Henry Gee's Blog, page 3

The Shape of Life: An Educational Resource

I’ve long been a fan of Alaskan artist Ray Troll, so imagine my pleasure when I was asked to guest on his PaleoNerds podcast (which you can find here). And more than that — Ray asked me to script and narrate an animation called the Tree of Life, which is now online here. It’s part of an educational website called the Shape of Life, a new resource for students and teachers of evolutionary biology. Dig in!

The Bright Side of Life

It’s always a thrill to get a celebrity endorsement, especially as they don’t happen very often, so I am unreasonably tickled with a review of A (Very) Short &c &c in the book blog of Eric Idle. Just mosey over to his reading blog, or, for the hard of scrolling, read this: 

My favourite book of the year and maybe the decade. Henry Gee is both brilliantly funny and brilliantly informative. So many times I found myself saying out loud “Oh my gawd” as some fact or information came at me. We are not the end of evolution. We are not even the summit of it. We are mistaken about our place in the incredible and very long evolution and continuous breaking of new life forms on earth. I shall read this book again and again. You might find the early chapters a little dense because there are so many monocellular Latin forms of life. Don’t be afraid to skip, move forward, the story gets better and better with incredible chapters on animal life and the evolution of mammals. Learn your place in the Universe, which is both incredible and unlikely and puny. 

This has to be the apotheosis of my zenith this week. Especially as he says my book is ‘brilliantly funny’. Now, that’s a compliment and a half.

Objects In The Rear-View Mirror, Part 2

The mid-eighties were very busy for me. I have recorded in these annals how a photograph sent me by a well-wisher cast me back to the end of 1987 when I suddenly left Cambridge to join The Submerged Log Company. Well, it happened again. I’ve just returned from some lab visits where a former colleague — a postdoc when I was a postgrad — dug up this photo:

It shows the delegates at the Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy that took place at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1986. I shan’t embarrass anyone reading this who finds themselves in this photo, especially if they are still alive. I am unshockable, though — I am in the middle at the back, and the colleague who sent me the picture is not entirely unadjacent. Looking over this photo is bittersweet given that so many of the people here have shuffled off their mortal coils and gone to join the Choir Invisible.

I have many memories of this meeting, for all that some have been fogged by strong liquor time. This was the meeting where I gave my first platform presentation … at 9am, the day after the Symposium Dinner. I was not particularly chipper, and looked over from the podium at the smattering of green faces before me.

The journey to Belfast was especially memorable. Some people chose to fly, but me and my lab-mate (he knows who he is — yes, he’s in the picture too), being thrifty grad students, decided to go by bus. We went from Cambridge to Victoria Coach Station, looking forward to the adventure of an overnight coach journey to Belfast via Stranraer, and the suitably comfortable National Express conveyance that would get us there. Imagine our surprise and shock when what turned up to take us was an ordinary charabanc in the livery of I forget what, but it might as well have been Honest Ron’s Sunshine Holidays. The seats had no headrests, and during the long road north I would often nod off, resting my head on my lab mate’s shoulder. He got his own back much later as my Best Man, when, in his speech, he confessed to my bride, and the whole party, in portentous tones, that he had a confession to make. ‘I once slept with Henry’, he said, ‘and it was not a pleasant experience’.

The road back was possibly even worse, as the bus broke down at the Watford Gap Service Station on the M1, one of the oldest, and therefore shabbiest, of all rest stops, and did so at the graveyard hour of 4 am or thereabouts. The passengers de-camped while a new charabanc was sent for, during which time my lab mate and I found an early breakfast of toast and marmalade — making the marmalade palatable with dollops of Paddy and Bushmills whiskey that I had bought an off-licence in the Lisburn Road. This was during the ‘troubles’ and the offy was heavily fortified, though in general I found Belfast, and Northern Ireland more generally (as the conference party went on an excursion to the Giants Causeway), a happy and welcoming place. Perhaps I’d had too much to drink. Ah, Happy days.

What I Read In September

Alastair Reynolds: Aurora Rising I’m always on for one of Alastair Reynolds’ space operas, tinged as they are with a certain gothic menace, so imagine my delight when I came across two that I’d never seen before, Elysium Fire and Machine Vendetta, more on which below. These are sequels, of a sort, to a novel I’d read long ago called The Prefect, now renamed Aurora Rising. I prefer the old title, though it soon become apparent why it was changed. So I re-read it. Aurora Rising is set in the same universe as Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels, in which humans a few centuries hence have colonised the nearby stars, thankfully by slower-than-light propulsion. As I get older I am beginning to get a bit fed up of faster-than-light McGuffins, and sympathise with Arthur C. Clarke who said (in the author’s note to his novel The Songs of Distant Earth) that they are tricks that allow characters to get from A to B ‘in time for next week’s instalment’.  But I digress. Some of the Revelation Space novels are set in the Glitter Band, a utopia of ten thousand habitats in orbit around Yellowstone, a planet in the Epsilon Eridani system, just over ten light years from the Earth. Having a large set of mini-planets in orbit around another obviates the need for hyperspace to get between locations (Reynolds managed the same trick with his Revenger trilogy). Managing the diverse societies of the Glitter Band is Panoply, a small police force quartered in a habitat of the same name. One of these policemen, or Prefects, is the rugged and somewhat morose Tom Dreyfus. The action opens when one of the habitats is wrecked by the seemingly deliberate torching by the fusion drive of a starship, one of the ‘light huggers’ used by post-human Ultras who spend decades traveling between the stars. As Dreyfus and his colleagues investigate the atrocity, they discover that not all is what it seems. The Ultras have been framed, with the aim of covering up events that happened eleven years earlier. Back then, the Prefects had to fight off an incursion by a rogue artificial intelligence called the Clockmaker, during which Dreyfus’ wife had been reduced to mental imbecility and his superior, Supreme Prefect Jane Aumonier, was subjected to an exquisite torture in which one of the Clockmaker’s devices, the Scarab, was affixed to her neck. As well as denying her sleep, the Scarab will not allow her to come closer than seven metres from another human, on pain of instant death. As if that wasn’t enough, the Prefects have to contend with Aurora, another rogue AI — the result of a disastrous attempt to upload human consciousness into electronic form — whose aim is complete takeover of the Glitter Band because, she says, she can foresee an awful calamity that will submerge all of them a century or two hence. The plot is as clever, twisty and turny as any police procedural (for this is really what it is). There are times when I get tired of characters talking to one another in a series of sarky double negatives, and I do wonder whether the gruff Dreyfus and the saintly Aumonier shouldn’t just get a room, but there were moments when I found myself actually moved by the Prefects’ predicaments and the sacrifices they make to uphold order.

Floe Foxon: Folklore and Zoology Just when you think scientists have shaken every tree and peered behind every bush, animals previously unknown to science keep emerging into the light which, far from being microscopic, would do you a mischief if they trod on your foot. Such as the okapi in 1901; what became to be known as the saola in 1993; and the bizarre hominin Homo floresiensis, which lived in Southeast Asia for more than a million years but became extinct a geological eye blink ago. Because of this I have a certain sympathy for cryptozoology, the search for unknown animals. Sadly, the reputation of cryptozoology has been tarnished by wishful thinking, fakery and the outpourings of people one might politely refer to as ‘enthusiasts’ who persist in pursuing such phantoms as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Floe Foxon aims to set this aright with a comprehensive inquiry into all claims for such mysterious beasts, debunking all of them, and calling for a more rigorous discipline that takes into account reports from indigenous people about mysterious creatures, not taking them at face value, but sifting them to account for the fact that tales of the unexpected may be more folkloric than fact. This is a worthy aim but the book fails for three reasons. The first is that the references are absolutely all over the place, which would be forgivable in a self-published book (which I originally assumed this was) but not in the product of a supposedly reputable publishing house. The second is that the book promises to explore the importance of indigenous folklore, but hardly touches the subject. And there is no index. It reads like a first draft — I hope Foxon revisits this book to correct these problems, because this could be a valuable work. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me this book in order that I might review it].

Alastair Reynolds: Elysium Fire But back to Prefect Dreyfus. A few years after the events in Aurora Rising, a demagogue appears in the Glitter Band called Devon Garlin, who hops from habitat to habitat urging citizens to secede from the already loose society and the governance of Panoply, and ‘take back control’ (that this novel came two years after the Brexit referendum might not be entirely a coincidence). At the same time, a contagion appears to be spreading, and growing exponentially, in which the implants that each citizen has in their brain malfunction and kills them. In a separate storyline, two young boys are raised in seclusion to manifest extraordinary powers of material manipulation in order that they might, one day, rule the Glitter Band. That these things are all connected is no surprise, and Dreyfus and his colleagues weave and wind their way to a solution. Aurora and the Clockmaker are here too, but as two equally matched adversaries, they spend most of their time engaged in stalemate, at least for the moment.

Alastair Reynolds: Machine Vendetta Continuing straight on from Elysium Fire, Panoply hatches a superblack project to confine and eliminate Aurora as well as the Clockmaker. Jane Aumonier closes the project, preferring a state of detente between the two artificial intelligences. But the project goes rogue, with disastrous consequences. SPOILER ALERT. the Clockmaker is destroyed, and Aurora is unleashed, a pre-teen Mean Girl with the seemingly limitless power of a god. The jig is up, it seems. It is only thanks to the devious — and, by now, compromised — Prefect Dreyfus, that ultimate disaster is averted. This is the most satisfying of all three Prefect Dreyfus novels, as well as the most serpentine.

 

 

W. G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn As it was Offspring#2 who recommended The Night Circus, it was Offspring#1 who introduced me to this modern classic. Both now number among my favourite books. The Rings of Saturn made its way to us by a circuitous route. Offspring#1 stumbled on it crabwise through Everywhere at the End of Time, an epic series of concept albums that depicts a person’s journey into dementia, the work of a composer of ambient music called The Caretaker. Seeking for more work by The Caretaker, Offspring#1 found that he’d written the music to a documentary about The Rings of Saturn, which inspired him to seek out the book itself. It’s easy to see why The Caretaker might have been asked to work on a programme about this book — both gravitate towards themes of loneliness, decay and desolation. Sebald was an expatriate German academic who taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The Rings of Saturn is ostensibly a travel journal, made on a walking holiday along the Suffolk coast southwards from Lowestoft, via Dunwich and Southwold. In reality it is a long series of digressions connected together in an almost stream-of-consciousness way, giving it the flavour of that peculiar state of thought one experiences while just on the edge of sleep. There you are, reading (to take one example among many) about a man who spends most of his life making a scale model of the lost Temple in Jerusalem, but before you know it you’re deep into a history of the cultivation of silk moths, with no recollection of how you got from one to the other. There are more literary allusions here than you can shake a stick at, and certainly more than I grasped. The debt to Borges is obvious and acknowledged. There is also a flavour of Joyce, though one should beware (as Borges himself would have warned) of trying to spot influences. In the end, comparisons fade. This book is sui generis: melancholic, marvellous, magnificent.

The Wonder of Life on Earth

One of the criticisms of my book A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth was that it lacked illustrations of the many creatures mentioned therein. To fill what seems to be a yawning chasm lacuna hole I’m pleased to announce that there will be an illustrated version, aimed at younger readers (9-11 years). It’ll be called The Wonder of Life on Earth. The text is all-new, and it’s currently being illustrated by Raxenne Maniquiz. Click here to get a flavour of her wonderfully rich natural history art. It’s available for preorder, so put it in your Christmas shopping order … for 2026.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice

This one kindly sent in by our Correspondent of all things Chthonic, Mr C. D. of Leeds. I think it speaks for itself. What it is saying, though, is less clear.

Objects In The Rear-View Mirror

It was so long ago, that sometimes it feels like only yesterday. It was the end of 1987, and there I was, a graduate student in Cambridge, finishing my Ph.D. and minding my own business (see photo below)

Picture of Fitzwilliam College MCR, 1987. I was the President, in the middle at the front. Actually, the REAL President was Spocket the College Cat, seated on my lap. Pic retrieved thanks to Asako Saegusa.

… when I was suddenly hired by the Submerged Log Company on a 3-month contract as a junior news reporter (my first ever published piece is here), but with the main aim of re-starting a column in The Times that the S.L. C. had had in the 1960s. This was all very ancient history — before the internet; before the web; when the best I had at home was a dial-up modem; when the only computer in the workplace was in the Editor’s office; when we had typewriters (electronic) and faxes, and working from home was a virtual impossibility — and I submitted copy to The Times by a flaky pre-internet digital transmission system called MCI Mail.

However, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a historian of science (and, as it happens, a near-contemporary of mine at the Zoology Department in Cambridge) who was writing the history of this venture and sent me some of the evidence. I had long since recycled all the scrapbooks I’d kept from that era (I wish I hadn’t) so it was with a mingled sense of delight, apprehension and vertigo that reviewed the first ever piece I had published in The Times. It was from the Op-Ed page of the issue of 30 January 1988, and you can read it here:

The piece seems prescient: it concerns this paper by James A. Lake of UCLA, whom I later came to know very well after I spent the first three months of 1996 as a Regents Professor there. In the paper, Lake presented a molecular phylogeny that grouped eukaryotes with a subset of prokaryotes he called ‘eocytes’. We now know these as archaea, and over the past few years their status as closest prokaryotic relatives of eukaryotes is now established. Now, I used to have a photograph of me and Lake in evening dress surrounded by people dressed as orcs… but that’s a story for another day.

What I Did In My Summer Holidays

My social media feeds have been full of pictures of people on their summer holidays. I haven’t actually been on holiday yet, though several Gees did enjoy a lovely short break in Wales in the spring, and later in the year me and Mrs Gee plan to go somewhere to celebrate our nth wedding anniversary. I don’t feel too deprived given that I live in a holiday resort anyway, and can go to the beach and have a paddle and an ice cream whenever I like.

Back at the ranch I have been putting the finishing touches to my next book, which is to say, I have approved the corrected text, and the next thing will be to get the corrected proofs so I can compile an index. Compiling an index is great. I find it to be one of the most interesting things you can do with your clothes on. What I wish to avoid is having to compile two indexes (one can have too much of a good thing), one each for the UK and US editions, so I hope that they’ll have the same paginations.

While on the subject of different editions, the foreign-rights people at my publisher, who are a bunch of eager terriers, have already sold the rights to editions in six other languages. I have some way to go to eclipse J. K. Rowling who’s published all seven of her Harry Potter books in 85 languages. My previous book has managed to get within the same order of magnitude, with 25 foreign-rights sales (we shan’t mention the pirated edition in Bengali). Most of the time the publisher will send me one or more complimentary copies. Here is my current shelfie:

From left to right you can see the UK, US, Estonian, Indonesian, Italian, Chinese (simplified), Polish, Korean, Spanish, Romanian, Turkish, Hungarian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, French, Albanian, German, Greek and Portuguese editions. They’ll soon be joined, I hope, by editions in Swedish, Czech, Slovak, Chinese (traditional) and Azerbaijani. I believe that there are Ukrainian and Russian editions out there, but I doubt that I’ll get to see these in the foreseeable future because of the current unpleasantness. My father is hoping for an edition in Yiddish, while I am holding out for Sindarin. The Foreign Rights director said that they didn’t have many sales representatives in Middle-earth. We discussed the possibility of an edition in the Black Speech of Mordor, but she warned me that this ‘was not a language she would utter here.’

A fun side-effect of foreign translation rights has been that when an edition appears in a territory, and the foreign publisher gets behind it, I get to do interviews for foreign newspapers and broadcasters. The French edition went down well in this regard, as did the Romanian and Portuguese editions, and there was a week earlier this summer when I was Big in Brazil.

Although most people have said they love the book, quite a few have complained that there aren’t many pictures. To remedy this, I’ve written a much shorter version aimed at pre-teens, and it’s currently being illustrated. The illustrations I have seen are lovely, but as is often the way with publishing, this may take a while to come out, but I hope to be able to show you something soon.

In the meantime I’ve been working on something else, but it’s at an early stage and I have promised myself not to say anything about it in case I jinx it.

Of the Rings of Power

In a famous letter to publisher Milton Waldman, probably written in late 1951 (No. 131 in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien), Tolkien wrote:

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy story … The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Despite the objections of purists, then, Peter Jackson’s films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and the ongoing Amazon Prime TV series The Rings of Power, carry the imprimatur of the creator, whatever one might think of their intrinsic artistic merits.

As for creation, Tolkien, who was deeply religious, also had very specific views. Creation, as in authorship, is really what he termed ‘sub-creation’, for all, he believed, stem from the action of the Creator. As such, an author should hold on to their works but lightly, and not become too enamoured of their beauty. The relationship between authors and their works is a central theme in Tolkien’s legendarium — what became The Silmarillion, from which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are, effectively, spin-offs. The whole thing is driven by the covetousness of the Elven-smith Feanor for his own creations, the Silmarils, whence the entire saga of apocalyptic disaster in which the elves are utterly defeated by the forces of evil. The theme is reprised in the story of the creation of the rings of power. A cautionary tale, indeed, and on the grandest of canvases.

All of which justifies, amply in my view, adaptations of an author’s works that do not adhere strictly to the author’s own beliefs or intentions, still less those of that author’s admirers. This is especially true in Tolkien’s case, given the evidence for how he wished his myth-making to propagate. For all that there will be some who find it hard to take, there can be no adaptation of Tolkien that is not in the canon, by definition.

This need not apply, however, to one’s aesthetic judgements of the works in and of themselves. Although there were some aspects of Peter Jackson’s adaptations I found irritating, my unease rested with choices made by the scriptwriters rather than the fact that the films had been made, still less that they deviated from the books. Mostly, I loved them. With an adaptation, one must first own that books are different from films. Books leave a great deal to the imagination of the reader, but in films, everything must be shown. And because ‘everything’ accounts for an awful lot, a great deal must be left out. Characters are merged or cut entirely for the sake of the narrative. Time is compressed.

There are other problems, too, thrown up by the fact that Tolkien chose to ‘tell’ as much as ‘show’. In The Lord of the Rings, as in The Hobbit, we are told of events that happened long ago, or going on simultaneously but elsewhere. The action frequently stops so someone can recall an ancient tale, or sing a song in of days gone by. And in Elvish, to boot. That, of course, is part of the charm. Tolkien acknowledged that glimpses of distant vistas enriched the reading experience. For those readers who wanted more, he added, there were appendices to The Lord of the Rings, more than 100 pages of background to the events and personalities of Tolkien’s invented world between the fall of Morgoth, the Great Enemy, at the end of the First Age (or ‘Elder Days’) and the matter of The Lord of the Rings itself, at the end of the Third. Because the appendices (I am so tempted to call them ‘Supplementary Information’) are nearly all by necessity telegraphic and annalistic, they leave plenty of room for ‘other minds and hands’ to fill in the gaps.

The makers of The Rings of Power have seized this opportunity with both hands. Even though they have invented a great deal, both in plot and characterisation, they have remained true (more or less) to the story told in the Supplementary Information Extended Data Appendices to The Lord of the Rings. They have also explained a great deal that Tolkien left vague or contentious.

For my reflections on the first episode of the first series of The Rings of Power, see here and, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, for the entire first series here, where you can remind yourself of events and brush up on the necessary background. From here on in there are spiders spoilers (and, yes, also some spiders).

I’ve watched the first three episodes of the second season series of The Rings of Power, and here is a recap of the story so far. In no particular order, as they say on all the game shows, the Numenoreans return home after their ultimately disastrous intervention in the ‘Southlands’ (that is, Mordor), during which Elendil’s son Isildur is lost, and the Queen-Regent Miriel is blinded. When they arrive, they find that the ailing king, Tar-Palantir, has died. The population turns toward her cousin and chancellor Pharazon, already a wily power-player, convinced that Tar-Palantir, and by implication Miriel, are too close to the elves. (This rings true to Tolkien’s conception. As the centuries wear on in the history of Numenor, the elves became less and less trusted until only a few ‘faithful’ had any dealings with them).

Back in Middle-earth, the refugees from the Southlands who have not switched sides to Adar’s orcs have converged on Pelargir, a small port once established by the Numenoreans but seemingly abandoned, the wood and thatch hovels of the Southlanders built amid the ruined stonework. Isildur makes his way there, helped by his faithful horse (echoes of Peter Jackson’s Aragorn-horse relationship in the film of The Two Towers) but he’s missed the boat home. During his adventures, Isildur escapes from the captivity of giant spiders (no Tolkien story is really complete without giant spiders).

Elsewhere, Elanor Brandyfoot, the harfoot (that is, proto-hobbit) has thrown in her lot with the Stranger, and is eventually joined by her best friend Poppy. They are slogging across a desert in Rhun (the East) looking for the constellation, or asterism, that the Stranger is looking for, which will give him some clue to what he’s supposed to be doing. This looks like a major boo-boo to me. To look for unfamiliar stars, you have to go south, not east. Tolkien explicitly says at one point in The Lord of the Rings that Aragorn had once journeyed to Harad (the south, much further than the ‘Southlands’), ‘where the stars are strange’. As they go, Elanor and Poppy are trying to give the Stranger a name, and come up with various preposterous archaic-English or gothic-sounding names of the kind that hobbits would eventually call themselves, but seem to circle around the word ‘Gand’. This discussion has important resonances with Gandalf’s encounter with Bilbo at the start of The Hobbit, in which Gandalf expounds on the sometimes strained relationship between names as and of themselves, and the things to which they refer. ‘I am Gandalf’, he says, ‘And Gandalf means “me”‘. Names, as Tolkien (being a philologist) would have been the first to understand, are important. The Stranger himself has recurring dreams about finding a wizard’s staff (the ‘gand’,  or ‘wand’, in Old Norse). The wanderers come to the attention of a sorcerer living in Rhun. I wonder whether this is one of the two so-called ‘blue wizards’, unnamed in the Lord of the Rings, who went east and fell out of the tales? Gee Minima reminds of a fan theory that this sorcerer might end up as one of Sauron’s Ringwraiths, perhaps the Witch King of Angmar.

Khazad-Dum, the kingdom of the dwarves, has hit on hard times. Hot-headed Prince Durin has fallen out with his father, King Durin III. An earthquake, possibly sparked by the eruption of Mount Doom,  has shaken its structure, such that the giant windows in the mountain-walls the dwarves use to admit light (and grow crops) have collapsed, and all is dark. Here we meet Narvi, the dwarf who (in The Lord of the Rings) collaborated with Celebrimbor to make the Doors of Moria — prefigured in the graphics that accompany the opening titles.

The Three Rings of the elves, having been forged by Celebrimbor, return to Lindon. Elrond is convinced that they can only lead to bad things, given that Halbrand (now exposed as Sauron) was involved in their forging, but Galadriel and Gil-Galad, with the help of the wise old ship-builder Cirdan, convince him that Sauron never touched them (it’s a point of ring-lore that the Three remain pure und uncorrupted by Sauron’s touch). Indeed, when the elves invoke their power, the fungoid decay that appears to afflict Lindon goes away and the Sun comes out. Which is nice. It’s fairly clear, though, that the rings are addictive. Clearly, there’ll be trouble at t’mill.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the first three episodes is the development of Sauron as a character. In a flashback to the very start of the Second Age, just after Morgoth’s defeat, Sauron tries to rally the remaining orcs to his banner, but the orcs, led by Adar, rebel, and ‘kill’ him. But Sauron cannot be killed so easily. Although seemingly crushed to a pulp, Sauron’s blood, gore and general squishy goo slowly reassemble until they become a kind of animated ball of black worms (imagine wet spaghetti soaked in squid ink) that slithers around the landscape for centuries, before ambushing a human and thus reassuming human form. Clearly, Sauron needs a method of domination that goes beyond mere persuasion. This is where the idea of rings of power come from, and why Elrond is so suspicious of the three rings made so far, even if Sauron had never touched them. But back to Sauron: we follow his progress until he meets Galadriel at sea, taking up the story in the first series.

Sauron needs more rings, though, and returns to Celebrimbor in Eregion, revealing himself as a divine figure, Annatar, Lord of Gifts (this part is true to Tolkien’s conception). Crucially, he lets Celebrimbor assume that he is a messenger sent from the Valar to assist people in Middle-earth combat evil — the exact purpose, as it happens, of the wizards, or Istari, of which the Stranger is (or seems to be) one. Annatar does not tell lies, as such, but he steers others to imagine things that aren’t true, playing on their own vanity. (The two-handers between Annatar and Celebrimbor are masterpieces of scriptwriting and acting). As Galadriel says in another scene, Sauron (as Halbrand) had played her ‘like a harp’, telling her the things she wanted to hear.

Lastly, about Adar. This character does not appear in Tolkien as such, but helps resolve the vexed issue of the origin of orcs. Tolkien is explicit that orcs reproduce in the usual way, and in this series we actually meet girl orcs and baby orcs. But there seems to be a great deal of variety among orcs, and, elsewhere it seems clear that orcs can be manufactured from base matter (articulated very well in film by Peter Jackson in The Lord of the Rings); and, again, that orcs were elves, captured and tortured by Morgoth. If that were true, there would have to have been an awful lot of captured elves. This caused Tolkien a lot of problems, and in some very late writings he spilled a lot of ink wondering if orcs had souls, or were capable of independent agency, and other matters. The scriptwriters of The Rings of Power have resolved all of this. Adar is quite plainly one of a relatively small number of captured and corrupted elves, who then propagate orcs in a variety of ways — he refers to his orcs as his ‘children’. They plainly do have independent agency to some degree, and are not necessarily slaves of Sauron. It is this that Sauron seeks to resolve by use of the domination that the use of rings imposes.

There is more to come. We are yet to meet Tom Bombadil and the barrow-wights, characters from The Lord of the Rings, excised from Peter Jackson’s films for perfectly good reasons of pacing. There’ll also be some ents, and also stoors — cousins of the harfoots, the river-bank-loving proto-hobbits stock whence Gollum emerged.

It’s plain, at least from the first three episodes, that the makers of The Rings of Power have upped their game. It’ just as beautiful, but this time the acting and writing have risen to match it. Morfydd Clark (Galadriel), Robert Aramayo (Elrond), Owain Arthur (Prince Durin) and especially the gorgeous Sophia Nomvete (Durin’s redoubtable wife Disa) are as outstanding as they were in the first series, among a cast too strong and numerous to describe individually, but this time Charles Edwards (Celebrimbor) has risen in stature — possibly because the writing is better. But the star turn has to be Charlie Vickers as Sauron. Everyone loves a good baddie, especially a baddie as complex and conflicted as Sauron who, as Tolkien says, started out as one of the good guys.

The best bit, though, is the score, by Bear McCreary. He takes the mood established by Howard Shore in his fabulous scores for The Lord of the Rings films (Shore also wrote the main title for The Rings of Power) but makes it all his own, especially with his use of brass and choirs. McCreary, like Shore, uses leitmotifs, and after a couple of listens you’ll be humming Galadriel’s theme without knowing it. But beware Tom Bombadil’s theme, which has become something of an ear worm which I find myself humming as I wake.

What I Read In August

Peter F. Hamilton: The Chronicle of the Fallers (The Abyss Beyond Dreams/ Night Without Stars) Another month, another enormous bonkbuster from Peter F. Hamilton. Back in June I reviewed the Commonwealth Saga (Pandora’s Star/ Judas Unchained) in which the prosperous Commonwealth of human planets, all neatly linked together by railways and wormholes, is invaded by a hostile alien force whose sole goal is conquest and the elimination of all life apart from itself. Last month I reviewed the Void Trilogy in which the Black Hole at the centre of the Galaxy turns out to be a micro-universe, the Void, in which different physics applies — including telepathy — but whose consumption of energy threatens to swallow the rest of the Galaxy. The Chronicle of the Fallers is another two-volume whopper that’s a continuation, in a way, of all the others, creating a seven volume series. In The Abyss from Dreams, Nigel Sheldon — a major character from the Commonwealth Saga — infiltrates the Void in attempt to find Querencia, the planet on which much of the action of the Void Trilogy takes place. By mistake he lands on a different planet in the Void, also colonised by humans, called Bienvenido. The humans here face a constant threat from space — aliens called the Fallers who are a cross between the threads of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight novels, and zombies, who either take over humans, or eat them. On Bienvenido, a young soldier, Sivasta, obsessed with the Fallers, rises to power and becomes a kind of Marxist dictator. As a result of Nigel Sheldon’s trying to disarm the Fallers at source, Bienvenido is ejected from the Void and finds itself in real space — but circling a lonely star in the intergalactic void. Now we move to Night without Stars. This star system is a kind of sin bin in which transgressive civilisations congregate. After that I kind of lost the plot a bit, but [SPOILER ALERT] the Fallers eventually win, though not without the human population having been transferred back to the Commonwealth, with the aid of another of the Commonwealth’s star turns, genetically engineered super-sleuth Paula Myo. Often exhilarating, increasingly exhausting, my impression after reading these novels was one in which McGuffins tend to predominate over story. Hyperdrives, ultra drives, easy voyages between galaxies, weapons that destroy stars, wormhole generators, re-life, rejuvenation, accelerated development from infancy to adulthood in a month, telepathy, telekinesis, transcendence into post-physical status, sentient robots, aliens of every kind: if a character (and the characterisation is excellent) face a problem, some new gizmo should be able to help them out. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy these novels, because I did, very much. But one can have too much of a good thing.

Tom Lathan: Lost Wonders We hear a great deal about how the encroachment of humans is driving many species  to extinction. What we hear much less about is extinction at the sharp end, on a case-by-case basis. Here Tom Lathan presents ten case histories of species that have become extinct very recently, that is, in the 21st century, their demise known to the very day. The only one anyone is likely to have heard of is Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island giant tortoise of the Galapagos. Others include birds, bats, fish, snails, and a shrub. The time, energy of efforts expended by conservationists to keep the various species alive in the face of natural disasters and bureaucratic ineptitude add up to a poignant read, but in the end I was left waiting for the other shoe to drop. All the species lived on small islands or in remote, patchy habitat and would very likely have gone extinct anyway, and rather soon, whatever anyone did. Some were close relatives or even variants of other, known species, so their existence and extinction rather depended on one’s viewpoint as a taxonomist. Lathan didn’t broaden his outlook to, say, consider other threatened species that represent much deeper lineages: the tuatara, say, or the aye-aye. More importantly, he didn’t explore whether the extinction of a few species of which nobody had heard might be the thin end of the wedge. That once one starts to pull at the seemingly insignificant threads of an ecosystem, first one species goes, and then another, until the whole thing collapses. And he doesn’t address the perhaps unfashionable view that, by creating new and novel patches of habitat, and moving animals and plants around, human activity might actually have increased biological diversity. In which case the efforts of conservationists to save endangered endemics, while laudable in and of themselves, look increasingly like Canute trying to stem the tide on command. Nature is much bigger than humanity, against which the efforts of humans to demand that nature stays exactly as it is looks a lot like hubris. DISCLAIMER: An uncorrected proof of the book was sent to me by the publisher. The book will be published in November.

Lavie Tidhar: Central Station I can’t remember if I ever visited the central bus station in Tel Aviv, though it’s highly likely, given that I visited Israel in 1985 and traveled extensively round the country by bus. Like all major transport hubs, I suspect that it was and is a magnet for people of every kind, and generated its own kind of life. In Central Station, Israeli author Lavie Tidhar has inflated it into a spaceport that separates Jewish Tel Aviv from Arab Jaffa in a near-future Balkanised Israel-Palestine. People go through Central Station to reach other parts of the world via sub-orbital spaceplanes, or, via space stations, to the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and the outer planets. The novel is less a narrative than accounts of the intertwined lives of the people born, raised, living in, working in, and passing through. The people are a stew of ethnicities, and include alien elements, people grown in labs and then forgotten about and left to grow up as street kids; and the ‘others’ who are more digital than human. There is a panoply of religions, including ones presided over by robots. There are knowingly playful references to other SF stories, and some rather good Jewish jokes (I was fond of the robot who, while invoking , served as a mohel to the local Jewish community). The most poignant scenes involve the hard-bitten robotniks: human soldiers killed in battle but patched together with machinery and sent back to fight in wars that everyone has forgotten and whose results turn out, in the end, to have been meaningless. The robotniks are the beggars of Central Station who appeal not for cash, but for spare parts. They speak a dialect called Battle Yiddish (which is basically just Yiddish), different from the argot of many residents of the Station, which is Asteroid Pidgin (which is basically just Pidgin). There is overt racism, too — to a young woman who has been converted into a strigoi, a kind of bio-weapon with many characteristics of a vampire. Good science fiction (and this is very good) is not necessarily about the future, but a genre in which ordinary people are presented with extraordinary situations, thus providing a satirical or even allegorical commentary on the way we live now. Parallels with the ongoing chaos of the Middle East are not hard to find.

Lavie Tidhar: Maror People of a certain age will remember James Michener, who wrote vast blockbusters in which historical panoramas were seen through the eyes of a multi-generational cast of characters. One such was The Source (1965), telling of the Holy Land from pre-Biblical times to foundation of Israel. Maror, by Lavie Tidhar, can be seen as its antithesis. Yes, it’s a vast epic about Israel, but it is relentlessly anti-heroic. It stems from the idea that any fully rounded nation must have more than just politicians, heroes, generals, visionaries and pioneers. It must have whores, pimps, gamblers, gangsters, crooks and villains, too, and the boundaries between good and evil are not always clear. It starts with Avi Sagi, a cop so hard-boiled that he makes Dirty Harry look squeaky-clean. Assassination is Avi’s middle name, it seems, and he doesn’t question who it is he’s popping off. Avi’s story, in the early 2000s, turns out to be just the first in a series of short stories and vignettes set in Israel (or among Israelis abroad) from just after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, through the Lebanon campaigns of the 1980s, up to 2008. The stories illustrate the history of Israel but through the eyes of cops so bent they could be drawn as pretzels; drug lords who are also devoted family men; soldiers, who, once out of the army, find jobs as ‘security consultants’ (please don’t call them ‘mercenaries’) to foreign terrorist organisations; professional drug couriers; politicians and generals who are also serial rapists and embezzlers, and who take advantage of the chaos of the Middle East to indulge in what are euphemistically called ‘import-export’ businesses. There is enough blood to satisfy even the most rabid fan of Tarantino. At the heart of it all — and the only common feature of all the tales — is the mysterious, Bible-quoting Cohen, a policeman who is also a gangster, who plays both sides because, he says, if crime can’t be stopped, it has to be ‘managed’, and this means bending the rules. It turns out that Cohen was born on the day Israel achieved independence, and he can be seen as a kind of genius loci for Israel: sleeves-rolled-up, practical, cunning, doing everything to ensure Israel’s survival by any means necessary. Several real people have walk-on parts. Some, such as Chaim Topol and Ofra Haza, will be recognisable to an international readership, but there are lots more who will, I suspect, mean nothing to anyone (such as me) not steeped in Israeli popular culture. The book is not without hope, though, even if cruelly dashed. In the mid-1990s, the young and idealistic Avi, trying to put a life of petty crime behind him, and fuelled, like all his generation, by the hope of the nascent Oslo peace accords and a peace treaty with Jordan, goes to a rock festival in Arad, in the Negev desert, and makes out with a girl. It all looks lovely… until disaster strikes. This is a portrait of a real event. The collapse of security barriers led to serious injury and death for young festival-goers. In Israel, 18 July, 1995 is as much ‘The Day the Music Died’, as Altamont, or the death of Buddy Holly, are remembered in the US. And on 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, an architect of peace, was assassinated by a Jewish ultra-nationalist hothead. Avi turns back to crime and after that the course of the book is relentlessly downhill. The story ends, as it began, with Avi, and from the foregoing you’ll not be surprised to learn that it’s not a happy conclusion. To anyone like me who admires Israel, even if they don’t always love it, this novel is deeply unsettling. But I am consoled that there is a message here, too, for progressives, who rightly deplore the fact that women and minorities have to work twice as hard to achieve as much as their white, male colleagues, but, in their hypocrisy (born of deep-seated antisemitism) question the very existence of Israel, because Israelis don’t live up to ethical standards they would not match themselves, or expect in anyone else. Postscript: in Hebrew, maror refers to the ‘bitter herbs’ that are eaten at the Jewish festival of Passover in which Jews celebrate their liberation from slavery in Egypt.