Henry Gee's Blog

What I Read In August

Anna Mackmin Devoured Oh, but this struck a chord. This is a bizarre coming-of-age-novel in which the initially unnamed protagonist — a girl on the verge of puberty – recounts her life in a commune living in a ramshackle house somewhere in Norfolk in the the early 1970s. Our girl lives with her (selectively) mute sister Star and her parents who give house room to an eclectic assortment of deluded and self-absorbed poets, new-agers, artists, ne’er do-wells, druggies and dropouts. Eventually, of course, it all falls apart. The bizarrerie is mainly about the writing style, which some will find refreshing, others annoying. Also, recipes. I thought it was a lot of fun, but perhaps because it reminded me of the people I knew back in the day during my education in a Steiner School, when, at the start of the school day, clapped-out vans and Citroen 2CVs adorned with decals saying ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ pulled up, disgorging black fumes and an unfeasible number of children, and the gardening was biodynamic.

Carl Zimmer Life’s Edge Age, infirmity and the casting-around for another book idea have led me to catch up with the output of my colleague and friend Zimmer, whom I’ve known since we were both cub reporters and before he started writing books, but, now that we’ve passed a lot of water, he has written quite a few. In Life’s Edge he wrestles with that je-ne-sais-quoi we call ‘life’. Most people know that life begins when the kids leave home and the dogs are dead. Apart from that, telling the difference between the quick and the dead has been a somewhat fraught business, and yet the issue informs many of the debates we have today, from abortion to end-of-life care. The problem is that we all know life when we come across it, but, like jazz or pornography, it seems impossible to achieve a definition that satisfies everyone. In his masterly book How Life Works (reviewed here) Philip Ball suggests that life is that which has meaning, but that probably wouldn’t satisfy everyone either. You can drill down and down to the level of molecules, but then, what do you have? I’ll tell you — bupkes.  As ever, Zimmer recounts his travels and encounters with scientists engaged in this evanescent issue with warmth, sympathy and affection. He doesn’t succeed in finding a definition, but the journey is nothing less than thought-provoking.

Leigh Bardugo Ninth House Where do those bright young witches and wizards go after Hogwarts? To Yale, of course, many of whose Secret Societies practice magic. There are eight Senior societies, and their activities are monitored by Lethe (the Ninth House of the title) which acts as a kind of magical military police. Meet Galaxy Stern, known as Alex, child of a hippy-drippy-trippy Los Angeleno mother of Ladino Jewish heritage, and an unknown father. Alex is a feral high-school dropout, but is recruited by Lethe because she has the remarkable ability to see ghosts without first having to drink the extremely toxic elixir otherwise required. A stranger in a strange land, she finds herself at Yale on a full scholarship, mixing with students much more accomplished (and more entitled) than she, so she has to succeed on chutzpah and street smarts. A deputy (‘Dante’) in an investigative duo working for New England brahmin Daniel Arlington (‘Virgil’), her already fragile world is thrown into confusion when she starts investigating the murder of a young New-Haven woman apparently unconnected with Yale, and Arlington is sucked into a vortex that leads straight to Hell. The parallels with Hogwarts are obvious: the ill-equipped recruit from a deprived home, the exotic and antique setting drenched in ancient ritual, the cast of eccentric and occasionally dangerous characters make it so. Just add a great deal of sex, violence and violent sex, all with or without a copious intake of drugs and not a little gore, and you are most of the way there. But where Bardugo succeeds (Rowling, meh, not so much) is in — well, everything. Ninth House excels: the quality of the writing, the nuanced characterisation, the taut plotting and the watertight world-building shine brightly. It helps that Yale, unlike Hogwarts, really exists, and so (I have learned) do many of the locations and institutions described in the story.  As a novel, it has  a conventional three-act structure. And with its plots, counter-plots, reveals, false trails and twisty ending, it is perfectly poised … and with enough untied knots for a sequel. Which leads me to…

Leigh Bardugo Hell Bent sees Alex Stern and her friends, notably shy, bookish Pamela Dawes (‘Oculus’, in Lethe language), hard-bitten detective Abel Turner (‘Centurion’, Lethe’s liaison with the New Haven PD) and plucky Mercy Zhao (Alex’s Yale room-mate) try and mostly fail to pull Daniel Arlington out of Hell. They succeed, mostly, but Arlington has, unsurprisingly, changed. And all this as Yale’s faculty seem to be dropping like flies. Hell Bent has a lot of Alex’s and Arlington’s  back story, as well as those of the various ghosts and faculty we met in Ninth House. It’s a satisfying entertainment but not quite as  good as Ninth House, which, perhaps, set an impossibly high standard. There are still a few loose ends — who was Alex’s father, for instance? I learn that a  further instalment is in prospect.

Carl Zimmer Planet of Viruses Originally written as a means of public education for the National Institutes of Health, Planet of Viruses is now in its third edition, and so covers Covid. Written in plain and simple language, this primer on what viruses are and what they do should be on everyone’s bookshelf. Essential.

Leigh Bardugo The Familiar Searching for more by Leigh Bardugo but avoiding her Young Adult  fantasy,  Offspring#1 suggested I try this. Set in Spain some time between the failure of the Spanish Amanda Armada and the death of Queen Elizabeth I (so, between 1588 and 1603), it concerns the life of Lucia, a cloddish scullion in a Madrid household at the lower end of the upper class, in a society absolutely obsessed with ancestry and status. Every nuance matters, and the slightest mistake could mean ostracism, exile, torture, even death. Spain’s Jews  had been either expelled or converted a century earlier, but ‘Secret Jews’ could still be punished by the Inquisition, and Lucia’s family is of Jewish heritage. She is unwittingly thrown into the spotlight when it’s revealed she can perform magic (‘little miracles’) and finds herself in a tourney of magicians that will be set before the King, seeking a Vengeance Weapon against the heretical English. As with Alex Stern in Ninth House, the heroine is of Jewish heritage; of humble beginnings; can perform magic; and is thrown into a milieu she can barely understand and in which she can succeed only by her own ingenuity. The unfamiliar setting was a little off-putting — all those Spanish names made it sometimes hard for me to distinguish who was who in a large cast of characters — but it was as well-wrought as I now have come to expect.  Despite the setting, the atmosphere in which people can be ‘cancelled’, their lives ruined by a chance remark that reaches the wrong ears, might be horribly familiar to those who fall foul of the self-righteous and sanctimonious guardians of public morality today. Should be subtitled Everyone Expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived In The Castle I seem to have settled into a groove by reading novels in which the protagonists are young, female and a bit odd. In this novel she’s Mary-Katherine Blackwood — ‘Merrikat’ — who is 18 and lives with her elder sister Constance and her Uncle Julian in a rambling old pile just outside an unnamed village in the United States, sometime in the mid-twentieth century (there are cars and telephones). Six years earlier the rest of the family had been killed in a mass poisoning for which Constance was blamed but later acquitted. The event has alienated the Blackwoods from the increasingly hostile villagers, and had catastrophic consequences for the surviving Blackwoods. It left Uncle Julian disabled and increasingly senile and Constance an obsessive agoraphobic. Only Merrikat goes out to run errands in the village. We see the world through her eyes, and as a narrator she is extremely particular, and peculiar: it’s clear that she has what we’d now call autism and learning disabilities. I don’t want to spoil it by revealing what happens next. After listening to this on Audible I discovered that the novel was written in 1962 and has become a minor classic. Jackson wrote several novels and stories, mainly mysteries and tales of horror. We Have Always Lived In The Castle was a late work and is now seen as a masterly study of  otherness and alienation, and even a metaphor for the antisemitism that Jackson and her (Jewish) husband reportedly experienced in their own lives, with its themes of ostracism, persecution and social isolation from the outside world, and the obsessive maintenance of ritual despite (and because of) increasingly desperate straits. Jackson’s best known work is The Haunting of Hill House and I think I’ll try that next.

 

What I Read In July

Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time The British government has acquired a device to transport people from past centuries to the present day. The people concerned are recorded as missing or dead, so the course of history should not be changed. At this end, Ministry employees have to give house room for the ‘immigrants’. Our protagonist, a young twenty-first century woman of mixed British-Cambodian parentage, is put in charge of an officer from the doomed Franklin Expedition to the North-West Passage. Cue many misunderstandings concerning the role of women, people of various ethnic heritages, and so on. This is not a comedy, however, and there’s more – it appears that the device to bring people to the present day is a gift from the future, and there are all sorts of other shenanigans going on. I enjoyed this mainly for the interesting use of metaphor. The protagonist describes the taste of Guinness, for example, as ‘angry Marmite’. Which was fun.

Laura Spinney: Proto Your Starter for Ten – what connects Slovakian and Sinhala? Phrygian and French? Hittite and Norwegian? The answer is that all are Indo-European languages, connected by historical and linguistic roots so deep that the similarities can be hard to trace. Yet it was the deep similarities of grammar and vocabulary between the languages now spoken more widely than any other on the planet that led to our modern understanding of language change in general, and new work on archaeology and ancient DNA has enriched and sometimes complicated the picture. Laura Spinney traces the tortuous history and geography back to the steppes of southern Russia, the plains of Anatolia and the high deserts of the Silk Road. I listened rather than read this – as an audiobook – and I am glad I have a decent knowledge of geography, as having a map in front of me would have been helpful. Perhaps the dead-tree version has suitable visual aids. I was fascinated to learn about Tocharian, a lost branch of Indo-European, and the deep connections between, say, English and Sanskrit. Spinney takes an interesting and controversial view on the preservation of languages that otherwise might have died out. Languages change all the time (and that’s rather the whole point), borrowing words from other languages. The Celtic languages spoken today, for example, are much corrupted by loans from English, so the Irish, Welsh and Gaelic that people work so strenuously to preserve are hardly authentic. Languages also change  much faster than one would imagine, as people move from place to place. Not many young, working-class people in London today speak the cockney that they might have done a couple of generations ago. Instead they speak a dialect called Multicultural London English, what the politically incorrect might call Jafaican. I could find only two irritants in this absorbing book. Shakespeare wrote in early Modern English, not Middle English. And why is the country Turkey rendered Türkiye? We don’t refer to Greece as Hellas, or Germany as Deutschland.

Paul Hayes: Dr Who: Pull To Open Regular reader of these annals will note that I recently delved into the literature concerning the BBC’s long-running SF series Dr Who, notwithstanding inasmuch as which Exterminate, Regenerate by John Higgs (review here). Whereas that was a complete history of the show, Pull To Open is a account of its genesis, up to and including its very first airing in November 1963, so goes into much more granular detail about the circumstances, and looks at contemporary world events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Profumo affair. Hayes makes the case that BBC Head of Serials Donald Wilson deserves as much credit as Sidney Newman for the invention of the show. Absorbing, but probably for diehard fans only.

Taylor Jenkins Reid: Atmosphere I first came across Reid as the author of Daisy Jones and the Six, a rockumentary about a seventies soft-rock band with uncanny similarities to Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac, and found the televisual emission much better than the book. I believe there is a movie adaptation in the works for this, too, though the book is good in itself. It follows the career of Joan Goodwin: astronomer and wannabe astronaut. Goodwin is all work, work, work and is sexually repressed, living her personal life somewhat vicariously through her appalling and selfish sister Barbara. Her sexual awakening comes through meeting Vanessa Ford, another astronaut candidate, and the trials they face keeping their passionate relationship hidden from any overt sign of ‘sexual deviancy’ that would get them kicked off the program. The sex scenes are poignant and passionate without being explicit, and the space scenes are (as far as I can tell) authentic. The story is bookended as Goodwin, the Cap Com at Mission Control, helps Ford land a damaged space shuttle. Gripping until the end.

What I Read In June

Catherine Chidgey: The Book Of Guilt Britain in the 1970s, full of ’70s nostalgia, but in an altered universe in which Hitler was assassinated in 1943, and the Second World War ended in a treaty in which the UK shared some of Nazi Germany’s darker scientific secrets. Our scene is set in what at first looks like an orphanage for boys in a grand but fading country house. All the inmates have left except for a final set of pre-teen triplets, cared for by Mothers Morning, Afternoon and Night, who teach them out of the Book of Knowledge (an out-of-date Children’s Encyclopaedia); record their dreams in the Book of Dreams, their transgressions in the Book of Guilt,  and who dose them with medicines to protect them against some mystery illness. All the other residents have, they believe, been promoted to a grander house in Margate, a paradise for children. Elsewhere, Nancy is a girl  kept by her parents as a guilty secret. The dystopia slowly winds out, mostly told through the eyes of Vincent, one of the triplets. And so the shocking horror slowly unspools. Echoes of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

John Higgs: Exterminate, Regenerate As someone once said in another context, one should never underestimate the power of cheap music. And it doesn’t come much more powerful, or more cheap, than Dr Who, the long-running children’s science-fiction programme that aired on the BBC from 1963 to 1989, and again from 2005 to the present day. Higgs gives a comprehensive, readable and honest account of the genesis, exodus and revelation of the show. The book is far, far better than most effusions on popular culture, and gets into the grittier details that the show’s enormous publicity machine won’t tell you, such as the bullying, misogyny, racism and sexual harassment behind the scenes; why Christopher Eccleston left the show after just one season series; and the complex relationship between the show and the BBC that affected its content, such that stories featuring the stuffy, bureaucratic Time Lords of Gallifrey (representing BBC higher-ups) tended to happen during particularly fraught periods in this pas-de-deux. He also analyses the show’s longevity, getting into such subjects as myth. Myths tend to feature archetypes such as the Trickster, and Higgs portrays the first iterations of the Doctor in this light. Myths are also not required to be consistent. Only the TARDIS and the signature tune have been constant elements from the first episode: even the Doctor is changeable. Philip Ball missed a trick as Dr Who isn’t discussed in his book The Modern Myths (reviewed here) where he makes the case that literary quality is in inverse proportion to mythic potential. Some Whovian myths are, however, exploded. Terry Nation didn’t get the idea for the Daleks from a volume of an encyclopaedia labelled DAL-LEK. And a reluctance of most of the (white, male) BBC staff to take on a show they felt was beneath their dignity, not a desire for diversity, explains why the very first episode, broadcast on 23 November 1963, was directed by a gay Asian and produced by a Jewish woman, nor that the originator of the show, if there was any single one, was Jewish. Higgs doesn’t make the leap, entirely obvious to me if perhaps nobody else, from these facts to the situation of the Doctor as a wanderer exiled from his home planet, though he could have done: in the same way that it was Jewish writers and artists who created comic-book superheroes who, like the Doctor, would sweep in, right wrongs, and stand up for the underdog. After-images, as it were, of the Golem of Old Prague, a prototype cartoon superhero in itself.  After reading this excellent book I wallowed in the entire Audible collection entitled Dr Who at the BBC, which is mostly fairly dull and repetitive, but features a few nuggets such as a radio play about Delia Derbyshire, the musician and engineer at  the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who turned Ron Grainer’s original score into the futuristic soundscape that’s now instantly familiar (you know the one, tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom woo-woo); and another radio play about a Dr Who fan convention in Belfast during the Troubles.

Stuart Turton: The Devil and the Dark Water A maritime romance and whodunit with a frisson of horror from the Age of Sail, this, so something for everyone. No swash is left unbuckled as the Saardam, a Dutch East-Indiaman, sets out from Batavia to Amsterdam under a horrible curse, that only the unlikely pair of sleuth Samuel Pipps and his monolithic-yet-sensitive sidekick Arent Hayes have any hope of unraveling. It was all far too convoluted for me, but I enjoyed the ride. Belatedly I see that Turton is another author with a story in The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) but one that didn’t stay with me quite as vividly as those of Natasha Pulley or Jess Kidd.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: Echo Taking horror from the oceans to the high mountains, this is a love story between two unlikely people. Manhattan socialite Sam Avery and Dutch beefcake Nick Gievers have been  inseparable since pecs were flexed in the gym. Sam would rather mix cocktails, but Nick’s passion ia a good deal more rugged. He is a skilled mountaineer, and the more remote and dangerous the mountain, the better. One day, Nick returns from a rarely-explored peak in the Alps, his face horribly disfigured, his companion lost, and bringing with him an ancient horror that soon spreads. Only Sam seems immune, but in coming to terms with Nick’s new life, he must confront ancient horrors of his own. I loved this book (the mountaineering sequences were especially absorbing), but it was, perhaps, somewhat overlong, and the ending rather too 2001-a-Space-Odyssey for a novel that also references Spandau Ballet.

I asked, ChatGPT answered

I asked Chat GPT: Please recast the argument between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a scene from a play by William Shakespeare.

It came up … er … ‘Trumps’

A Scene from The Tempest of Tech and Throne
Act III, Scene II
A courtyard in the realm of public opinion. Enter DONALDUS, the exiled King, and ELONIUS, a merchant alchemist and master of flying chariots.

DONALDUS
What rogue is this that mounts the stars in steel,
Yet scorns the hand that lifted him aloft?
I made thee, knave! When Fortune’s tide ran low,
‘Twas I who lent the gale to fill thy sails.

ELONIUS
Thou err’st, great Trump, for I did chart my stars
Long ere thy golden tower cast its shade.
Thy boast is but the echo of thy pride,
Not coin from which I forged my wondrous works.

DONALDUS
Aye, silver-tonguèd serpent! In days gone past,
Didst thou not whisper praises in my hall?
“Most noble Donaldus,” thou didst proclaim,
“The sun itself doth envy thy bright reign.”

ELONIUS
In truth, I flattered where I feared thy wrath,
As courtiers do when kings grow tempest-toss’d.
Yet now the realm hath eyes to see thy guise—
A jester crowned, whose crown sits much askew.

DONALDUS
Thou art but a knave in merchant’s garb,
A peddler of toys and tongues of flame.
Thy wagons fly, yet still thou canst not flee
The ire of kings nor truth of loyalty.

ELONIUS
Better to craft new worlds than serve a fool.
Thy realm is tweets, thine armies bots and boasts.
Wouldst wage a war of words? Then have at thee—
But know, my ships reach stars thine eyes can’t see.

DONALDUS
Ingratitude! A sin most foul and deep!
Go then, false Elonius—fly far and fast!
Yet mark me well: no throne awaits in space,
Nor shall the people crown a lord of code.

ELONIUS (aside)
The stars are silent, yet more just than kings.
This play of power ends—I’ll write new scenes.

Exeunt, their feud echoing through the digital wind.

What I Read In May

Once again I apologise for being late. I make no excuse for this, partly because there are too many reasons to mention. Oh all right, here’s one —  my desire to participate in the online world is waning. The same empty vessels  with the same prejudices still resonate  as loudly as they ever did. I am very tempted to leave them to it and do something more useful instead. Partly for this reason I haven’t added the usual pictures and links, and I am wondering whether I shall continue much more in this vein. Time will tell.

Paul Cooper: Fall of Civilisations I was prompted to read this as there was a glimmer of a joint book event with the author given that my latest book is similarly fin d’espèce. The event never happened, but I got the book all the same. It’s a very readable account of the decline and fall of different civilisations through the ages, and seems to be a spin-off of a podcast called Fall of Civilisations. The book definitely has that episodic feel. Each one of the fourteen chapters is a case history of the rise, decline and fall of a civilisation, from Sumer to Easter Island. It was refreshing to find details of civilisations far from the usual beaten track, such as the Khmer; the southern Indian civilisation of Vijayanagar; and the Songhai of the African Sahel. It is engagingly written, but – perhaps because of its derivation from a podcast – doesn’t quite have the coherence of, say, Collapse by Jared Diamond. So, what causes civilisations to fall? Well, it’s a number of things. Climate change (whether natural or human-caused); the exhaustion of land required to support a large population; but, mostly, the endless capacity for human societies to bash themselves in the face with their own stupidity, cupidity and vainglory.

Mark Rowlands: The Happiness of Dogs In which a professional philosopher and avocational Dog Person takes issue with the Socratic ideal that only the examined life is worth living. In the course of his exploration (and I use the word course advisedly, because one acquires in reading this book a great deal of knowledge about the current thinking on matters such as morality, motivation, sentience and so on) Rowlands shows that dogs, lacking the human ability to reflect upon themselves and their place in the world, have a more fulfilled life. It is the unexamined life, contra Socrates, that is worth living. Humans sometimes achieve a nirvanic state in which they can fleetingly ‘lose themselves’ , if, for example, they are playing sport; indulging in some hobby or activity that they love; or during sex. To quote from the Guide to Jewish Buddhist Wisdom – there is no self. But if there is no self, whose arthritis is this?  Dogs, though, find themselves in this state as a matter of course, and can do things routinely that many humans struggle to achieve even for a moment, such as full, honest love and commitment. So pupperino, so prelapsarian, and who, really, is the better off?

Jonny Sweet: The Kellerby Code is what might have happened had P. G. Wodehouse tried to write Brideshead Revisited but ended up with Vile Bodies. It concerns Edward, our mashup of Jeeves, Charles Ryder and Tony Last, who would do anything for his ungrateful friends Robert and Stanza. Collect their dry-cleaning. Get them tables at a restaurant. Be There for them at any time of day or night. And all because he has a burning and unrequited love for Stanza, whose ancestral pile of Kellerby stands in for Brideshead. Without wishing to spoil anything from this brittle, pin-sharp satirical froth, Edward – unlike Tony – laughs Last.

Tom Michell: Penguin Lessons The true story of a young Englishman who finds himself teaching at an English-style boy’s public school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1970s. On vacation across the estuary of the River Plate in Punta dal Este, Uruguay, he becomes the unlikely saviour of a penguin, the only one left alive after a colony has been fouled by an oil slick. Smuggling the penguin into Argentina where it becomes a kind of school mascot, the penguin – named Juan Salvado – provides inspiration for one and all, mostly by being a good listener. The book is charming and reminiscent of such tales as Tarka the Otter. I have heard that it is to be adapted into a magic-lantern presentation starring Steve Coogan as Juan Salvado.

Mouthy Al-Rashid: Between Two Rivers I have long been fascinated with the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, ever since I did a school project on Sumer almost half a century ago, reading the works of Samuel Noah Kramer and Georges Roux and becoming entranced with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Al-Rashid became entranced on her very first exposure to cuneiform writing, and offers a guide to the rises and falls of Mesopotamian civilisations through a unique lens. One of the many discoveries was a collection, all in the same stratigraphic level at Ur and in a palace that might have been the residence of a princess, of a series of Mesopotamian artefacts of widely divergent dates and uses. This, says Al-Rashid, could have been the earliest known museum. Al-Rashid uses these objects to tell the story of ancient Mesopotamia. I find my schoolboy interest rekindled.

James Rhodes: Instrumental The author is a renowned concert pianist who is unusual in that he came to the instrument late in life, and indeed for a period of ten years didn’t touch a keyboard at all. In this searing and very sweary memoir, the author recounts how his mind and body were scarred by sustained physical and sexual abuse from a gym teacher over a period of five years between the ages of five and ten. This led to a very uncertain life in which his deep psychological trauma remained — and still remains — unhealed. It also led to back problems caused by the spinal damage resulting from the repeated violent penetration of the anus of a five-year-old by an adult male penis. This is occasionally a very difficult read (or listen) and leaves one recoiling with rage at those adults who violate the young and the defenceless, and how society repeatedly fails to do much about it. Oh, and there’s some lovely music.

Natasha Pulley: The Bedlam Stacks Another month, another highly imaginative novel from Natasha Pulley. This one is set in the same fictional universe as The Watchmaker of Filigree Street but apart from a couple of scenes with the main protagonist of that book, the setting is very different. The scene is the early nineteenth century, and an British expedition is sent to Darkest Peru to steal cuttings of the cinchona tree for transport to Ceylon, so the quinine can be used to treat malaria ravaging the Indian subcontinent. The expedition makes its way over the high Andes into a region of dreamlike fantasy, where people with various disabilities and disfigurements live in New Bethlehem (hence Bedlam), a colony set on three tall islands (hence Stacks), set in a wide river, where magic is real and statues appear to move. The style is very much the Boy’s Own Adventure of tales such as King Solomon’s Mines (though with more modern sensibilities) with nods to Heart of Darkness and — dare I say it — the chilling Weeping Angels from Dr Who. Each one of Pulley’s novels has its own flavour, even if some are set in the same fictional setting. Whereas The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was crisp and telegraphic, The Bedlam Stacks is richly weird. The Half-Life of Valery K takes place in the Soviet Union of the 1960s — and The Mars House is set on, well, Mars. There are, however, things in common. The characterisation is sensitive; there is quite often a bromance between the two male leads; and all the novels feature at least one mention of an octopus.

What I Read In April

I apologise to you both for the late arrival of this post. I have been otherwise preoccupied with promoting my latest book Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way as well as contending with a great deal of business at the Submerged Log Company, after which Mrs Gee and I enjoyed a short break. And, like Jenny, I am of the age where one begins to wonder why one bothers, realising (not for the first time) that I appear to be one of the few greyhounds in the stadium to realise that the hare they are chasing is only a toy. But I’m here now, and here is what I read in April.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Shroud In my opinion few writers can match Adrian Tchaikovsky in his evocation of alien life and its struggle towards intelligence (see his magisterial Children of Time, reviewed here). Here he has a crew of a spaceship forced to crash-land on the eponymous moon of a gas giant. The moon is optically dark but radiates vast quantities of radio chatter. The novel — mainly a two-hander between the surviving crew members of a crippled escape pod — concerns the meeting between humans and the alien life-forms on the moon that have evolved a kind of distributed intelligence based on radio chatter, during which the aliens seem to understand much more about the humans than vice-versa.

 

 

Travis Elborough: Atlas of Unexpected Places I had expected this to be as charmingly liminal as a superficially similar book, Off The Map by Alastair Bonnett (reviewed here) but it turned out to be less a meditation on the subject of topophilia (a love of place) as a compendium of more or less random find spots on the globe with interesting anecdotes about them, from an ornate but largely unused railway station in Spain to the caves of Lascaux in France. It’s the sort of book of short but amusing stories one would  put in the lavatory of  one’s guest wing to entertain visitors while they are on the throne..

 

 

Jess Kidd: The Hoarder This rambling mystery comes from the rich haul of authors I ran into while reading The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) and whose wonderfully gothic Things In Jars I reviewed here. Whereas that was Victoriana, The Hoarder takes us up to the present day with social care worker Maud Drennan who is sent to look after the cantankerous Cahal Flood in a decaying mansion crammed full of rubbish. Like Bridie Devine in Things in Jars, Maud is both Irish and psychic, forever accompanied by one or more saints, quick to advise her on what to do with her difficult charge. Maud is convinced that there’s a mystery in the House of Flood. Which of course there is. I love Jess Kidd’s writing. The prose is charming; the characters, beautifully realised  (Maud’s landlady, a transvestite retired magician’s assistant is especially memorable); and the dialogue exceptional. I’d be surprised if this didn’t make my end-of-the-year selection, though what with other rich pickings from The Winter Spirits it will have stiff competition.

Adam Roberts: Lake of Darkness A somewhat schizoid author who when not indulging in Tolkien-related silliness writes sere, biting and award-winning SF such as the very wonderful Jack Glass, about a criminal with igneous ingenious and incarnadine ways of breaching containment. Lake of Darkness is set in a post-scarcity future in which the crew of one of two spaceships exploring a black hole is murdered by the captain, Raine, who appears to have gone rogue. A historian specialising in 21st-century serial killers who interviews the imprisoned Raine is infected with what seems to be the same contagion (echoes of Silence of the Lambs). Whatever it is has — impossibly — escaped from the black hole. But what? An alien menace? Satan himself? What starts out as an everyday SF locked-room mystery turns into a tough, uncompromising exegesis on the physics of black holes… and the nature of good and evil. Not everyone will enjoy this. I found it mindbendingly brilliant.

 

Andrew Michael Hurley: The Loney Yet another author from The Winter Spirits, to which the author contributed The Old Play, a story about a drama performed as a traditional community ritual whose continuity appears to depend on the commission of a kind of  human sacrifice. These themes echo in The Loney, in which the devoutly Catholic Smith family goes on an Easter retreat to a remote part of the Lancashire coast, where there is a shrine to St Anne. Their story is told through the eyes of the unnamed teenage younger Smith son, protector of his older brother Andrew who is mute and has learning difficulties. The family hopes that Andrew’s exposure to holiness will cure him. And, well, he is cured (no spoiler – this is made clear in the Prologue) but what appears to be a miracle has not quite the holiness that the family imagined. The novel gets much of its power from the things that are left unsaid, the grown-up conversations that the narrator cannot quite understand, so that the horror dawns slowly on the reader who is ever eager to learn how Andrew’s miracle comes to pass. I’ll give no further clues, but there is a parallel in Ursula Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.

Introducing Humungous Biosciences

There has been much fuss and flapdoodle about a company called Colossal Biosciences that aims to use the wonders of modern genetic technology to call extinct species back from the other side of the rainbow bridge. Their latest scheme has been to ‘de-extinct’ an ice-age predator, the dire wolf, by inserting various genes copied from DNA retrieved from fossil dire wolves and inserting them into regular ordinary grey wolves. Critics say that the result isn’t so much a dire wolf but a duck with a hat on a designer dog. But those puppies do look adorable.

Others suspect that the enterprise isn’t so much driven by science as fantasy.  It has not escaped our notice that one of the authors of a preprint announcing the. retrieval of dire wolf DNA is George R. R. Martin, the creator of the sprawling Game Of Thrones series of fantasy novels, which engendered a popular televisual adaptation, and in which fantasy animals called dire wolves play a small part. (For those who have never watched Game of Thrones, the plot is basically this — that people have sex a lot, and then die).

Nonetheless, Colossal plans to reanimate the dodo and the thylacine, and has made some progress with the woolly mammoth, though the results so far do seem — how would one put this? — petite.

To the many critics of Colossal, and there are many, I say — Pish! Tosh! and Fie! We wouldn’t be living in the world today if scientists didn’t go off on one occasionally and engage in projects that seemed to their less visionary contemporaries as dribblingly insane. They laughed at Galileo. Also, Tesla.

And then there’s that name: Colossal. It’s the kind of moniker that puts one in mind of fictional corporations such as ACME, or Stark Industries, often founded by ridiculously wealthy but genius-level megalomaniacs who live in James-Bond-style lairs beneath extinct volcanoes in Secret Locations.

Being as I really am a genius-level megalomaniac who lives in a James-Bond-style lair beneath an extinct volcano in a Secret Location (near Cromer) I can only view Colossal as a challenge. So, in the spirit of free-market capitalism, I have set up a rival. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Humungous Biosciences. Unlike many genius-level megalomaniacs who live in James-Bond-style lairs beneath extinct volcanoes in Secret Locations, however, I am not ridiculously wealthy. This means that the hand-pickled picked, top-flight scientists I’ve recruited for Humungous Biosciences have often had to resort to low-budget rather more creative solutions than those available to Colossal. But necessity is the mother of Frank Zappa, and they have achieved great things with squeegee bottles and miles of sticky-backed plastic the resources they have. Privation certainly hasn’t stopped them coming up with a raft of projects to bring back creatures from their unquiet graves, whether they want to be so reanimated or not. Some of their schemes are even possible using ordinary everyday household objects, so in the spirit of openness and citizen science, readers are encouraged to try out some of them at home (at their own risk). Here therefore is a selection from the latest call for funding prospectus.

Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius)

Take any ordinary everyday elephant — such as you might find around any home — and cover it in russet shag-pile carpet.

Woolly Rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis)

See ‘Woolly Mammoth’.

Giant Deer (Megaloceros  giganteus)

Also known as the Irish Elk, this can be recreated by taking a red-deer stag and glueing very large branches to its head.

Glyptodont (Doedicurus sp.)

This gigantic relative of the armadillo can be recreated by covering a VW beetle with egg boxes.

Aurochs (Bos primigenius)

This legendarily ferocious progenitor of domestic cattle may be recreated by taking a large white bull; fattening it on testosterone, antibiotics, and supersized Happy Meals; and then shoving a scotch bonnet up its bottom.

Steller’s Sea Cow (Hydrodamalis  gigas)

This project is still in the planning stages but prospective investors can get a good idea of what it would be like by watching me sea-bathing (from a safe distance), at least until the Sea Mammal Research Unit arrives.

Macrauchenia (Macrauchenia patachonica)

Macrauchenia was a litoptern, a group of extinct mammals only known from South America. Its claim to fame is that it was discovered by Charles Darwin. Macrauchenia looked like a large ungulate with a short trunk. It can be recreated by getting two short lengths of shower hose, glueing them together side-by-side, and attaching them to the forehead of any conveniently located llama. (Special orders only).

Giant Ground Sloth (Megatherium americanum)

There are no plans as yet to recreate this species. However, I’ve seen some of our scientists watching attentively and taking notes when I sit down to lunch.

Diprotodon (Diprotodon optatum)

This rhinoceros-sized cousin of the wombat can be recreated by feeding LSD to ordinary wombats. The wombats won’t actually be any bigger, but THEY’LL think they’re HUGE.

Aepyornis (Vorombe titan)

In a preliminary study, scientists  have attempted to  recreate the aepyornis, or elephant bird, by crossing an elephant with a bird. First results are not encouraging, producing elephants that can’t remember anything. They’re also lighter than air and tend to float away, endangering air traffic.

Giant Trilobite (Isotelus rex)

Efforts to recreate this 70-centimetre aquatic Ordovician monster are well advanced. The project involves glueing medieval plate armour to Roombas and letting them loose. The problem  is that when placed in water they invariably explode. The Humungous Biosciences marketing department is thinking of rebranding this project as a recreation of the giant Carboniferous (and land-living) millipede Arthropleura.

Unicorns

Humungous Biosciences is also responding to the challenge, set by Colossal with the dire wolf, of creating animals that never existed in reality. The first project is the unicorn, which can easily be created by taking any pure white horse that has been reared and handled by virgins, and glueing an ice-cream cone to its forehead.

Ents

In ‘Project Treebeard’, scientists at Humungous Biosciences have been trying to create ents by splicing actin and myosin genes into banyan trees. The results have been encouraging, if disconcerting. The trees really do seem to move around, but only when nobody is looking.

FINALLY: there is a good reason for not making fun of projects at Colossus. If they are as keen on creating animals from the Game of Thrones franchise as they seem, there can really only be one aim: to create the gigantic fire-breathing flying dragons responsible for incinerating so many of the cast … and, presumably, the competition. That’s why we at Humungous Bioscences intent to get there first.

What I Read In March

I apologise for the late arrival of this month’s book blog. I have been distracted by the publication of my own book, the subject of which is somewhat fin-d’espèce, if not fin-du-monde, and which you can read all about here.

Laura Purcell: The Silent Companions You’ll both no doubt recall that Mrs Gee gave me an anthology of horror stories for Christmas entitled The Winter Spirits, thus introducing me to a host of authors of whom I had not previously heard. One of these was Laura Purcell, whose story Carol of the Bells and Chains was High Victorian gothic horror set in the nursery of a grand house. The Silent Companions has a similar setting, and starts when newlywed Elsie Bainbridge comes to the decaying country pile of her new husband, who has – inconveniently – just died. Her only companion is her late husband’s rather vapid sister. With nothing else to do but explore the huge building, she unlocks a door that she shouldn’t, unleashing nursery crymes. The story intercuts with a tale in the same house just before the English Civil War, when the nursery horrors (the ‘silent companions’ of the title) first came into the house, bought by the Lady of the House from a remarkable curiosity shop run by a man called Samuels – a shop that subsequently disappears without trace. So, take Victorian Gothic and mix in aspects of Child’s Play and Needful Things. My concern, being a Red-Sea Pedestrian, is the anachronistic nature of Samuels, who is plainly Jewish, yet Jews were absent from England until the Protectorate. But this is a tale of the fantastic, so one can perhaps excuse it. And it is a fine spine-chiller.

Jess Kidd: Things In Jars Another author from The Winter Spirits here, of a story called Ada Lark about a street urchin who becomes the assistant to a fraudulent medium (is there any other kind?) Things in Jars is a mystery in which Mrs Bridie Devine, private investigator extraordinaire, is asked to track down the missing daughter of an aristocrat – a girl with remarkable powers. Mrs Devine, despite (and perhaps because of)  a chequered personal history, is quite at home in the rambunctious stews of Victorian London, and mixes with a cast of characters is picturesque and outlandish as anything in Dickens – from Clara Butter, Mrs Devine’s giantess housemaid, to the ghost of a dead prizefighter who claims to be in love with our intrepid heroine. All this and bottled mermaids too in a tale told in that spellbinding, endlessly creative yet somewhat elliptical style one finds in Irish-born writers from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to Roddy Doyle and Spike Milligan. All in all an absolute cracker. I want to read more about Bridie Devine.

Natasha Pulley: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Pulley was the author of The Salt Miracles, my favourite story from The Winter Spirits — a mist-enshrouded and highly original tale about pilgrims to the Hebridean shrine of an obscure saint. In January I lauded The Mars House, a simply gorgeous SF trans bromance set on Mars, which is now Offspring#1’s favourite book. When we enthused to Offspring#2 about Pulley, she passed me The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which was Pulley’s debut novel. It takes place in a slightly alternative Victorian London in which Thaniel Steepleton, a government telegraph operator, comes home to find a beautiful watch on his pillow. Pocketing it, the watch sounds an alarm just before a terrorist bomb explodes that destroys Scotland Yard. The works of the watch are traced to Keita Mori, the Japanese emigre watchmaker of the title, who is suspected of having made the bomb. Steepleton is tasked with keeping tabs on Mori, and eventually comes to live with him. A parallel strand has a young female scientist who is trying to prove the existence of the luminiferous aether before her mother forces her to marry. The writing is crisp, the plot clever, the dialogue (in places) laugh-out-loud funny in an Oscar-Wilde-Noel-Coward kind of way, but I have a sense that, like some of Mori’s clockwork, it’s all wound up a bit too tight. Perhaps this was stress-to-impress in what became a widely acclaimed debut, before Pulley learned to relax and let some more of her affectionate style in. Having said that, there is plenty of humour in the form of Katsu, Mori’s seemingly intelligent and wayward clockwork octopus. Having read more of Pulley, her signature, apart from gay romance, seems to be the gratuitous insertion of a loveable octopus, in the same way that Trollope put in scenes about fox hunting.

Natasha Pulley: The Half-Life of Valery K By now you’ll have guessed that I have become quite a fan of Natasha Pulley. Apart from anything else, she impresses by her range: from steampunk in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street to SF in The Mars House and now historical fiction set in Russia that seems in every way as authentic as anything by Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, Wolves Eat Dogs). It’s 1963, and Valery K, a scientist sent to Stalin’s Gulag for some invented infraction, is transferred to a secret radiation lab not far from the Urals to be part of a team led by his old doctorate supervisor. The task is to monitor the local environment as part of controlled experiments on the effects of radiation on the flora and fauna. But there’s more to it than that, or course, and Valery risks being shot (or worse) as he tries to expose the secrets beneath the secrets. It’s rather grim (at times not even Pulley’s humour can alleviate the bitter cruelty and the Siberian chill) but is a fabulous read for all that, and contains her by-now-familiar bromance (Valery cultivates an unlikely friendship with his KGB minder). And, oh yes, an octopus. Because, why not? I have only one quibble — did they really have TV remotes in 1963?

Sophie Hannah: Haven’t They Grown? Beth hasn’t seen her former best friend Flora for twelve years, not since their children were small. Taking her now-teenage son to football practice, Beth drives past the house where Flora now lives, and, without being seen, sees Flora in her car with her own children who look exactly the same as they had been twelve years before. Such is the set-up for a crime thriller in which Beth dives down the rabbit hole to discover what’s really going on. No, not time travel, but a thoroughly convoluted, entirely unlikely but ultimately page-turningly compelling thriller. Once again, Sophie Hannah is an entirely new author to me, despite her having written scads of books (although she didn’t feature in The Winter Spirits, you’ll be relieved to know). Offspring#1 picked up this copy at a charity shop because he knows that I’m dead easy to buy presents for. I love books. Also, liquorice allsorts.

What I Read In February

Max Telford: The Tree Of Life Many years ago when the world was young I tried to explain, in popular science form, how scientists organise the natural world, all the better to understand the pattern of creation. The result was Deep Time. In The Tree of Life, Max Telford does the same thing but a lot better, bringing to a popular audience the very cutting edge of how scientists understand the pattern evolution has created. He does this with humour and a great deal of flair, though he is coy about exactly why John Ruskin gasped in horror on seeing his new bride naked for the first time (those who know, know). DISCLAIMER: The author is known to me personally and sent bound proofs so I could write an endorsement. I also feature prominently in the acknowledgements as the ultimate cause of this book,  so if you don’t like it, you can blame me.

 

 

Bridget Collins: The Silence Factory Last month I read a sparkling collection of weird tales called Winter Spirits, each tale written by an author of whom I had not previously heard. Thus encouraged I found Natasha Pulley and her superb novel The Mars House. Another author was Bridget Collins, and I pulled her novel The Silence Factory down from the cloud for a listen. If you don’t like spoilers spiders spiders, look away now. On a remote Greek Island in the early nineteenth century, spiders weave webs of dream and deception, worshipped by the island’s women. Some of the spiders are captured and brought back to England where a descendant of the original explorer weaves the silk into a marvellous material which, on one side, offers a perfect soundproofing material, but on the other radiates maddening echoes. He does this in a factory that’s so noisy that it drives the workers deaf, mad, or both. That’s the concept, and the story is done well enough, but the theme of the male despoliation of nature in opposition to the female respect for it, though well taken, was perhaps too heavy handed for my taste.

Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell I had read this long ago but had forgotten most of it until encouraged to revisit it as an audiobook by Offspring#1. Now, this is a masterclass in how to write modern fantasy. The scene is set in the early years of the 19th Century. Napoleon is ravaging Europe, while in York, the Learned Society of York Magicians meets once a month. The gentlemanly mages are all theoretical magicians, for there has been no practical magic done for centuries, ever since the disappearance of the Raven King, the medieval and semi-mythical fairy ruler of Northern England. Until, that is, the York magicians meet the secretive and intensely jealous Gilbert Norrell, a gentleman magician from elsewhere in Yorkshire who can still do practical magic. He comes to London where he makes his name raising a titled lady from the dead. To do this he invokes — in secret — the help of a fairy. who, once summoned creates all kinds of spooky and tragic chaos. While in London, Norrell serves the war effort, conjuring illusions to deceive the French fleet, for example. Norrell has the field to himself until the arrive of Jonathan Strange, a Shropshire landowner unable to apply himself to any particular calling until he discovers that he is a powerful magician. Unlike Norrell, who prefers the comforts of home, Strange is not afraid to  get his hands dirty and serves as Magician-in-Ordinary to Wellington in the Peninsular War, and at Waterloo. Strange gets caught up in Norrell’s fairy deceptions, but after many seemingly digressive adventures the tale ends mostly happily. It’s a vast book, and succeeds through the deft use of pastiche, for it is written in the style of the early 19th century, and has lots of absorbing footnotes, some of which extend to the length of fairy tales themselves. Some people might find this distracting. I found it utterly absorbing.

Adriana Marais: Out Of This World And Into The Next A summary of where we are in the Universe, how we got here, and how and why we should leave our home planet, by a very eager physicist and would-be astronaut. I can’t really say any more now as I have been asked to review this for another organ. Watch this … er … ‘space’.

 

 

The Origin and Extinction of Humanity FAQ

People often ask questions about the lifetime of our own species. Questions such as ‘how long have humans existed?’; ‘When will humans go extinct?’ and ‘Did humans ever nearly go extinct in the past?’ Another one is ‘how will humans go extinct?’ In my book The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire I answer these questions, and many more, such as ‘Will the human population ever stop growing, and why?’ and ‘Will humans colonise space?’ Here I give a quick round-up of some of these frequently asked questions.

HOW LONG HAVE HUMANS EXISTED?
The answer depends on what you mean by ‘human’. Let’s start by concentrating on our own species, Homo sapiens. This is the species to which all people on the planet belong. The earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens come from Morocco and are about 315,000 years old. However, Homo sapiens probably lived in Africa earlier than this, maybe as long as 500,000 years ago. We can expand the definition of ‘human’ to include all those extinct species that are more closely related to us than to our next-closest living relative, the chimpanzee. If we do that, humans have existed for around seven million years. The earliest species on the human lineage that we know about is Sahelanthropus tchadensis. This lived in Chad, in central Africa, about seven million years ago. It walked upright but probably looked and behaved much like a modern chimp. Other early human relatives that would seem more ape-like to us included Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus afarensis (‘Lucy’) and Paranthropus robustus. All these creatures lived in Africa. The earliest of our extinct relatives that looked similar to a modern human was Homo erectus. This evolved in Africa more than two million years ago. It was the first member of the human family to leave Africa and spread throughout Europe and Asia. It evolved into many different forms including Neanderthals; the Denisovan yetis of Tibet; the hobbit Homo floresiensis; Homo antecessor, Homo naledi, the ‘dragon-man’ Homo longi and many others – including us. Homo sapiens is the only member of the human family that still exists. All the others are extinct.

WHEN WILL HUMANS GO EXTINCT?
This is a hard question to answer definitively. Nobody can predict exactly when humans will go extinct. However, humans will go extinct at some time, because extinction is what happens to all species. However, there are signs that humans will go extinct soon, in geological terms. In The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire I predict that humans will go extinct within the next 10,000 years.

HOW WILL HUMANS GO EXTINCT?
There are lots of answers to the question of how humans will go extinct. Some are chance events such as a large asteroid hitting the earth; a worldwide nuclear war; invasion of aliens from outer space; or takeover by some human technological development such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Even with none of these things, humans will go extinct soon because all modern humans are genetically very similar, making us very susceptible to disease; a rapid decline in fertility; over-exploitation of the Earth’s resources; and climate change.

DID HUMANS NEARLY GO EXTINCT IN THE PAST?
Yes, possibly many times. For almost all of human existence, humans have been very rare. Only since the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago have humans existed in large populations. That is when people started to live in villages, towns and cities. Today, about half of all humans live in cities, and this proportion will increase. For 99% of the existence of Homo sapiens, humans were hunter-gatherers and lived in very small family groups. Humans have almost become extinct several times. The most risky time for humans was between 900,000 and 800,000 years ago, when there were never more than around 1,000 breeding humans at any one time. When the number of individuals is as low as this, or lower, extinction becomes a real possibility, whether from genetic disabilities caused by inbreeding, or localised chance events. All modern humans descend from this tiny group. A consequence of such genetic ‘bottlenecks’ is that modern humans are all genetically very similar. This is because they all descend from the very small pool of people that survived the period when the population was very small. Today, there is more variation in one troupe of chimpanzees in West Africa than in the whole human population. This is called the ‘Founder Effect’.

WILL THE HUMAN POPULATION EVER STOP GROWING?
Yes. The human population will stop growing in the 2060s. Ever since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, the human population has been growing exponentially. At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, around 1800, there were a billion people. Back in the 1960s, when over-population started to become a worry to writers such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, there were only around 3.5 billion. Today there are more than 8 billion people. The population is still growing but will reach its peak in the third quarter of this century, around the 2060s. At that time there will be 10-11 billion people. After that the population will shrink very rapidly. By 2100 there could be 8 billion (the same as today) and by 2300, as few as 1 billion.

WHY WILL THE HUMAN POPULATION STOP GROWING?
The human population will stop growing for many reasons. The most obvious is a massive decline in human fertility. In the 1960s the rate of human population growth reached its peak, at around 2.3% a year. Today it is less than 1%. Human fertility in almost all countries is declining. This is measured by the Total Fertility Rate, or TFR. This is the number of children a woman must have in her lifetime. To keep the population stable, the TFR is 2.0 – two parents, two children. The population neither increases nor decreases. Actually, the TFR for stability is a little more than this, about 2.1, to compensate for various factors, such as the fact that slightly more boys are born than girls. Today, the TFR is nearly all countries is well below 2.1. Fewer people are being born than are dying. Populations are ageing. There may be many reasons for the decline in fertility. One is the ‘demographic transition’. It used to be that people had many children, expecting that most would die in infancy. Now, people have few children, expecting that they will survive. But people are having fewer children now, too few to sustain a population, except by immigration. Another factor is a massive decline in male reproductive health. Men, even if young and otherwise healthy, produce fewer sperm than they used to. Nobody knows why. It could be because of pollution, overcrowding or stress. All this could be related to the environment. Homo sapiens has now outgrown the ability of the Earth to sustain it. The global economy has not grown appreciably for 25 years. Resources are more expensive and harder to obtain; employment is scarcer and less rewarding; young people can no longer to afford to buy or rent a home in which they can raise children. All this is made worse by climate change, which itself leads to scarcity, disruption in the distribution of resources, and conflict.

WILL HUMANS COLONISE SPACE?
Maybe, but they will have to do it in the next 200 years if it is to succeed. In  The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire I argue that the only way that humans can prevent their own extinction in the next 10,000 years is to colonise space, whether on the surfaces of the Moon or Mars, or more likely self-sustaining space stations or habitats inside large asteroids. If each colony has a population large enough to minimise inbreeding (more than about 1,000), and has occasional interactions with other space colonies, this will allow the genetic pool of humans to become more varied. However, if the colonisation is to succeed, it must be done before 2300. By then, the human population on Earth will have shrunk so much that the pool of technologically educated human minds will be too small to engage in such large-scale projects. We have a long way to go. Only 12 people have ever walked on the Moon – all healthy, educated men. Although around 400 people have been in space, only a few have gone above the Earth’s magnetosphere that protects people from damaging radiation. No woman has ever gone into deep space. Nobody has become pregnant or given birth in space. We know nothing about how people might raise children in space. Apart from knowing little about space medicine, the technologies we will need to make space colonisation a success, such as creating truly self-sustaining habitats, or creating food entirely artificially, are in their infancy. There are also legal and diplomatic problems that will need to be overcome. The Outer Space Treaty forbids any human from fencing off any region of space and creating a new, independent polity. Infractions of this might lead to lethal conflicts here on Earth. If we are to save the human species from extinction, we must start to think seriously about long-term human space colonisation.