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2015 In Books Part 2: Some Things About The Contents of Books
So here's the second half third of my year-in-books follow up, in which I actually attempt to wrtie short reviews of some of the books from this year. Let's find out how "short" is "short"!
1. Absolute Worst Book of the Year: The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya by Tanigawa Nagaru, the only book that got a fully-earned one-star rating on my Goodreads this year.
I picked it up because I'd seen S1 of the anime and liked it, and I'd heard about light novels as a genre, and I wanted to try one and see what they were like. Plus I figured it would be a fun read. It was not.
There were some writing/structural/pacing type issues that made it hard for me to get into it, but I'm willing to give some of that a pass as either translation issues or genre conventions I'm not familiar with.
What I'm not giving it a pass on is the fact that at least half the plot, and 90% of the "humor", was based around a character who is emotionally and physically a teenage girl being sexually harassed and assaulted and abused until she has a total breakdown in public, and that we were expected to find this funny and light-hearted because she has big boobs so what can you expect, eh.
I stuck it out to the end out of sheer bloody-mindedness and the spark of a hope that Kyon would eventually realize that this was bad and should stop, but that did not really ever happen. So much nope.
2. Absolute Best Find of the Year: Accounts of the J. W. Gardner Family, which is exactly what it sounds like: it's a little leatherbound notebook that contains a day-by-day listing of what the J. W. Gardner family (of somewhere between NYC and Albany) paid for out of household expenses between the years of 1883 and 1892.
I bought it for $3 at a yard sale from a guy who cleaned junk out of unoccupied houses (along with three marbled composition notebooks - no, actually bound in hand-marbled paper! - with John Gardner's schoolwork c. the 1830s-1860s in them). They are so cool. You wouldn't think it would be that much fun to just read an account book, but the glimpse into their lives is so great and you just want to keep reading - did they keep getting that magazine subscription? How late did he wait to buy Christmas presents this year? How many pairs of tapping boots will young Gertie go through?
I really want to, a, get all the data into a spreadsheet so I can play with it and share it with you all, and, b, narrow down where the family lived and who they were in hopes that I can donate the notebooks to a local historical society or something.
Ten More Books From This Year That I'm Still Thinking About
...I'm leaving out ones I've already rambled about at length on here. And these aren't necessarily the best books I've read - some of them were not very good books - but they're the ones that have made the biggest impact on me and that I keep mentioning to people.
1. Welcome to Mars by James Blish
This is a hard-SF novel about a guy who gets marooned alone on Mars and has to science his way to survival until the rescue ship can come. If that sounds familiar, well. You know. It's pretty different from The Martian, though. The guy in question is an all-American teenager and genius who invents an antigravity drive, takes off for a weekend trip to Mars in a spaceship he built in the barn, and then gets stuck when a rough landing breaks a part he can't replace. It's a YA novel, and it was written in the 1960s, so Dolph gets a much kinder Mars than Mark got, and the science is generally sillier.
The main difference though is that Dolph is not alone on Mars - the only person on Earth who knew anything about his invention was his girlfriend Nanette, who is just as genius at engineering as he is but not as knowledgeable because nobody before Dolph had ever thought she might be interested. So when he didn't come back as planned, she got his prototype in working order, packed up everything she thought might help him fix it, and took off after him.
...she had a rough landing too and broke the replacement parts, and unfortunately with the prototype now on Mars nobody back on Earth could figure out how to get to him. But they made do and survived until Dolph's mom (also an engineering genius, working for NASA) rediscovered it out of sheer desperation and rescued him. Because what good is a story about an all-American boy unless he gets rescued by his girlfriend and then his mom, amirite or amirite?
Anyway, this is not exactly a profound book, but I read it from the library twice or so, and then could never find it again, and yet it stuck in the back of my head all these years (decades at this point!) until I finally could re-read it, desperately hoping it would still be good. It's definitely not bad if you like 1960's juvenile SF! But what I didn't realize until I re-read it from this end is the extent to which I 100% imprinted on Dolph and Nanette as my ideal of a heterosexual relationship. They respect each other! Trust each other! Care about each other and care for each other! Are committed to each other! Support each other when they screw up and celebrate when they succeed! Help each other be better and larger people! Communicate with each other and teach each other and build things together!
...and most of the rest of the time pretty much ignore each other's existence because why would you want to be around other people all the time, people need space and alone time and also just get distracted sometimes and forget they are dating someone? Also there is science to do. Also they are physically comfortable with each other but have like 0 sexual attraction as far as I can tell and spend two Martian sols from age 16-20 literally living in a shipping container together and kissed exactly once.
Doesn't that sound like the perfect relationship? It sounds so great. I am writing ridiculous Dolph/Nanette drawerfic about how Nanette having a boyfriend who loves her but isn't in love with her is the perfect solution to her life, drawerfic that nobody else will ever want to read but that is okay because Dolph and Nanette belong to eleven-year-old me.
2. Australian Aboriginal Kinship : an introductory handbook by Laurent Dousset
This is a book about moiety. You know, like in sedoretu AUs? Yeah, that kind of moiety. Le Guin was an anthropologist: she didn't make up the idea of a society where everyone is divided into moiety based on who their mother is, and moiety is just as important as gender or age. (As far as I know she did make up the part with the four-way marriages, but then again I could be wrong.)
There are actually quite a few real cultures that have a concept of moiety, but the largest concentration is among indigenous cultures of Australia, so I thought if I was ever going to actually write sedoretu fic (...or write a meta post to educate the people I've seen talking like moiety is a crazy SF idea that could never work in RL) I should, you know, read up on it.
Australian Aboriginal Kinship: An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert had the advantage that it was available free via the author's academia.org page, but also has the advantage that it was not written as an academic study of kinship systems: it was written in cooperation with some of the people of the Western Desert in order to help White people learn how to interact in proper society.
If you're interested in writing sedoretu, or for that matter A/B/O or D/s or any other AU that adds other social divisions alongside gender, or for that matter any SF societies that you don't want to be just blatantly based on your own, I definitely recommend this book.
It's not an easy read - it starts you at the beginning with the concepts of what kinship is and just how many different ways different cultures think of kinship and the super-basics of what you need to know about how Western anthropologists think about kinship. And this is. Really difficult to get through, especially if you're starting square without having ever thought about alternate kinship systems (or not having relearned the terminology since that one class years ago, like me). But it's totally worth it. Especially if you ever want to be able to understand (or write) cultures that aren't built on exactly the same foundations as your own.
After that, it moves on to the specifics of the Aboriginal cultures which were really fascinating. What I find myself thinking about more than the moiety system, though, was the general picture it gave of how these societies work as societies. They're desert hunter-gatherers with really low population densities, and low absolute populations as well, so that, for example, a lot of the languages involved have only ever had a few hundred speakers.
And yet, the way these societies work is not at all how I would have imagined before reading it. Because it's a book about kinship, the view we get of the cultures involved is all about interconnections; the world it paints is one where, yes, you might spend most of your life what we'd think of as spatially isolated - alone on gathering trips, or camping with just a few close relations several days' travel from anyone else - and yet the lives of the people are all about connections with other people; through language, myth, land, and, yes, the complex kinship systems, which means that they can meet basically anyone and know that they are a close relation and how they fit within their social networks.
Anyway. I am not going to explain it well in a short review, read the book.
3. Bronze Age economics: The beginnings of political economies ed. by Timothy Earle
This is a fairly misleading title in that none of the societies discussed are actually what I'd think of as in "the bronze age": it's a collection of archeological/anthropological essays about the political and economic organization of societies that are fairly complex and stratified and centralized but do not have the technological advances that most people would associate with a large centralized state, such as, for example, wheeled vehicles, money, and writing.
Most of the essays focus on the pre-White-conquest Hawaiian and Incan empires, and then there's a little bit about early Scandinavia as well, which is why I thought I was reading the book, but the Scandinavian stuff turned out to be the least interesting. So, how do you have a centralized, authoritarian bureaucracy with no writing to keep records? How do you manage complex imperial economies with no concept of money? How do hierarchical societies with huge wealth disparities maintain themselves on a small group of islands with really limited land and access to relatively few raw materials?
A lot of the theory stuff in the book is probably outdated and I didn't necessarily buy it all anyway, but the views into how these societies functioned in ways we would find as really familiar in a modern state, without having (or, indeed, feeling the lack of) things like writing and money were amazing and I am going to be writing a lot of high fantasies with moneyless and nonliterate empires. (I have the book Debt: the First 5000 Years waiting at the top of my to-read pile once my catchup reading is done.)
(Mind you, under it are about ten paleontology books because gorgonopsians and ediacarans, yes.)
4. Legends of Le Détroit by Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin
This is another public domain ebook, readable via archive.org: Legends of Le Detroit. I started reading it, iirc, because the tag wranglers were trying to research a super-obscure folklore thing somebody tagged on an SPN fic, but then I actually got into it, so I kept going. It's a collection of folklore and historical anecdotes (most of them with a supernatural aspect) written in 1884, so it is of course plenty racist and sexist and et cetera. It's also written before Henry Ford built any automobiles, so it's written from a Detroit without any of the things most people today think of as Detroit. But the main reason it's sticking with me is that most of the stories date from Detroit in its very early days, the first two or three generations after white people showed up and renamed the land. So this is a view (from only two or three generations later than that) of the storytelling and narrative creation of a colony from its beginnings to the point at which it's securely a nation. And that's a view that was very interesting to get, speaking both as a person who is interested in writing stories about fictional settlements, and as a person who lives on colonized land in a country that is collectively really invested in forgetting as much as possible of the details of that early history of taking the land and how it was justified. So here is a mythologizing of it from an era that was less committed to the forgetting.
5. Rockets, missiles, and men in space by Willy Ley
I bought this because I'd read some of Willy Ley's cryptozoology-related writings and knew I liked his style, and then it sat on my shelf for a couple years, and then I read a review of the first edition in a 1951 volume of Analog magazine and decided to actually read the thing finally (Mine is not the 1951 edition, it's the 1969 edition that talks very hopefully about how the Apollo program will reach the moon any day now, which seemed like a great time to pick up the narrative from.)
It's a really good book - dense at times, but it covers a LOT of information, and does a really good job of explaining it to laypeople without oversimplifying. It starts with a history of rocketry and space travel and speculation about rocketry and space travel from prehistory up to the nineteenth century, and then going into much greater detail with the beginnings of modern rocket science in the 19th century. In the early 1930s it went into first-person as Willy Ley himself helped found the club in Berlin that did a lot of early research on large rockets. Ley got out of Germany before the War started, but he knew all the German researchers, so he can then cover the Nazi rocketry research in really close detail, and move seamlessly into the post-war American space program. At the time the book was published, he could still talk in fair detail about every single human artifact that had ever left the atmosphere.
Anyway, I talked about how this book deepened my understanding of technological change in my post on steampunk, and I also understand rocketry and orbital mechanics and their histories a lot better, but there's another thing it fundamentally shifted in my head, that's been dawning on me sort of more slowly, which is: the fear that gripped the world in the Cold War arms race wasn't because of the development nuclear bombs.
Which now that I have realized it seems obvious? But my memory of the Cold War as a living threat is of the very tail end of it: my first actual related memory is the Berlin Wall coming down. So I wasn't raised to fear Russia deciding to attack the US: I was raised in fear of a stupid mistake or two causing worldwide nuclear winter and wiping out life on Earth.
Which meant that a lot of the stuff about the history of the Cold War never really made sense to me, the way the stories were told: like, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why the heck were we so worried about missiles being in Cuba when the whole point was that one little spat somewhere could start up annihilation everywhere? Who cares about Cuba? I mean, more detailed stuff I got later about how exactly the technologies had developed and what the balance of power was made it make a little more sense to me (as much as that could ever make sense) but still, I thought, nukes are nukes whether they're in Cuba or Siberia.
It didn't actually occur to me until I read this book that actually, militarily speaking, nukes on their own aren't that scary. If you just have a nuclear bomb on your military base, it's not going to be worth much strategically. A nuke on a hypersonic bomber or intercontinental ballistic missile, that's when it gets scary. But - what I have never seen pointed out in so many words - an ICBM or hypersonic bomber was already scary enough even without a nuke on it. Sure, you can't poison the whole planet with conventional explosives, but you can still bomb the crap out of the enemy's cities. And that? That's what had the global powers scared shitless at the start of the cold war. It's what still has them scared shitless now. WMDs are a nice sound bite, but the thing that actually overturned all of war and politics at the end of WWII, and still has everything in a total mess seventy years later, is this:
A nation can no longer defend territory.
Up until WWII, all European military strategy for millennia really had been based on the idea of drawing up lines around territory that was controlled by a government, and preventing the enemy from crossing those lines, and if the enemy made it over the line, you moved the line back and retrenched, or you surrendered and negotiated a new line. People living in the areas the lines were moving over were screwed, but there was still the concept of a safe center that was being defended, and could be defended. During WWII, advances in aircraft and the development of the V1 rockets made it abundantly clear that any enemy who wanted to could leapfrog your lines and wreak havoc behind them. Even if you could fight an air war, the air war was not going to be fought based on defined territorial boundaries. There was no safe center. And this was going to keep being more and more a part of war and all pre-existing military and geopolitical strategies just went out the window.
And everybody panicked and flailed around and started stockpiling nuclear ICBMs, as you do when all the things that used to make you feel safe suddenly go away. But it wasn't the nukes that changed everything: it was the missiles.
In 1932 Stanley Baldwin made a speech in the British Parliament called A Fear For The Future which is better remembered, when it's remembered at all, as "The Bomber Will Always Get Through", making the argument that war as Europe knew it was broken because nations now had the air capacity to bomb each others' civilian centers regardless of ground defenses, and that even just the existence of civilian aircraft meant there could be death from the skies anywhere, and therefore we should probably stop doing wars.
Apparently people spent a lot of time arguing that he was wrong, because he was talking about bombs on planes and missiles ended up being worse, or because obviously we can't stop doing wars that would just be silly, or whatever. But yeah. From this end, he's stating the obvious. War as they knew it before the 1930s is broken beyond recognition and will never work again.
And yet - now that I've noticed that - I look around me at the current generation who are screwing up geopolitics, the people a generation or two older than me - and it's super-obvious that they're still just flailing around terrified at the idea that they can't defend a territory anymore. And that not only has nobody yet figured out how to make the new kind of war work, but nobody in the militarily active global powers is even trying that hard, because they're too busy trying to pretend that one day they will discover how to make the old kind of war work so that they can feel like they have a safe center again.
I grew up in a world where global nuclear annihilation and air strikes hitting civilian targets and long-range missiles and terrorist bombings and remote-controlled death from above and, honestly, even the Death Star, were just taken for granted as how war happens. Obviously if there is a war with a country that has resources anything like the US's, there will be no 'front lines' and everyone is at risk of sudden death. It hadn't occurred to me until the last couple months that all the old white dudes who are currently making all the blatantly obviously stupid foreign policy and military choices, and the old white dudes voting for them, are people who still cannot bear to imagine living in the world that I was born to, and are too busy trying to figure out how to defend their territory, like little screaming chipmunks, to bother to learn how to function in the world that actually exists now. And yet now that I've realized that's what the disconnect is, I can't stop noticing it every time I accidentally listen to the news.
(Anyway, most of that was not what the book I'm currently reviewing was about, it's just stuff I never noticed until I read a book on these particular topics written at exactly the point in history when this one was written.)
...and this is going to be p. 2 of 3 because short reviews. haha, hahaha. Short.
1. Absolute Worst Book of the Year: The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya by Tanigawa Nagaru, the only book that got a fully-earned one-star rating on my Goodreads this year.
I picked it up because I'd seen S1 of the anime and liked it, and I'd heard about light novels as a genre, and I wanted to try one and see what they were like. Plus I figured it would be a fun read. It was not.
There were some writing/structural/pacing type issues that made it hard for me to get into it, but I'm willing to give some of that a pass as either translation issues or genre conventions I'm not familiar with.
What I'm not giving it a pass on is the fact that at least half the plot, and 90% of the "humor", was based around a character who is emotionally and physically a teenage girl being sexually harassed and assaulted and abused until she has a total breakdown in public, and that we were expected to find this funny and light-hearted because she has big boobs so what can you expect, eh.
I stuck it out to the end out of sheer bloody-mindedness and the spark of a hope that Kyon would eventually realize that this was bad and should stop, but that did not really ever happen. So much nope.
2. Absolute Best Find of the Year: Accounts of the J. W. Gardner Family, which is exactly what it sounds like: it's a little leatherbound notebook that contains a day-by-day listing of what the J. W. Gardner family (of somewhere between NYC and Albany) paid for out of household expenses between the years of 1883 and 1892.
I bought it for $3 at a yard sale from a guy who cleaned junk out of unoccupied houses (along with three marbled composition notebooks - no, actually bound in hand-marbled paper! - with John Gardner's schoolwork c. the 1830s-1860s in them). They are so cool. You wouldn't think it would be that much fun to just read an account book, but the glimpse into their lives is so great and you just want to keep reading - did they keep getting that magazine subscription? How late did he wait to buy Christmas presents this year? How many pairs of tapping boots will young Gertie go through?
I really want to, a, get all the data into a spreadsheet so I can play with it and share it with you all, and, b, narrow down where the family lived and who they were in hopes that I can donate the notebooks to a local historical society or something.
Ten More Books From This Year That I'm Still Thinking About
...I'm leaving out ones I've already rambled about at length on here. And these aren't necessarily the best books I've read - some of them were not very good books - but they're the ones that have made the biggest impact on me and that I keep mentioning to people.
1. Welcome to Mars by James Blish
This is a hard-SF novel about a guy who gets marooned alone on Mars and has to science his way to survival until the rescue ship can come. If that sounds familiar, well. You know. It's pretty different from The Martian, though. The guy in question is an all-American teenager and genius who invents an antigravity drive, takes off for a weekend trip to Mars in a spaceship he built in the barn, and then gets stuck when a rough landing breaks a part he can't replace. It's a YA novel, and it was written in the 1960s, so Dolph gets a much kinder Mars than Mark got, and the science is generally sillier.
The main difference though is that Dolph is not alone on Mars - the only person on Earth who knew anything about his invention was his girlfriend Nanette, who is just as genius at engineering as he is but not as knowledgeable because nobody before Dolph had ever thought she might be interested. So when he didn't come back as planned, she got his prototype in working order, packed up everything she thought might help him fix it, and took off after him.
...she had a rough landing too and broke the replacement parts, and unfortunately with the prototype now on Mars nobody back on Earth could figure out how to get to him. But they made do and survived until Dolph's mom (also an engineering genius, working for NASA) rediscovered it out of sheer desperation and rescued him. Because what good is a story about an all-American boy unless he gets rescued by his girlfriend and then his mom, amirite or amirite?
Anyway, this is not exactly a profound book, but I read it from the library twice or so, and then could never find it again, and yet it stuck in the back of my head all these years (decades at this point!) until I finally could re-read it, desperately hoping it would still be good. It's definitely not bad if you like 1960's juvenile SF! But what I didn't realize until I re-read it from this end is the extent to which I 100% imprinted on Dolph and Nanette as my ideal of a heterosexual relationship. They respect each other! Trust each other! Care about each other and care for each other! Are committed to each other! Support each other when they screw up and celebrate when they succeed! Help each other be better and larger people! Communicate with each other and teach each other and build things together!
...and most of the rest of the time pretty much ignore each other's existence because why would you want to be around other people all the time, people need space and alone time and also just get distracted sometimes and forget they are dating someone? Also there is science to do. Also they are physically comfortable with each other but have like 0 sexual attraction as far as I can tell and spend two Martian sols from age 16-20 literally living in a shipping container together and kissed exactly once.
Doesn't that sound like the perfect relationship? It sounds so great. I am writing ridiculous Dolph/Nanette drawerfic about how Nanette having a boyfriend who loves her but isn't in love with her is the perfect solution to her life, drawerfic that nobody else will ever want to read but that is okay because Dolph and Nanette belong to eleven-year-old me.
2. Australian Aboriginal Kinship : an introductory handbook by Laurent Dousset
This is a book about moiety. You know, like in sedoretu AUs? Yeah, that kind of moiety. Le Guin was an anthropologist: she didn't make up the idea of a society where everyone is divided into moiety based on who their mother is, and moiety is just as important as gender or age. (As far as I know she did make up the part with the four-way marriages, but then again I could be wrong.)
There are actually quite a few real cultures that have a concept of moiety, but the largest concentration is among indigenous cultures of Australia, so I thought if I was ever going to actually write sedoretu fic (...or write a meta post to educate the people I've seen talking like moiety is a crazy SF idea that could never work in RL) I should, you know, read up on it.
Australian Aboriginal Kinship: An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert had the advantage that it was available free via the author's academia.org page, but also has the advantage that it was not written as an academic study of kinship systems: it was written in cooperation with some of the people of the Western Desert in order to help White people learn how to interact in proper society.
If you're interested in writing sedoretu, or for that matter A/B/O or D/s or any other AU that adds other social divisions alongside gender, or for that matter any SF societies that you don't want to be just blatantly based on your own, I definitely recommend this book.
It's not an easy read - it starts you at the beginning with the concepts of what kinship is and just how many different ways different cultures think of kinship and the super-basics of what you need to know about how Western anthropologists think about kinship. And this is. Really difficult to get through, especially if you're starting square without having ever thought about alternate kinship systems (or not having relearned the terminology since that one class years ago, like me). But it's totally worth it. Especially if you ever want to be able to understand (or write) cultures that aren't built on exactly the same foundations as your own.
After that, it moves on to the specifics of the Aboriginal cultures which were really fascinating. What I find myself thinking about more than the moiety system, though, was the general picture it gave of how these societies work as societies. They're desert hunter-gatherers with really low population densities, and low absolute populations as well, so that, for example, a lot of the languages involved have only ever had a few hundred speakers.
And yet, the way these societies work is not at all how I would have imagined before reading it. Because it's a book about kinship, the view we get of the cultures involved is all about interconnections; the world it paints is one where, yes, you might spend most of your life what we'd think of as spatially isolated - alone on gathering trips, or camping with just a few close relations several days' travel from anyone else - and yet the lives of the people are all about connections with other people; through language, myth, land, and, yes, the complex kinship systems, which means that they can meet basically anyone and know that they are a close relation and how they fit within their social networks.
Anyway. I am not going to explain it well in a short review, read the book.
3. Bronze Age economics: The beginnings of political economies ed. by Timothy Earle
This is a fairly misleading title in that none of the societies discussed are actually what I'd think of as in "the bronze age": it's a collection of archeological/anthropological essays about the political and economic organization of societies that are fairly complex and stratified and centralized but do not have the technological advances that most people would associate with a large centralized state, such as, for example, wheeled vehicles, money, and writing.
Most of the essays focus on the pre-White-conquest Hawaiian and Incan empires, and then there's a little bit about early Scandinavia as well, which is why I thought I was reading the book, but the Scandinavian stuff turned out to be the least interesting. So, how do you have a centralized, authoritarian bureaucracy with no writing to keep records? How do you manage complex imperial economies with no concept of money? How do hierarchical societies with huge wealth disparities maintain themselves on a small group of islands with really limited land and access to relatively few raw materials?
A lot of the theory stuff in the book is probably outdated and I didn't necessarily buy it all anyway, but the views into how these societies functioned in ways we would find as really familiar in a modern state, without having (or, indeed, feeling the lack of) things like writing and money were amazing and I am going to be writing a lot of high fantasies with moneyless and nonliterate empires. (I have the book Debt: the First 5000 Years waiting at the top of my to-read pile once my catchup reading is done.)
(Mind you, under it are about ten paleontology books because gorgonopsians and ediacarans, yes.)
4. Legends of Le Détroit by Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin
This is another public domain ebook, readable via archive.org: Legends of Le Detroit. I started reading it, iirc, because the tag wranglers were trying to research a super-obscure folklore thing somebody tagged on an SPN fic, but then I actually got into it, so I kept going. It's a collection of folklore and historical anecdotes (most of them with a supernatural aspect) written in 1884, so it is of course plenty racist and sexist and et cetera. It's also written before Henry Ford built any automobiles, so it's written from a Detroit without any of the things most people today think of as Detroit. But the main reason it's sticking with me is that most of the stories date from Detroit in its very early days, the first two or three generations after white people showed up and renamed the land. So this is a view (from only two or three generations later than that) of the storytelling and narrative creation of a colony from its beginnings to the point at which it's securely a nation. And that's a view that was very interesting to get, speaking both as a person who is interested in writing stories about fictional settlements, and as a person who lives on colonized land in a country that is collectively really invested in forgetting as much as possible of the details of that early history of taking the land and how it was justified. So here is a mythologizing of it from an era that was less committed to the forgetting.
5. Rockets, missiles, and men in space by Willy Ley
I bought this because I'd read some of Willy Ley's cryptozoology-related writings and knew I liked his style, and then it sat on my shelf for a couple years, and then I read a review of the first edition in a 1951 volume of Analog magazine and decided to actually read the thing finally (Mine is not the 1951 edition, it's the 1969 edition that talks very hopefully about how the Apollo program will reach the moon any day now, which seemed like a great time to pick up the narrative from.)
It's a really good book - dense at times, but it covers a LOT of information, and does a really good job of explaining it to laypeople without oversimplifying. It starts with a history of rocketry and space travel and speculation about rocketry and space travel from prehistory up to the nineteenth century, and then going into much greater detail with the beginnings of modern rocket science in the 19th century. In the early 1930s it went into first-person as Willy Ley himself helped found the club in Berlin that did a lot of early research on large rockets. Ley got out of Germany before the War started, but he knew all the German researchers, so he can then cover the Nazi rocketry research in really close detail, and move seamlessly into the post-war American space program. At the time the book was published, he could still talk in fair detail about every single human artifact that had ever left the atmosphere.
Anyway, I talked about how this book deepened my understanding of technological change in my post on steampunk, and I also understand rocketry and orbital mechanics and their histories a lot better, but there's another thing it fundamentally shifted in my head, that's been dawning on me sort of more slowly, which is: the fear that gripped the world in the Cold War arms race wasn't because of the development nuclear bombs.
Which now that I have realized it seems obvious? But my memory of the Cold War as a living threat is of the very tail end of it: my first actual related memory is the Berlin Wall coming down. So I wasn't raised to fear Russia deciding to attack the US: I was raised in fear of a stupid mistake or two causing worldwide nuclear winter and wiping out life on Earth.
Which meant that a lot of the stuff about the history of the Cold War never really made sense to me, the way the stories were told: like, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why the heck were we so worried about missiles being in Cuba when the whole point was that one little spat somewhere could start up annihilation everywhere? Who cares about Cuba? I mean, more detailed stuff I got later about how exactly the technologies had developed and what the balance of power was made it make a little more sense to me (as much as that could ever make sense) but still, I thought, nukes are nukes whether they're in Cuba or Siberia.
It didn't actually occur to me until I read this book that actually, militarily speaking, nukes on their own aren't that scary. If you just have a nuclear bomb on your military base, it's not going to be worth much strategically. A nuke on a hypersonic bomber or intercontinental ballistic missile, that's when it gets scary. But - what I have never seen pointed out in so many words - an ICBM or hypersonic bomber was already scary enough even without a nuke on it. Sure, you can't poison the whole planet with conventional explosives, but you can still bomb the crap out of the enemy's cities. And that? That's what had the global powers scared shitless at the start of the cold war. It's what still has them scared shitless now. WMDs are a nice sound bite, but the thing that actually overturned all of war and politics at the end of WWII, and still has everything in a total mess seventy years later, is this:
A nation can no longer defend territory.
Up until WWII, all European military strategy for millennia really had been based on the idea of drawing up lines around territory that was controlled by a government, and preventing the enemy from crossing those lines, and if the enemy made it over the line, you moved the line back and retrenched, or you surrendered and negotiated a new line. People living in the areas the lines were moving over were screwed, but there was still the concept of a safe center that was being defended, and could be defended. During WWII, advances in aircraft and the development of the V1 rockets made it abundantly clear that any enemy who wanted to could leapfrog your lines and wreak havoc behind them. Even if you could fight an air war, the air war was not going to be fought based on defined territorial boundaries. There was no safe center. And this was going to keep being more and more a part of war and all pre-existing military and geopolitical strategies just went out the window.
And everybody panicked and flailed around and started stockpiling nuclear ICBMs, as you do when all the things that used to make you feel safe suddenly go away. But it wasn't the nukes that changed everything: it was the missiles.
In 1932 Stanley Baldwin made a speech in the British Parliament called A Fear For The Future which is better remembered, when it's remembered at all, as "The Bomber Will Always Get Through", making the argument that war as Europe knew it was broken because nations now had the air capacity to bomb each others' civilian centers regardless of ground defenses, and that even just the existence of civilian aircraft meant there could be death from the skies anywhere, and therefore we should probably stop doing wars.
Apparently people spent a lot of time arguing that he was wrong, because he was talking about bombs on planes and missiles ended up being worse, or because obviously we can't stop doing wars that would just be silly, or whatever. But yeah. From this end, he's stating the obvious. War as they knew it before the 1930s is broken beyond recognition and will never work again.
And yet - now that I've noticed that - I look around me at the current generation who are screwing up geopolitics, the people a generation or two older than me - and it's super-obvious that they're still just flailing around terrified at the idea that they can't defend a territory anymore. And that not only has nobody yet figured out how to make the new kind of war work, but nobody in the militarily active global powers is even trying that hard, because they're too busy trying to pretend that one day they will discover how to make the old kind of war work so that they can feel like they have a safe center again.
I grew up in a world where global nuclear annihilation and air strikes hitting civilian targets and long-range missiles and terrorist bombings and remote-controlled death from above and, honestly, even the Death Star, were just taken for granted as how war happens. Obviously if there is a war with a country that has resources anything like the US's, there will be no 'front lines' and everyone is at risk of sudden death. It hadn't occurred to me until the last couple months that all the old white dudes who are currently making all the blatantly obviously stupid foreign policy and military choices, and the old white dudes voting for them, are people who still cannot bear to imagine living in the world that I was born to, and are too busy trying to figure out how to defend their territory, like little screaming chipmunks, to bother to learn how to function in the world that actually exists now. And yet now that I've realized that's what the disconnect is, I can't stop noticing it every time I accidentally listen to the news.
(Anyway, most of that was not what the book I'm currently reviewing was about, it's just stuff I never noticed until I read a book on these particular topics written at exactly the point in history when this one was written.)
...and this is going to be p. 2 of 3 because short reviews. haha, hahaha. Short.
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