The two hefty vol­umes of Rodger’s his­tory of the British Navy bring the sto­ry only up to 1815. But this life­time schol­arly work is well-bal­anced with read­abil­ity. Rodger thinks strate­gi­cally more than tac­ti­cally. He knows that the eco­nom­ics of get­ting ships on the sea, admin­is­ter­ing and sup­ply­ing them, and mak­ing sure they do some­thing use­ful is the heart of the mat­ter. Britain had exer­cised con­sid­er­able sea pow­er in the north­ern world in Anglo-Sax­on times, but the land-lub­bing, horse rid­ing Nor­man aris­toc­racy used ships very crude­ly. Even in the Renais­sance, there was no real “navy”, but mere­ly incon­sis­tent attempts to put togeth­er fleets for var­i­ous tem­po­rary pur­poses, and naval tac­tics remained prim­i­tive. Hen­ry VIII was par­tic­u­larly irre­spon­si­ble and destruc­tive, as he was with every­thing else. Elizabeth’s reign was dom­i­nated by “pri­va­teer­ing”. It was only dur­ing Cromwellian times, when the rul­ing dic­ta­tor­ship feared dis­loy­alty among sea­men, that the first attempts were made to orga­nize and admin­is­ter what would fit our mod­ern notions of a nation­al navy. Much of the sto­ry, of course, involves the more eco­nom­i­cally advanced Dutch, with whom British polit­i­cal, mil­i­tary and eco­nomic rela­tions were inter­wo­ven for cen­turies. Rodgers is very adept at sort­ing out these complexities.

This book, by the author­i­ta­tive expert on glob­al mon­ey laun­der­ing, out­lines the involve­ment of the gov­ern­ments, cor­po­ra­tions, and banks in the pro­cess­ing of crim­i­nal mon­ey on a vast scale. But he is more con­cerned with the sys­tem of false book­keep­ing with which the world’s poor­est regions are sys­tem­at­i­cally drained of cap­i­tal. Bak­er is no philo­soph­i­cal light­weight: he remains trapped in a false sys­tem of def­i­n­i­tions and ter­mi­nol­ogy, but he knows that there is some­thing wrong with it. He cor­rectly points out that the cur­rent Con­ser­v­a­tive ide­ol­ogy of glob­al finance has noth­ing to do with Adam Smith’s the­o­ries of free mar­kets, which it vio­lates in every par­tic­u­lar, but is descend­ed, instead, from the moral blank­ness of Jere­my Bentham’s platophistries. But he can­not pull him­self out of his received frame­work to make the nec­es­sary next steps in analy­sis. There is no doubt, how­ever, of his basic decency..

A very good show for a first nov­el: A young prodi­gy at Cam­bridge uses her dis­cov­ery of bod­i­less time trav­el to enter the mind of a young Amer­i­can sol­dier at the inva­sion of Guam dur­ing World War II. The sto­ry is told in par­al­lel with the clas­si­cal Greek myth of the Labours of Her­cules, and also draws on the native folk­lore of Guam. George pulls you into the sto­ry quick­ly and treats his char­ac­ters with sen­si­tiv­ity. I espe­cially respect this kind of work because it requires real research to pull off. Get­ting things right, his­tor­i­cally, psy­cho­log­i­cally, and cul­tur­ally, has not been a big goal in the big SF pub­lish­ing hous­es, late­ly, and this is an encour­ag­ing excep­tion. I found only a few choic­es of words that I would quib­ble with.

14673. (Antho­ny Bouch­er) The Case of the Sev­en Sneezes
14674. (Mar­shall McLuhan) The Guten­burg Galaxy
14675. (Ger­ald Pos­ner) Secrets of the King­dom ― The Inside Sto­ry of the Saudi‑U.S. Connection
14676. (Evan­ge­line Wal­ton) The Chil­dren of Llyr
14677. (Nan­cy Phe­lan & Michael Volin) Sex and Yoga
14678. (Jared Dia­mond) Guns, Germs and Steel
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I’ve been remark­ing that some of the best writ­ten books, in recent times, have been pub­lished in the “juve­nile” mar­ket. This book proves my point. It’s a beau­ti­fully writ­ten, emo­tion­ally pow­er­ful, and high­ly imag­i­na­tive demon­stra­tion of what it means to be a slave. No top­ic is clos­er to my heart, and, frankly, I wish that I had writ­ten this book. “47” is a plan­ta­tion slave, who, in the 1830’s, encoun­ters an alien being who is strand­ed on earth. He tells his tale from the view­point of now, since he has become effec­tively immor­tal, and still retains the 14-year-old body. But the sci­ence fic­tion ele­ment of the sto­ry is under­played. Mosley con­cen­trates on mak­ing the read­er hear, taste, smell, and feel the real­ity of slav­ery. It’s a fine piece of work.

The first item, the essay “On Fairy Sto­ries”, is essen­tial read­ing for any­one with a seri­ous inter­est in Tolkien. It makes clear exact­ly what he was doing, and why. It was writ­ten dur­ing the height of the dom­i­nant posi­tion of “real­ism” in lit­er­a­ture, when any­thing even remote­ly imag­i­na­tive was con­sid­ered trash by lit­er­ary peo­ple. Tolkien was par­tic­u­larly annoyed by those who saw fan­tasy, espe­cially the par­tic­u­lar kind of fan­tasy that he called “fairy-sto­ry”, as exclu­sively for chil­dren. He writes:

Among those who still have enough wis­dom not to think fairy sto­ries per­ni­cious, the com­mon opin­ion seems to be that there is a nat­ural con­nex­ion between the minds of chil­dren and fairy-sto­ries, of the same order as the con­nex­ion between children’s bod­ies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sen­ti­ment, and one that is there­fore most often made by those who, for what­ever pri­vate rea­sons (such as child­less­ness), tend to think of chil­dren as a spe­cial kind of crea­ture, almost a dif­fer­ent race, rather than as nor­mal, if imma­ture, mem­bers of a par­tic­u­lar fam­ily, and of the human fam­ily at large. Actu­ally, the asso­ci­a­tion of chil­dren and fairy-sto­ries is an acci­dent of our domes­tic his­tory. Fairy sto­ries have in the mod­ern world been rel­e­gated to the ‘nurs­ery’, as shab­by or old-fash­ioned fur­ni­ture is rel­e­gated to the play-room, pri­mar­ily because adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.

Touché. I can still remem­ber when that atti­tude was gospel, when a good sci­ence fic­tion writer like Kurt Von­negut had to vocif­er­ously deny that he wrote SF so he could be tak­en seri­ously, and the ency­clo­pe­dias described H. G. Wells as the author of Tono Bun­gay, Mr. Brit­tling Sees It Through, and, embarrass­ingly, “some sci­en­tific romances”.

con­tents:

14691. [2] (J. R. R. Tolkien) On Fairy Stories
14692. [3] (J. R. R. Tolkien) Leaf by Niggle

I’ve enthused before about the work of Tim Wynne-Jones. This is an ear­ly nov­el of his. His writ­ing was not quite as sharp as it has since become, but this nov­el still held my atten­tion. In part, it’s because the sto­ry (a sort of fusion of Charles Dick­ens and Ray­mond Chan­dler) focus­es on my own neig­bour­hood in Toron­to, and con­cerns the under­side of that neigh­bour­hood at the very time when I was myself part of that under­side. I rec­og­nize and remem­ber almost every phys­i­cal fea­ture in the book. Some of the places, build­ings, and social con­fig­u­ra­tions no longer exist, but read­ing this nov­el brought them back to me with the inten­sity of the smell of piss in a dark city alley.

14657. (Dan O’ Neill) The Fire­crack­er Boys
14658. [2] (William Shake­speare) Hen­ry V [play]
(Groff Con­klin –ed.) 5 Unearth­ly Visions:
. . . . 14659. (Eric Frank Rus­sell) Leg­work [sto­ry]
. . . . 14660. (Wal­ter M. Miller, Jr.) Con­di­tion­al­ly Human [sto­ry]
. . . . 14661. (Ray­mond Z. Gal­lun) Stamped Cau­tion [sto­ry]
. . . . 14662. (Damon Knight) Dio [sto­ry]
. . . . 14663. (Clif­ford D. Simak) Shad­ow World [sto­ry]
14664. (Michel Trem­blay) Quar­ante-qua­tre min­utes, quar­antes-qua­tre secondes
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