The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (Books 2018, 17)
Back where it all began, then: Banksie’s debut. It’s a bit dated, of course. Do you remember pay phones having pips? And “I must convince dad to get a VTR.” Who ever called it a VTR, rather than VCR? Outside of TV companies, at least.
Still a great, crazy story with an ending that, now, seems less believable than it ever did. Well, the whole setup, really: the idea that you could have a child and not register them, and keep them away from all need for interaction with the authorities. Even if you lived on a private island, that’s hard to imagine nowadays.
And I had forgotten what a misogynistic character the narrator, Frank, is. Which is, frankly, ironic.
I recall reading a theory once that Eric, the crazy, dog-burning brother, doesn’t actually exist, that he was all a figment of Frank’s supercharged imagination. I was keeping that at the back of my mind as I read this time, and I don’t think there’s much evidence of it. But I’ll see if I can track down the actual theory.
Here we go: “The Weaponry of Deceit: Speculations on Reality in The Wasp Factory” by Kev McVeigh. Originally published in the BSFA’s Vector magazine.
Reading it again now, McVeigh has a point: Eric can be seen as a metaphor for Frank’s masculinity. But I prefer to take it at face value: sometimes a crazy family is just a crazy family.
The difficulty in searching for anything to do with this novel nowadays is that it’s on the English Literature curricula of both the English A-Levels and the Scottish Highers. So there are lots (and lots and lots) of sites offering analyses of it for students to plagiarise learn from. As well as all the Goodreads entries and blog posts you would expect.
And, oops! I’ve just added to the pile.
Trumping Through London
On Friday I went for a walk through central London with a couple of hundred thousand of my closest friends.
The march was due to start at 2pm from Portland Place. I was a little late. I went straight to Oxford Circus. I came out of the tube station and just stood and watched the people walking down Regent Street. It was amazing, and seemed endless. Then I saw these two with great signs:
A Clash quote and a bad pun? Count me in.
I walked down the pavement alongside the march for a bit, taking more photos.
Before long we got to Trafalgar Square.
There were many speakers and a few musicians. Len McCluskey told us that the police had estimated the crowd was over 250,000, which was surprising, since they tend to underestimate. Anyway, if so, it was the biggest since the Iraq war demo. More amusingly, we were a bigger crowd than at Trump’s inauguration.
That said, I looked around and it didn’t feel that crowded. I’ve seen the O2 full, and I would guess that there were a similar 20,000 in the square.
But it turned out when I left that there were many, many people in the streets around the square. I guess they didn’t want to push forward because the square looked full. I’m quite glad about that.
The atmosphere was fantastic all day. The police presence was pleasingly low (or at least low-key), despite the stories of leave being cancelled and people drafted in from all over the country.
Did it do any good? Probably not, in the sense that it won’t have any direct effect on Trump. But it made a lot of people feel good, and it showed the world that we care.
Expecting leadership challenge, vote of no confidence… we could have a general election within weeks. Hope it’s not while I’m away on holiday.
Feels like the major influence on British politics this century — if not in my whole lifetime — has been the Tory party feuding over the EU. If the fuckers had just split in two twenty years ago we wouldn’t be in this mess now.
I feel strangely drawn to the idea of watching the World Cup today. It’s particularly odd, since there’s tennis on.
I visited Sweden once, so that makes me more-or-less Swedish, right?
Matter by Iain M Banks (Books 2018, 16)
Closer to the Cultural action again, though a lot of this happens on a shellworld, one of thousands of weird, ancient, constructed worlds scattered through the galaxy. They are an incredible image, but in a sense they don’t matter.1 Most of the events that happen on the shellworld don’t have to be on it. Except maybe in this way: it allows Banks to tell a story that includes civilisations both at the musket stage, and at the godlike AI stage.
Civilisations on the various levels of shellworld are allowed to develop at their own pace, unhindered and unhelped by the more advanced “involved” groupings in the teeming galaxy (at least in theory). And yet they know of the existence of the advanced, spacefaring races. I can’t help but think that that very knowledge would have a profoundly debilitating effect on any society. Imagine knowing the Culture existed, but that you were excluded from it.
This is exactly why the Culture generally doesn’t make less advanced societies aware of its existence. It’s the reason for Star Trek’s Prime Directive. Yet somehow this story works even with some of its protagonists having that knowledge.
I wrote about it a decade ago, when I first read it. I seem to have enjoyed it more this time. I didn’t notice the linguistic foibles, and while I was aware of the weird shadow-wrongness of the cover, I’m used to it, so it didn’t trouble me.
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See what I did there? ↩︎
On @atpfm episode 280 @marcoarment says that playing music from your own library on Sonos is buggy. In my experience it’s flawless. And it’s what Sonos has done since before there was Apple Music or even Spotify, so it should work.
Orwell would have had something to say about their use of “unanimous”:
The judges praised her “whole set of amazing stories” and said they believed that “if George Orwell had been here he would have been unanimous in choosing our winner”.
(Emphasis mine.) From the Guardian.
When you manage your dependencies with Maven, the transitive dependencies mean you can find you’re using a library that you never explicitly said you depended on (because some library that you do depend on included it). This can lead to confusion, as I learned today.
Inversions by Iain M Banks (Books 2018, 15)
Ah, the Culture novel that some still think isn’t. I feel sorry for anyone who ever read this without knowing about the Culture first. The denouement must be completely mystifying.
The Special Circumstances game applies here, but of course we have absolutely no way of knowing what they’re up to. A Culture agent, alone on a backwards planet (technology at the level of muskets), acting as doctor to a king who’s maybe not quite as bad as some of the other rulers on the planet (or maybe, let’s face it, just as bad).
It’s unusual not to get even the slightest hint of the galaxy-spanning machinations that must be going on behind the scenes, but of course the narrator is a native of the planet and knows nothing about even the existence of other planets.
In some ways it feels like something of an exercise for the author — stunt writing, as Charlie Stross calls it — but luckily the characters are engaging and the stories (there are two running in parallel) are very well told.