'Rogue Moon' by Algis Budrys

Another SF Masterwork which didn't impress me very much, though I can see it has some merit and has been influential. Scientists, led by Dr Hawks, are investigating a strange alien artifact on the moon which kills people in grotesque and arbitrary ways. Volunteers explore it using a matter transmitter that creates an almost-identical copy who can go inside to explore a bit before dying, while another copy back on earth remembers what happened and so can try again. The Tom Cruise film 'Edge of Tomorrow' springs to mind, and any other story in which a character dies repeatedly because of some SF gimmick.

The SF aspect of the novel is done reasonably well. Dr Hawks is driven to solve the mysteries of the artifact which kills so indifferently; the machine symbolizes the universe, indifferent to human life. The novel is very much about death: it was originally going to be titled 'The Death Machine'. Characters discuss the deaths of people and the inevitable death of the universe. Cheery stuff.

There is a nice passage describing the artifact:

"Perhaps it's the alien equivalent of a discarded tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it lies across the trail to the beetle's burrow? Does the beetle understand why it is harder to climb to the left or right, inside the can, than it is to follow a straight line? Would the beetle be a fool to assume the human race put the can there to torment it — or an egomaniac to believe the can was manufactured only to mystify it? It would be best for the beetle to study the can in terms of the can's logic, to the limit of the beetle's ability. In that way, at least, the beetle can proceed intelligently. It may even grasp some hint of the can's maker. Any other approach is either folly or madness."

This passage, the sequences set in the artifact, and the novel's bleakness reminded me of Roadside Picnic. As the volunteers explore the artifact using trial and error, passing the bodies of older volunteer-copies, the Stalkers of Roadside Picnic explore the Zones using trial and error, the ruined bodies of earlier stalkers littering the floor. The absent aliens of both novels are indifferent to humanity, and through them we are shown a universe in which humans are tiny and insignificant, grasping at what little knowledge they can.

I preferred Roadside Picnic.

The best I can say about Rogue Moon is that it is an ambitious novel with a great SF concept which is sadly not pulled off very well. A lot of it is just so tedious - I almost gave up on it, but it's a short read so I pushed on. Most of the book is character driven, and the characters are monstrously dull and uninteresting. They spend an awful lot of time making long speeches psychoanalyzing each other and interacting in other extremely boring ways. There's a romantic subplot which is somewhat sweet but really quite unbelievable.

I cannot bring myself to recommend Rogue Moon. The SF concept is good, but there are better novels out there

Theresa May and the Coming Doom

Theresa May said the decision to call a snap election came to her while on a walking holiday. She needed, so the reasoning goes, to strengthen her mandate, and therefore her negotiating hand, for the Brexit talks with Brussells, and to prevent Brexit being resisted by opposition or backbench MPs. The first of these explanations is nonsense: all of the EU country leaders will have mandates to represent their countries' interests, so Theresa's mandate will be nothing special (unless, unreported, EU leaders have been sniggering at her for not actually having been elected herself, for having taken over the party relatively unopposed - the other leadership candidates stepped down before the vote was taken to the members). Yanis Varoufakis says his mistake when dealing with the EU was assuming a large mandate from the Greek people would give him a negotiating advantage: the Brussels bureaucracy neutralizes the democratic mandates of specific nations, so all nations, theoretically but not in practice, are supposed to be equal when deciding the future of the Union. The second is also nonsense: opposition MPs voted overwhelmingly in favour of triggering article 50.

Popular opinion on the left was that the election was called because the Conservative party was under investigation for electoral fraud, been fined the maximum amount, and cases against individual MPs had been passed on to police. If MPs were found guilty, triggering by-elections, public opinion of the party would drop and the Conservatives may have lost their majority. It was also a good time to call the election because the Conservatives were way ahead in the polls, and, so far, whenever the polls have been wrong it has been to Labour's detriment.

There is a more interesting and depressing explanation for the snap election occurring now. Since July 2016 May&Co have been preparing for the Brexit negotiations and coming up with little beyond vacuous soundbites ('Brexit means Brexit!' 'Red, White and Blue Brexit!'). Theresa campaigned for Remain, but has transformed into a hardcore Brexiteer, and perhaps over the past year has realized how complex and difficult Brexit will be.

The projected date for the end of the negotiations is 2019; the next election was supposed to be 2020.

Perhaps May accepted Brexit was going to be a disaster - or, at least, not as good for most of her supporters as they are expecting - and decided to call the election so the next one, five years away, will be in 2022, so the Conservatives have 2 more years of power and, they hope, an overwhelmingly majority so they push through whatever is necessary to deal with the fallout from Brexit being a disaster.

In August 2011, riots erupted across England. Buildings were burnt down. Shops looted. Police were deployed en masse to calm it down. I remember not being able to catch a train because Manchester city centre had been cordoned off. I also remember they were filming 'The Dark Knight Rises' at Wollaton Hall while this was going on, and I wondered when watching it whether the riots had influenced Nolan&Co.

Since 2010, the police budget has been cut each year - we now have fewer police officers per capita than we did in the 1970s. Crime rates are increasing, and the police, like the NHS and other public servies, are overstretched. Home Secretary Amber Rudd has refused to rule out further cuts to the police. I find it easy to imagine a terrible backlash against the government should Brexit be the disaster it is looking increasingly likely to be. I wonder whether the reduced police force would be able to cope.

Theresa May is one of the supervillain MPs whose opinions scare me a little (a lot). She's not a fan of human rights - while campaigning for Remain, she said she liked the EU but would like to get out of the European Convention on Human Rights (which is separate to the EU). The only European country not a member of the ECHR is Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe. Even Russia is a member. Even Putin pretends to care about human rights. We have a Prime Minister who doesn't even pretend.

While Home Secretary she was in charge of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands, which she failed at: net immigration reached record highs. I can imagine she was told to appear tough on immigrants to win votes, hence there were 'Immigrants Go Home!' vans driving around the country - a showy scheme which was incredibly ineffective. The economy has grown rather slowly since 2010, and that is with record immigration increasing the number or workers and spenders - some economists say the Conservatives deliberately let immigration rise so high to cover up how their austerity policies were negatively impacting the economy.

The Conservative narrative for this election is that it is a contest between Theresa May & Her Team versus Jeremy Corbyn & the Coalition of Chaos. The party aspect is being heavily played down, it is like we are being encouraged to vote for a president not a party.

Now, campaigning, she is not meeting the public. She is not answering questions unless they have been pre-vetted, and will not even let journalists hold microphones at events (so it can be switched off if they move off script). She is not being challenged. She is not debating other party leaders. She is hiding from scrutiny and democratic accountability.

Tabloid headlines have been horrible: 'CRUSH THE SABOTEURS', 'ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE', being the most awful. The shameless pro-Tory bias from media outlets has been depressing. The Investigatory Powers Act gave our government the most sweeping surveillance powers in all of the Western world.

My imagination finds it too easy to extrapolate from our contemporary starting point to an even-more-dystopian near future, where the Conservatives have a super majority and can pass whatever they want, where they are not held to account, where opposition to the Dear Leader is almost unheard of, where Brexit is a disaster, where riots occur, where the Conservatives declare a state of emergency and... we become a one party state.

I'm hoping it's just my imagination getting carried away because I've read too much dystopian fiction. I'm not a massive Corbyn fan, though I do like him. I don't think he's going to be PM: Conservative majority is looking quite certain, but we can make sure there is still some opposition to hold them to account, however ineffectual it may be.

In 2004, Conservative Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin (who was in May's Cabinet) allegedly told a private meeting that the NHS would not exist within five years if the Conservatives won a majority. Look at the NHS crisis, 'a humanitarian crisis' according to the Red Cross. Look at the NHS cyber attack - the government decided not to continue paying for Windows XP support, leaving the system vulnerable. Look at the NHS recruitment crisis, fewer new doctors and nurses being trained. The NHS nurses bursary being scrapped. Junior doctors going on strike for the first time in 40 years. This summer, nurses are going on strike for the first time ever. The NHS is being destroyed.

This ended up a lot longer and more desultory than I expected. I need to go now but I would have written more - I need a haircut. Hope you enjoyed reading this; apologies for any spelling errors - I haven't had time to proofread because I really need to go get that haircut.

'The Book of Black Magic' by A.E. Waite

As research for a piece of fiction, I've been reading about European magic. The extant manuscripts of the various Grimoires of Black Magic in the British Museum date from the 15th century onwards, though may have been written earlier. Black magic is strange, or to paraphrase the author of the book I've read, it is a mixture of the grotesque and the imbecilic.

The Grimoires teach that through the glory and power of God, one can summon and control infernal spirits. In popular culture we think of black magic as a godless deal with demons - it is strange to think those who practiced it believed themselves holy. There's a Jewish legend about King Solomon: God gave him the power to control demons, and he used demons to build his temple and help him out whenever he wanted. There are also Christian and Islamic versions of this legend - in the Islamic version, Solomon also has a magic carpet. Many of the Grimoires claim to be based on the magical writings of King Solomon, who shared the secrets of demon-control.

In Jewish mythology, demons are not fallen angels - they are creatures God abandoned bodiless and unfinished at sunset on the 6th day, to mark the importance of ceasing work to rest on the Sabbath. They are not inherently evil, though are jealous and spiteful of humanity's completeness. Thus demons are another of God's creatures on Earth, over which man is supposed to be the ruler, and so in Jewish magic systems the wizard sorcerer chap is hoping for God's assistance in placating one of his subordinate creatures - analogous to praying that your horse will carry you to your destination without rearing up and maiming you.

(I have a separate book on Jewish magic which I have not read yet.)

The Solomon-inspired magic was adapted to a Christian setting and audience. The wizard sorcerer chap calls on the power of God to help him summon and enslave a fallen angel to do his bidding. Jesus commands demons in the gospels (the Pharisees think he is in league with Satan because the demons obey him so quickly), and so a devout Christian should also be able to to command demons with Jesus' support. As the Pharisees thought Jesus was bad for his command over the demons, the Church authorities think the sorcerers are evil for their command over the demons. So the reasoning goes.

(While most Grimoires claim to originate with King Solomon, a few others claim to be the work of a Pope, who was holy enough to have been taught the magical arts by an angel of light.)

Most of the rituals concern personal and material gain: summoning a demon so it can lead you to treasure, or make a woman love you, or harm an enemy. Very cliche and selfish objectives. Not very holy. I was trying to imagine the sort of person who - hundreds of years ago - would have turned to such rituals. Poor, lonely, awkward, and yet with an ego big enough to think they were holy and great enough to get God's assistance in enslaving a fallen angel. I pictured a modern-day Internet Troll living in the pre-modern world.

In preparation for a ritual, the sorcerer is supposed to fast, refrain from social contact with other humans, and sleep as little as possible for so many days, presumably so by the time they carried out the ritual their mental state was sufficiently ruined hallucinations came very easily. Specific prayers must be repeated throughout the fasting days, and at the sorcerer must bathe in holy water and bless every item to be used in the ritual - his robes (white linen, embroidered with certain symbols depending on which ritual is being performed), the incense, the parchment or vellum, the candles, the magic circle, etc.

There is only one extant ritual which calls for a blood sacrifice for the sake of blood sacrifice. I'll spare you the details, but it involves killing both a black hen and a young lamb. A few others feature human body parts in their reagents list -
the author notes that human bodies would have been easyish to find back then, when mortality was high, life expectancy low, and the death sentence was a punishment for many crimes.

Curiously, the cliche of sorcerers sacrificing a goat as part of their rituals comes from a misunderstanding: the Grimoires teach that the magic circle should be drawn on virgin kidskin which has been carefully prepared. Sorcerers could not rely on the local tannery for this, and so would prepare their own. Obviously, since the goat's tanned hide was to be used in the ritual, the sorcerer would bless the goat repeatedly - before, during, and after slaughtering it - and so to any casual observer, it would look like blood sacrifice for the sake of blood sacrifice.

In case it's not obvious, I think this magic stuff is bollocks. At best a historical curiosity, at worst a way of seriously damaging your mental health. I tried to imagine how I would react to it, living hundreds of years ago. I found myself feeling sympathetic towards the Inquisition. If your worldview takes the existence of evil demons as a fact, and your holy books warn against greed and lust and malice, it is so easy to imagine these Grimoires having been forged by demons to trick the poor, lonely, and egotistical down a dark path. They are like the pre-modern equivalent of scam e-mails, promising 'EARN $5000 PER DAY - SUMMON A TREASURE-FINDING DEMON' or 'THE ONE TRICK WOMEN CAN'T RESIST - INFERNAL SPIRITS WOO 4 U', but rather than making you lose the contents of your bank account, you lose your soul too.