Category: Review

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Review

“Debunked”

Dito Abbott

Something like 100 pages in to this book I looked over at my sister and said “I can’t tell if I like this book or not, but hopefully I’ll figure it out by the end.” Here I am at the end of the book, and I’ve concluded that I did like it, although I don’t know if I liked it enough to go looking for the sequel.1

There’s parts of the writing that remind me of Terry Pratchett’s works for younger readers; the footnoting style is very reminiscent of that, really, but you can feel the different age group as the target demographic. I think the part I struggled with the most was the plot; the book feels less like A Story and more like a collection of setpieces strung together. A ramshackle lighthouse under siege during a storm! An airship full of strange creatures! A flying city next to a desert hurricane! A fortress library, suspended above the caldera of an active volcano! And, honestly, any one of these makes for a fun setting for some scenes, and a good little vignette, but piecing them all together into a coherent whole is… challenging.

That said, if you just want to settle in for a quick read with some solid comedy, this was a pretty good book. Go in with the right expectations, and have fun!2

  1. The book is very clear throughout that it is Book One of the series, it really wants you to know that it’s part of a series and there’s more books to read. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“A Thousand Recipes for Revenge”

Beth Cato

Once again, a really interesting magic system—this time, focused entirely on food, although with a fun theological twist to how it works. In short, anyone can be a cook, but to make truly good food, you have to be a Chef: someone in possession of a tongue blessed by the five gods. Add to that the existence of magical ingredients, and the requirement that they only work when used by a Chef and blessed by the gods, and you’ve got a recipe for a very different course of history than we had.

And, wonder of wonder, this is an author that actually followed that. Some of the different cultures of continental Europe are vaguely recognizable, but which countries actually exist and what they’re called, entirely different. Which is very fitting, honestly; given how much of our history has been driven by arguing about capital-g God, if we had very clear miracles happening all the time, a whole lot of things would’ve gone very differently. There’s no need for converting people when the extremely-active deities are out there doing it themselves.

Wrapped up in that setting, there’s a very interesting story: a former military Chef, now in hiding for leaving military service.1 And, separately, a foreign princess, freshly arrived in this vaguely-France-inspired country to be married to their crown prince, sealing an alliance of their kingdoms. Where it gets fun is finding all the places their stories intersect; early on, it’s just a brief flash of “based on timing, I think that coach the Chef saw go by was taking the princess to the ball!” But as the story goes, you can find more and more moments like that.

Towards the end, the plot gets absolutely wild. Somewhere between an M. Night Shyamalan twist and a well-done Marvel story, in how it feels, but that’s all the spoilers you’ll get from me. Go read the book!2

  1. And, for reference on what time period we’re vaguely in, several of the chapter-start quotes pull from regulations and other materials that very clearly state that a Chef is the property of the Crown. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Alchemist”

Paolo Bacigalupi

A sequel to The Executioness, and one that answered some of the questions I wondered about in that one! (If it seems convenient that I read them in this order, it’s because I read the jacket and decided to start with The Executioness so that I could end on the, presumably, happier note of someone figuring this out.)

Because of course bramble, even magical bramble, can’t be the end state. It’s too complex; entropy always wins in the end. And here, someone figured out the proper way to burn it so that it truly dies.

Unfortunately for me, that happened far too early in the story for it to be a happy ending just like that. Looking at how many pages you have left is a great way to stress yourself out about a book.1 Still, figuring out just what would go wrong, and how the protagonist would get out of it, made this one more of a fun read than the first. Check it out.2

As a fun follow-on, after I went to post this review: I have, in fact, read this before, and even posted a review here! It’s been long enough that I had no memory of that, so I’m posting a new one as well. I suppose you can compare Past Grey’s thoughts, if you’d like.

  1. I’ve got another one I’m working on that I’ve had to take a break from for a month or so, because everything is going great for the protagonist… and I’m just barely halfway through. Something is about to go horribly wrong. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“The Executioness”

Tobias S. Buckell

This is one of those stories where the worldbuilding is executed incredibly well, and it leaves me with so many interesting questions. The short version: magic exists! But using it generates bramble—a plant that you apparently can’t kill, and whose thorns, in a very fairy tale fashion, make you fall asleep. I, of course, immediately start wondering about the sort of ecosystem this implies—because, given something like that, surely something has evolved a way to eat it, right?1

The story itself is… not fun, really, but an interesting read, at least. Worth giving it a go, as it was a pretty quick one.2

  1. Or, also a fun concept, maybe not yet! Which does imply that the combination of magic and bramble is, on an evolutionary timescale, pretty recent. And that puts me back into my common thought “how can I explain this magic system as actually being some kind of advanced technology from right before the sci-fi civilization collapsed back to these dark ages?” ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“First Test”

Tamora Pierce; graphic novel adaptation by Devin Grayson and Becca Farrow

I somehow missed that this was going to be a thing until the day before it was released. It took me something like ten seconds between finding out it was up for preorder and actually putting in the preorder; I consider it a testament to my willpower that I made it days after it was delivered before I finally let it jump the queue and be my next thing to read.

Keladry of Mindelan is my comfort reading. The visual treatment here brought me so much joy; it’s quicker to read than the original novel is, and I suspect I’m going to wind up rereading it quite often as a result. Sitting down to reread the Protector of the Small quartet is an investment, it’s what I’m doing with my reading time for a while. This, I can get through in something like an hour.

There’s a couple places where I could feel the edits, but for the most part, everything felt natural; sure, the story was abridged some, but all of it made sense.1

Two thoughts on this visual treatment, specific to that: my immediate thought upon seeing Neal was “he looks like Sokka!” and I sorta held on to that feeling throughout.2

And, even more so in this visual treatment where the words stand alone more, one of my favorite quotes jumped out at me. I was glad it made it in:

The short sword is the sword of law. Without it, we are only animals. The long sword is the sword of duty. It is the terrible sword, the killing sword.

It should surprise precisely nobody that I’m going to recommend this book. I grabbed the paperback—I think I already knew that this was going to be an oft-reread comfort book for me, and wanted the comfortable feel of a paperback to match that. Please, vote with your wallet; get them to do the rest of the series, too.3 I really want to see a baby griffin. And, weirdly, one of the killing machines.

  1. Well, okay, the fact that the Gift was shown (only twice) and was the same vague sparkles each time instead of being the color of each person’s magic, that bugged me a bit. ↩
  2. Hakuin Seastone also sorta reminded me of Zuko, although I think he’s a bit more Live Action TV Series Zuko than Animated Series Zuko. ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Silk Roads”

Peter Frankopan

Just like my last book review, I’ve got two thoughts; apparently it’s always two things with me. This time, it was two things that I actually did learn about in history class that this book helped me understand better than the classes ever did.

First, the American Revolution. As the output of the American education system, I’m well aware that it, basically, got started because Britain raised taxes on the colonies in what would become the US, and we all got mad about it.1 What this book pointed out is why Britain increased taxes — because, of course, they had to know it wouldn’t be popular, so it wouldn’t have been just for funsies, there had to be a reason. The reason, it turns out, was that they had just bailed out the British East India Company, and big bailouts require funding. Why did they bail out the British East India Company? Because the BEIC’s revenues from India had suddenly collapsed! Why did those revenues suddenly collapse? To summarize, because the company realized that, thanks to the magic of colonialism, the could just… not pay a living wage! To anyone! And so they didn’t. And then millions of people starved. (To those following along at home, the moral of the story is that you should pay people a living wage. And also, y’know, not do coercive labor practices in any way, shape, or form.)

Secondly, and let’s just go ahead and say right now that it’s not gonna get lighter in tone, was World War II. I very specifically remember thinking, in not only high school but also college-level history classes, “how did Hitler think invading Russia was going to go well, it’s like the canonical way to end a European empire.” It was never really explained, the best I ever got was mumbling about his egomaniacal tendencies and the need for “Lebensraum.” Which, to be fair, were factors. But this book did a lot better a job explaining a key thing: crops. The goal wasn’t to invade Russia, it was to take Ukraine—the bread basket of the USSR. And the issue wasn’t egonomanicism or greed, it was that Germany didn’t have enough food. Also on the list of things that can cause massive starvation: declaring war on everyone, dumping your entire economy into war matériel, and conscripting every farm worker with a Y chromosome. Plants may generally be able to grow themselves, but they don’t harvest themselves.

The book had a whole lot of other interesting stuff. I knew (and, let’s be real, still know) very little about Asian history, so a whole heck of a lot of this was new to me. The bits above are what I called out because they were revelatory moments about things I already knew about. A different form of learning to “this is brand new information” types of things. I found the book quite approachable, and the chapters were broken up fairly well—not tiny chunks, each one is still gonna take some time to get through, but reasonable enough. The naming pattern definitely got stretched thin after a while, but that’s probably less of an issue if you’re reading a print copy instead of the ebook where the chapter title is always visible at the top of the screen.

All in all, a good read, and I recommend it, Check it out!2

  1. “No taxation without representation” does point out that the lack of representation was also a key issue, but it’s not as relevant to my realization here. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Modern Software Engineering”

David Farley

Over the course of reading this book, I kept coming back to two thoughts.

Firstly, I think Farley undersells the advances that programming languages have made. He has a point that the level of bikeshedding about languages that programmers are capable of is too much, but treating it as completely nothing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Take an example close to my heart: comparing Objective-C and Swift, there have been some significant advances. The introduction, and use throughout the language and libraries, of optionals has functionally eliminated null-pointer exceptions. Memory management bugs are a massive category of problems, across all sorts of software. Look at Heartbleed, for example. If you’re using Swift idiomatically, and avoiding the (hilariously named) UnsafePointer stuff, this sort of problem cannot happen.1

Secondly, this book felt like the moment where in my mind I went “oh, we are getting there.” He makes a point early on that software engineering as a field has different standards of success than other engineering disciplines. Again, an example: this morning, I woke up to a truly terrible software bug in an app I use that had deleted several years worth of data. This is a bad bug, and I’m personally quite upset about that loss, but it’s not as bad as, say, the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse. Subjectively, it feels like software as a whole has a lower bar for “is this okay to produce” than the other, physical engineering disciplines.

Where this book changed my opinion is in starting to feel like the field is beginning to coalesce around some standards. We’re nowhere near the level of “you have to use these techniques, and if you don’t you can lose your Software Engineering License and be prohibited from working professionally in the field,” but some of those techniques are taking shape.2 Farley’s argument is that the core of it is fast feedback, allowing for tight iteration loops, and from that it logically follows that test-driven development is the best option.

And yes, I’m sold! Just the other day, while doing some tinkering on a personal project, I found several bugs I’d created — because the tests I wrote before I started writing the code failed. That’s such a nice way to do things. And now, having written both the code and the tests, I feel much more comfortable with the idea of “oh, I’m going to need to reuse some of this logic somewhere else, I’ll just pull it out into a separate chunk.” I don’t have to spend an hour thinking through “what might break from this,” or testing things out. I just do it, run the tests, and know that I’m good.

As to the book itself: he’s hammering the same points over and over, as these sorts of books tend to do. I found it a generally good read, and took many notes for the book club discussion, but I don’t know that it was particularly world-changing… or if anyone else will have the same “eureka” feeling from it that I did. That moment came with a very clear sense of “all the other stuff I’ve read and done leading up to now came together into this idea.” It’s not a bad book, though, and could be a pretty good starting point if you’re just getting into the “read about the field” kind of thing, so check it out.3

  1. And I’m also setting aside the type checker, which is, for all intents and purposes, a form of mandatory unit testing imposed at compile time. Writing Swift, you don’t have to safety-check your inputs to make sure they’re the right types; the language does it for you. ↩
  2. I do absolutely believe that software engineers should be forming some kind of industry group and establishing shared standards for what “software engineering” actually means. ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Blindspots Between Us”

Gleb Tsipursky

This is one of those books where I wind up with a whole bunch of notes. Cognitive science: it’s neat stuff!

As with most of my reading, I have no idea when, where, or why I got this book; based on the title, I wasn’t quite expecting cognitive psychology, particularly not in a self-help sort of manner. Broadly, each segment is “here’s this problem that you have, because you’re a human and that’s just how human brains work; here’s some approaches you can take to mitigate that problem.”

The word ‘mitigate’ is important in there, though: there’s not a magic solution to any of these biases.1 The best you can do is be aware of these evolutionary foibles and try to catch yourself when they’re happening.

A thought that kept coming to mind, all the way through this book, was how much it reminded me of some of the excerpts of Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem? that I’ve read. In his case, he uses a division between a Scientist Brain and a Caveman Brain, roughly; here, it’s the Autopilot System and the Intentional System. I tend to think of it as a three-part split, between lizard brain, monkey brain, and person brain, although that does present the issue of the person brain being outnumbered by the other two. On the other hand, maybe you should feel a bit outnumbered; the person brain is the slow one, whereas monkey and lizard brain are progressively faster.

Regardless, there’s a split between your higher-order thinking, stuff that makes it possible for us to, y’know, gestures at modern civilization, and the lower-order stuff that kept us alive through the majority of human history, before all the conveniences of modern life. Evolution is slow to change, and hasn’t even begun to catch up to what life is like now; and, back in the caveman days, the caveman who stopped to contemplate the social implications of running from the oncoming lion had lower odds of survival than the one who was in a dead sprint before the expensive, slow higher-order consciousness had even parsed that particular blur as “lion.”

This book is basically a list of ways that those monkey-brain reflexes trip us up in modern life, and hints for helping your person-brain deal with it. Which is, overall, quite a useful thing to be able to do! As a book, I mostly enjoyed reading it—it does have Self-Help Book Syndrome, wherein it provides a bunch of examples that are occasionally useful but mostly just come across as stilted and unhelpful—and recommend it. Check it out.2

  1. Well, as of this writing there isn’t. By the time you’re reading this, maybe we figured out some kind of brain implant technology that makes us all better at thinking about stuff. I can dream. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“How to Read Literature Like a Professor”

Thomas C. Foster

If you pay attention to my reviews, you may notice a dearth of “literature” as a genre. This was my attempt to begin working on rectifying that; sadly, I don’t think it will have worked. This sort of literary analysis, tearing apart every decision the author made to try to find the symbolism behind it, just isn’t my cup of tea.

Which isn’t to say that this wasn’t a good book! I quite liked the way it served as an overview of the topic, to begin with. Beyond that, there were a couple things that really stood out to me as something of throughlines to the book.

First, that, roughly put, meaning is in the eye of the beholder. We each bring our own personal history, our own preconceptions and biases, to our reading. The things that strike me as meaningful are going to be different than the things that strike my sister as meaningful, but the two of us are likely to have more overlap than I would with someone reading the same thing in their home in Hong Kong.

Secondly, a professorial reiteration of the idea that there’s nothing new. It’s one big melting pot; in the same way that each reader has their own approach to the same book, each other has their own approach to the same ur-story underneath everything.1

So, overall, a useful introduction to/reminder of literary analysis as a concept. I remain… not sold on the whole field, but to each their own! If it’s of interest to you, this is a pretty good place to start.2

  1. This also, I felt, made an excellent addition to the arguments in favor of transformative works as a thing. If all of fiction is just remixes of earlier fiction, then what difference is there, really, between a fanfic and Dante’s Inferno? One is older, is all, and has attained respectability over time. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Perfect Software And Other Illusions About Testing”

Gerald M. Weinberg

Another book club entry, and a shorter one than usual, it feels like. I think the core concept is a good one to hold on to: testing everything is impossible, so you should be aware of what tradeoffs you’re choosing, and pick the ones that best meet your needs.

There’s some places in the book where, coming at it with Programmer Brain, I was annoyed at how long it took to explain something. Like yes, of course, you can’t test every possible system state, even just looking at a single small program there’s likely to be thousands of possible states, and that’s without addressing all the additional states created by the fact that programs don’t exist in isolation. The system they’re running on can impact them; the person using them can have a varying level of knowledge on using the program or the system; the program can be left continuously running for a long time, getting into ever more-complex possible states; heck, even cosmic radiation can impact program state.1

That complaint aside, there’s still a lot of useful ideas in there. Remember, the testers are not the enemy! But neither are they infallible. They are, in point of fact, people. Have empathy for them.

In all, a good, and reasonably quick, read about the software development process. Give it a go if that’s your type of thing.2

  1. Seriously, cosmic rays flipping bits inside RAM (or on various forms of longer-term storage media) is a real problem! ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Prodigals”

Alan Dean Foster

This was a fun little romp of a book. It starts as a first contact scenario, a nice hectic experience for everyone involved as the various contacted governments scramble to pull together contact teams. And then it promptly goes off the rails for them, as nobody’s expectations about what First Contact will actually look like have anything to do with what happens.1

There’s some fun twists and turns in the book, and I quite enjoyed it. Towards the end it went a little funny, but I think… reasonably stuck the landing. Check it out.2

  1. And I am, frankly, delighted that the book managed to come up with a coherent reason for why this first contact was completely nonsensical in a way that most First Contact stories completely fail at. They’re from space. Do you know how much stuff there is out there? Why would an advanced race bother landing on a planet to mine for resources? ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Bad Gays”

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

This is a fun concept for a book: take the concept of “let’s talk about the forgotten gays of history” and focusing, instead of on the heroic ones, the villainous ones. I thought the choice of Hadrian for the cover art was weird, but the chapter on him… sorta explained that, and sorta didn’t? Like, my reading is that he was definitely a toxic boyfriend, but not particularly a villain beyond that, unless you want to count the inherent villainy of being a Roman emperor. And even then, by Roman Emperor Standards, he wasn’t actually all that bad.1

I have, in the past, bounced off books for being too academic in style, and this feels like it’s right around the upper edge of what I can tolerate in that way. It’s an interesting telling of the history, with a fair amount of citations throughout, but where I started to lose interest was where it got deep into… queer theory? Historiography? Something like that. Not a book to read when your brain is tired and you just want to gently process words, there’s too many moments demanding of deep thought for that. But then, sometimes that’s what you’re in the mood for.

Overall, though, I enjoyed the read! It’s a fun, if sometimes disheartening and depressing, skim through a specific subset of history. Give it a go.2

  1. This is, admittedly, a pretty low bar. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Thing Explainer”

Randall Munroe

This was a really interesting book to read. The quick summary is that it explains things! (It’s a well-chosen title.) The trick is that it does so using line art and the 1,000 most-common words, in the style of Simple English Wikipedia. It’s a mix of genuinely useful information, decontextualization that feels like Strange Planet, and a surprisingly similar feeling to trying to read a book in a language in which you are not fluent. For as short a book as it is, it took me a long time to read it; I could only get through a few pages at a time, and then I had to go take a break to let my brain recover.

It is, however, quite fun to read. You’ll learn some things, and at the same time you’ll have a few moments of feeling proud of yourself for figuring out what the heck it’s trying to convey. It’s an educational puzzler. I had a lot of fun with it; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”

Dr. Walter Rodney

This is one of those books that I feel underprepared to read. Human interests are fractal; every topic is full of so much more detail and history than you’d ever expect. And this is a book from deep within a topic area. There’s a lot of assumed prior reading that I just don’t have.

The general thesis is pretty simple to state: through slavery and colonization, Europe took the resources of Africa to fuel its own development, and in so doing, slowed the development of—or, roll credits, underdeveloped—Africa.

And that point is made quite well throughout. There’s a lot of the history of the relationship between Europe and Africa, and it’s a whole lot of interesting, useful information. The one point that really lodged in my head was population numbers over time: using the (very) rough census data available, the extrapolated populations of Europe, Asia, and the Americas just kept growing over time; Africa’s population stayed stable for a couple of centuries. Gee, do you think there’s something environmentally unique about Africa that meant this gigantic landmass with plenty of arable land was just immune to natural population growth? Or could it perhaps be that people kept showing up with empty ships and leaving with ships full of slaves?

And the population numbers were already something I hadn’t known about, but the larger point made is that having a permanent population drain is a massive detriment to a region’s ability to develop. Every person taken away isn’t just a person taken away, they’re a whole set of possible futures cut off. Every interaction they could’ve had with someone else, every possible invention they could’ve come up with… every child they could have had, and every interaction and invention and child that child could’ve had, expanding on into the future. A massive amount of potential, stolen away… over and over, constantly, for centuries. It’s a hell of an impact, and the way Dr. Rodney talks about it really drives that point home. For that alone, this book is well worth the read.

There’s two part of the book that didn’t hold up well. Firstly, it was written in the 1960s, and has a lot to say about the future of socialism, with the unfortunate outcome of pointing to the USSR and North Korea as shining examples of development. That… aged poorly.

The other issue is a lot more mechanical, and hopefully just an issue of the specific edition I was reading: it had, very clearly, been run through OCR software at some point, and was reprinted based on that without an editing pass. It’s a tad headache-inducing to have to deliberately blur your vision at times so you can figure out what word was supposed to be there, based on the shape, instead of whatever word actually wound up there. Whatever OCR software was used, it was very bad at distinguishing between the characters f/l/t, as well as c/e, and the editing pass appears to have been “paste it into Word, hit ‘spell check,’ accept the first suggestion for everything.” Not great, Bob!

All in all, I found this to be an interesting read, and can heartily recommend it. Maybe… avoid this specific edition, though.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“His Majesty’s Airship”

S.C. Gwynne

The extent of my knowledge of dirigibles, prior to reading this book, basically consisted of “they’re cool in steampunk, the Hindenburg going up like a struck match the size of a building made sure we don’t use them in real life, and I kinda hope we’ll be able to make them actually viable with modern technology sometime soon.” Which is, to be fair, probably between one and two more pieces of knowledge above average for the topic. I stand by two of them, and the third is also fairly accurate, but now the Hindenburg thing is supplemented with “it wasn’t even remotely the first time something like that happened, it was just the first time it happened on camera.” And boy, did that ever make a difference. Turns out it’s a lot less visceral to read about an airship crash than it is to watch it happen.

For a quick summary, rigid airships looked like they had a solid chance at being the New Big Thing for a while there. Zeppelin had some entertaining failures, weirdly became a national hero for having stuff go catastrophically wrong but in a way that everyone could be jingoistic about, and then The Great War began and it was already pretty dang obvious that air superiority was very important. Hey, look, this guy has been building these giant airship things, and had specifically envisioned them as being terror weapons the whole time! And so began the first blitz of London.

The word “terror” in there is doing a lot of important work, because as just regular ol’ weapon weapons, they were kinda hilariously inept. They had no idea where they were, most of the time—there’s a great line in the book about how they missed London (and valuable military/industrial targets) so often that people were starting to wonder if they were deliberately attacking crops in the fields. Hint: they were not, it’s just that airships are hard to steer.

War ends, British empire is the biggest empire to ever empire, and boy howdy would it be nice if we could just fly everywhere instead of waiting for boats to go the long way, eh? Politics happens, the British government throws millions of pounds at developing their airship, R101, it makes a triumphant first flight! No, wait, scratch that, it makes a triumphant first departure, heading off for a journey to show off just how fast you can get to India from London with an airship, and makes it as far as… France before it, quite literally, crashes and burns.

All told, the story is quite interesting. Some historians try to position themselves as without bias; Gwynne… does not. I had to copy down a quote from where he really shows what he thinks of this whole ‘airship’ concept: “In spite of what appears in retrospect to be excruciatingly obvious—the lethal impracticality of the big rigids—the idea did not die, and airships did not disappear.” (80) Tell us how you really feel, mate!

I read through it being quite entertained by that stance, because as I said at the start, I’m optimistic that we may one day be able to make this technology work. Not to get too Diamond Age about it, but I kinda suspect that nanotechnology and possibly building, like, something like an aerogel but filled with hard vacuum would work better than “an amount of hydrogen that could power a city for a day or two”. The fact that their best storage mechanism was cow intestines also says something about the sum total of manufacturing technology available at the time.

Really, a lot of what went wrong has more to do with management than technology. The head of the program, a politician who had built his entire brand around this project? Not gonna be super excited with delaying things for safety. The manager of the program who’s supposed to report to him being the kind of guy who passes on all the good news and buries the bad? Bad thing to have around when the thing you’re building is a gigantic bomb that you shove passengers into.

This was, overall, a very readable history book. I had a good time going through it, even if I did roll my eyes occasionally at the author and frequently at the people running the show.1 It’s worth your time to hear about this whole fascinating bit of history that tends to get forgotten by the flashier events that happened around it. Check it out.2

  1. Seriously, after the second time that the ‘admiral’ drunkenly overrules the captain of the ship and insists that he will do the landing, and then does the airship equivalent of scraping off the landing gear—maybe fire the guy? Just a thought. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩