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Review: Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa, by Al J. Venter

Cold War creeping into dying Colonialism (5 stars)

It’s hard to grasp that Portugal had African colonies up to the 1970s, when pretty much the entire world had left the Colonial bandwagon and was more preoccupied with the Cold War. While the eyes of the world were on Vietnam, Portugal, one of the poorest countries in Europe, was waging three different wars at the same time: in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea (today’s Guinea-Bissau).

The book Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa meticulously analyzes the period. South-African journalist Al Venter is a veteran war correspondent in Africa and the Middle East, and witnessed first hand Portugal’s fight against it’s former colonies. The book has a very good combination of factual research and the author’s own perspective on the conflicts. That was essential for the understanding of someone like me, who knew squat about it. The book also comes with several photographs and maps that help a layman make sense of the conflict.

“It is difficult to tell a man’s age in the bush: a 13-year-old often looks 18 or older and it was no secret that many of those captured were barely 14 or 15, all of them armed. It was the same in old Stanleyville (today Kisangani) in the Congo: some of the worst brutalities were perpetrated by children not yet into their teens.”

It is a conflict in a different scale than Vietnam. Helicopters and bombings were rare, as were direct confrontations. The norm were cat and mouse skirmishes, of slow and constant attrition. More than all, those were wars of wills. The books defends that the Portuguese pride, that wanted to keep a self-image of a colonizing powerhouse, kept Portugal for decades stuck in a war it couldn’t win. There was a crucial imbalance of determination between the colonies and Portugal.

The book describes several atrocities, perpetrated both by the government and the revolutionary groups. The first traces of distress date back to 1961, when Angolan peasants revolted because they had to sell their cotton by a price fixed by Portugal, a lot lower than the international market price. The Portuguese commanders simply bombed dozens of villages with napalm, killing 7 thousand locals.

“During bush operations, everything in their path would be destroyed; livestock slaughtered, crops and villages burnt, the local people rounded up for questioning and anyone acting in a suspicious manner arrested and hauled back to base. Tribesmen who attempted to escape this treatment were regarded as “fleeing terrorists”, and shot. The death would then be formally listed as a “terrorist kill”.”

Most of the Portuguese soldiers, young and poor, felt like they were dragged into a meaningless conflict and did the minimum necessary until their campaign was over. It is sad to see how, like in any conflict, the local population suffered the hardest blows. They were pushed both by the government and revolutionaries. It is very interesting how the book explains the guerrilla’s backgrounds, many insurgents were trained in China and incorporated tactics by Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara in the African context, like using propaganda and mobility. It’s the beginning of the Cold War creeping into dying Colonialism.

It is also sad to know how these revolutions would end up after Portugal packed away from Africa. The former colonies were taken by even bloodier conflicts, that echo to this day in the continent because of the arbitrary divisions set up by the European nations.

Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa is at the same time an informative and personal book about an obscure period of our recent history.

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Review: Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson

Lukewarm conclusion to a great series (3 stars)

“There’s a whole new apocrypha out there, really – ghost ships, lost cities…There’s a pathos to it, when you think about it. I mean, every bit of it’s locked into orbit. All of it manmade, known, owned, mapped. Like watching myths take root in a parking lot.”

Mona Lisa Overdrive is the conclusion of the Sprawl trilogy of William Gibson, composed also of Neuromancer and Count Zero. Like the previous titles, it follows different threads of stories that combine only at the end: a yakuza boss’ daughter sent to London for protection, a recluse artist that is charged in taking care of the body of a man that locked himself in cyberspace, a sex worker used in the heist of a famous simstim superstar, etc.

Mona Lisa Overdrive didn’t grab me the way the previous Sprawl books did, unfortunately. The plot threads seemed move convoluted this time around – I confess there is much I plain didn’t understand – and I wasn’t really invested in the characters at any time.

It was nice to see the reappearance of characters from the previous books like Molly, the Finn and Bobby, and I liked how what happened in the previous books have become cyberspace myth in Mona Lisa Overdrive. But It didn’t seem like there was much at stake and the AIs – one of the most interesting aspects of the previous titles – seemed pushed to the background here.

Mona Lisa Overdrive is still a good book – Gibson’s talent for description remains top notch here – but for me it was a somewhat lukewarm conclusion to a great series.

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Review: Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Seminal cyberpunk (5 stars)

Written in 1984, Neuromancer is widely considered one of the seminal classics of cyberpunk, a sci fi subgenre that is pessimistic and dystopic, with themes like the fusion between body and cybernetic technology, corrupt corporations controlling society, hackers and antiheroes. Neuromancer was William Gibson’s first book and the first to get the three main sci fi awards: Nebula, Philip K. Dick and the Hugo.

Dystopias from previous decades had totalitarian governments taken to the nth-degree, like in George Orwell’s 1984. I find very interesting how this is inverted in 1980’s dystopias, as they imagine a supposedly free society where capitalism has gone wild. Neuromancer’s influence is enormous, ideas like cyberspace and the internet were born from this book in a way.

The narrative follows a former hacker called Case, who can’t jack into cyberspace anymore because of a neurotoxin implanted in his brain by a former employer he tried to cheat. He ends up being recruited by a “street samurai” called Molly, to join her in a heist job. Molly is perhaps the most interesting character in the book, a cyborg with dagger-like nails and mirrored lenses planted in her eyes. Among the other characters there is a mental construct of Case’s former teacher, a sociopath that can create illusions at will and a former special forces guy that apparently leads this “Ocean’s Eleven” crew from the future of our past.

It is frightening how Neuromancer describes artificial intelligences, entities that could take over the world if freed from their virtual prisons. The book also addresses how even human minds could be “hacked” and dominated by these AI’s, and dealing with them is no different that dealing with the demons of yore. It is very curious how this high tech world can look like a medieval universe of wizards conjuring demons.

The book has that Blade Runner neonoir feel, film that was released two years before the book, fact that brought Gibson to the brink of despair and made him rewrite the book a dozen times, because he was convinced that everyone would think he copied the movie.

Neuromancer is a fascinating time capsule of how our past saw the future – notably, Gibson missed on some technologies like cell phones. This is a superbly written book, even the esoteric descriptions of technological terms are a joy to read because of Gibson’s descriptions.

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Review: The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

Military sci fi that transcends the genre (5 stars)

The two main military sci fi classics are Starship Troopers and Forever War. While the first is a World War II metaphor, with a somewhat ambiguous message about militarism and even the need of fascism in times of crisis, Joe Haldeman’s book exposes the madness of the Vietnam war as it follows the life of a soldier through thousands of years of a meaningless conflict. Joe Haldeman himself is a Vietnam vet that was even awarded a medal for combat wounds.

The story follows William Mandela, who was recruited at the end os the 1990s – the book was written in 1974 – to fight a mysterious alien race called Taurans. To travel to the front, ships move so fast that time dilates, making the subjective time inside the ship slower than the “real” time of the universe. So, when Mandella comes home after fighting for two years of his, nearly three decades have passed on Earth. And as they travel further, bigger is the time dilation, and the conflict crawls on for decades and centuries.

For a book about an armed conflict, Forever War has surprisingly few battle scenes, showing that maxim that war is long periods of monotony punctuated by brief moments of deep terror. Time dilation becomes an obvious metaphor for the feeling of isolation Vietnam veterans felt when they returned home. After going through so much terror, they had difficulty adapting to their home country, that had undergone so many changes in art, music, hippie movement, sexual revolution, etc.

This cunning gimmick is very well constructed all along the book, and the reader sees how evermore Mandella distances himself from the society he is supposed to be protecting. The Taurans also don’t appear much, the biggest adversaries seem to be the military bureaucracy. The version I read had a terrible introduction by writer John Scalzi. As much as I like the author, he seemed more interest in writing about the similarities between his title Old Man’s War and Forever War than Joe Haldeman’s book itself.

One of the best book I have read, great on many fronts and highly recommended.

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Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick

Sci fi meets counterculture (4 stars)

A great book of the “psychedelic science fiction” of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s the sci fi of censorial experiences, of questioning reality, conspiracy theories, the nature of identity and dystopic worlds. It was loosely adapted to cinema in Blade Runner, as well as several other works from Philip K. Dick, like Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report.

Fans of Blade Runner may find a lot of differences in the tone of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? While the movie focuses on the life struggle of the replicants, androids that are practically identical to human beings, the book is centered in more metaphysical themes like religion and emotional control. Director Ridley Scott said he didn’t even read the original book.

In the first scene we are introduced to a bizarre technology, a Penfield Mood Organ, a device that allows people to type emotion to be felt, like joy, resignation or sadness. Even with such a technology, bounty hunter Rick Deckard can’t communicate with his wife. A recurring theme in Philip K. Dick: the dependency in a technology that does not solve a much bigger problem.

Empathy is a central theme in the book. What differentiates humans from androids is the capacity to feel compassion towards the suffering of others. The theme also pops up in the bizarre mercerism religion, in which people connect themselves via a “empathy box” to feel as one the suffering of William Mercer, a Jesus Christ-esque martyr of the digital age.

Empathy also appears in the book towards animals. Real animals are expensive and someone’s social status is measured by the rarity of their pets. Deckard spends a small fortune on a goat. The cheaper option was to buy the synthetic variety, even if that fact needed to by hidden from the neighbors.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Is a much more ambiguous and complex journey than the film it inspired. The emphasis are in the ideas, not in the narrative flow. Philip K. Dick himself considered said he was more of a fictional philosopher than a writer. A rewarding book of ideas if you read it on it’s own terms.

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Review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo

The limits of human misery (5 stars)

I live in Brazil, a country of great social inequality, but even so the misery and cruelty shown in Behind the Beautiful Forevers is impressive. This work, winner of the 2012’s National Book Award and written by Pulitzer winner Katherine Boo, is the result of three years she spent in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai, India.

The title is a reference to an outdoor of Italian luxury mosaics that faces the city’s modern international airport; and Annawadi is right behind, like a black humor joke. It is a place of hunger and constant disease. Where people sleep in the middle of trash and are bitten by rats during the night. Where the fight for survivor surfaces a greedy and cruel side in the neighbors, the police corruption and politics. A place where people supplement their meager diet with rats and frogs from a fetid lagoon. Annawadi shows the combination of the darkest side of globalization with the Indian cast system, defined in the book as “the most perfectly oppressive labor division system ever conceived”.

Most of the story revolves around a Muslim family in the place of Hindu majority. They are accused of being responsible for the suicide of a one-legged woman. She set fire to herself because the renovation of a shared wall made dust fall in her rice, and wanted to teach a lesson to the neighbors that went too far. The lawsuit against the father of the family and his son extends for years and becomes a nightmare, revealing an endemic corruption in each and every level of the official system. The Indian bureaucracy seems like a big machine to forget the poor.

“In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.”

One day the Indian press does visit this place of poverty and injustice because of a death. Of a horse. A few days before, a garbage collector was ran over and died after pleading for help for hours in an active road. They took him out of there when he was already dead and the coroner determined – without an autopsy – that he died of tuberculosis, so that it wouldn’t smudge the region’s statistics.

The facts are amazing, and the execution of Behind the Beautiful Forevers too. The author used over a thousand hours of video, photographs and audio interviews to write the book. And Boo also has an incredible sensibility to find the right stories and the literary talent to transcribe them.

One of the best non-fiction books I have read. A deep immersion in an incredible theme, with incredible execution, multiple sources, long time of research. A must-read for journalists, those interested in modern India, or any human being.

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Review: The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia

The fragility of machines (3 stars)

The attributes of robots that are usually emphasized in fiction are super-human strength, speed and intelligence. That’s why it is curious to find a story that exposes the fragility of machines and their reliance on humans for maintenance.

The Alchemy of Stone is set in a steampunk city on the brink of a civil war, and divided between past and future, poor and rich, science and magic, represented by the factions of the Mechanics and Alchemists. The protagonist Mattie is an emancipated robot that works as a alchemist, so she is truly divided between these worlds of science and magic.

Although Mattie is emancipated, her creator still insists in holding the key to her heart, and she needs him to literally wind her up like a clock, as well undergo minor repairs, like when she breaks her porcelain face, loses an eye, etc. It reminded me of a destructive relationship that the victimized party can’t seem to escape.

The problem I had with the book is that I had a deep antipathy towards the heroine, who was a bit of a drama queen for my tastes. All the human struggle was lost to me as the omniscient narrator got into looong rambling about what the lady felt or didn’t feel. Things got worse when Mattie got involved with a renegade mechanic. A love that culminates in one of the most bizarre sex scenes I have read, as the romantic interest circled with his tongue her – in this case very literal – keyhole.

The book does bring some very interesting ideas in the world creation front. Several fantasy elements are thrown into the steampunk setting. The city is guarded by living gargoyles that are turning to stone because of a plague, and their monologues bring a sense of decadence, sadness and end of a culture. A very interesting character is a smoker of souls who inhales the spirits that haunt the living, but got addicted to opium to try and endure the endless talking of the dead inside him.

The book also ends kind of abruptly, perhaps because I was more interested in the political maneuvers of the background than with Mattie’s story itself. Baring the chick lit tone that didn’t appeal to me, I enjoyed very much the setting and how the book emphasizes the frailty of an automata instead of bringing another super-robot.

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Review: The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers

A king whom emperors have served (3 stars)

Originally published in 1895, The King in Yellow is a supernatural horror classic. It has a series of short stories that involve in some way a mysterious character and play called the King in Yellow. The first part of the play is banal and mediocre, but the second act brings madness to whoever reads it.

This insanity would come from terrible truths about the universe revealed in the text, that are beyond human comprehension. This idea would have great influence in the “cosmic horrors” of H. P. Lovecraft, who even included elements from Robert W. Chambers’ book in his Cthulhu mythos, like the Yellow Sign.

The character of the King in Yellow barely appears directly, but seems to cast a shadow throughout the entire book. It’s a character that is present – and feared – even in it’s absence. To me, he seems like a manifestation of human greed. Yellow is the color of gold, and he is described as “a king whom emperors have served” and several of the stories involve jealously and envy.

The book brings a total of 10 short stories. It begins with the best one, “The Repairer of Reputations”, that shows a then future New York of 1920 – 25 years after the book’s publication – where suicide has been legalized and the interested parties need only to enter a Lethal Chamber. The narrative follows Hildred, a men who desires the young Constance, who is actually in love with Hildred’s cousin, the charming military officer Louis. The best character is the “repairer of reputations” from the title, a deformed and eccentric man who for some reason is constantly attacked by his cat.

“The Mask” brings a new love triangle, this time between a scientist who discovered an alchemical process that can keep live creatures indefinitely frozen like statues. “In the Court of the Dragon” has a man that feels constantly observed by a sinister church organ player, the same theme of “Yellow Sign”, this time with a artist that has terrible nightmares and that believes is stalked by a cemetery guard. Many of the other stories are set in Paris and involve bohemians, war and love, always with a macabre tone.

I liked the psychological terror, a lot more subtle than Lovecraft’s, but I found the quality of the stories very uneven and in the last ones I was bored out of my mind wishing I was reading Edgar Alan Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne. The fantastical idea of the King in Yellow seems to me bigger than the book itself.

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Review: On Guerrilla Warfare, by Mao Tse-tung

A manual on the kind of war that defined the 20th century (3 stars)

On Guerrilla Warfare was one of the books left by Chinese leader Mao-Tse Tung, but unlike his more famous Red Book, this one is dedicated entirely to military strategy. This was a difficult book to rate and review, because I liked reading the foreword by Samuel B. Griffith, who translated the book in the 40s, more than On Guerrilla Warfare itself.

After atomic weapons came along, conventional warfare became a lot costlier to nuclear nations. This made guerrilla the kind of “low key” conflict that defined the 20th century, and promises to continue to shape the 21th. What the preface shows is how guerrilla it is a lot more powerful that one may think.

“It is often said that guerrilla warfare is primitive. This generalization is dangerously misleading and true only in the technological sense. If one considers the picture as a whole, a paradox is immediately apparent, and the primitive form is understood to be in fact more sophisticated than nuclear war or atomic war or war as it was waged by conventional armies, navies, and air forces. Guerrilla war is not dependent for success on the efficient operation of complex mechanical devices, highly organized logistical systems, or the accuracy of electronic computers. It can be conducted in any terrain, in any climate, in any weather; in swamps, in mountains, in farmed fields. Its basic element is man, and man is more complex than any of his machines. He is endowed with intelligence, emotions, and will. Guerrilla warfare is therefore suffused with, and reflects, man’s admirable qualities as well as his less pleasant ones. While it is not always humane, it is human, which is more than can be said for the strategy of extinction.”

Mao pretty much updates the thoughts of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, emphasizing speed, stealth and the surprise factor. The preface also shows very well the particulars of Chinese thought in Mao’s text.

“An important postulate of the Yin-Yang theory is that concealed within strength there is weakness, and within weakness, strength. It is a weakness of guerrillas that they operate in small groups that can be wiped out in a matter of minutes. But because they do operate in small groups, they can move rapidly and secretly into the vulnerable rear of the enemy.”

“It is often a disadvantage not to have heavy infantry weapons available, but the very fact of having to transport them has until recently tied conventional columns to roads and well-used tracks. The guerrilla travels light and travels fast. He turns the hazards of terrain to his advantage and makes an ally of tropical rains, heavy snow, intense heat, and freezing cold. Long night marches are difficult and dangerous, but the darkness shields his approach to an unsuspecting enemy.”

On Guerrilla Warfare is a fascinating read in which it shows how sheer human determination can knock whole empires down. Griffith even suggests it is impossible to be beaten by a conventional army after about one forth of the population is converted to the cause. The basic element of a guerrilla is man, and man is more complex than any of his machines.

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Review: The Future of the Mind, by Michio Kaku

The wonder that is our brains (5 stars)

Michio Kaku is a proponents one of the superstring theory in physics, but in Future of the Mind he goes out of his field to show what groundbreaking neurology research tells us about our minds.

The human brain is, by far, the most complex structure we know in the universe. Your brain has about 100 billion neurons, about as many stars in the Milky Way. It represents about 2% of our body weight, but spends 20% of our energy – 65% in a baby – and it is believe that 80% of our genes code mental functions.

One of the most surprising conclusions in the book is that our understanding of “me”, of being a single person, is an illusion. The brain doesn’t work as a kind of CEO of the body, but more like a Parliament. There are several “mes”, each competing with the others to push it’s agenda passed along. What the brain does is, as soon as a decision is taken by the committee, to rationalize the result, giving us the impression that a single entity took the decision.

Maybe you have heard of the separation of the brain hemispheres, the left side logical and analytical and the right artistic and holistic. What neuroscientists are discovering is that this separation is deeper than we think. The left hemisphere is “dominated” by the left one, and it has an entirely different personality than your own. Each of us has an imprisoned conscience in our heads besides “our” own. Scientists even managed in experiments to “talk” do people’s left hemisphere, without their knowledge!

“The possible implications of this are mind-boggling. It suggests that we might all be carrying around in our skulls a mute prisoner with a personality, ambition, and self-awareness quite different from the day-to-day entity we believe ourselves to be.”

Future of the Mind starts to become scary when it shows that mind reading and control may not be science fiction forever. Scientists can today “read” the dreams of a sleeping subject and create an estimated image of what goes on in their minds. Researches also are able to control the behavior of flies and worms emitting magnetic fields and are debating the start of research on simians. This freaks me out. Imagine a government that can punish you for subversive thoughts still in your head.

Like other books from Kaku, Future of the Mind brings a sense of scientific wonder in the reader, in this case towards our brains. Each of us have in our heads a supercomputer that, if we tried to emulate with our current technology, would take several city blocks and a dedicated nuclear plant do cool it. Our brain is awesome. Let’s not waste it.

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