Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Book Review: "Fossil Capital" by Andreas Malm

Fossil Capital (2016)
Andreas Malm (1977)
488 pages


The term Anthropocene first appeared in the late twentieth-century, coined to express the idea that the world has entered a new geological epoch, one characterized by significant human impact on the Earth. Although formally rejected by the scientific standards committee responsible for the official Geologic Time Scale, it remains a powerful descriptor of the widespread effects of human activity on the environment – in particular, the impacts associated with greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

As felicitous as the word may be for environmentalists, however, author Andreas Malm opens his book Fossil Capital challenging its appropriateness. His disagreement centers on the implication of the prefix Anthro-: that the fundamental nature of human development shoulders the blame for the rising use of fossil fuels over the past two centuries to the point of a potentially existential crisis for civilization as we know it – the implied indictment of humankind as a whole. Instead, he argues that while

unlikely to gather anything like a consensus behind it, a more scientifically accurate designation … would be ‘the Capitalocene.’ This is the geology not of mankind, but of capital accumulation. (391)

In support of his contention, Malm, a professor of Human Ecology, explores The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, as stated in his book’s subtitle. Focusing on the cotton industry in early 19th century England – the booming manufacturing sector at the birth of the Industrial Revolution – he details how and why factories employing skilled labor and clean waterpower in the early 1800’s had, by the middle of that century, transitioned to automation and carbon-intensive steam power. Through an extensive analysis of that history, he builds the case for capital accumulation as the main driver behind these transitions.

Malm opens by noting that the widespread belief that humankind inexorably expands its consumption of resources rests largely on theories first put forth by economists David Ricardo and Thomas Robert Malthus in the late 1700’s. The pair argued that human societies naturally grow to the point that resources become scarce, and that the subsequent threat of poverty then motivates the development and adoption of technical solutions out of the impasse. In this line of thinking, then:

Coal resolved a crisis of overpopulation. Like all innovations that composed the Industrial Revolution, the exploitation of fossil fuels was the outcome of a ‘valiant struggle of a society with its back to the ecological wall’, and ‘response to a particular resource shortage’, a decision ‘made ‘under duress’ (23)

It turns out, however, that the facts simply don’t support this characterization. By carefully and thoroughly examining data and original writings regarding the growth and evolution of the cotton industry over the first half of the 1800’s, Malm demonstrates the lack of evidence for the traditional narrative, and then lays out the extensive evidence for the actual motivations behind the transition to automation and the use of steam power.

In the late 1700’s, he notes, the key steps in fabric production – spinning, turning cotton into yarn, and weaving, turning yarn into fabric – were done by machines requiring highly skilled workers, spinners and weavers, and that the energy for these factories came from water mills. With the English selling fabric globally, “profits of 50%” (59) were realized, and capital rushed in, leading to a dramatic expansion in the number and size of factories and so of production, with little change to the manufacturing process.

Then, in 1825, came the “the greatest financial meltdown of the nineteenth century.” So deep was the subsequent “panic,” that “when five years had passed without improvement, [a business paper] concluded that the glorious era of manufacture and commerce was approaching a complete end.” Overproduction led to falling prices, and profits fell “to an average of 5% or lower in the decade after the panic.” (58-59)

Business owners attempted to improve their profit position by, not surprisingly, lowering wages. As workers saw their pay drop below subsistence levels, strikes followed. These work stoppages were often led by the spinners, Malm notes: since spinning machines required complex, manual manipulation, the spinner “remained indispensable, [and so able to] bring mills to a full stop.” (64) Owners, seeking a way out from under the threat of such strikes, approached “the genius of a workshop for machine manufacturing [and asked him] to invent a self-acting mule” (65) – a spinning machine that could do the complex manipulations required on its own. By 1830, the first such machines were in use, and owners rushed to integrate them into their businesses. The craftsmen previously employed were replaced by minders, low-skilled workers who only needed to monitor and occasionally adjust these automated machines.

Close on the heels of this transition, the other major step in fabric production, weaving, succumbed to automation, as the power loom was invented and quickly propagated throughout the industry. The specifics driving the transition were different, as Malm describes, but the motivation was the same: owners desired to establish a more powerful position over weavers. The result, again, was a shift to automated equipment that required less-skilled, lower paid workers.

Through these examples from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Malm demonstrates the foundation of his thesis: that the evidence simply does not support the conclusion that transitions to using new technologies necessarily occur as a result of a crisis of population growth or of resource scarcity. The focus of business owners on labor costs was, in fact, never a secret; Malm quotes a cotton mill manager of the time as saying:

Many of the recent improvements in machinery have been accelerated in their introduction nearly as much by the vexatious conduct of the work people … as by the wish to bring goods to market at a cheaper price. (75) 

Another manager in the 1830’s wrote that

the machines never get drunk; their hands never shook from excess [work]; they were never absent from work; they did not strike for wages; they were unfailing in their accuracy and regularity. (198)

Thus, then as now, “the logic of capitalist commodity production – the hunt for profit, the burden of fixed capital, the struggle for survival in ultra-competitive markets” (188) drove the shift to automation.

Of course, this fundamental dynamic of capitalism – owners reducing wages to increase profits, workers pushing back in frustration, and owners finally finding it more profitable to replace workers with automation – remains a familiar story two centuries later. Increasing automation, in fact, puts the lie to politicians who argue that they can create jobs in the US by getting businesses to bring factories back from overseas; as economist Martin Wolf points out in his trenchant and thought-provoking book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (my review linked to at right):

Even if some industrial production were to be brought home [to Western, high income countries], at great cost, via protection against imports [such as by tariffs], there would then be ongoing – and probably accelerating – use of robots. (121, Wolf)


With the true reasons behind the introduction of automation detailed, Malm takes up the principal focus of his book: identifying the drivers for the shift to steam from existing sources of power such as water. He again provides extensive evidence and references that the traditional reasons given by historians for this shift – pressures to expand production to meet growing populations or overcome resource constraints – don’t stand up to historical scrutiny: the problem in the bust years of the 1820’s was over-production, not a demand explosion or limited sources of waterpower.

He notes that the steam engine had been in use since its invention in the late 1700’s, but only to a limited extent because of the higher costs of coal relative to freely available sources of water. Nonetheless, in the wake of the crisis of the 1820’s and despite plenty of streams and rivers remaining in England to be exploited, business owners shifted to steam, as they did to automation. Through an in-depth exploration of this transition to steam – a precursor to its adoption elsewhere as the industrial revolution spread across the globe – Malm demonstrates the driving force as being, again, factory owners’ desire for greater control over their workforce in order to increase profits – not an inevitable shift to a newer technology. (He points out that it is a false argument to look forward to a century later, when water resources may have eventually been exhausted; businesses did not make the transition anticipating a need generations in their future.)

Steam power allowed owners to move their factories from the typically sparsely populated areas near streams, to city centers. This, along with automation requiring less skilled labor, provided them a larger pool of workers, making it easy to replace those causing unrest or striking. He quotes owners of one factory in 1834 as stating that “the threat of discharge we conceive as one of the most effectual means of securing proper obedience and due subordination amongst all the hands employed by us.” (153) Malm also hints at perhaps the origin of the now commonplace two weeks’ notice contracts for non-union employees:

Inside Lancastrian cotton towns, the masters made it a habit to display the rule of two weeks’ notice for all the hands to see – an impossible luxury in [rural, water mill driven factory locations] where the masters strove for long-term contracts. (153) 

In general, business owners recognized that:

only a shadow of potential substitutes will keep a worker aware that she is fortunate to have her job. The threat of dismissal is ‘perhaps the most effective means yet discovered to impose labour discipline in class-divided societies.’ … a large, dense, concentrated supply [of workers] allows for ‘flexible labour turnover policies’, whereas a small, thin, spatially dispersed labour market forces firms to treat their employees as precious minerals. (299)

Over several chapters, Malm also examines the environmental and social impacts of coal powered factories on cities, including describing the failed attempts by groups of workers to push back on the transition to steam power. In so doing, he corrects the popular image of Luddites as anti-technology: they indeed sought to stop the shift to the new, automated equipment – but with the intent of saving their jobs, and so livelihood, not out of an inherent hatred of new technology. Yet another self-serving myth in the long history of business owners’ campaigns to create public beliefs that rationalize accepting and ignoring the capitalist system’s damaging externalities, as opposed to acknowledging, confronting and addressing them.

Malm then shifts his discussion to the present, in a chapter titled China as Chimney of the World: Capital Fossil Today, in which he highlights China as a significant example of how fossil fuel capitalism continues to operate today as it began to some two centuries ago, except now globally. Companies use the mobility that fossil fuels provide to enable global exploitation of the cheapest, most compliant labor, with the consequence of continued growth in Green House Gas emissions.

He begins by highlighting the common narrative of the growth in Chinese coal consumption as a destructive choice they have made and are imposing on the world – Chinese CO2 emissions. Examining the data, he reveals a much more complicit role for the West, and in particular the capitalist economic system, for these emissions.

A figure in the book shows China’s coal consumption as flat from 1995 to 2000, but then undergoing a roughly 100% increase from 2000 to 2007, after China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade organization “dismantled … barriers to investment.” (331) And yet, despite nearly 20% population increase over that period, residential energy use stayed flat, while industry accounted for 90% of coal use in 2002. Thus, industrial growth led to the dramatic increase in coal consumption, and so CO2 emissions.

But, he notes, 50% of the Chinese CO2 emissions in the period 2002 to 2008 were due to exported products, and 63% of exports came from foreign affiliates who relocated to China, with the US the leading country of origin for such exported factories. Thus, Western companies, in search of increasing profits, have sought out lower wages and a stable (non-union) workforce in China for goods produced for the West and, in so doing, have played an outsized role in motivating China to quickly expand its energy infrastructure. This has meant China building relatively easily installed and locally supplied coal power plants; not surprisingly, he notes, on a per unit production basis China emits more CO2 than Western countries. Thus, for a significant portion of China’s growth in CO2 emissions, the blame falls on Western business owners pursuing larger profits for goods sold to Western buyers.

Based, then, on an analysis of data and behavior from the earliest days of the industrial revolution to the present-day, Malm argues that “fossil capital … constitutes the main propulsive force of the fossil economy.” (355) Fossil fuels have provided capitalists with power, both in the sense of motive force for their machines and economic authority over their workers. From this, then, Malm’s contention that Capitalocene stands as a better descriptor of our time than Anthropocene:

Capitalists in a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation of the fossil economy; at no moment did the species vote for it either with feet or ballots, or march in mechanical unison, or exercise any sort of shared authority over its own destiny and that of the earth system. … Steam won because it augmented the power of some over others. … The succession of fossil-fuelled technologies following steam – electricity, the internal combustion engine, the petroleum complex: cars, tankers, refineries, petrochemicals, aviation… – have all been introduced through investment decisions, sometimes with crucial input from certain governments but rarely through democratic deliberation. The privilege of instigating new cycles of burning appears prima facie to have stayed with the class in charge of commodity production. (267-8)


 Turning, toward the end of the book, to the challenges of attempting to turn away from fossil fuels to reduce Green House Gas emissions, Malm points out a fundamental complexity:

It would be foolhardy … to trust in demand and supply as the mechanisms of the transition. If solar and wind were to become radically cheaper than fossil fuels, demand for the latter might fall – only to induce a corresponding fall in their prices, reviving demand and reestablishing an equilibrium of profligacy. (382) 

Given the inherent nature of market forces, then, only taking fossil fuels off the table as an energy option, will move the needle in terms of emissions reductions.

Malm’s book provides a deeply engaging and highly readable account of the history of the rise of fossil fuel use. His text does, admittedly, retain a bit of the feel of its origins as his Ph.D. thesis, in particular in its approach to referencing other works. As one example: Malm will provide an author and their background, and then some hundred or more pages later reference the author only by last name; a curious reader must perform a multi-step search through the index to track down the full name. A second, if related issue, is the unfortunate lack of a bibliography; if a footnote references, for example, “Hunter, Waterpower, 506-507,” and a reader wishes to know the full author’s name and the title of their book, it becomes a painful search through the footnotes to find the initial, complete reference, often several chapters earlier.

More fundamentally, one could push back on Malm’s analysis and conclusions regarding the role of capitalists – versus human society as a whole – in the expansion of fossil fuel use over the past two centuries by observing that capitalists are humans too, so is it a distinction without a difference? The point he makes, however, is that we (present-day) society have become so profoundly taken-in by arguments of the inevitable nature of human technological development that we’ve come to believe that increasing fossil fuel use has been unavoidable. Through extensive referencing of historical data and documentation Malm lays out a convincing argument for revising this assumption, and so view the transition to fossil fuels as a decision, not an inevitability.

And, if we acknowledge that the choice to use fossil fuels was made by a relatively small number of capitalist business owners seeking increased profits by switching to a source of power that they could exploit to achieve a controlling power over their labor force, we can recognize it as a (now potentially catastrophic) decision that could deserve revisiting and changing. More broadly, and what I’m particularly drawn to with his book, is that it can encourage us to reconsider other assumptions we hold to be inescapable aspects of our economic system. And if we do, and we understand that they can be changed, even now, then perhaps we must not be consigned to the devastating experience of 

[philosopher Walter] Benjamin’s angel of history [who] ‘sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet’ … [leaving] some swept away by the storm we call progress, others sailing to their fortunes. (393)


Other notes and information:

Ultimately, Malm’s arguments can encompass many other impacts associated with the Anthropocene as well, such as, say, pollution impacts or destruction of our natural environment.



Although not central to the thesis of his book, Malm also makes the striking observation that shifting through automation and steam power to a labor force concentrated in cities led to a gradual normalization of the shift from craftsmen to minders:
when a multitude of workers live together in the same neighbourhoods, submission to factory discipline may appear as a calling, a normal way of life and expected future: the town is the place where the ethos of wage labour – so repulsive to the first recruits – takes root. (299)


Until I read the Walter Benjamin quote that I conclude at the end of the essay, I hadn’t realized the source of singer Laurie Anderson’s lyrics in her amazing song The Dream Before. Lyrics here.



Malm’s argument against what he sees as Malthus and Ricardo’s myth of humans having an inevitable tendency to shift to new technologies and exploit resources to exhaustion, and the pass this gives business owners within the capitalist system in driving such behavior, reminded me of historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. (My review linked to at right.) Oreskes and Conway conclude that: 
By promoting a false dichotomy between laissez-faire capitalism and communist regimentation, market fundamentalists [have made] it difficult for Americans to have conversations about crucial issues, such as appropriate levels of taxation or the balance between federal and state authority, or even how to appraise the size of the federal government objectively. (118)


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Book Review: "Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present" by Peter Hessler

Oracle Bones (2006)
Peter Hessler (1969)
491 pages

Perhaps the most effective way to develop a deep understanding of another country is to live and work there for an extended period. By joining one’s neighbors and friends in their quotidian lives, one can begin to appreciate both the idiosyncrasies of a country’s culture and the impact and weight of its particular history on its people.

Just such understandings inform journalist Peter Hessler’s recollections in Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present. In what he refers to as a work of “narrative non-fiction,” Hessler transforms his experiences living and working in China into an exploration of its present day cultural and political realities, and their origins in Chinese history – connecting them to both ancient and more recent events. And, reflecting what constitutes perhaps the second most important benefit of visiting a foreign country, he also turns his gaze back to his own homeland, coming to see cultural and political aspects of the US in a new light.

The book opens in May 1999, with Hessler living in Beijing after having spent two years in the Peace Corps teaching English at a school in the Chinese heartland. It covers the period through June 2002, during which time he supported himself as a clipper for American news bureaus, cutting out and filing articles of interest from foreign newspapers. Beyond his day job, however, he wrote free-lance articles, often inspired by people he met as a result of his penchant for spending much of his free time walking the streets, in Beijing as well as during his travels around China.

Particularly engaging are the letters from former students in his English classes that he weaves into his telling. Allowing their voices to color his commentary animates his prose, while also providing a convincing credibility to his observations about daily life in China. Over the years, several of them travel to the richer, coastal cities in search of work, following a path of internal immigration so common in China in recent decades. What Hessler hears from them and observes directly when he visits some of them in their new lives, offers insight into the broader challenges China has faced with this migration.

Already in his Author’s Note, Hessler hints at another topic he covers, noting that he has “used real names with one exception”: a pseudonym for a Uighur he befriends in Beijing. Through this friend, Hessler parses the history of the continuing problems for the Uighur population in China. Such an approach can run the risk of resulting in a biased, anecdotal account, but Hessler, while clearly having a point of view, seems intent on providing a largely objective account of the situation. And, by exploring the topic through the lens of a particular person caught up in it, he achieves a much more intimate portrait of the conflict than a dry history and analysis could.

While this variety of perspectives on modern China form the backbone of Hessler’s narrative, roughly halfway through the book he describes a chance encounter that triggers an additional narrative path for him, one that illuminates the social and political evolution in China over the past century. A young archaeologist he interviews about the titular Oracle Bones – ancient, prophetic inscriptions etched onto bones and turtle shells – introduces him to a book about Chinese artifacts. Hessler learns that the author, archeologist Chen Mengjia, committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Intrigued, he begins to investigate Chen’s story, leading him to interview those still alive who remember him, as well as others who knew of him and his work.

Similar to the way in which Hessler reveals the character of current day Chinese (and to an extent US) society through the experiences of his friends and others he meets in China, his unraveling of the threads of Chen’s life becomes a window into aspects of China’s complicated recent history. It also serves to remind readers of the challenges inherent in establishing the details of a human life from the memories of others, each of whom have their own conscious and unconscious biases, agendas, and regrets.

This last becomes startlingly clear when Hessler, after having interviewed a wide variety of people about Chen’s life, meets with an aging archaeologist who wrote a criticism of Chen during the Cultural Revolution, a text included in Chen’s book. By that point, Hessler has learned much about the complexity of Chen’s life, but this piece of criticism looms over it all, seeming to indicate cruel intent, and with his subsequent suicide, becoming even almost incriminating.

Bringing it up with the scholar who wrote it, however, Hessler notes that “the emotions that I expected to see – annoyance, defensiveness, even anger – haven’t materialized. If anything, the man just looks tired, the bags sagging heavy beneath his eyes.” (390) The scholar’s eventual reply makes evident the struggle of life under an autocratic government, in a regime based on a cult of personality, wielding loyalty tests and palpable threats of violence to force conformance to the leader’s desires. Speaking of the Cultural Revolution, the scholar explains:

It’s not difficult just for foreigners to understand, … it’s difficult for young Chinese to understand. At that time, there was a kind of pressure on us to write this sort of thing. The Institute of Archaeology asked me to write it. I was very young and I couldn’t refuse. … I didn’t want to do it …. I always regretted that article. (391)

In the discussion that follows, the sincerity of his regret rings true. For readers, and clearly for Hessler himself, it becomes a clarifying moment regarding Chen’s story, but also, more generally, about the complicity and fear present in an autocratic regime. Although Hessler wrote and published this book almost two decades ago, readers will find clear connections to the present day experiences of Republican legislators pushed out for disagreeing with their party leader or feeling the need to censor their comments for fear of violence against themselves and their families.

One moment in Hessler’s chronicle that I found fascinating, although it’s only indirectly related to Chen’s story, is a revealing vignette about China’s architectural legacy. A gentleman he interviews, Mr. Zhao, lives in a traditional style home apparently once quite common in Beijing, which is to be bulldozed to make way for a new, modern apartment complex. Hessler notes that although the Chinese have a deep cultural history,

When I saw old buildings that had actually survived the centuries, like Old Mr. Zhao’s courtyard and house, they usually consisted of materials that had been replaced over the years. His home, like the Forbidden City or any traditional Chinese temple, was built of wood, brick, and tile. In China, few buildings had been constructed of stone. Some sections of the Ming dynasty Great Wall were faced with stone, but that was a defensive structure, not a monument of a public building. Chinese structures simply weren’t designed to withstand the centuries. (184) 

Thus, although the style of older buildings may continue to reflect traditional cultural standards, the actual physical structures may not be correspondingly old. This observation recalled for me the fascinating exploration of the ways in which a place’s architecture can evolve in architect Christina del Rio Fuente’s wonderful book Palimpsestos: Las Huellas del Tiempo en la Arquitectura (Palimpsests: The Traces of Time in Architecture); my review linked to at right.

Given the increased tensions between the US and China over the past decade or so, Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones can serve as a kind of touchstone, reminding readers of the complex population that lies behind the news generally reported by the media. We discover people busy and distracted with their day-to-day lives, and so as prone to be influenced by their government’s self-interested claims about America as Americans tend to be by our government’s self-interested characterizations of China. We come to better understand how the Chinese view both their own country and ours, and how facile misunderstandings of the other can so easily develop.


Other notes and information:


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Book Review: "Other Winds Will Blow" ("Soplarán otros vientos") by Alfonso Carvajal

Other Winds Will Blow (Soplarán otros vientos) (2019)
Alfonso Carvajal (1950)
Illustrations by Alicia Carvajal
175 pages

After retiring in 2015 as a professor from the University of Valladolid in Spain, Alfonso Carvajal returned to his hometown El Toboso, in La Mancha, southeast of Madrid – a town and a region made famous by the Miguel Cervantes novel Don Quixote. Once back, and with time on his hands, Carvajal wrote and submitted an essay to the regional newspaper. As he notes in the introduction to his collection Other Winds Will Blow (Soplarán otros vientos), “good luck did the rest” (“el buen azar hizo el resto”): the essay was accepted and published by the newspaper, and more pieces followed as he embraced this new pursuit.

Though his themes range from politics to culture to the natural world, he consistently rises above dry, esoteric observations in his essays, instead animating and enriching them with a healthy dose of his personal experiences. They fairly crackle with a sense of his broad engagement with the world and his profound passion for how we can best live our lives.

This shines through perhaps most notably in pieces that reflect on his emotional influences. In The Bars of My Town, for example, he explores the central role bars play in small towns in Spain, describing the different types typically present. But the piece really comes alive as he then goes on to explore the smells and sounds that create the unique atmosphere that brings him and others back repeatedly to their same haunts – and he celebrates the sense of community that results.

A similar emotional resonance fills The Sentimental Education, in which he provides a kind of greatest hits guide to the music, radio programs and concerts that have accompanied him from one stage of his life to the next. So much more than a personal favorites list, however, he transforms this recollection into a meditation on the central role music plays for so many of us in our lives.

Roughly half of the essays address political topics, to which Carvajal brings a sense of the fundamental importance of fairness and decency. Whether writing about ossified traditions of petty corruption that too often go unchallenged among local government officials, the thorny issue of Catalonian independence, or a globe-spanning topic such as the handling of people’s personal data, he brings a measured tone, deeply informed by his experience, learning and abiding sense of humanity.

These traits also characterize his essays on the natural world and our place in it. Here, beyond an homage to Thoreau, he engages with several challenges tied closely to the seemingly inevitable – and destructive – outcomes of our modern economic system. Thus, for example, he highlights the problems created by the privatization of water access and, in several essays, the profound impact of transportation systems on the natural world, including the months-long uncontrollable fires of vast dumps of used tires that became a major air and water quality crisis in Spain just a few years ago.

In a present-day world in which the mix of partisan divisions and social media has led to public exchanges that too often descend into toxic screaming matches, Alfonso Carvajal’s essays provide a measure of solace. Thoughtful and uplifting, they remind us of the beauty to be found in both the natural world and our relations with one another. And, when he does write of the challenges we yet face to make the world a better, more livable place, he does so with nuance and a sense of hope for the future that can inspire a reader to themselves engage in making this happen.


Other notes and information:

The book contains a beautiful series of abstract paintings by Alicia Carvajal.

Unfortunately, these essays have not yet been translated into English.

All translations to English in this review are my own
  
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Book Review: "Fractal Noise" by Christopher Paolini

Fractal Noise (2023)
Christopher Paolini (1983)
286 pages

In the opening pages of Christopher Paolini’s Fractal Noise, the crew of a spaceship exploring a star system discover a mystery on one of the planets: a huge, perfectly round hole carved into the surface, from which emanates a powerful electromagnetic pulse at a regular period of just over ten seconds. Analyzing the signal, the crew discover an underlying structure: a “fractal … representation of … the Mandelbrot set,” (20) and realize that they have become the first humans to encounter evidence of an alien intelligence, although no current signs of life seem present.

The intensity of the electromagnetic pulse creates dangerous conditions near the hole for both electronics and humans, as well as a steady, strong wind that scours the surface around it. Despite these challenges, the ship’s captain sends a team to the surface, with orders to trek up to the anomaly to understand what they can about its structure, and possibly its origins.

The shuttle must necessarily land some distance away, to avoid damage from the pulse. With a several day trip ahead of them, and with the strength of the wind and intensity of the noise increasing with each step forward, a motley group of four scientists begin making their way toward the hole. The team members have volunteered for the mission, although with wildly differing motivations and levels of commitment to its success, and despite evident personal discord between several of them. As conditions worsen and challenges mount on their slog toward the hole, their differences soon lead to the unraveling of whatever minimal cohesiveness existed between them at the outset.

Two of the team have approached the mission from a purely scientific point of view – the pursuit of knowledge. The other two, however, seek to discover in the alien artifact an understanding of the meaning of existence that will deliver them from profound personal demons, a quest that becomes increasingly fanatical for both of them even as the dangers to the team mount. In the face of ever more crippling setbacks, how will the team balance the risks taken for science versus those one may be willing to accept in the dogged pursuit of deliverance from one’s existential pain?

While the story builds tension and suspense that pulls a reader forward, it feels a bit too constructed to generate deep interest in the characters. The four scientists on the mission each represent a kind of caricature: one, a pure scientist who never considers the world beyond their research; a second with a strong personal belief in a life of pleasure-seeking, and dismissive of the search for life’s meaning as a distraction; a third, deeply religious character, seeking an escape from a horrific past experience; and, in the main character, someone driven by a traumatic personal loss they struggle to move past. And from an overall story point of view, although I’m not generally one to pick on plot elements as over the top, here the many and varied moments of violence the characters withstand – from the hostile environment and each other – escalate to lethal levels that eventually overwhelm any attempt to suspend disbelief.

That said, Fractal Noise provides a thrilling read and delves into intriguing questions on both the future of religious belief in the context of human civilization spreading among the stars and the potential impact of the discovery of an alien civilization on the human psyche. While I have my quibbles, there’s enough here that I look forward to reading another of Paolini’s novels in the future.


Other notes and information:


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Book Review: "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time (2015)
Adrian Tchaikovsky (1972)
600 pages

Successful novelists manage to make readers care about their characters and their characters’ experiences. The best science fiction writers, often setting their stories in distant times or places, and sometimes involving alien lifeforms, have an additional challenge: construct a society or civilization that compels and engages readers, that feels real – successfully accomplish what is referred to as world-building.

In his novel Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky again demonstrates his mastery of the art of character development and world-building. Perhaps most impressively, he does so despite presenting to readers a particularly challenging set of characters for whom to elicit sympathy and empathy.

The story opens in a space station orbiting a planet in a distant star system. The planet’s surface has been terraformed to resemble Earth, and the project’s lead scientist is preparing to seed it by deploying shuttles that contain the seeds of life, including a nanovirus intended to accelerate evolutionary progress toward intelligence, reducing it from millions of years to some centuries. The goal is for a sufficiently advanced human-like intelligence to develop that can become a kind of support staff for future colonists. But even as the lead scientist gives a speech to her team in advance of the launch of the shuttles – her words and thoughts fairly dripping with wild self-aggrandizement and stunning hubris – events go sideways, with radical implications for the future of life on the planet.

When, centuries later, humans arrive again in the system, having escaped a by then dying Earth, they discover a beautiful, green gem of a world, and make plans to settle on it. To their surprise, however, they encounter already established life on the planet – a world-spanning civilization of beings that shock their sensibilities and expectations; and, more importantly, a civilization not ready to step aside for the arriving humans. Thus begins a wild ride of technological and psychological maneuvering to see who will survive a desperate battle for control of the planet.

From its first moments, through to nearly the end, the story becomes a kind of extended allegory of the old adage man plans, and God laughs. The surprise of the opening chapter, in that sense, becomes only the first of many Tchaikovsky presents to readers. Brilliantly, while these unexpected plot twists sneak up on a reader, in retrospect each has its origins in earlier events, if often only cryptically – Tchaikovsky never springs them on us out of the blue.

As I’ve written in other of my reviews, one particular enjoyment I get from reading is making connections to what I’ve read before or have been thinking about, and Children of Time triggered several of these. One such involves the intelligent life on the planet coming to consider the equivalent of the Turing test question: whether, compared to an advanced being, there is a point at which a compute device has “grown sufficiently advanced and complex [that it] would … feel the same to communicate with both?” (445) Certainly, an idea that, if in a radically different context in the novel, touches directly on the current discussions around when an Artificial Intelligence may become indistinguishable from a human being.

As a second example: sometime later in the story the intelligent life on the planet confronts the stark realization that “they are not alone in the universe, and that this is not a good thing.” (489). Precisely this theme lies at the very heart of Cixin Liu’s wonderful The Dark Forest (my review linked to at right).

It is these beings’ reaction to this knowledge, just a few pages later, that has since given me pause as I reflect back on the novel; they find that “little focuses the collective mind more decisively than the threat of utter extinction,” (512) and quickly unify to develop the means to survive. I first encountered this theme in Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and I’ve always found it self-evidently true – adversity brings the threatened together. More recently, however, given the events of the past decade or so, I find myself wondering whether it is indeed so obvious what would happen. Even faced with a clearly imminent existential threat, would humankind really unify to deal with it? Consider the current, divisive partisanship in the US: would a substantial portion of the US population simply dismiss such a threat as a liberal or conservative – pick your particular political bogeyman of choice – conspiracy theory, and ridicule it?

And, indeed, Tchaikovsky addresses in his story this social tendency of intelligent beings to devolve into partisanship, blindly following beliefs that have become dogma. Both the humans on the spaceship and the intelligent life on the plant end up in conflict amongst themselves, whether over seemingly parochial and arbitrary beliefs, or an inability to reach some sort of compromise with one another. At least based on a sample size of two radically different intelligent life forms, Tchaikovsky seems to imply that certain forms of socially destructive behaviors come inherently with intelligence.

In demonstrating this, he creates characters as complex entities, with a mix of destructive flaws and good intentions. A sign of his success in this regard is how difficult it is to fully root for or against any of the characters or groups in the story. There are better and worse individuals among them, certainly, but none are idealized, all have flaws they sometimes succeed in overcoming, and other times fail to.

In Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky provides a brilliant and engaging, if for many readers I suspect also psychologically challenging, story of life striving to survive against powerful and often implacable odds. His extraordinary world-building capabilities shine again here, as they have in other of his works, such as, for example, Elder Race and Terrible Worlds: Revolutions (my reviews linked to at right). I look forward to diving into the second book in this trilogy soon.


Other notes and information:


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Monday, June 3, 2024

Book Review: "The Return" by Hisham Matar

The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016)
Hisham Matar (1970)
243 pages

It’s frightening to think of the hours – soon distant and forgotten, yet so slow and negligible while they’re going by – during which our friends and relatives think we’re alive when in fact we are dead…. This fear isn’t for the dead … but for the living, who will later have to reconstruct those hours … that they lived through unaware their world had changed.
Javier Marías, Dark Back of Time

In the spring of 2012, writer Hisham Matar returned to Libya with his mother and brother, just months after the conclusion of the civil war that had led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal regime. (And, though they could not know it at the time, during an all too brief period peace, as a second civil war broke out only two years later.) Having fled Libya in 1979 to escape the Gaddafi regime, they returned to see their homeland and visit with extended family and friends for the first time in decades.

Matar, however, arrived in Libya freighted with another, quite specific desire: to understand what had become of his father, who had been seized in 1990 by the Egyptian secret police, transferred to Libya, and taken to “Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, which was known as “The Last Stop” – the place where the regime sent those it wanted to forget.” (10)  Until 1996, his family had news of his father; but then, nothing. In The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, Matar writes of the many years he spent haunted by the lack of closure regarding his father: “When I think of what might have happened to him, I feel an abyss open up beneath me. I am clutching at the walls.” (43)  His return to Libya in 2011 serves as a framework for his recollections of both his years as an exile and his pursuit of information about his father.

Through flashbacks, Matar tells the story of his father’s growing disillusionment in the 1970’s with the Gaddafi regime, the family’s eventual exile, and his life outside of his homeland. He recalls that

For months after we left Libya, when I was a child, I used to lie staring at the ceiling, imaging my return. I pictured how I would kiss the ground [and] embrace my cousins. (36) 

But months became years, and eventually he left Egypt to attend boarding school in England – under an assumed name for security reasons – which eventually led to university there.

During his time in England came his father’s kidnapping, imprisonment in Libya, and subsequent disappearance, leaving Matar in a kind of twilight state with respect to both his life and his connection to his homeland. He tells of his attempts to uncover what became of his father, his inability to move on from the traumatic uncertainty, and the constant sense of disconnectedness the effort of this search precipitated in his daily life and work.

His pursuit of the truth led him into contact with one of Gaddafi’s sons, who promised to provide him information. His descriptions of this engagement, in which he was strung along for years without resolution, provides a disturbing look into the cavalier disregard for people’s humanity that too often characterizes the behavior of dictators and their entourage, who feel themselves above any law.  He comes to realize that

Power must know how fatigued human nature is, and how unready we are to listen, and how willing we are to settle for lies.  Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know.  Power must believe, given how things proceed, that the world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice or accountability or truth.  Power must see such attempts as pathetic, and yet the bereaved, the witness, the investigator and the chronicler cannot but try to make reason of the diabolical mess. (214)


 In The Return, Matar provides a thoughtful examination of the ties between a father and son, and between a person and their homeland. When these connections become severed, the effects can ripple on through one’s life, he makes clear, in complex and lasting ways. Perhaps most pressingly, he struggles with the question of whether and how to find peace regarding the disruptions and uncertainties that result, and how to decide when to stop trying to achieve some closure regarding what has been lost. Can we, should we, he asks himself and his readers, move on with our lives with such fundamental holes in our being? And if so, how?


Other notes and information:


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Sunday, May 26, 2024

Book Review: "Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald" ("The Battle in Teutoburger Forest") by Reinhard Wolters

Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald (The Battle in Teutoburger Forest) (2008)
Reinhard Wolters
255 pages

Last year, I watched Barbarians (in the original German, Barbaren) on Netflix, which tells the story of a battle that occurred in 9 AD, in what is present-day Germany, between regional tribes under a leader named Arminius and occupying Roman Legions led by a commander named Varus. While I enjoyed the series as entertainment, I also found myself wondering how accurately it represented historical events.

On one hand, I recalled having learned that fighting did occur between tribes located in what the Romans referred to as Germania, and the Roman Legions. On the other hand, it was clear that, as historical fiction, most of the characters and their interactions would be invented. But, the main characters, the main events – how faithfully does the series represent them?

Other than a few cursory Google searches, however, I didn’t actively follow-up on my questions at the time. Then, recently, a serendipitous find brought them front of mind: I discovered historian Reinhard Wolters’s book Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald: Arminius, Varus und das römische Germanien (The Battle in Teutoburger Forest: Arminius, Varus and the Roman Germania) among my parents’ books. My interest peaked, I dove right in.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my questions of authenticity didn’t lend themselves to easy answers. Yes, the battle portrayed in the Barbarians series apparently happened; yes, the various tribes in Germania who participated were led by Arminius, and the Roman Legions by Varus. Beyond these basic facts, however, Wolters makes clear that significant uncertainties and conflicting opinions exist among historians, archaeologists, and the variety of scholars and laypeople who have explored the history of the event. With his book, Wolters describes his goal as being to offer:

an up-to-date, critical as well as transparent introduction to the current state of our understanding about the battle in Teutoburger Forest – to its prehistory, its course, as well as the consequences that resulted from the severe Roman defeat against the Teutons. (7)

Throughout, Wolters references the limited (and exclusively Roman) written sources that have survived to the present day – along with inscriptions on ancient monuments and memorials – from which historians have attempted to reconstruct the reality of a battle that has become the stuff of legend. He notes the challenges faced in attempting to understand these historical sources, and he carefully evaluates the variety of conclusions that have been drawn from them.

The breadth of the uncertainty quickly becomes evident, not only in attempts to clarify the backgrounds of the two protagonists, Arminius and Varus, but also the details of the battle, and even whether it is properly characterized as a battle, with sources “describing in one case an attack by Germanic fighters on a Roman military outpost, while in other cases … a treasonous ambush, set in difficult territory.” (13)

Beyond evaluating the interpretations from the ancient texts of how events played out, and of Arminius and Varus as the protagonists, Wolters provides a fascinating account of the investigation into where the battle took place. Theories and counter-theories have been put forth over the centuries, he notes, by a wide variety of interested parties:

In this debate, have participated and continue to participate not just professional archaeologists and historians; widely differing proposals have been and continue to be put forward by knowledgeable local researchers and laypeople from a wide variety of professional origins. (150)

One might assume that the battle took place in the north-central German region known as the Teutoburger Forest; however, writes Wolters, this name for the area only first appeared a few centuries ago, based on one scholarly interpretation of the ancient texts as to the location of the battle. In recent decades, new archaeological evidence has narrowed the focus to a site some dozen miles north of the Teutoburger Forest, just over a similarly forested ridge. But, as Wolters describes, even with regards to that site, significant questions and contradictory information remain.

While the specific, historical details surrounding the battle and its location make for a fascinating story, I found particularly striking Wolter’s examination of what the engagement with the history of this battle by scholars and others – from Roman times up through the present day – reveals about the process of rendering and interpreting history itself.

In his evaluation of both the historical sources and subsequent works by historians and others who have interpreted them over the centuries, Wolters provides a kind of case study for the trenchant observation of historian Eric Foner in the preface to his excellent essay Who Owns History (my review linked to at right):

Each generation rewrites history to suit its own needs. … In every country, versions of the past provide the raw materials for nationalist ideologies and patriotic sentiments.

Wolters finds this truth to apply not only to the original Roman sources, but also to the wide variety of interpretations of them that have arisen since, calling out:

the fragmentary nature of what has been passed down from, and no less the contradictions already present in, the ancient sources. These written accounts originate from different centuries and stand at different timespans from the events described: they provide information over the changing horizon of meaning already in antiquity – and this meaning was each time guided by the interests of the authors and marked by each of their specific, contemporary experiences. (14-15)

In that vein, he explores the ways in which Roman historians, as well as scholars and others up through to the present-day, have colored their interpretations of the event based on their personal outlook, including the social and political context in which they lived and worked, and with which they wished to either align themselves with or influence the direction of. This has included, in particular, a long line of German historians, writers of literary and theatrical works, and artists who have sought to present Arminius’s rising up to defeat the Roman occupiers as a defining moment in the origin of the idea of Germany as a nation, or as the original example of Germanic pursuit of freedom and independence. The result, he finds, has been centuries of often wildly varying interpretations of the event, that both exploit the conflicting information from the ancient sources and often extrapolate far beyond it, to make a particular political or social statement.

For this one dramatic event, that took place over perhaps a few days some two thousand years ago, Wolters provides a thorough and enjoyable introduction in The Battle in Teutoburger Forest. He leverages the event itself to present an understanding of the Roman state, both in terms of its inner workings, as well as its view of and engagement with the lands to the east of the Rheine that it sought to add to its empire. With that context in place, he explores the understandings historians have developed of the lives of its principal characters, Varus and Arminius, as well as the battle they fought and its aftermath.

And, beyond the instructive examination of the historical events themselves, he provides an engaging and eye-opening look at the challenges present in interpreting ancient sources colored by their authors’ eye to their particular political and social environment, as well as the way subsequent historians, too, have allowed such motivations to influence their interpretation and presentation of the event.

As ever, I suppose, with texts on history that carry a strong bias: caveat emptor…


Other notes and information:

The translations from the original German are mine.


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf