'Dark Benediction' by Walter Miller Jr

A short story collection that deserves its place in the SF Masterworks collection. Miller's short stories focus on character and emotion rather than technology, and so while the imagined futures are quite retro and a bit dated, they still make compelling reading. There is some very memorable imagery which makes the stories feel quite cinematic; I could easily imagine them being adapted into an impressive anthology TV series.

The titular story is a post-apocalypse with some similarities to Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, though with better drawn characters and a far stranger plague. My favourite stories were 'The Big Hunger', a history of human space travel and galactic conquest written in a somewhat biblical style, and 'Conditionally Human', about a man whose job is killing animals who have been artificially granted intelligence through genetic engineering - the story has many layers, touches many subjects, making a very impressive 58 pages.

Subject matter is varied, though is sometimes quite typical of the time period. Two stories explore 1950s anxieties over increasing automation: 'The Darfsteller', which won a Hugo award, about an aging actor who can't move with the times when theatres become automated - while I could tell it was a well-constructed and well-written story, I didn't find it especially engaging. 'Dumb Waiter' is a post-apocalyptic story in which the protagonist explores an abandoned automated city: it's all still functioning and running as normal, but there are no people. 'The Will' is a simple and uplifting time-travel story. 'I, Dreamer' is about a sentient spaceship. 'You Triflin' Skunk!' is a jokey alien invasion tale. 'Anybody else Like me?', about human mutation, packs a surprisingly powerful emotional punch for only being 18 pages. 'Blood Bank' is a far-future space opera.

Two stories are set on Mars: 'Crucifixus Etiam' and 'Big Joe and the Nth Generation'. These were relatively weak, though still entertaining: Mars colonization has been done to death in SF, so the subject feels quite cliche now.

'Vengeance for Nikolai' is set during an invasion of Soviet Russia by American fascists ('blueshirts') who greet each other by saluting and saying, "America first!" 

Anthologies tend to be hit and miss, but I only actively disliked one story here: 'The Lineman', which featured truly appalling misogyny. This is 50s SF, so the gender politics is obviously quite dated: the female characters in most of the stories were badly drawn, and the male characters were often casually misogynist, but 'The Lineman' took it to another level. Minor spoiler: (view spoiler) I do not think this story should have been included.

Overall though, I thoroughly recommend this collection if you're wanting some good retro SF.

I've given the collection a 4 star rating. I rated each of the stories separately as I was reading:

'You Triflin' Skunk' 4/5
'The Will' 4/5
'Anybody else Like me?' 4/5
'Crucifixus Etiam' 3/5
'I, Dreamer' 4/5
'Dumb Waiter' - 4/5
'Blood Bank' - 4/5
'Big Joe and the Nth Generation' - 3/5
'The Big Hunger' - 5/5
'Conditionally Human' - 5/5
'The Darfstellar' - 3/5
'Dark Benediction' - 4/5
'The Lineman' - 1/5
'Vengence for Nikolai' - 3/5

Average rating: 3.64
Average excluding 'The Lineman': 3.85

'The Island of Doctor Moreau' by HG Wells

While simple in terms of plot structure - the protagonist ends up on a strange island where strange things happen - Wells packed a lot of thematic elements into his short 3rd novel. Adam Roberts says in the introduction that the novel is so richly layered it is possible to get too carried away in interpretation; Margaret Atwood listed ten different interpretations in her introduction to another edition. My review focuses on what I think are the three most obvious thematic elements.

The novel is a tale about the dangers of unethical scientific research; Moreau is driven by his research, his attempts to create humans from animals, and cares for nothing else. He is the classic mad scientist, experimenting with lifeforms and indifferent towards the suffering he causes - his operations are carried out sans anesthetic, his home becomes known as the House of Pain. Published in 1896, before animal rights activism really took off, Wells' novel articulates our cultural anxieties about scientific knowledge being pursued unethically, about the suffering of animals in experiments, and remains relevant in our modern world of biological and genetic engineering.

Wells described the book as "an exercise in youthful blasphemy" - it mocks attempts to combine Darwinian evolution with belief in a deity. Moreau is playing God: he is creating imperfect humanoids out of animals, commanding them to resist their animal natures (to uphold 'the Law'), and becoming frustrated and wrathful whenever his imperfect creations do not live up to his high standards. Evolution - 'nature red in tooth and claw' - is a brutal process, full of suffering and death: Moreau the creates his Beast Men through vivisection sans anesthetic, a brutal and painful process. Wells is not kind to Moreau the deity-figure.

And it is about human nature, crafted from the bestial over millennia of evolution. The final chapter is particularly effective on this subject, after the protagonist has returned to civilization:

I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another, still passably human, Beast People, animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that.

The Island of Doctor Moreau is a short novel with a simple plot but compelling symbolism. It has obviously been hugely influential on science fiction and popular culture. I wasn't blown away by it and at times the simplistic plot did bore me - I considered giving it 3 stars rather than 4 - but I'm glad I've finally read it, and would recommend it for a quick read.

'Power Systems' by Noam Chomsky & David Barsamian

 I like Chomsky, but I'm no fanboy.

This is the second book of Chomsky-Barsamian conversations I've read. The first was How the World Works, which I read back in 2014 when I was very, very ignorant about global politics. The content shocked me and made me realise how little I knew.

I came to this collection with more knowledge and was therefore able to be more critical.

Firstly: the positives. The conversational format makes the book very easy to read - I've ended up buying two more Chomsky-Barsamian books for quick, light reading. Chomsky is very knowledgeable: I did learn a lot, and some of his insights made me stop reading, look around for a bit, and think 'Shit, the guy's got a point.' Given how easy it is to read, I would recommend picking it up cheap and blitzing through it. The book is very short and won't take you very long - my edition is 224 pages, only 179 of which is the conversational content, the rest is the notes and index - and it's worthwhile reading to gain some knowledge and understanding.

Now for the negatives.

The conversational format - the book consists of edited interview transcripts - means that Chomsky sometimes goes off on an boring tangent or doesn't answer the question well. A lot of topics are discussed, but none in much depth.

Chomsky has a tendency to state things without proper explanation or citation. To me, the most glaring example was on page 77:

A national health care system would, incidentally, eliminate the deficit, among other things - not that the deficit is all that important.

There is no explanation as to why an American NHS would eliminate the budget deficit, nor is there any citation for this claim: there are 17 pages of citations, but nothing to back this up.

When I bought How the World Works back in 2014, a friend of mine told me (I'm paraphrasing): 'Chomsky's political output is very different to his empirical linguistic work. He knows an awful lot, but doesn't have much understanding of how it all fits together.' Nearly 3 years later I understand this statement.

Chomsky is extremely knowledgeable about the crimes and injustices committed by America and its allies, but he doesn't synthesize this knowledge into a complex understanding of the world: everything comes down to a simplistic Good&Evil narrative. America is an Evil Empire oppressing the world. Perhaps the human mind is too limited to process so much information into a complex global narrative: we all love a compelling Good vs Evil story, possibly a hangover from the old tribal way of life, We the Good Tribe versus Them the Baddies. This worldview can get a bit tiring and repetitive - it is almost the equal opposite of the mainstream American Good&Evil narrative: American the Good Guys spreading the joys of democracy and capitalism around the world. Both narratives are too simplistic. The world is a very complex place.

I came to this book having recently watched a lot of John Pilger documentaries: I highly recommend them; most can be watched for free on Pilger's website. Like Chomsky, Pilger is of the anti-imperialist Left, who oppose Western economic and military imperialism. Like Chomsky, Pilger's view is Manichean: the Evil Western Powers vs The World's Suffering Poor. It is a narrow view, but a very important narrow view because it highlights the crimes of the West and its allies, which should be more well known, better reported, and better understood.

I expect Chomsky and Pilger's Manichean worldview is strengthened by how relatively little-known Western crimes are: their frustration over people being ignorant, and being kept ignorant by a complicit media, feeds back into their outrage about imperialist crimes, making America and its allies seem even more evil. The Internet makes information about these crimes more readily available, but they are still little known. Chomsky and Pilger are both veteran dissidents from before the Internet; they've been outraged about American crimes for a long time.

Conversational Chomsky is worth reading for easy knowledge and insight, despite his flaws and the hit&miss conversational format. I haven't read technical Chomsky yet, though I will probably give Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media a go. The documentaries of John Pilger, who has a very similar worldview to Chomsky, are certainly worth watching.