The occasional scrivener

An overview of the events that lead to the Terror. Not as good as Andress.

A memoir of WW2 in Burma by the author of Flashman (which I’ve never read). Unlike a lot of Brits of his background he fights as a private and the books is an affectionate look at his squadmates - salt of the earth Cumbrians to a man.

Ongoing. Check progress at the repo.

History is written by the victors, and at least in English letters the story of the Great War is heavily focussed on the British and American side. The story of the Central Powers is less well known.

This book is an excellent cultural and in parts political history of the disasters that befell the “antagonists” in World War 1. You won’t find much about individual battles and campaigns, but there’s a lot to learn about the fate of refugees, the political organization of “Ober Ost” (the parts of Russia captured by Germany), and the differing handling of internal opinion by the Reich and the Empire/Kingdom.

WW1 gets overshadowed by WW2, but there are so many things that cannot be explained without it. Ludendorff’s craven attempt to deflect blame on Germany’s defeat on the civilian government laid the foundation to the myth that the army was “stabbed in the back”. Austria-Hungary’s uncontrolled breakup led to all manner of ills, not least Hungary’s desire to avenge the treary of Trianon. And of course, would the Bolsheviks have managed to take power unless Russia was losing an unpopular war?

En utmärkt genomgång av hur Tyskland påverkades det första decenniet efter Andra världskrigets slut. Jähner går igenom hur flyktingar från delar av Tyskland motvilligt integrerades av folk i regioner som nu såg sig själva som bayrare och swabier snarare än stortyskar. Människor deltog entusiastiskt i återuppbyggnaden (det var inte bara “ruinkvinnor” som jobbade med det). VW-staden Wolfsburgs förvandling från fabrik med tillhörande läger till småborgerlig mönsterstad skildras också.

Enligt författaren var det det omtalade fenomenet att tyskarna snabbt såg sig som offer, kanske like mycket eller mer än som som dödades och förföljdes under nazisternas krig, medverkande till åtminstonde Västtysklands förvandling till modern demokrati. Det verkliga uppgörelsen fick vänta tills på 80-talet.

Boken heter på originalspråket tyska Wolfszeit: Deutschland und die Deutschen 1945 - 1955 och finns även översatt till engelska som Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955.

I jokingly mentioned that a recent free software licensing flamewar was approaching the most comments over upvotes, but when I crunched the numbers, it was nowhere near that. Another user asked me for some more details.

This Google sheet shows the top 100 submissions, sorted by comment/score ratio. In HN&&LO I mark submissions with a ratio above 2.5 as “controversial”.

Some caveats: the score is net. I don’t track upvotes and flags separately, which means that a submission with a low net score can have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes (itself a measure of controversy).

The numbers are from when I gathered the data, and may not be 100% up to date.

I’ve sorted by the absolute ratio, to account for negative net scores. This might skew the results a bit (shouldn’t a submission with -2 net and 20 comments be rated more controversial than one with 2 net and the same number of comments?) but I honestly don’t know how to account for that.

A cursory glance at the dates seems to show that the most controversial submissions were earlier in the site’s history.

Running ranking of the novels

1. Use of Weapons
2. Consider Phlebas
3. Matter
4. Look to Windward
5. The Hydrogen Sonata
6. The Player of Games
7. Inversions
8. Excession
9. Surface Detail

Consider Phlebas (1987)

The sensawunda is strong in this one.

I first read this in 1993, in a Orbit trade paperback purchased from Akademiska Bokhandeln in central Stockholm. It had a large selection of English-language SF at the time.

I don’t remember if I read this before or after Banks’ non-M The Wasp Factory. I believe it was after, because I recognized the trademark Banks features of a certain callousness towards character’s lives and Grand Guignol set-pieces are there. He had also dabbled in SF elements in Walking on Glass.

Anyway, most people don’t seem to rate this book as a Culture novel, possibly because in it, the Culture is basically backdrop. The protagonist Horza is against it, after all. But two of the other viewpoints are from the Culture, and it’s pretty clear where the author’s sympathies lie. That said, the Idirans aren’t portrayed as entirely evil either. It’s part of why Banks is a cut above many other SF authors.

It was also a quicker read than I remember. Of course, re-reading a book allows you to skate over longeurs (I didn’t bother to closely read Horza’s near psychosis during the Damage game, for example). If there’s a weakness, it’s that the descriptions of physical spaces (the hovercraft landing on Vavache, the stations in the Command Center) are both long and confusing.

The Player of Games (1988)

This is the Culture novel I’ve seen recommended online as a starter novel for the series. I honestly didn’t understand why, and this is what partly led me to start this project. I’ve tried to give this book a fair shake, but after a re-read (the first one since I first read it) I’m not convinced it’s one of the better novels, much less a good introduction to the series.

It is true that it sets the scene for many of the subsequent novels. The Culture is at peace, unlike in Consider Phlebas, and the main action is Contact/Special Circumstances meddling in some less advanced society to advance the Culture’s ends. So if a reader is expecting more galaxy-spanning action like in the previous novel, they’d be disappointed.

But it’s a slow, meandering book. There’s almost no action, the protagonist is in my opinion unlikable, and there’s little character development. Gurgeh is just a giant nerd. Maybe that explains this novel’s appeal online, as well as the weird “power level progression” of him being really really good at the game of Azad. The Empire itself isn’t more than a crude caricature of a capitalist society in our time. There’s more fascinating details about the Gerontocracy of Sorpen in the first chapter of Consider Phlebas than about the entire Empire.

Oh well, that’s done. Onwards and upwards!

Use of Weapons (1990)

(Heads up: if reading in Apple Books app, the app will open on chapter One, and you’ll probably miss the starting bits. They’re important.)

Now this is the good stuff. Maybe the novel is a bit too intricately constructed with its intertwining narratives going back and forth in time, and I guess the graphic depictions of violence will put a few people off, but as an exploration of the human cost of being the sort of person who does the Culture’s dirty work it’s unmatched.

(When I read this work I was pretty into nihilistic depictions of violence so I lapped it up. I’ve changed a bit since then.)

We also get our first introduction in this series to what I regard as a quintessential Banksian trope: the wham revelation. This is also a feature of many of his early non-M novels so I just assumed it was a given in all of them, but both the previous works lack them, in my opinion.

According to this Guardian interview from 2012, UoW was the first Culture novel period, making its position as the best unassailable. (it also confirms that the draft for Against a Dark Background is really really old).

Excession (1996)

I happened to find it in my bookshelf, so I read this in the Orbit hardcover I purchased in a Waterstones in London in 1996 (along with a hardcover of Gibson’s Idoru.) Compared with the Orbit ebook it’s better, because the interminal Mind email conversations are even harder to follow in the ebook version.

Following up on Use of Weapons is a tall order, and this book doesn’t fulfill it. I found it a slog.

There is a lot of chatter between Minds in this book and to be honest they’re its biggest weakness. Banks might be fascinated by the inner working of the Minds but I am not, and I don’t know if other readers are either.

I’m also of the mind that the book’s plot is an homage to the “Golden Age” space opera of E.E. Smith & company, where each advance in technology is matched in the next installment by a countermeasure that’s mathced in its turn. In the end entire galaxies are consumed in vortices of energy! Having built up the Culture as an unbeatable galactic power Banks felt the need to introduce a threat to it.

The problem for me is that I don’t really care about the Culture getting its ass whupped. In addition to the nattering Minds, the humans in the novel are shallow or boring or both. The only fun people are the Affront.

So far, the weakest of the Culture novels.

Inversions (1998)

This is an SF novel with about as much SFnal elements as salt in pasta water - i.e. not very much but enough to give a nice taste. It’s also only very loosely a Culture novel. Banks has fun in a Tudoresque society, and the resolution is pleasingly vague — did the two Culture agents appearing in different countries know about each other, or was it just a coincidence (or a sick Mind joke) that they ended up there? We’ll never know.

All in all, it’s a book for Culture completionists.

Look to Windward (2000)

I dismissed this almost exactly 20 years ago:

Although Banks’ Culture novels are always enjoyable, this one feels like he’s coasting.

I will have to amend that, this one is better than I remember. It’s better plotted than Excession, and has some genuine sensawunda with the airsphere. The protagonists are also more believable. Specifically Masaq’ Hub is a better written Mind than those in Excession.

There are some weaknesses, such as the disjointed conversations that Kabe overhears. Sure they can be funny, and sure they offer some insight into what “normie” Culture citizens witter on about, but I found them both boring and twee.

Can you enjoy this book without having previously read all or just some of the Culture novels? Maybe not. There’s a bunch of stuff about Contact/Special Circumstances that’s implied, and the premise hinges on Contact trying to “uplift” the Chel and stuff going horribly wrong (in part, says a character, because the Culture has been doing this so many times they’re trying to optimize the process). This kind of moral dilemma is covered in The State of the Art as well as both The Player of Games and Use of Weapons, and at this point it’s Banks expanding on the theme.

Matter (2008)

In July 2009 I wrote:

A novel set in the Culture. Not really a fan of this one. Feels like Banks is re-using a lot of ideas from earlier works. And the shocking revelation was pretty lame (assuming I identified it correctly).

In July 2013 I added:

I don’t really know what to say about Matter. It’s not one of my favourite Culture novels but re-reading it gave me a new appreciation of Banks’ talents as a writer.

And now it’s July 2024 and I really should try harder to write a review.

Matter combines a number of tropes we’ve seen in Banks’ Culture novels so far: the megastructure. The alien societies. Contact meddling in “primitive” planets. The viewpoint outside the Culture among the primitives, observing the meddling from the “inside”.

And the mix works. The biggest problem is the conclusion. The windup to the end of the novel is both confusing and rushed. Still, I’m rating it higher than Look to Windward almost solely for the high sensawunda to page count ratio.

Surface Detail (2010)

This is interesting mostly because it’s the first Culture novel with a defined antagonist. Joiler Veppers is in the book throughout. We follow his actions and his thoughts just as much as we do those of his sex slave Lededje Y’breq, the main protagonist. And it’s clear that Banks hates Veppers. The richest man by far in his civilization, he’s cruel, amoral and generally a bad egg. It’s amusing to think that our own IT lords such as Musk and Bezos profess to love the Culture novels, when the one person who resembles them in the books is an outright bastard.

Otherwise I don’t find the novel that interesting. Banks seems to cross the “virtual reality” checkbox off his ouvre, and the idea that super-realistic VR will be used to create literal Hells is amusing. But aside from that and some cool settings it’s a boring Culture novel.

The Hydrogen Sonata

Finally done with the Culture novels. This is a middling one. My review from 12 years ago still stands, I think.

List of all Iain (M) Banks novels in chronological order

Culture novels in bold. Source

• The Wasp Factory (1984)
• Walking on Glass (1985)
• The Bridge (1986)
• Espedair Street (1987)
• Consider Phlebas (1987) [M]
• The Player of Games (1988) [M]
• Canal Dreams (1989)
• Use of Weapons (1990) [M]
• The Crow Road (1992)
• Against a Dark Background (1993) [M]
• Complicity (1993)
• Feersum Endjinn (1994) [M]
• Whit (1995)
• Excession (1996) [M]
• A Song of Stone (1997)
• Inversions (1998) [M]
• The Business (1999)
• Look to Windward (2000) [M]
• Dead Air (2002)
• The Algebraist (2004) [M]
• The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007)
• Matter (2008) [M]
• Transition (2009) [M]
• Surface Detail (2010) [M]
• Stonemouth (2012)
• The Hydrogen Sonata (2012) [M]
• The Quarry (2013)

Sten har flyttat från Sandhamn till Åre och antal mord och våldsbrott ökar lavinartat. Man kanske ska be henne flytta nånstans där ingen bor för säkerhets skull…

Hursomhelst är det en kompetent hopsatt thriller, där huvudpersonen denna gång är polis och inte advokat, så hon kan faktiskt göra polisarbete utan att författaren måste ta till allt mer krystade anledningar för att få in henne i utredningen.

Apr 2023 | Apr 2022 | Apr 2021 | Apr 2020 | Apr 2019 | Apr 2018 | Apr 2017 | Apr 2016 | Apr 2015 | Apr 2014 | Apr 2013 | Apr 2012 | Apr 2011 | Apr 2010 | Apr 2009

Tags on the link aggregation site https://lobste.rs serve two purposes: to deliniate the scope of acceptable submissions, and to enable users to filter those topics they are not interested in.

As such, the tag creation dates are heavily frontloaded to the start of the site, and newer tags are applied more rarely. Usually it is because a newly popular language appears more and more in the submissions, leading to a portion of the users to demand a tag to be able to filter it out.

I have searched my dataset for the first occurrence of each tag listed on the filter page, and added the year-month of that occurrence. The data is visible in this Google sheet.

A summary:

• 2012: 63 tags created
• 2013:  9
• 2014:  7
• 2015:  3 (elixir, graphics, testing)
• 2016:  7
• 2017: 11
• 2018:  3 (osdev, transcript, wasm)
• 2019:  2 (a11y, email)
• 2021:  1 (nix)
• 2022:  1 (kotlin)
• 2024:  2 (gleam, retrocomputing)

I have also calculated the proportion of submitted stories for each tag, compared to the number of users filtering that tag. The most impopular language is unsurprisingly Fortran, where 197 users are filtering 59 stories (334%). JavaScript has 4.6k entries and a 5% filtering to submission ratio .

Regarding the editor wars, 317 users are filtering emacs, as compared to 168 filtering vim.

Update 2024-10-07: added 2 entries for 2024.

En god överblick över kriget i Norge 1940-45. Oldenburgs försök att täcka in allt leder till ett lite hattigt flöde, där det är svårt att hänga med i händelseförloppet ibland. Men det är en viktig historia att berätta.

Feb 2023 | Feb 2022 | Feb 2021 | Feb 2020 | Feb 2019 | Feb 2018 | Feb 2017 | Feb 2016 | Feb 2015 | Feb 2014 | Feb 2013 | Feb 2012 | Feb 2011

• Del 1: 1939-1940
• Del 2: 1940-1942
• Del 3: 1942-1945

Detta är en utmärkt överblick av Sverige under andra världskriget. Berggren går igenom såväl det komplicerade politiska spelet där regeringen Hansson försökte balansera Sveriges intressen gentemot Nazityskland, samt bilder från vardagsliv under krigsåren.

Bland det jag fick reda på är att Christer Strömholm, kanske efterkrigstidens mest omtalade svenska fotograf, inte bara var nazist i unga år men även stred på Francosidan under spanska inbördeskriget.

Min bild var också att Sverige svängde tvärt mot Tyskland efter Stalingrad (januari 1943) man faktum är att i alla fall folkopinionen i Sverige svängde redan 1942, bland annat på grund av tyskarnas hårda framfart i Norge.

Jag lånade dessa böcker genom biblioteket här i stan och är tacksam att kunna leva i ett samhälle där detta är möjligt. Det samhället grundlades före kriget, men bibehölls under det, med många kompromisser och moraliska fel.

Under en längre bilresa hann vi beta av två ljudböcker, upplästa av författaren själv.

Skugga

En fyraårig pojke hittas övergiven på Skansen i slutet av 70-talet. Han minns bara sin mammas förnamn, Elina, men alla försök att hitta henne misslyckas. Varför lämnades han bort? Vad är sambandet mellan pojken och den världsberömde författaren och Nobelpristagaren Axel Ragnerfeldt?

Inte helt otippat visar det sig att bakom den perfekta författarfasaden döljer sig mörka hemligheter…

Skuld

Vår huvudperson, en alldaglig man med panikångest, dras in i en mardrömslik jakt på en kvinna han kallar “demonen”. Men vem är jägaren och vem är den jagade?

Detta är Alvtegens första roman och det märks jämfört med Skugga som är skriven nästan 10 år senare. Visst är den bra men det är lite för mycket övermänniska över antagonisten som gäckar vår hjälte och hela tiden ligger steget före.

Dec 2022 | Dec 2021 | Dec 2020 | Dec 2019 | Dec 2018 | Dec 2017 | Dec 2016 | Dec 2015 | Dec 2014 | Dec 2013 | Dec 2012 | Dec 2011 | Dec 2010