wot i red on my hols by alan robson (nuptiae anniversarium)

It was Twenty Years Ago Today

The Martian Contingency is the fourth novel in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series. The events in the series all take place in an alternative 1970. A meteor strike which took place back in 1952 has wiped out Washington DC and the resultant climate change is becoming more and more catastrophic. The novels explore this scenario and the attempts to find some kind of solution to what may well turn out to have been an extinction event.

It has been quite a long time since the previous novel was published and I must confess that, although I remembered the broad outline of the story arc, the details had begun to escape me. Fortunately Mary Robinette Kowal has done a superb job of seamlessly filling in the necessary background material and I strongly suspect that the book could be read as a stand alone story.

The novel is narrated in the first person by Elma York, the lady astronaut herself. She is part of the second Mars mission, which is charged with expanding the habitat constructed by the first Mars mission so that a third mission can bring along sufficient people  to begin building a larger (and hopefully more self-sustaining) community on the planet. Elma, as one of the longest-tenured astronauts, now has significant command responsibilities.

It soon becomes clear to Elma that something must have gone badly wrong on the first mission, but the event appears to have been swept under the carpet. She finds concrete evidence that some kind of catastrophe had happened, though she is unsure about its exact nature because there is no mention of it in the official record. Furthermore, much to her annoyance, the members of the first mission who have returned to Mars with this second mission refuse to discuss it with her, fobbing off her questions with obvious lies. Things eventually come to a head when ramifications from what happened on the first mission start to threaten the safety and survival of the second mission. The time for secrets is past if everyone is to come out of this alive...

The novel really explores three major narrative threads – the technical problems involved in carving out a liveable space on a hostile world, the social problems of trying to ensure that everybody gets on with everybody else in spite of the occasional personal agendas that sometimes get in the way, and the political machinations that revolve around keeping the various governmental agencies involved in the project as a whole on track. All are complex and all feed back on each other in complicated ways. They are three very difficult and very heavy balls to juggle without dropping them on your toes. Fortunately Mary Robinette Kowal is a superb juggler and I am truly impressed with how seamlessly she weaves these intertwining threads together.

I do have quibbles of course – how could I not?

Mary Robinette Kowal prides herself on her technical accuracy and by and large she does an amazing job of getting it right. But even Homer nods, and she makes an elementary mistake at one point which almost (but not quite) invalidates a fairly major plot element. For various reasons that don’t matter here, there has been a massive accidental (probably…) release of carbon dioxide into the dome on the Martian surface. This is very dangerous for the people living and working in the dome – breathing carbon dioxide can certainly kill you rather quickly. Unfortunately much of what the author says in her description of the effects of breathing carbon dioxide is not quite right,

When you inhale you take in oxygen from the air. The oxygen binds to the haemoglobin in your blood so that it can be carried round the body in the bloodstream to refresh the places that need refreshing. When you exhale, you breathe out carbon dioxide which is the waste product from all of that refreshment. Carbon dioxide is a largely inert gas which soon dissipates, given adequate ventilation. But if there is a large concentration of the gas in the air around you and if you keep inhaling it (and exhaling more of it) you will eventually pass out. If you do not receive treatment, you will die. This is because the more carbon dioxide there is in the air around you, the less oxygen there will be in every breath that you take. It is this lack of oxygen that eventually kills you, rather than anything the carbon dioxide does directly – in and of itself carbon dioxide is not a poison, it is an asphyxiant. It does not bind to the haemoglobin in your blood except in rare, very extreme circumstances and even then it binds only very loosely and is easily replaceable again by oxygen. Consequently victims of carbon dioxide inhalation can easily be treated if the patient is caught in time. All they need is a supply of oxygen and soon they will be right as ninepence again.

Carbon dioxide asphyxiation is the reason why masturbating men who put a plastic bag over their head in an attempt to enhance the pleasure of the moment all too often die – generally there is nobody with them to take the bag off their head before they pass out from continuing to inhale the carbon dioxide that they exhaled just a moment ago when they gasped with delight. As this cycle repeats, their supply of oxygen dwindles and dwindles with every breath because the plastic bag is impermeable and no oxygen is getting into it from outside. Eventually there is little or no oxygen left in the bag and their world goes away from them. I’m sure they’d end up feeling very embarrassed if they weren’t actually dead.

This scenario, writ large and without the sexual connotations, is what would have happened when the carbon dioxide was released into the Martian dome, the dome itself being in many ways just a gigantic, impermeable plastic bag.

However the symptoms and effects that Mary Robinette Kowal describes are (mainly) those of carbon monoxide poisoning which is a very different kettle of fish indeed. Carbon monoxide does bind to haemoglobin and once the haemoglobin has grabbed hold of the carbon monoxide it is extremely reluctant to let go of it again. Haemoglobin much prefers carbon monoxide over oxygen in the same sort of way that small children much prefer ice cream over vegetables. Because of this preference even quite small quantities of carbon monoxide in the air can kill extremely quickly. Ironically, people who have died from carbon monoxide poisoning actually look remarkably fit and well because there is a nice healthy red glow to their skin!

Because carbon monoxide is a poison rather than an asphyxiant it kills its victims much more rapidly than carbon dioxide does, and patients suffering from exposure to it are correspondingly much harder to treat.

But in both cases, if oxygen is not provided quickly the patient will eventually stop breathing and will soon die. Patients can sometimes be resuscitated after breathing has stopped but the longer they remain apneoic (not breathing) the higher the chance that permanent brain damage may have occurred.

Mary Robinette Kowal is perfectly correct when she talks about the dangers associated with releasing carbon dioxide into the dome but she is a little less than correct when she describes the effects of the gas on the people there. Everything she says about it is both confused and confusing.

Parts of the novel are a rather thinly veiled discussion about contemporary (real world) social and political problems – for example there is a large section concerning people’s attitudes towards abortion which, in light of the recent debate about Roe vs Wade in present day America, can only be read as a bit of somewhat heavy handed social commentary. I found these kinds of things rather tiresomely obvious and, to my mind, they went on for far too long. They just got in the way of the story and felt as if they had been shoe-horned in to fill up the page count a bit. I would have liked to have seen some heavy editing here. I’m not saying that these things had no place in the book (they are important topics after all). I just felt that they should have been treated rather like salt in a stew – a sprinkle of salt makes it taste great, but a whole salt-cellar full will ruin it,

And finally there is the very ugly slang centred around the vagaries of the Martian calendar, together with the painfully embarrassing dialogue full of sexual innuendo that makes everybody sound like twelve year old adolescents who have just found out about sex and are sniggering together behind the bike sheds, finding dirty meanings in the most innocent of sentences. It very quickly gets very annoying and I simply don’t believe that highly trained technical people dealing with profound, complex and important problems would behave so childishly.

Despite my misgivings I really did enjoy the novel. Mary Robinette Kowal has done a marvellous job with it. She’s very good at making me want to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next. And when you get down to it, isn’t that all that matters?

* * * *

Adrian McKinty has written a series of police procedural novels set in Northern Ireland during the (euphemistically named) Troubles. Sean Duffy is a catholic policeman who works for the largely protestant RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary), Terrorists of every persuasion regard Duffy with suspicion. The IRA consider him a traitor because he works for the protestant police and the various protestant terror groups are certain he must be an IRA informer. Clearly both sides want him dead. He checks his car for bombs every time he gets in it. Should he ever find one, it will be debatable as to which side might have placed it there!

Hang on St Christopher and God’s Away on Business are the eighth and ninth stories in the series, but that doesn’t matter very much. The books work extremely well as stand alone novels and you can pretty much read them in any order, Interestingly, God’s Away on Business is the ninth book in terms of publication order, but in fact it is chronologically a prequel to the series as a whole.

As you might expect, the stories are very grim and dark. The Troubles were a time of extreme violence. Bodies littered the streets and lots of kneecaps were removed with extreme prejudice. Torture was an everyday occurrence. The Duffy novels do not draw a veil over the terror, the death and the horror. But despite that, these books are often very, very funny. Duffy never fails to find humour in even the darkest of circumstances and he is not above telling the occasional joke himself as the mood takes him. He confesses to a colleague that when he was seventeen he was mugged by a gang of French mime artists. What they did to him was unspeakable.

* * * *

Fagin the Thief is a novel by Allison Epstein. As you might deduce from the title, it is the biography of one Jacob Fagin, the man who the world first met in the pages of Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist where we saw him making his living from a gang of children who he had trained to be successful thieves and pickpockets. We learn very little about Fagin’s life in the Dickens novel – Dickens had other fish to fry, and Fagin appears only very briefly in his story. But he remains a fascinating character – Dickens brought him magnificently to (very twisted) life and it is impossible to ignore his charisma. He dominates every scene he appears in. One of the most memorable scenes from the musical play Oliver! (derived, of course, from the Dickens novel) was of Fagin singing that he had to pick a pocket or two…

Jacob Fagin, Allison Epstein tells us, was born towards the end of the eighteenth century in the dark alleys of London, deep in the heart of the Jewish enclave of Stepney. His father had been hanged as a thief. His mother had been in the crowd who had gathered to watch her husband die at the end of the rope. Against his mother’s wishes, Jacob is determined to continue the family tradition of thievery. He sees no other choice for himself if he is to make his way in the world. A light-fingered gentleman takes Jacob under his wing, teaching Fagin all he knows. Fagin learns his lessons quickly and skilfully and it isn’t long before he is making a very nice living for himself, thank you very much, always keeping himself in the shadows and successfully avoiding the attentions of the authorities and the hangman.

When he has mastered all that his mentor can teach him, Jacob strikes out on his own. He recruits a small and ever-changing gang of children, waifs and strays who drift in and out of his life and to whom he passes on his dubious skills. Life is good for all of them.

But everything starts to change when he adopts an aspiring teenage thief named Bill Sikes. Bill is foul-tempered and foul-mouthed, short of temper and quick to violence. He poses a danger both to himself and to anyone foolish enough to cross him.

Bill instigates a major robbery, sure that the proceeds from it will set him up for life. He "borrows" some helpers from Fagin. But (of course) his plans go awry, putting Jacob Fagin in very real danger of meeting the hangman face to face at long last…

We are re-introduced to a lot of old friends in the pages of this novel – Bill Sikes, his dog Bull's-eye, Nancy, the Artful Dodger – and we make many new ones as well. The story teems with people, high class and low class, people on their way up and people on their way down. They caper and dance through the story, so real that you can smell them. And that’s the novel’s greatest strength. It is a brilliant evocation of its historical context. The sense of time and of place (and people) is outstanding – a truly grim picture of Dickensian London at its darkest and bleakest. Yet at the same time the story is not without beauty and it contains a surprising amount of humour. The book is a lovely tribute to Dickens as well as being a first class novel in its own right. Allison Epstein never puts a foot wrong and the story held me enthralled all the way to the inevitable, but nevertheless still somewhat surprising, end.

* * * *

Close to Home is the first novel in Cara Hunter’s series about Detective Inspector Adam Fawley. The story seems quite straightforward to begin with. Eight-year-old Daisy Mason has vanished from her family’s Oxford home during a costume party. She’s dressed as a daisy for heaven’s sake so surely she’ll be easy to find if she is wandering around anywhere in the surrounding streets? She’ll stick out like a sore stamen. But if there is more to the case than a child who has simply drifted way while everyone was distracted by other things, Fawley is certain that someone in the family will turn out to be the offender. Nine times out of ten child abductions are carried out by someone close to home.

Daisy’s family is certainly a very strange one. Sharon, her mother, is obsessed with keeping up appearances, while Barry, her father, is cold, distant and defensive under questioning. And then there is also Daisy’s little brother who is very withdrawn into himself and is almost completely uncommunicative . . .

It quickly becomes clear that there is much more going on below the surface than we first realised. Several flashbacks tell us a lot about Sharon and Barry’s sometimes rather bizarre past. Some of this knowledge is made public and the twitterverse goes bananas in its certainty that the family is responsible for what they are now thinking of as Daisy’s death. The court of public opinion has no doubt whatsoever where the guilt lies. That doesn’t make the verdict true, of course, but when did that ever stop the great unwashed from seeking retribution?

Every time an explanation is uncovered it reveals a new complication that redirects the investigator’s attention. Wheels within wheels, complexities within complexities. It’s very easy to say that nothing is what it seems to be but in the case of this novel that is literally true. Nothing, absolutely nothing at all is what it seems to be. Everyone has something to hide and some of the hidden secrets are very, very dark indeed.

There’s a certain bizarre fascination to be found in following the slowly unravelling complexities of a plot as deep, as grim and as clever as this one. I think I could have done without the final plot twist that is revealed right at the very end on almost the last page, though to be fair it was adequately foreshadowed in the body of the novel. Nevertheless it didn’t ring true to me and it felt like a bit of an unconvincing anti-climax. I’d have preferred the book to have finished with the very satisfying ending that precedes the Epilogue when everybody we have grown to hate gets their just desserts. The final twist, in my opinion anyway, over-eggs the pudding just that little bit too much.

But each to their own. There’s no doubt at all that the novel is cleverly structured and the story is beautifully told. Cara Hunter is completely in control of her material and never puts a foot or a finger wrong. I have very high hopes for the rest of the novels in the series.

* * * *

Sarah Wynn-Williams is a New Zealander who, for a time, was quite high up in the policy making hierarchy at Facebook. She left under something of a cloud several years ago and Careless People is her kiss and tell, warts and all, memoir of her time at the coal face.

Facebook has done its very best to muzzle her. They have successfully taken legal action that prevents her from giving interviews but despite their best efforts they have utterly failed in their attempts to prevent publication of her book. Indeed, those very well publicised attempts to keep the book under wraps have actually had the opposite effect. They have attracted so much interest that the book has shot to the top of the best-seller lists all over the world! It’s a well known phenomenon which is often referred to as The Streisand Effect – look it up if you aren’t familiar with the phrase or the idea behind it. The cack-handed attempts by Facebook to stop the publication are really quite typical of the organisation (disorganisation might be a better word) that Sarah Wynn-Williams describes. They appear to have a very tenuous grasp on the notion of cause and effect and so the completely predictable outcome of their bumblings appears to have taken them by surprise. How odd...

I very much doubt that Mark Zuckerberg will recognise the irony inherent in the idea that Facebook’s attempts to keep their dirty laundry secret have actually succeeded only in spreading that laundry out all over the world for everybody to sniff. It’s also rather ironic that Facebook loudly proclaims itself to be a bastion of free speech and yet it is trying very hard to deny Sarah Wynn-Williams the right to speak freely. Probably they are doing it because it is very unlikely that Zuckerberg knows the meaning of the word irony. After all, it’s a big word, it’s got three syllables in it. That’s way above his intellectual level.

Careless People paints a picture of an almost completely dysfunctional enterprise that has succeeded in spite of itself rather than because it has any idea about what it is doing. Imagine how successful the company might have been if anybody in the organisation was even half way competent. It doesn’t bear thinking about. The idea sends a shiver of fear up my spine…

Zuckerberg has surrounded himself with sycophantic ignoramuses (ignorami?). One high official who had actually been an advisor to President Bush, no less, was absolutely astonished to learn one day that Taiwan was an island. Another had what they thought was a really clever idea – let’s make people’s facebook profiles contain organ donation details. That will make it so much easier for doctors to find organ donors from anywhere in the world rather than restricting them only to local donors. Superficially that is indeed a very attractive idea and if it could be made to succeed it would have obvious advantages. But of course many countries have very strict laws about organ donation and the idea turned out be extremely illegal in a lot of places. Facebook was astonished. The fact that other countries had laws and customs that were different from American laws and customs was a completely bewildering idea to the person in charge of the project.

When Mark Zuckerberg is tense he likes to unwind by playing board games. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. So it is not uncommon for Zuckerberg to demand that his VIPs play, for example, Settlers of Cataan with him. They always agree, and they always let him win!! Because, of course, he’s the boss, he’s infallible, he can’t ever be seen to have lost at anything. I wasn’t kidding when I called them all sycophants.

Wynn-Williams herself was made of sterner stuff. She records how she once played board games with Zuckerberg while travelling on his private jet. She didn’t hold back, beating him twice in a row. His reaction to this was to accuse her of cheating. "You had multiple ways to win," she informed him the second time he did that and then she analysed the game for him, pointing out the better moves he could have made. Zuckerberg wasn’t convinced and neither he was he happy to be shown up like that. In his heart of hearts he probably still believes that she cheated. What other explanation could there possibly be?

On a more serious note, it seems likely that Facebook was directly responsible for the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar (Burma). The military junta that initiated the massacre (perhaps genocide or ethnic cleansing might be more accurate words) specifically and deliberately used Facebook to inflame hatred against its minority Muslim population. Facebook’s blatant refusal to muzzle hate speech in any way, shape or form only served to fan the flames.

Mark Zuckerberg has blood on his hands. Literally.

Careless People presents a clear warning about the dangers of unfettered shareholder capitalism when combined with the unthinking technological ideologies that empower it. Almost by definition this is a recipe for disaster. Facebook is not the only example of this, it is just one of the most egregious. The market, in the abstract, has no morals and therefore neither do the people who implement the fundamental, but very dangerous idea of perpetual growth that is the driving force behind their business philosophy. The world has become very small now because the technology has spread so far, so wide and so fast. As a consequence, companies like Facebook are seen to be choosing actively to play down care, empathy, and respect for the individual because now these things only get in the way. They are anathema because they have a negative effect on the bottom line and that amounts to sacrilege. The barriers that once upon a time prevented – or at least limited -- those immoral strategies from succeeding are crumbling under the onslaught of the technology that is undermining them. It’s hard to know how it can be stopped.

Read Careless People and get scared.