shores left off. Indeed, it starts with a recap of an event that played a minor part in the first novel, but which is now promoted to greater significance.

The markets are still shaky, the President still under pressure, the something that may (or may not) have come to Earth is still an unresolved issue. Under the direction of the Sioux chairman, exploration of the interstellar transport system continues. It’s a problematic endeavour. The explorers have no way of knowing where they’re going to end up when they push the button that operates the transporter. The system is too small to move vehicles, so all exploration must be carried out on foot. The locations are sometimes dangerous, sometimes ambiguous, and sometimes merely odd. The Sioux are particularly interested in a pristine and apparently uninhabited world that has been called Eden—could they colonize it, taking it for themselves? It’s only accessible from their land, so is it also their land? For Native Americans to own a huge untamed wilderness, which they could deny to the government of the United States—wouldn’t that be a pleasing irony?

And then an exploratory expedition encounters intelligent life on Eden. (Again, McDevitt choses to be understated in his description of this moment—the party push through some undergrowth, four days’ trek from the transport system, and encounter a simple wooden bridge.) Crisis for the Sioux! Are they seriously going to steal someone else’s land?

The new discovery doesn’t help resolve the mystery of the transport system’s builders. In fact, further exploration simply makes the system more puzzling. Meanwhile, political pressures at home continue to mount.

There are resolutions—in particular with reference to the something that may (or may not) have come to Earth. But mysteries remain, and the story finishes on a distinctly melancholy note. McDevitt is in his eighties now, and this novel feels almost like a reassessment of the optimistic stance on which he finished Ancient Shores. It seems he feels his characters might just have done the wrong thing, first time around.

So. I’d recommend Ancient Shores unreservedly—if you haven’t read McDevitt before, it’s a fine introduction to his writing and his style, and it stands alone just fine. And if you find you like McDevitt, once you finish Ancient Shores it’s going to be difficult for you to avoid reading Thunderbird, to find out what happens next. And Thunderbird is a good read, full of incident and revelations, with McDevitt’s ability to put interesting characters into an interesting story drawing you in and carrying you along, just as always. But it takes you on a different kind of journey.

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Phenomena, Reading, Walking

Tristan Gooley: How To Read Water

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Cover of How To Read Water, Tristan GooleyOur journey will begin, like so many great explorers before us, in the kitchen.

Tristan Gooley is, according to his website, a “natural navigator”—by which he means that he navigates using nature, not that he’s just intrinsically good at navigating. He set out his stall with his first book, appropriately entitled The Natural Navigator, which is all about navigating using the sun and stars, the land and water, the plants and animals. And Gooley is an equal-opportunities naturalist—he’s quite prepared to navigate around town using the orientation of satellite TV dishes (they generally point southeast in the UK) and the route of helicopters (they’re legally required to avoid over-flying built-up areas as much as possible, so have a tendency to follow rivers through the city).

How To Read Water is his third book about natural navigation, a successor to the compendious The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs. As the title suggests, this one zeroes in on water in the environment—and, in trademark style, Gooley is just as happy picking up directional clues from the behaviour of ships as he is from the distribution of puddles. He’s also refreshingly relaxed about what “natural navigation” actually means to the people who read his books—he knows that most of us are going to read this stuff out of curiosity about the outdoor environment, and few will actually throw away their GPS and compass. That’s fine with Gooley—although the book is loosely structure around the “natural navigation” concept, what shines through is a simple delight in just being out in the world, with a heightened awareness of the subtle cues that nature always provides.

The subtitle hints at the structure of the book—Clues, Signs and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea. Gooley starts small, with a glass of water in the kitchen, and expands the view steadily from puddles to rivers to lakes to ocean waves, currents and tides. Interspersed are digressions on the sound of water, the behaviour of fish, navigating at sea using the stars, the marking of ship navigation channels, and many other things.

Indeed, it begins to feel like a bit of a rag-bag. There has to be a diminishing return to this sort of book, and with this third volume I occasionally felt that Gooley was casting around for almost any unused material that he could roughly align with the concept of “water”. The chapter entitled “Rare and Extraordinary” is a case in point, containing a wild assortment of briefly noted phenomena that have something to do with water, but not much to do with navigation—for example, it includes short notes on flying fish, braided rivers, and amphidromes (points in the open ocean that experience a back-and-forth or round-and-round tidal flow, rather than a change in water level). He even mentions the green flash, an atmospheric optical phenomenon which has essentially nothing to do with water at all, and he addresses it so briefly that you can find out much more about it from my own humble offering on the topic. It’s not clear to me why this chapter is included at all.

But the book has taken on such a wide remit that I think there’s something here for everyone, although I also suspect that most readers will encounter a chapter or two that they find themselves skipping through in frustration. (For me, that was the chapter entitled “Shipwatching”.)

That aside, there are two undoubted delights to be had. One is finding out something entirely new, as I did when Gooley discussed the anatomy of a beach, and the origin of rips and undertows. The other (perhaps even more satisfying) is encountering something that you have been vaguely aware of for a long time, but which Gooley sets out in clear detail—a definite “Ah-ha!” moment. For me, that moment came during Gooley’s discussion of the anatomy of rivers. As a hillwalker, I’ve been crossing upland rivers for decades, and am often successful at finding a safe crossing-place over even initially unpromising-looking volumes of water. What I’m doing, it turns out, is exploiting a natural alternation in rivers between riffle and pool—I’m unconsciously seeking out the rapidly moving shallow sections (“riffles”) that are easier to cross than the deeper, slower pools. I’ve also long had an aversion to starting a river crossing on the inside of a meander loop, aware that I’m likely to find myself wading into deeper water as I progress. Gooley explains this phenomenon in terms of the thalweg, the line of maximum flow, which tends to stray towards the outer bank of a curving river.

River Sligachan, Skye
A riffle in the River Sligachan (Click to enlarge)
© 2016 The Boon Companion

And I learned some new words, which any reader of this blog will know is a Fine Thing. For instance, the tendency of some deciduous trees to retain their brown leaves throughout the winter (think of all those messy beech hedges, stuffed with dead leaves) is called marcescence. Which, I find after a bit of my own research, comes from the Latin marcere, “to be faint or languid”.

Occasionally things go wrong. If “a cube of water as tall and deep as the average person” weighs “almost three tonnes”, then an average person is about 1.4 metres tall (around 4 feet 7 inches). And I found the explanation of tides a little garbled, mixing gravity and centrifugal force in a way that wasn’t at all clear.

But over all, as with his previous books, there’s much to delight and enlighten. It’s an entertaining gallop through the complexities of hydrodynamics. On which topic, I’ll sign off with a statement attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to the physicist Horace Lamb, which Gooley quotes appreciatively:

I am an old man now, and when I die and go to Heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. About the former I am rather optimistic.

Horace Lamb, at a British Association meeting in 1932

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Mechanical trousers will help turn mountains into molehills (Times: May 12, 2016)An article by Tom Whipple in The Times today (May 12, 2016) reports on a set of powered trousers designed by Panizollo et al. and described in an article published today by the Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation: “A biologically-inspired multi-joint soft exosuit that can reduce the energy cost of loaded walking“.

The authors conclude:

Our results demonstrate that an autonomous soft exosuit can reduce the metabolic burden experienced by load carriers, possibly augmenting their overall gait performance.

The overall reduction in work associated with walking is around seven per cent—”something you can just about feel”, according to one of the authors (Walsh), quoted in The Times. That’s in line with previous studies of other devices, which the authors mention in the Discussion section of their paper (my link takes you to the full-text, Open Access article).

Whipple sees an application to hillwalking:

It will be just enough, in other words, that you can turn up at your local Ramblers’ Association and make the other walkers feel inadequate, without also making them suspicious.

All this is very gratifying to me, since I invented the device (fictionally, at least) a good 23 years ago, when I wrote a story entitled “Lachlan and the Bionic Long-Johns”, in which my hero Lachlan McLoughlin takes on various hill challenges while wearing something rather similar. My version worked rather better (that’s the joy of fiction, of course), and you can see it in action in Chris Tyler‘s lovely cartoon on the rear cover of my (long out-of-print) book Munro’s Fables (TACit Press, 1993):Rear cover of Munro's Fables(You can nowadays find the story in the e-book The Complete Lachlan or the paperback The Complete Lachlan & Walking Types.)

I can’t really claim all the credit, though. The idea of a powered exoskeleton has been around since at least 1959, when Robert Heinlein described a full-body version in his novel Starship Troopers.

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