July 2017
- Segrè, Gino and Bettina Hoerlin. The Pope of Physics. New York: Henry Holt, 2016. ISBN 978-1-62779-005-5.
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By the start of the 20th century, the field of physics had
bifurcated into theoretical and experimental specialties. While
theorists and experimenters were acquainted with the same
fundamentals and collaborated, with theorists suggesting
phenomena to be explored in experiments and experimenters
providing hard data upon which theorists could build their
models, rarely did one individual do breakthrough work in both
theory and experiment. One outstanding exception was Enrico
Fermi, whose numerous achievements seemed to jump effortlessly
between theory and experiment.
Fermi was born in 1901 to a middle class family in Rome,
the youngest of three children born in consecutive years. As was
common at the time, Enrico and
his brother Giulio were sent to be wet-nursed and raised by
a farm family outside Rome and only returned to live with
their parents when two and a half years old. His father was
a division head in the state railway and his mother taught
elementary school. Neither
parent had attended university, but hoped all of their children
would have the opportunity. All were enrolled in schools
which concentrated on the traditional curriculum of Latin,
Greek, and literature in those languages and Italian. Fermi
was attracted to mathematics and science, but little
instruction was available to him in those fields.
At age thirteen, the young Fermi made the acquaintance of Adolfo
Amidei, an engineer who worked with his father. Amidei began to
loan the lad mathematics and science books, which Fermi
devoured—often working out solutions to problems which Amidei
was unable to solve. Within a year, studying entirely on his
own, he had mastered geometry and calculus. In 1915, Fermi
bought a used
book, Elementorum Physicæ
Mathematica, at a flea market in Rome. Published in 1830
and written entirely in Latin, it was a 900 page compendium
covering mathematical physics of that era. By that time, he was
completely fluent in the language and the mathematics used in
the abundant equations, and worked his way through the entire
text. As the authors note, “Not only was Fermi the only
twentieth-century physics genius to be entirely self-taught, he
surely must be the only one whose first acquaintance with the
subject was through a book in Latin.”
At sixteen, Fermi skipped the final year of high school, concluding
it had nothing more to teach him, and with Amidei's encouragement,
sat for a competitive examination for a place at the
elite Sculoa Normale Superiore, which provided a complete
scholarship including room and board to the winners. He
ranked first in all of the examinations and left home to
study in Pisa. Despite his talent for and knowledge of
mathematics, he chose physics as his major—he had always
been fascinated by mechanisms and experiments, and looked
forward to working with them in his career. Italy, at the
time a leader in mathematics, was a backwater in
physics. The university in Pisa had only one physics
professor who, besides having already retired from research,
had knowledge in the field not much greater than Fermi's own.
Once again, this time within the walls of a university,
Fermi would teach himself, taking advantage of the university's
well-equipped library. He taught himself German and English in
addition to Italian and French (in which he was already fluent)
in order to read scientific publications. The library subscribed
to the German
journal Zeitschrift für
Physik, one of the most prestigious sources for
contemporary research, and Fermi was probably the
only person to read it there. In 1922, after completing a thesis on
X-rays and having already published three scientific papers, two
on X-rays and one on general relativity (introducing what are
now called Fermi
coordinates, the first of many topics in physics which would bear
his name), he received his doctorate in physics,
magna cum laude. Just
twenty-one, he had his academic credential, published work
to his name, and the attention of prominent researchers
aware of his talent. What he lacked was the prospect of
a job in his chosen field.
Returning to Rome, Fermi came to the attention of Orso Mario
Corbino, a physics professor and politician who had become a
Senator of the Kingdom and appointed minister of public
education. Corbino's ambition was to see Italy enter the top
rank of physics research, and saw in Fermi the kind of talent
needed to achieve this goal. He arranged a scholarship so Fermi
could study physics in one the centres of research in northern
Europe. Fermi chose Göttingen, Germany, a hotbed of work
in the emerging field of quantum mechanics. Fermi was neither
particularly happy nor notably productive during his eight
months there, but was impressed with the German style of
research and the intellectual ferment of the large community of
German physicists. Henceforth, he published almost all of his
research in either German or English, with a parallel paper
submitted to an Italian journal. A second fellowship allowed
him to spend 1924 in the Netherlands, working with Paul
Ehrenfest's group at Leiden, deepening his knowledge of
statistical and quantum mechanics.
Finally, upon returning to Italy, Corbino and his colleague
Antonio Garbasso found Fermi a post as a lecturer in physics
in Florence. The position paid poorly and had little prestige,
but at least it was a step onto the academic ladder, and
Fermi was happy to accept it. There, Fermi and his colleague
Franco Rasetti did experimental work measuring the spectra of
atoms under the influence of radio frequency fields. Their
work was published in prestigious journals such as
Nature and Zeitschrift für
Physik.
In 1925, Fermi took up the problem of reconciling the field of
statistical
mechanics with the discovery by Wolfgang Pauli of the
exclusion
principle, a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon
which restricts certain kinds of identical particles from occupying
the same state at the same time. Fermi's paper, published in 1926,
resolved the problem, creating what is now called
Fermi-Dirac
statistics (British physicist
Paul Dirac
independently discovered the phenomenon, but Fermi published first)
for the particles now called
fermions,
which include all of the fundamental particles that make up
matter. (Forces are carried by other particles called
bosons, which go beyond
the scope of this discussion.)
This paper immediately elevated the twenty-five year old Fermi
to the top tier of theoretical physicists. It provided the
foundation for understanding of the behaviour of electrons
in solids, and thus the semiconductor technology upon which all
our modern computing and communications equipment is based.
Finally, Fermi won what he had aspired to: a physics professorship
in Rome. In 1928, he married Laura Capon, whom he had
first met in 1924. The daughter of an admiral in the World War
I Italian navy, she was a member of one of the many secular and
assimilated Jewish families in Rome. She was less than
impressed on first encountering Fermi:
He shook hands and gave me a friendly grin. You could call it nothing but a grin, for his lips were exceedingly thin and fleshless, and among his upper teeth a baby tooth too lingered on, conspicuous in its incongruity. But his eyes were cheerful and amused.
Both Laura and Enrico shared the ability to see things precisely as they were, then see beyond that to what they could become. In Rome, Fermi became head of the mathematical physics department at the Sapienza University of Rome, which his mentor, Corbino, saw as Italy's best hope to become a world leader in the field. He helped Fermi recruit promising physicists, all young and ambitious. They gave each other nicknames: ecclesiastical in nature, befitting their location in Rome. Fermi was dubbed Il Papa (The Pope), not only due to his leadership and seniority, but because he had already developed a reputation for infallibility: when he made a calculation or expressed his opinion on a technical topic, he was rarely if ever wrong. Meanwhile, Mussolini was increasing his grip on the country. In 1929, he announced the appointment of the first thirty members of the Royal Italian Academy, with Fermi among the laureates. In return for a lifetime stipend which would put an end to his financial worries, he would have to join the Fascist party. He joined. He did not take the Academy seriously and thought its comic opera uniforms absurd, but appreciated the money. By the 1930s, one of the major mysteries in physics was beta decay. When a radioactive nucleus decayed, it could emit one or more kinds of radiation: alpha, beta, or gamma. Alpha particles had been identified as the nuclei of helium, beta particles as electrons, and gamma rays as photons: like light, but with a much shorter wavelength and correspondingly higher energy. When a given nucleus decayed by alpha or gamma, the emission always had the same energy: you could calculate the energy carried off by the particle emitted and compare it to the nucleus before and after, and everything added up according to Einstein's equation of E=mc². But something appeared to be seriously wrong with beta (electron) decay. Given a large collection of identical nuclei, the electrons emitted flew out with energies all over the map: from very low to an upper limit. This appeared to violate one of the most fundamental principles of physics: the conservation of energy. If the nucleus after plus the electron (including its kinetic energy) didn't add up to the energy of the nucleus before, where did the energy go? Few physicists were ready to abandon conservation of energy, but, after all, theory must ultimately conform to experiment, and if a multitude of precision measurements said that energy wasn't conserved in beta decay, maybe it really wasn't. Fermi thought otherwise. In 1933, he proposed a theory of beta decay in which the emission of a beta particle (electron) from a nucleus was accompanied by emission of a particle he called a neutrino, which had been proposed earlier by Pauli. In one leap, Fermi introduced a third force, alongside gravity and electromagnetism, which could transform one particle into another, plus a new particle: without mass or charge, and hence extraordinarily difficult to detect, which nonetheless was responsible for carrying away the missing energy in beta decay. But Fermi did not just propose this mechanism in words: he presented a detailed mathematical theory of beta decay which made predictions for experiments which had yet to be performed. He submitted the theory in a paper to Nature in 1934. The editors rejected it, saying “it contained abstract speculations too remote from physical reality to be of interest to the reader.” This was quickly recognised and is now acknowledged as one of the most epic face-plants of peer review in theoretical physics. Fermi's theory rapidly became accepted as the correct model for beta decay. In 1956, the neutrino (actually, antineutrino) was detected with precisely the properties predicted by Fermi. This theory remained the standard explanation for beta decay until it was extended in the 1970s by the theory of the electroweak interaction, which is valid at higher energies than were available to experimenters in Fermi's lifetime. Perhaps soured on theoretical work by the initial rejection of his paper on beta decay, Fermi turned to experimental exploration of the nucleus, using the newly-discovered particle, the neutron. Unlike alpha particles emitted by the decay of heavy elements like uranium and radium, neutrons had no electrical charge and could penetrate the nucleus of an atom without being repelled. Fermi saw this as the ideal probe to examine the nucleus, and began to use neutron sources to bombard a variety of elements to observe the results. One experiment directed neutrons at a target of silver and observed the creation of isotopes of silver when the neutrons were absorbed by the silver nuclei. But something very odd was happening: the results of the experiment seemed to differ when it was run on a laboratory bench with a marble top compared to one of wood. What was going on? Many people might have dismissed the anomaly, but Fermi had to know. He hypothesised that the probability a neutron would interact with a nucleus depended upon its speed (or, equivalently, energy): a slower neutron would effectively have more time to interact than one which whizzed through more rapidly. Neutrons which were reflected by the wood table top were “moderated” and had a greater probability of interacting with the silver target. Fermi quickly tested this supposition by using paraffin wax and water as neutron moderators and measuring the dramatically increased probability of interaction (or as we would say today, neutron capture cross section) when neutrons were slowed down. This is fundamental to the design of nuclear reactors today. It was for this work that Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1938. By 1938, conditions for Italy's Jewish population had seriously deteriorated. Laura Fermi, despite her father's distinguished service as an admiral in the Italian navy, was now classified as a Jew, and therefore subject to travel restrictions, as were their two children. The Fermis went to their local Catholic parish, where they were (re-)married in a Catholic ceremony and their children baptised. With that paperwork done, the Fermi family could apply for passports and permits to travel to Stockholm to receive the Nobel prize. The Fermis locked their apartment, took a taxi, and boarded the train. Unbeknownst to the fascist authorities, they had no intention of returning. Fermi had arranged an appointment at Columbia University in New York. His Nobel Prize award was US$45,000 (US$789,000 today). If he returned to Italy with the sum, he would have been forced to convert it to lire and then only be able to take the equivalent of US$50 out of the country on subsequent trips. Professor Fermi may not have been much interested in politics, but he could do arithmetic. The family went from Stockholm to Southampton, and then on an ocean liner to New York, with nothing other than their luggage, prize money, and, most importantly, freedom. In his neutron experiments back in Rome, there had been curious results he and his colleagues never explained. When bombarding nuclei of uranium, the heaviest element then known, with neutrons moderated by paraffin wax, they had observed radioactive results which didn't make any sense. They expected to create new elements, heavier than uranium, but what they saw didn't agree with the expectations for such elements. Another mystery…in those heady days of nuclear physics, there was one wherever you looked. At just about the time Fermi's ship was arriving in New York, news arrived from Germany about what his group had observed, but not understood, four years before. Slow neutrons, which Fermi's group had pioneered, were able to split, or fission the nucleus of uranium into two lighter elements, releasing not only a large amount of energy, but additional neutrons which might be able to propagate the process into a “chain reaction”, producing either a large amount of energy or, perhaps, an enormous explosion. As one of the foremost researchers in neutron physics, it was immediately apparent to Fermi that his new life in America was about to take a direction he'd never anticipated. By 1941, he was conducting experiments at Columbia with the goal of evaluating the feasibility of creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with natural uranium, using graphite as a moderator. In 1942, he was leading a project at the University of Chicago to build the first nuclear reactor. On December 2nd, 1942, Chicago Pile-1 went critical, producing all of half a watt of power. But the experiment proved that a nuclear chain reaction could be initiated and controlled, and it paved the way for both civil nuclear power and plutonium production for nuclear weapons. At the time he achieved one of the first major milestones of the Manhattan Project, Fermi's classification as an “enemy alien” had been removed only two months before. He and Laura Fermi did not become naturalised U.S. citizens until July of 1944. Such was the breakneck pace of the Manhattan Project that even before the critical test of the Chicago pile, the DuPont company was already at work planning for the industrial scale production of plutonium at a facility which would eventually be built at the Hanford site near Richland, Washington. Fermi played a part in the design and commissioning of the X-10 Graphite Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which served as a pathfinder and began operation in November, 1943, operating at a power level which was increased over time to 4 megawatts. This reactor produced the first substantial quantities of plutonium for experimental use, revealing the plutonium-240 contamination problem which necessitated the use of implosion for the plutonium bomb. Concurrently, he contributed to the design of the B Reactor at Hanford, which went critical in September 1944, running at 250 megawatts, that produced the plutonium for the Trinity test and the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. During the war years, Fermi divided his time among the Chicago research group, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and the bomb design and production group at Los Alamos. As General Leslie Groves, head of Manhattan Project, had forbidden the top atomic scientists from travelling by air, “Henry Farmer”, his wartime alias, spent much of his time riding the rails, accompanied by a bodyguard. As plutonium production ramped up, he increasingly spent his time with the weapon designers at Los Alamos, where Oppenheimer appointed him associate director and put him in charge of “Division F” (for Fermi), which acted as a consultant to all of the other divisions of the laboratory. Fermi believed that while scientists could make major contributions to the war effort, how their work and the weapons they created were used were decisions which should be made by statesmen and military leaders. When appointed in May 1945 to the Interim Committee charged with determining how the fission bomb was to be employed, he largely confined his contributions to technical issues such as weapons effects. He joined Oppenheimer, Compton, and Lawrence in the final recommendation that “we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.” On July 16, 1945, Fermi witnessed the Trinity test explosion in New Mexico at a distance of ten miles from the shot tower. A few seconds after the blast, he began to tear little pieces of paper from from a sheet and drop them toward the ground. When the shock wave arrived, he paced out the distance it had blown them and rapidly computed the yield of the bomb as around ten kilotons of TNT. Nobody familiar with Fermi's reputation for making off-the-cuff estimates of physical phenomena was surprised that his calculation, done within a minute of the explosion, agreed within the margin of error with the actual yield of 20 kilotons, determined much later. After the war, Fermi wanted nothing more than to return to his research. He opposed the continuation of wartime secrecy to postwar nuclear research, but, unlike some other prominent atomic scientists, did not involve himself in public debates over nuclear weapons and energy policy. When he returned to Chicago, he was asked by a funding agency simply how much money he needed. From his experience at Los Alamos he wanted both a particle accelerator and a big computer. By 1952, he had both, and began to produce results in scattering experiments which hinted at the new physics which would be uncovered throughout the 1950s and '60s. He continued to spend time at Los Alamos, and between 1951 and 1953 worked two months a year there, contributing to the hydrogen bomb project and analysis of Soviet atomic tests. Everybody who encountered Fermi remarked upon his talents as an explainer and teacher. Seven of his students: six from Chicago and one from Rome, would go on to win Nobel Prizes in physics, in both theory and experiment. He became famous for posing “Fermi problems”, often at lunch, exercising the ability to make and justify order of magnitude estimates of difficult questions. When Freeman Dyson met with Fermi to present a theory he and his graduate students had developed to explain the scattering results Fermi had published, Fermi asked him how many free parameters Dyson had used in his model. Upon being told the number was four, he said, “I remember my old friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” Chastened, Dyson soon concluded his model was a blind alley. After returning from a trip to Europe in the fall of 1954, Fermi, who had enjoyed robust good health all his life, began to suffer from problems with digestion. Exploratory surgery found metastatic stomach cancer, for which no treatment was possible at the time. He died at home on November 28, 1954, two months past his fifty-third birthday. He had made a Fermi calculation of how long to rent the hospital bed in which he died: the rental expired two days after he did. There was speculation that Fermi's life may have been shortened by his work with radiation, but there is no evidence of this. He was never exposed to unusual amounts of radiation in his work, and none of his colleagues, who did the same work at his side, experienced any medical problems. This is a masterful biography of one of the singular figures in twentieth century science. The breadth of his interests and achievements is reflected in the list of things named after Enrico Fermi. Given the hyper-specialisation of modern science, it is improbable we will ever again see his like.
- Schulman, J. Neil. The Robert Heinlein Interview. Pahrump, NV: Pulpless.Com, [1990, 1996, 1999] 2017. ISBN 978-1-58445-015-3.
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Today, J. Neil Schulman is an accomplished novelist, filmmaker,
screenwriter, actor, journalist, and publisher: winner
of the Prometheus Award for libertarian science fiction. In the
summer of 1973, he was none of those things: just an avid
twenty year old
science fiction fan who credited the works of
Robert A. Heinlein
for saving his life—replacing his teenage depression with
visions of a future worth living for and characters worthy of
emulation who built that world. As Schulman describes it,
Heinlein was already in his head, and he wanted nothing more
in his ambition to follow in the steps of Heinlein than
to get into the head of the master storyteller. He managed to
parlay a book review into a commission to interview Heinlein
for the New York Sunday News. Heinlein consented
to a telephone interview, and on June 30, 1973, Schulman
and Heinlein spoke for three and a half hours, pausing only
for hourly changes of cassettes.
The agenda for the interview had been laid out in three pages of
questions Schulman had mailed Heinlein a few days before, but the
letter had only arrived shortly before the call and Heinlein
hadn't yet read the questions, so he read them as they spoke.
After the interview, Schulman prepared a transcript, which was
edited by Robert Heinlein and Virginia, his wife. The interview
was published by the newspaper in a much abridged and edited
form, and did not see print in its entirety until 1990, two years
after Heinlein's death. On the occasion of its publication,
Virginia Heinlein said “To my knowledge, this is the
longest interview Robert ever gave. Here is a book that should
be on the shelves of everyone interested in science fiction.
Libertarians will be using it as a source for years to come.”
Here you encounter the authentic Heinlein, consistent with the
description from many who knew him over his long career: simultaneously
practical, visionary, contrary, ingenious, inner-directed,
confident, and able to observe the world and humanity without
the filter of preconceived notions. Above all, he was a master
storyteller who never ceased to be amazed people would pay him
to spin yarns. As Schulman describes it, “Talking with
Robert Heinlein is talking with the Platonic archetype of all
his best characters.”
If you have any interest in Heinlein or the craft of science
fiction, this should be on your reading list. I will simply quote
a few morsels chosen from the wealth of insights and wisdom
in these pages.
- On aliens and first contact:
- The universe might turn out to be a hell of a sight nastier and tougher place than we have any reason to guess at this point. That first contact just might wipe out the human race, because we would encounter somebody who was meaner and tougher, and not at all inclined to be bothered by genocide. Be no more bothered by genocide than I am when I put out ant poison in the kitchen when the ants start swarming in.
- On the search for deep messages in his work:
- [Quoting Schulman's question] “Isn't ‘Coventry’ still an attempt by the state (albeit a relatively benign one) to interfere with the natural market processes and not let the victim have his restitution?” Well, “Coventry” was an attempt on the part of a writer to make a few hundred dollars to pay off a mortgage.
- On fans who complain his new work isn't consistent with his earlier writing:
- Over the course of some thirty-four years of writing, every now and then I receive things from people condemning me for not having written a story just like my last one. I never pay attention to this, Neil, because it has been my intention—my purpose—to make every story I've written—never to write a story just like my last one…I'm going to write what it suits me to write and if I write another story that's just like any other story I've ever written, I'll be slipping. … I'm trying to write to please not even as few as forty thousand people in the hardcover, but a million and up in the softcover. If an author let these self-appointed mentors decide for him what he's going to write and how he's going to write it, he'd never get anywhere….
- On his writing and editing habits:
- I've never written more than about three months of the year the whole time I've been writing. Part of that is because I never rewrite. I cut, but I don't rewrite.
- On the impact of technologies:
- When I see how far machine computation has gone since that time [the 1930s], I find it the most impressive development—more impressive than the atom bomb, more impressive than space travel—in its final consequences.
- On retirement:
- Well, Tony Boucher pointed that out to me years ago. He said that there are retired everything else—retired schoolteachers, retired firemen, retired bankers—but there are no retired writers. There are simply writers who are no longer selling. [Heinlein's last novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, was published in 1987, the year before his death at age 80. —JW]
- On the conflict between high technology and personal liberty:
- The question of how many mega-men [millions of population] it takes to maintain a high-technology society and how many mega-men it takes to produce oppressions simply through the complexity of the society is a matter I have never satisfactorily solved in my own mind. But I am quite sure that one works against the other, that it takes a large-ish population for a high technology, but if you get large populations human liberties are automatically restricted even if you don't have legislation about it. In fact, the legislation in many cases is intended to—and sometimes does—lubricate the frictions that take place between people simply because they're too close together.
- On seeking solutions to problems:
- I got over looking for final solutions a good, long time ago because once you get this point shored up, something breaks out somewhere else. The human race gets along by the skin of its teeth, and it's been doing so for some hundreds of thousands or millions of years. … It is the common human condition all through history that every time you solve a problem you discover that you've created a new problem.
- Mills, Kyle. The Survivor. New York: Pocket Books, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4767-8346-8.
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Over the last fifteen years, CIA counter-terrorism operative
Mitch Rapp
(warning—the article at this link contains minor spoilers)
has survived myriad adventures and attempts to take him out
by terrorists, hostile governments, subversive forces within
his own agency, and ambitious and unscrupulous Washington
politicians looking to nail his scalp to their luxuriously
appointed office walls, chronicled in the thirteen thrillers
by his creator,
Vince Flynn.
Now, Rapp must confront one of the most formidable challenges
any fictional character can face—outliving
the author who invented him. With the death of Vince Flynn
in 2013 from cancer, the future of the Mitch Rapp series was
uncertain. Subsequently, Flynn's publisher announced that
veteran thriller writer
Kyle
Mills, with fourteen novels already published, would be
continuing the Mitch Rapp franchise. This is the first novel
in the series by Mills. Although the cover has Flynn's name in
much larger type than Mills', the latter is the sole author.
In this installment of the Rapp saga, Mills opted to dive right
in just days after the events in the conclusion of the previous
novel,
The Last Man (February 2013).
The CIA is still reeling from its genius black operations
mastermind, Joseph Rickman, having gone rogue, faked his own
kidnapping, and threatened to reveal decades of the CIA's
secrets, including deep cover agents in place around the world
and operations in progress, potentially crippling the CIA and
opening up enough cans of worms to sustain the congressional
committee surrender-poultry for a decade. With the immediate Rickman
problem dealt with in the previous novel, the CIA is
dismayed to learn that the ever-clever Rickman is himself a
survivor, and continues to wreak his havoc on the agency from
beyond the grave, using an almost impenetrable maze of
digital and human cut-outs devised by his wily mind.
Not only is the CIA at risk of embarrassment and exposure of its
most valuable covert assets, an ambitious spymaster in Pakistan
sees the Rickman intelligence trove as not only a way to destroy
the CIA's influence in his country and around the world, but the
means to co-opt its network for his own ends, providing his
path to slither to the top of the seething snake-mountain which
is Pakistani politics, and, with control over his country's
nuclear arsenal and the CIA's covert resources, become a player
on the regional, if not world scale.
Following Rickman's twisty cyber trail as additional disclosure
bombshells drop on the CIA, Rapp and his ailing but still
prickly mentor Stan Hurley must make an uneasy but
unavoidable alliance with Louis Gould, the murderer of Rapp's
wife and unborn child, who almost killed him in the previous novel,
in order to penetrate the armed Swiss compound (which has me green
with envy and scribbling notes) of Leo Obrecht, rogue private
banker implicated in the Rickman operation and its Pakistani
connections.
The action takes Rapp and his team to a remote location in
Russia, and finally to a diplomatic banquet in Islamabad where
Rapp reminds an American politician which fork to use, and how.
Mitch Rapp has survived. I haven't read any of Kyle Mills'
other work, so I don't know whether it's a matter of his
already aligning with Vince Flynn's style or, as a professional
author, adopting it along with Flynn's worldview, but had I not
known this was the work of a different author, I'd never have
guessed. I enjoyed this story and look forward to further
Mitch Rapp adventures by Kyle Mills.
- van Creveld, Martin. Hitler in Hell. Kouvola, Finland: Castalia House, 2017. ASIN B0738YPW2M.
-
Martin
van Creveld is an Israeli military theorist and historian,
professor emeritus at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and author
of seventeen books of military history and strategy, including
The Transformation of War,
which has been hailed as one of the most significant recent works
on strategy. In this volume he turns to fiction, penning the
memoirs of the late, unlamented Adolf Hitler from his current
domicile in Hell, “the place to which the victors assign
their dead opponents.” In the interest of concision, in
the following discussion I will use “Hitler” to
mean the fictional Hitler in this work.
Hitler finds Hell more boring than hellish—“in some
ways it reminds me of Landsberg Prison”. There is no
torture or torment, just a never-changing artificial light and
routine in which nothing ever happens. A great disappointment
is that neither Eva Braun nor Blondi is there to accompany him.
As to the latter, apparently all dogs go to heaven.
Rudolf Hess
is there, however, and with that 1941 contretemps over the flight to
Scotland put behind them, has resumed helping Hitler with his
research and writing as he did during the former's 1924
imprisonment. Hell has broadband!—Hitler is even able
to access the “Black Internetz” and read, listen to,
and watch everything up to the present day. (That sounds
pretty good—my own personal idea of Hell would be an
Internet connection which only allows you to read Wikipedia.)
Hitler tells the story of his life: from childhood, his
days as a struggling artist in Vienna and Munich,
the experience of the Great War, his political awakening
in the postwar years, rise to power, implementation of
his domestic and foreign policies, and the war and final
collapse of Nazi Germany. These events, and the people involved
in them, are often described from the viewpoint of the present
day, with parallels drawn to more recent history and figures.
What makes this book work so well is that van Creveld's Hitler
makes plausible arguments supporting decisions which many
historians argue were irrational or destructive: going to war
over Poland, allowing the British evacuation from Dunkirk,
attacking the Soviet Union while Britain remained
undefeated in the West, declaring war on the U.S. after Pearl
Harbor, forbidding an orderly retreat from Stalingrad, failing
to commit armour to counter the Normandy landings, and fighting
to the bitter end, regardless of the consequences to Germany
and the German people. Each decision is justified with arguments
which are plausible when viewed from what is known of Hitler's
world view, the information available to him at the time, and
the constraints under which he was operating.
Much is made of those constraints. Although embracing totalitarianism
(“My only regret is that, not having enough time, we did not
make it more totalitarian still”), he sees himself surrounded
by timid and tradition-bound military commanders and largely
corrupt and self-serving senior political officials, yet
compelled to try to act through them, as even a dictator can
only dictate, then hope others implement his wishes. “Since
then, I have often wondered whether, far from being too ruthless,
I had been too soft and easygoing.” Many apparent blunders
are attributed to lack of contemporary information, sometimes
due to poor intelligence, but often simply by not having the
historians' advantage of omniscient hindsight.
This could have been a parody, but in the hands of a
distinguished historian like the author, who has been thinking
about Hitler for many years (he wrote his 1971 Ph.D. thesis on
Hitler's Balkan strategy in World War II), it provides a serious
look at how Hitler's policies and actions, far from being
irrational or a madman's delusions, may make perfect sense when
one starts from the witches' brew of bad ideas and ignorance
which the real Hitler's actual written and spoken words
abundantly demonstrate. The fictional Hitler illustrates this
in many passages, including this particularly chilling one
where, after dismissing those who claim he was unaware of the
extermination camps, says “I particularly needed to
prevent the resurgence of Jewry by exterminating every last
Jewish man, woman, and child I could. Do you say they were
innocent? Bedbugs are innocent! They do what nature has
destined them to, no more, no less. But is that any reason
to spare them?” Looking backward, he observes that
notwithstanding the utter defeat of the Third Reich, the
liberal democracies that vanquished it have implemented many
of his policies in the areas of government supervision of
the economy, consumer protection, public health (including
anti-smoking policies), environmentalism, shaping the
public discourse (then, propaganda, now political correctness),
and implementing a ubiquitous surveillance state of which the
Gestapo never dreamed.
In an afterword, van Creveld explains that, after on several
occasions having started to write a biography of Hitler and then
set the project aside, concluding he had nothing to add to
existing works, in 2015 it occurred to him that the one
perspective which did not exist was Hitler's own, and that the
fictional device of a memoir from Hell, drawing parallels
between historical and contemporary events, would provide a
vehicle to explore the reasoning which led to the decisions
Hitler made. The author concludes, “…my goal was
not to set forth my own ideas. Instead, I tried to understand
Hitler's actions, views, and thoughts as I think he, observing
the past and the present from Hell, would have explained them.
So let the reader judge how whether I have succeeded in this
objective.” In the opinion of this reader, he has
succeeded, and brilliantly.
This book is presently available only in a
Kindle edition; it is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
- Cowie, Ian, Dim Jones, and Chris Long, eds. Out of the Blue. Farnborough, UK, 2011. ISBN 978-0-9570928-0-8.
-
Flying an aircraft has long been described by those who do it
for a living as hours of boredom punctuated by moments of
stark terror. The ratio of terror to boredom depends upon
the equipment and mission the pilot is flying, and tends to be
much higher as these approach the ragged edge, as is the case
for military aviation in high-performance aircraft. This book
collects ninety anecdotes from pilots in the Royal Air Force,
most dating from the Cold War era, illustrating that you never
know for sure what is going to happen when you strap into an
airplane and take to the skies, and that any lapse in attention
to detail, situational awareness, or resistance to showing
off may be swiftly rewarded not only with stark terror but
costly, unpleasant, and career-limiting consequences. All of
the stories are true (or at least those relating them say they
are—with pilots you never know for sure), and most are just
a few pages. You can pick the book up at any point; except for
a few two-parters, the chapters are unrelated to one another.
This is thus an ideal “bathroom book”, or way to
fill a few minutes' downtime in a high distraction environment.
Because most of the flying takes place in Britain and in
NATO deployments in Germany and other countries in northern
Europe, foul weather plays a part in many of these adventures.
Those who fly in places like Spain and California seldom
find themselves watching the fuel gauge count down toward zero
while divert field after divert field goes RED weather just
as they arrive and begin their approach—that happens
all the time in the RAF.
Other excitement comes from momentary lapses of judgment or
excessive enthusiasm, such as finding yourself at 70,000 feet
over Germany in a
Lightning
whose two engines have flamed out after passing the plane's
service ceiling of 54,000 feet. While in this case the
intrepid aeronaut got away without a scratch (writing up the
altimeter as reading much too high), other incidents ended up
in ejecting from aircraft soon to litter the countryside with
flaming debris. Then there's ejecting from a perfectly good
Hunter
after a spurious fire warning light and the Flight Commander
wingman ordering an ejection after observing “lots of
smoke” which turned out, after the fact, to be just
hydraulic fluid automatically dumped after a precautionary
engine shutdown.
Sometimes you didn't do anything wrong and still end up in a
spot of bother. There's the crew of a
Victor
which, shortly after departing RAF Gan in the Maldive Islands
had a hydraulic system failure. No big thing—the Victor
has two completely independent hydraulic systems, so there
wasn't any great worry as the plane turned around to return
to Gan. But when the second hydraulic system then
proceeded to fail, there was worry aplenty, because that
meant there was no nose-wheel steering and a total of eight
applications of the brakes before residual pressure in the
system was exhausted. Then came the call from Gan: a series of
squalls were crossing the atoll, with crosswinds approaching the
Victor's limit and heavy rain on the runway. On landing, a gust of
wind caught the drag parachute and sent the bomber veering off
the edge of the runway, and without nose-wheel steering, nothing
could be done to counteract it. The Victor ended up ploughing a
furrow in the base's just-refurbished golf course before
coming to a stop. Any landing you walk away from….
The two hydraulic systems were determined to have failed from
completely independent and unrelated causes, something that
“just can't happen”—until it happens to you.
Then there's RAF pilot Alan Pollock, who, upset at the RAF's
opting in 1968 not to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its
founding, decided to mount his own celebration of the
milestone. He flew his Hunter at high subsonic speed and
low altitude down the Thames, twisting and turning with
the river, and circling the Houses of Parliament as Big
Ben struck noon. He then proceeded up the Thames and,
approaching Tower Bridge, became the first and so far only
pilot to
fly
between the two spans of the London landmark. This
concluded his RAF career: he was given a medical discharge,
which avoided a court martial that would have likely have
sparked public support for his unauthorised aerial tattoo.
His first-hand recollection of the exploit appears here.
Other stories recount how a tiny blob of grease where it didn't
belong turned a Hunter into rubble in Cornwall, the strange
tale of the world's only turbine powered biplane, the
British pub on the Italian base at Decimomannu, Sardinia:
“The Pig and Tapeworm”, and working as an engineer on the
Shackleton
maritime patrol aircraft: “Along the way, you will gain
the satisfaction of ensuring the continued airworthiness of a
bona fide museum piece, so old that the pointed bit is at the
back, and so slow that birds collide with the trailing edge
of the wing.” There's nothing profound here, but it's
a lot of fun.
The paperback is currently out of print, but used copies
are available at reasonable cost. The Kindle
edition is available, and is free for Kindle Unlimited
subscribers.
- Howey, Hugh. Wool. New York: Simon & Schuster, [2011] 2013. ISBN 978-1-4767-3395-1.
-
Wool was originally self-published
as a stand-alone novella. The series grew into a total
of six novellas, collected into three books. This “Omnibus
Edition” contains all three books, now
designated “Volume 1 of the Silo Trilogy”. Two
additional volumes in the series:
Shift and
Dust are respectively a
prequel and sequel to the present work.
The Silo is the universe to its inhabitants. It consists of a
cylinder whose top is level with the surrounding terrain and
extends downward into the Earth for 144 levels, with a central
spiral staircase connecting them. Transport among the levels is
purely by foot traffic on the staircase, and most news and
personal messages are carried by porters who constantly ascend
and descend the stairs. Electronic messages can be sent, but
are costly and rarely used. Levels are divided by
functionality, and those who live in them essentially compose
castes defined by occupation. Population is strictly
controlled and static. Administration is at the top (as is
usually the case), while the bottom levels are dedicated to the
machines which produce power, circulate and purify the air, pump
out ground water which would otherwise flood the structure, and
drill for energy and mine resources required to sustain the
community. Intermediate levels contain farms, hospitals and
nurseries, schools, and the mysterious and secretive IT (never
defined, but one assumes “Information Technology”,
which many suspect is the real power behind the scenes [isn't it
always?]). There is some mobility among levels and occupations,
but many people live most of their lives within a few levels of
where they were born, taking occasional rare (and exhausting)
trips to the top levels for special occasions.
The most special of occasions is a “cleaning”. From
time to time, some resident of the silo demands to leave or,
more often, is deemed a threat to the community due to
challenging the social order, delving too deeply into its
origins, or expressing curiosity about what exists outside, and
is condemned to leave the silo wearing a protective suit against
the forbiddingly hostile environment outside, to clean the
sensors which provide denizens their only view of the
surroundings: a barren landscape with a ruined city in the
distance. The suit invariably fails, and the cleaner's body
joins those of others scattered along the landscape. Why do
those condemned always clean? They always have, and it's
expected they always will.
The silo's chief is the mayor, and order is enforced by the
sheriff, to whom deputies in offices at levels throughout the
silo report. The current sheriff's own wife was sent to
cleaning just three years earlier, after becoming obsessed with
what she believed to be a grand deception by IT and eventually
breaking down in public. Sheriff Holston's own obsession grows
until he confronts the same fate.
This is a claustrophobic, dystopian novel in which the reader
begins as mystified with what is going on and why as are the
residents of the silo, at least those who dare to be curious.
As the story progresses, much of which follows the career of a
new sheriff appointed from the depths of the silo, we piece
together, along with the characters, what is happening and how
it came to be and, with them, glimpse a larger world and
its disturbing history. The writing is superb and evocative of
the curious world in which the characters find themselves.
The Kindle edition is presented in a very unusual format. It is illustrated with drawings, some of which are animated—not full motion, but perspectives change, foregrounds and backgrounds shift, and light sources move around. The drawings do not always correspond to descriptions in the text. The illustrations appear to have been adapted from a graphic novel based upon the book. The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.There are numerous mysteries in this story, many of which are explained as the narrative progresses, but there's one central enigma which is never addressed. I haven't read the prequel nor the sequel, and perhaps they deal with it, but this book was written first as a stand-alone, and read as one, it leaves this reader puzzled. The silo has abundant energy produced from oil wells drilled from the lower levels, sufficient to provide artificial lighting throughout including enough to grow crops on the farm levels. There is heavy machinery: pumps, generators, air circulation and purification systems, advanced computer technology in IT, and the infrastructure to maintain all of this along with a logistics, maintenance, and spares operation to keep it all running. And, despite all of this, there's no elevator! The only way to move people and goods among the levels is to manually carry them up and down the circular staircase. Now, I can understand how important this is to the plot of the novel, but it would really help if the reader were given a clue why this is and how it came to be. My guess is that it was part of the design of the society: to impose a stratification and reinforce its structure like the rule of a monastic community (indeed, we later discover the silo is regulated according to a book of Order). I get it—if there's an elevator, much of the plot goes away, but it would be nice to have a clue why there isn't one, when it would be the first thing anybody with the technology to build something like the silo would design into what amounts to a 144 storey building.Spoilers end here.
- Fulton, Steve and Jeff Fulton. HTML5 Canvas. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4493-3498-7.
-
I only review computer books if I've read them in their entirety,
as opposed to using them as references while working on
projects. For much of 2017 I've been living with this book
open, referring to it as I performed a comprehensive overhaul
of my Fourmilab site, and I just realised that
by now I have actually read every page, albeit not in linear
order, so a review is in order; here goes.
The original implementation of World Wide Web supported only text
and, shortly thereafter, embedded images in documents. If you
wanted to do something as simple as embed an audio or video clip,
you were on your own, wading into a morass of browser- and
platform-specific details, plug-ins the user may have to install
and then forever keep up to date, and security holes due to all of this
non-standard and often dodgy code. Implementing interactive
content on the Web, for example scientific simulations for
education, required using an embedded language such as
Java,
whose initial bright promise of “Write once, run anywhere”
quickly added the rejoinder “—yeah, right” as
bloat in the language, incessant security problems, cross-platform
incompatibilities, the need for the user to forever keep external
plug-ins updated lest existing pages cease working, caused Java to
be regarded as a joke—a cruel joke upon those who developed
Web applications based upon it. By the latter half of the 2010s,
the major browsers had either discontinued support for Java or
announced its removal in future releases.
Fortunately, in 2014 the HTML5
standard was released. For the first time, native, standardised
support was added to the Web's fundamental document format to
support embedded audio, video, and interactive content, along with
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in the
JavaScript
language, interacting with the document via the
Document
Object Model (DOM), which has now been incorporated into the
HTML5 standard. For the first time it became possible, using only
standards officially adopted by the
World
Wide Web Consortium, to create interactive Web pages
incorporating multimedia content. The existence of this standard
provides a strong incentive for browser vendors to fully implement
and support it, and increases the confidence of Web developers that
pages they create which are standards-compliant will work on the
multitude of browsers, operating systems, and hardware platforms
which exist today.
(That encomium apart, I find much to dislike about HTML5. In my
opinion its sloppy syntax [not requiring quotes on tag
attributes nor the closing of many tags] is a great step
backward from
XHTML 1.0,
which strictly conforms to XML syntax and can be parsed by a
simple and generic XML parser, without the Babel-sized tower of
kludges and special cases which are required to accommodate the
syntactic mumbling of HTML5. A machine-readable language should
be easy to read and parse by a machine, especially in
an age where only a small minority of Web content creators
actually write HTML themselves, as opposed to using a content
management system of some kind. Personally, I continue to use
XHTML 1.0 for all content on my Web site which does not
require the new features in HTML5, and I observe that the
home page of the World Wide Web
Consortium is, itself, in XHTML 1.0 Strict. And there's
no language version number in the header of an HTML5
document. Really—what's up with that? But HTML5
is the standard we've got, so it's the standard we have to use
in order to benefit from the capabilities it provides: onward.)
One of the most significant new features in HTML5 is its support
for the Canvas
element. A canvas is a rectangular area within a page which is
treated as an RGBA
bitmap (the “A” denotes “alpha”, which
implements transparency for overlapping objects). A canvas is just
what its name implies: a blank area on which you can draw. The drawing
is done in JavaScript code via the Canvas API, which is documented
in this book, along with tutorials and abundant examples which can be
downloaded
from the publisher's Web site. The API provides the usual
functions of a two-dimensional drawing model, including lines, arcs,
paths, filled objects, transformation matrices, clipping, and
colours, including gradients. A text API allows drawing text on the
canvas, using a subset of
CSS
properties to define fonts and their display attributes.
Bitmap images may be painted on the canvas, scaled and rotated,
if you wish, using the transformation matrix. It is also possible
to retrieve the pixel data from a canvas or portion of it,
manipulate it at low-level, and copy it back to that or another
canvas using JavaScript
typed
arrays.
This allows implementation of arbitrary image processing. You
might think that pixel-level image manipulation in JavaScript
would be intolerably slow, but with modern implementations of
JavaScript in current browsers, it often runs within a factor of
two of the speed of optimised C code and, unlike the C code, works
on any platform from within a Web page which requires no twiddling
by the user to build and install on their computer.
The canvas API allows capturing mouse and keyboard events,
permitting user interaction. Animation is implemented using
JavaScript's standard setTimeout method. Unlike
some other graphics packages, the canvas API does not maintain
a display list or refresh buffer. It is the responsibility of
your code to repaint the image on the canvas from scratch
whenever it changes. Contemporary browsers buffer the image
under construction to prevent this process from being seen by
the user.
HTML5 audio and video are not strictly part of the canvas
facility (although you can display a video on a canvas), but
they are discussed in depth here, each in its own chapter.
Although the means for embedding this content into Web pages
are now standardised, the file formats for audio and video are,
more than a quarter century after the creation of the Web,
“still evolving”. There is sage advice for
developers about how to maximise portability of pages across
browsers and platforms.
Two chapters, 150 pages of this 750 page book (don't be
intimidated by its length—a substantial fraction is code
listings you don't need to read unless you're interested in the
details), are devoted to game development using the HTML5 canvas
and multimedia APIs. A substantial part of this covers topics
such as collision detection, game physics, smooth motion, and
detecting mouse hits in objects, which are generic subjects
in computer graphics and not specific to its HTML5 implementation.
Reading them, however, may give you some tips useful in
non-game applications.
Projects at Fourmilab which now use HTML5 canvas are:
- The Probability Pipe Organ
- RetroPsychoKinesis Experiments
- Terranova: Planet Maker
- Orbits in Strongly Curved Spacetime
- Cellular Automata Laboratory
- The Analytical Engine (curve drawing apparatus)
- HotBits (animated logo)
- Smith, L. Neil. Blade of p'Na. Rockville, MD: Phoenix Pick, 2017. ISBN 978-1-61242-218-3.
-
This novel is set in the “Elders” universe,
originally introduced in the 1990 novels Contact and
Commune and Converse and Conflict, and now
collected in an omnibus edition with additional material,
Forge of the Elders. Around
four hundred million years ago the Elders, giant mollusc-like
aquatic creatures with shells the size of automobiles, conquered
aging, and since then none has died except due to accident or
violence. And precious few have succumbed to those causes:
accident because the big squid are famously risk averse, and
violence because, after a societal adolescence in which they
tried and rejected many political and economic bad ideas, they
settled on p'Na as the central doctrine of their
civilisation: the principle that nobody has the right to
initiate physical force against anybody else for any
reason—much like the
Principle
of Non-Aggression, don't you know.
On those rare occasions order is disturbed, the services of a
p'Nan “debt assessor” are required. Trained in the
philosophy of p'Na, martial arts, psychology, and burnished
through a long apprenticeship, assessors are called in either
after an event in which force has been initiated or by those
contemplating a course which might step over the line. The
assessor has sole discretion in determining culpability, the
form and magnitude of restitution due, and when no other
restitution is possible, enforcing the ultimate penalty on the
guilty. The assessor's sword, the Blade of p'Na, is not just a
badge of office but the means of restitution in such cases.
The Elders live on one of a multitude, possibly infinite,
parallel Earths in a multiverse where each planet's history has
diverged due to contingent events in its past. Some millennia
after adopting p'Na, they discovered the means of observing,
then moving among these different universes and their variant
Earths. Some millennia after achieving biological immortality
and peace through p'Na, their curiosity and desire for novelty
prompted them to begin collecting beings from across the
multiverse. Some were rescues of endangered species, while
others would be more accurately described as abductions. They
referred to this with the euphemism of
“appropriation”, as if that made any difference.
The new arrivals: insectoid, aquatic, reptilian, mammalian,
avian, and even sentient plants, mostly seemed happy in their
new world, where the Elders managed to create the most diverse
and peaceful society known in the universe.
This went on for a million years or so until, just like the
revulsion against slavery in the 19th century in our timeline,
somesquid happened to notice that the practice violated the
fundamental principle of their society. Appropriations
immediately ceased, debt assessors were called in, and before
long all of the Elders implicated in appropriation committed
suicide (some with a little help). But that left the question
of restitution to the appropriated. Dumping them back into
their original universes, often war-torn, barbarous, primitive,
or with hostile and unstable environments after up to a million
years of peace and prosperity on the Elders' planet didn't make
the ethical cut. They settled on granting full citizenship to
all the appropriated, providing them the gift of biological
immortality, cortical implants to upgrade the less sentient to
full intelligence, and one more thing…. The Elders had
developed an unusual property: the tips of their tentacles could
be detached and sent on errands on behalf of their parent
bodies. While not fully sentient, the tentacles could, by
communicating via cortical implants, do all kinds of useful work
and allow the Elders to be in multiple places at once (recall
that the Elders, like terrestrial squid, have ten
tentacles—if they had twelve, they'd call them twelvicles,
wouldn't they?). So for each of the appropriated species, the
Elders chose an appropriate symbiote who, upgraded in
intelligence and self-awareness and coupled to the host by their
own implant, provided a similar benefit to them. For humanoids,
it was dogs, or their species' canids.
(You might think that all of this constitutes spoilers, but it's
just the background for the Elders' universe which is laid out in
the first few chapters for the benefit of readers who haven't read
the earlier books in the series.)
Hundreds of millions of years after the Great Restitution Eichra
Oren (those of his humanoid species always use both names) is a
p'Na debt assessor. His symbiote, Oasam Otusam, a
super-intelligent, indiscriminately libidinous, and wisecracking
dog, prefers to go by “Sam”. So peaceful is the planet
of the Elders that most of the cases Eichra Oren is called upon
to resolve are routine and mundane, such as the current client,
an arachnid about the size of a dinner table, seeking help in
tracking down her fiancé, who has vanished three days before
the wedding. This raises some ethical issues because, among
their kind, traditionally “Saying ‘I do’ is the
same as saying
‘bon appétit’ ”.
Many, among sapient spiders, have abandoned the Old Ways, but some
haven't. After discussion, in which Sam says, “You realize
that in the end, she's going to eat him”, they decide,
nonetheless, to take the case.
The caseload quickly grows as the assessor is retained by
investors in a project led by an Elder named Misterthoggosh,
whose fortune comes from importing reality TV from other
universes (there is no multiverse copyright convention—the
p'Na is cool with cultural appropriation) and
distributing it to the multitude of species on the Elders'
world. He (little is known of the Elders' biology…some
say the females are non-sentient and vestigial) is now embarking
on a new project, and the backers want a determination by an
assessor that it will not violate p'Na, for which they would be
jointly and separately responsible. The lead investor is a
star-nosed mole obsessed by golf.
Things become even more complicated after a mysterious attack
which appears to have been perpetrated by the
“greys”, creatures who inhabit the mythology and
nightmares of a million sapient species, and the suspicion and
fear that somewhere else in the multiverse, another species has
developed the technology of opening gates between universes,
something so far achieved only by the now-benign Elders, with
wicked intent by the newcomers.
What follows is a romp filled with interesting questions.
Should you order the vegan plate in a restaurant run by
intelligent plants? What are the ethical responsibilities of a
cyber-assassin who is conscious yet incapable of refusing orders
to kill? What is a giant squid's idea of a pleasure yacht? If
two young spiders are amorously attracted, it only pupæ
love? The climax forces the characters to confront the question
of the extent to which beings which are part of a hive mind are
responsible for the actions of the collective.
L. Neil Smith's books have sometimes been criticised for being
preachy libertarian tracts with a garnish of science fiction.
I've never found them to be such, but you certainly can't accuse
this one of that. It's set in a world governed
for æons by the principle of non-aggression, but that
foundation of civil society works so well that it takes an
invasion from another universe to create the conflict which is
central to the plot. Readers are treated to the rich and
sometime zany imagination of a world inhabited by almost all
imaginable species where the only tensions among them are due to
atavistic instincts such as those of dogs toward tall plants,
combined with the humour, ranging from broad to wry, of our
canine narrator, Sam.