- Smolin, Lee.
Einstein's Unfinished Revolution.
New York: Penguin Press, 2019.
ISBN 978-1-59420-619-1.
-
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, one of those
nagging little discrepancies vexing physicists was the behaviour
of the
photoelectric
effect. Originally discovered in 1887, the phenomenon causes
certain metals, when illuminated by light, to absorb the light
and emit electrons. The perplexing point was that there was a
minimum wavelength (colour of light) necessary for electron
emission, and for longer wavelengths, no electrons would be
emitted at all, regardless of the intensity of the beam of light.
For example, a certain metal might emit electrons
when illuminated by green, blue, violet, and ultraviolet light, with
the intensity of electron emission proportional to the light
intensity, but red or yellow light, regardless of how intense,
would not result in a single electron being emitted.
This didn't make any sense. According to
Maxwell's
wave theory of light, which was almost universally
accepted and had passed stringent experimental tests, the
energy of light depended upon the amplitude of the wave
(its intensity), not the wavelength (or, reciprocally,
its frequency). And yet the photoelectric effect didn't
behave that way—it appeared that whatever was causing the
electrons to be emitted depended on the wavelength
of the light, and what's more, there was a sharp cut-off
below which no electrons would be emitted at all.
In 1905, in one of his
“miracle
year” papers,
“On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and
Transformation of Light”, Albert Einstein suggested a
solution to the puzzle. He argued that light did not propagate
as a wave at all, but rather in discrete particles, or “quanta”,
later named “photons”, whose energy was proportional
to the wavelength of the light. This neatly explained the
behaviour of the photoelectric effect. Light with a wavelength
longer than the cut-off point was transmitted by photons whose
energy was too low to knock electrons out of metal they
illuminated, while those above the threshold could liberate
electrons. The intensity of the light was a measure of the
number of photons in the beam, unrelated to the
energy of the individual photons.
This paper became one of the cornerstones of the revolutionary
theory of
quantum
mechanics, the complete working out of which occupied much
of the twentieth century. Quantum mechanics underlies the
standard model
of particle physics, which is arguably the most thoroughly tested
theory in the history of physics, with no experiment showing
results which contradict its predictions since it was formulated
in the 1970s. Quantum mechanics is necessary to explain the
operation of the electronic and optoelectronic devices upon
which our modern computing and communication infrastructure
is built, and describes every aspect of physical
chemistry.
But quantum mechanics is weird. Consider: if light
consists of little particles, like bullets, then why
when you shine a beam of light on a
barrier
with two slits do you get an interference pattern with bright
and dark bands precisely as you get with, say, water waves?
And if you send a single photon at a time and try to measure
which slit it went through, you find it always went through one
or the other, but then the interference pattern goes away.
It seems like whether the photon behaves as a wave or a particle
depends upon how you look at it. If you have an hour, here is
grand master explainer
Richard Feynman
(who won his own Nobel Prize in 1965 for reconciling the
quantum mechanical theory of light and the electron with
Einstein's
special
relativity) exploring how profoundly weird the
double slit
experiment is.
Fundamentally, quantum mechanics seems to violate the principle
of realism, which the author defines as follows.
The belief that there is an objective physical world whose
properties are independent of what human beings know or
which experiments we choose to do. Realists also believe
that there is no obstacle in principle to our obtaining
complete knowledge of this world.
This has been part of the scientific worldview since antiquity
and yet quantum mechanics, confirmed by innumerable experiments,
appears to indicate we must abandon it. Quantum mechanics says
that what you observe depends on what you choose to measure; that
there is an absolute limit upon the precision with which you
can measure pairs of properties (for example position and momentum)
set by the
uncertainty
principle;
that it isn't possible to predict the outcome of experiments
but only the probability among a variety of outcomes;
and that particles which are widely separated
in space and time but which have interacted in the past are
entangled
and display correlations which no classical mechanistic theory
can explain—Einstein called the latter “spooky
action at a distance”. Once again, all of these effects
have been confirmed by precision experiments and are not
fairy castles erected by theorists.
From the formulation of the modern quantum theory in the 1920s,
often called the
Copenhagen
interpretation after the location of the institute where
one of its architects,
Neils Bohr,
worked, a number of eminent
physicists including Einstein and
Louis de Broglie
were deeply
disturbed by its apparent jettisoning of the principle of realism
in favour of what they considered a quasi-mystical view in which
the act of “measurement” (whatever that means) caused
a physical change
(wave
function collapse) in the state of a system. This seemed to
imply that the photon, or electron, or anything else, did not have
a physical position until it interacted with something else: until
then it was just an immaterial wave function which filled all of
space and (when squared) gave the probability of finding it at
that location.
In 1927, de Broglie proposed a
pilot wave theory
as a realist alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation. In
the pilot wave theory there is a real particle, which has a
definite position and momentum at all times. It is guided in
its motion by a pilot wave which fills all of space and is
defined by the medium through which it propagates. We cannot predict
the exact outcome of measuring the particle because we cannot have
infinitely precise knowledge of its initial position and
momentum, but in principle these quantities exist and are
real. There is no “measurement problem” because
we always detect the particle, not the pilot wave which guides it.
In its original formulation, the pilot wave theory exactly reproduced
the predictions of the Copenhagen formulation, and hence was not a
competing theory but rather an alternative
interpretation
of the equations of quantum mechanics. Many physicists who preferred
to “shut up and calculate” considered interpretations a
pointless exercise in phil-oss-o-phy, but de Broglie and
Einstein placed great value on retaining the principle of realism
as a cornerstone of theoretical physics. Lee Smolin sketches an
alternative reality in which “all the bright, ambitious students
flocked to Paris in the 1930s to follow de Broglie, and wrote textbooks
on pilot wave theory, while Bohr became a footnote, disparaged for
the obscurity of his unnecessary philosophy”. But that wasn't
what happened: among those few physicists who pondered what the
equations meant about how the world really works, the Copenhagen
view remained dominant.
In the 1950s, independently,
David Bohm
invented a pilot wave theory which he developed into a complete
theory of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. To this day, a
small community of “Bohmians” continue to explore
the implications of his theory, working on extending it to be
compatible with special relativity. From a philosophical
standpoint the de Broglie-Bohm theory is unsatisfying in that it
involves a pilot wave which guides a particle, but upon which
the particle does not act. This is an
“unmoved
mover”, which all of our experience of physics argues
does not exist. For example, Newton's third law of motion holds
that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and in
Einstein's general relativity, spacetime tells mass-energy how to
move while mass-energy tells spacetime how to curve. It seems
odd that the pilot wave could be immune from influence of the
particle it guides. A few physicists, such as Jack Sarfatti, have
proposed “post-quantum” extensions to Bohm's theory
in which there is back-reaction from the particle on the
pilot wave, and argue that this phenomenon might be accessible to
experimental tests which would distinguish post-quantum phenomena
from the predictions of orthodox quantum mechanics. A few
non-physicist crackpots have suggested these phenomena might even
explain
flying saucers.
Moving on from pilot wave theory, the author explores other attempts
to create a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics:
objective
collapse of the wave function, as in the
Penrose
interpretation; the
many
worlds interpretation (which Smolin calls “magical
realism”); and
decoherence
of the wavefunction due to interaction with the environment. He
rejects all of them as unsatisfying, because they fail to address
glaring lacunæ in quantum theory which are apparent from its
very equations.
The twentieth century gave us two pillars of theoretical physics:
quantum mechanics and
general
relativity—Einstein's geometric theory of gravitation.
Both have been tested to great precision, but they are fundamentally
incompatible with one another. Quantum mechanics describes the very
small: elementary particles, atoms, and molecules. General relativity
describes the very large: stars, planets, galaxies, black holes, and
the universe as a whole. In the middle, where we live our lives,
neither much affects the things we observe, which is why their
predictions seem counter-intuitive to us. But when you try to put
the two theories together, to create a theory of
quantum gravity,
the pieces don't fit. Quantum mechanics assumes there is a
universal clock which ticks at the same rate everywhere in the
universe. But general relativity tells us this isn't so: a simple
experiment shows that a clock runs slower when it's in a
gravitational field. Quantum mechanics says that it isn't possible
to determine the position of a particle without its interacting with
another particle, but general relativity requires the knowledge of
precise positions of particles to determine how spacetime curves and
governs the trajectories of other particles. There are a multitude
of more gnarly and technical problems in what Stephen
Hawking called “consummating the fiery marriage between
quantum mechanics and general relativity”. In particular,
the equations of quantum mechanics are
linear,
which means you can add together two valid solutions and get
another valid solution, while general relativity is
nonlinear,
where trying to disentangle the relationships of parts of the
systems quickly goes pear-shaped and many of the mathematical
tools physicists use to understand systems (in particular,
perturbation
theory) blow up in their faces.
Ultimately, Smolin argues, giving up realism means abandoning what
science is all about: figuring out what is really going on.
The incompatibility of quantum mechanics and general relativity
provides clues that there may be a deeper theory to which
both are approximations that work in certain domains (just as
Newtonian mechanics is an approximation of special relativity
which works when velocities are much less than the speed of
light). Many people have tried and failed to “quantise
general relativity”. Smolin suggests the problem is that
quantum theory itself is incomplete: there is a deeper
theory, a realistic one, to which our existing theory is
only an approximation which works in the present universe where
spacetime is nearly flat. He suggests that candidate theories
must contain a number of fundamental principles. They must be
background
independent, like general relativity, and discard such concepts
as fixed space and a universal clock, making both dynamic and
defined based upon the components of a system. Everything must
be relational: there is no absolute space or time; everything is defined
in relation to something else. Everything must have a cause, and
there must be a chain of causation for every event which traces
back to its causes; these causes flow only in one direction. There is
reciprocity: any object which acts upon another object is acted upon
by that object. Finally, there is the “identity of indescernibles”:
two objects which have exactly the same properties are the same
object (this is a little tricky, but the idea is that if you
cannot in some way distinguish two objects [for example, by their
having different causes in their history], then they are the same
object).
This argues that what we perceive, at the human scale and even in
our particle physics experiments, as space and time are actually
emergent properties of something deeper which was manifest in
the early universe and in extreme conditions such as gravitational
collapse to black holes, but hidden in the bland conditions which
permit us to exist. Further, what we believe to be “laws”
and “constants” may simply be precedents established by
the universe as it tries to figure out how to handle novel
circumstances. Just as complex systems like markets and evolution
in ecosystems have rules that change based upon events within
them, maybe the universe is “making it up as it goes along”,
and in the early universe, far from today's near-equilibrium, wild
and crazy things happened which may explain some of the puzzling
properties of the universe we observe today.
This needn't forever remain in the realm of speculation. It is
easy, for example, to synthesise a protein which has never existed
before in the universe (it's an example of a
combinatorial
explosion). You might try, for example, to crystallise this novel
protein and see how difficult it is, then try again later and see if
the universe has learned how to do it. To be extra careful, do it first
on the International Space Station and then in a lab on the Earth.
I suggested this almost twenty years ago as a test of
Rupert
Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, but (although
doubtless Smolin would shun me for associating his theory
with that one), it might produce interesting results.
The book concludes with a very personal look at the challenges
facing a working scientist who has concluded the paradigm
accepted by the overwhelming majority of his or her peers is
incomplete and cannot be remedied by incremental changes based
upon the existing foundation. He notes:
There is no more reasonable bet than that our current
knowledge is incomplete. In every era of the past our
knowledge was incomplete; why should our period be any
different? Certainly the puzzles we face are at least
as formidable as any in the past. But almost nobody bets
this way. This puzzles me.
Well, it doesn't puzzle me. Ever since I learned classical
economics, I've always learned to look at the incentives in
a system. When you regard academia today, there is huge risk
and little reward to get out a new notebook, look at the
first blank page, and strike out in an entirely new direction.
Maybe if you were a twenty-something patent examiner in a small city
in Switzerland in 1905 with no academic career or reputation at
risk you might go back to first principles and overturn space, time,
and the wave theory of light all in one year, but today's
institutional structure makes it almost impossible for a
young researcher (and revolutionary ideas usually come from
the young) to strike out in a new direction. It is a blessing
that we have deep thinkers such as Lee Smolin setting aside the
easy path to retirement to ask these deep questions today.
Here is a
lecture by
the author at the Perimeter Institute about the topics
discussed in the book. He concentrates mostly on the problems
with quantum theory and not the speculative solutions discussed
in the latter part of the book.
- Kotkin, Stephen.
Stalin, Vol. 2: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941.
New York: Penguin Press, 2017.
ISBN 978-1-59420-380-0.
-
This is the second volume in the author's monumental projected
three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin. The first volume,
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928
(December 2018) covers the period from Stalin's birth through
the consolidation of his sole power atop the Soviet state after
the death of Lenin. The third volume, which will cover the
period from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 through
the death of Stalin in 1953 has yet to be published.
As this volume begins in 1928, Stalin is securely in the
supreme position of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, and having over the years staffed the senior ranks
of the party and the Soviet state (which the party operated
like the puppet it was) with loyalists who owed their positions
to him, had no serious rivals who might challenge him. (It is
often claimed that Stalin was paranoid and feared a coup, but
would a despot fearing for his position regularly take
summer holidays, months in length, in Sochi, far from the capital?)
By 1928, the Soviet Union had largely recovered from the damage
inflicted by the Great War, Bolshevik revolution, and subsequent
civil war. Industrial and agricultural production were back to
around their 1914 levels, and most measures of well-being had
similarly recovered. To be sure, compared to the developed
industrial economies of countries such as Germany, France, or
Britain, Russia remained a backward economy largely based upon
primitive agriculture, but at least it had undone the damage
inflicted by years of turbulence and conflict.
But in the eyes of Stalin and his close associates, who were ardent
Marxists, there was a dangerous and potentially deadly internal
contradiction in the Soviet system as it then stood. In 1921, in
response to the chaos and famine following the 1917 revolution and
years-long civil war, Lenin had proclaimed the
New
Economic Policy (NEP), which tempered the pure
collectivism of original Bolshevik doctrine by introducing a
mixed economy, where large enterprises would continue to be
owned and managed by the state, but small-scale businesses
could be privately owned and run for profit. More importantly,
agriculture, which had previously been managed under a top-down
system of coercive requisitioning of grain and other products
by the state, was replaced by a market system where farmers
could sell their products freely, subject to a tax, payable in
product, proportional to their production (and thus creating an
incentive to increase production).
The NEP was a great success, and shortages of agricultural
products were largely eliminated. There was grousing about
the growing prosperity of the so-called
NEPmen, but the
results of freeing the economy from the shackles of state
control were evident to all. But according to Marxist doctrine, it was
a dagger pointed at the heart of the socialist state.
By 1928, the Soviet economy could be described, in Marxist
terms, as socialism in the industrial cities and capitalism in
the agrarian countryside. But, according to Marx, the
form of politics was determined by the organisation of the
means of production—paraphrasing Brietbart, politics is
downstream of economics. This meant that preserving capitalism
in a large sector of the country, one employing a large
majority of its population and necessary to feed the cities,
was an existential risk. In such a situation it would only be
normal for the capitalist peasants to eventually prevail over
the less numerous urbanised workers and destroy socialism.
Stalin was a Marxist. He was not an opportunist who used
Marxism-Leninism to further his own ambitions. He really
believed this stuff. And so, in 1928, he proclaimed an
end to the NEP and began the forced collectivisation of Soviet
agriculture. Private ownership of land would be abolished, and
the 120 million peasants essentially enslaved as “workers”
on collective or state farms, with planting, quotas to
be delivered, and management essentially controlled by the party.
After an initial lucky year, the inevitable catastrophe ensued. Between 1931
and 1933 famine and epidemics resulting from it killed between
five and seven million people. The country lost around half of
its cattle and two thirds of its sheep. In 1929, the average
family in Kazakhstan owned 22.6 cattle; in 1933 3.7. This was
a calamity on the same order as the Jewish Holocaust in Germany,
and just as man-made: during this period there was a global glut
of food, but Stalin refused to admit the magnitude of the
disaster for fear of inciting enemies to attack and because doing so
would concede the failure of his collectivisation project.
In addition to the famine, the process of collectivisation
resulted in between four and five million people being arrested,
executed, deported to other regions, or jailed.
Many in the starving countryside said, “If only Stalin
knew, he would do something.” But the evidence is
overwhelming: Stalin knew, and did nothing. Marxist theory
said that agriculture must be collectivised, and by pure force
of will he pushed through the project, whatever the cost. Many
in the senior Soviet leadership questioned this single-minded
pursuit of a theoretical goal at horrendous human cost, but they
did not act to stop it. But Stalin remembered their opposition
and would settle scores with them later.
By 1936, it appeared that the worst of the period of
collectivisation was over. The peasants, preferring to live
in slavery than starve to death, had acquiesced to their fate
and resumed production, and the weather co-operated in
producing good harvests. And then, in 1937, a new horror
was unleashed upon the Soviet people, also completely man-made
and driven by the will of Stalin, the
Great Terror.
Starting slowly in the aftermath of the assassination of
Sergey Kirov
in 1934, by 1937 the absurd devouring of those most
loyal to the Soviet regime, all over Stalin's signature, reached
a crescendo. In 1937 and 1938 1,557,259 people would be
arrested and 681,692 executed, the overwhelming majority for
political offences, this in a country with a working-age population
of 100 million. Counting deaths from other causes as a
result of the secret police, the overall death toll was probably
around 830,000. This was so bizarre, and so unprecedented in
human history, it is difficult to find any comparable situation, even in
Nazi Germany. As the author remarks,
To be sure, the greater number of victims were ordinary Soviet
people, but what regime liquidates colossal numbers of
loyal officials? Could Hitler—had
he been so inclined—have compelled the imprisonment or
execution of huge swaths of Nazi factory and farm bosses, as well
as almost all of the Nazi provincial Gauleiters and their
staffs, several times over? Could he have executed the personnel
of the Nazi central ministries, thousands of his Wehrmacht
officers—including almost his entire high command—as
well as the Reich's diplomatic corps and its espionage agents, its
celebrated cultural figures, and the leadership of Nazi parties
throughout the world (had such parties existed)? Could Hitler
also have decimated the Gestapo even while it was carrying
out a mass bloodletting? And could the German people have been
told, and would the German people have found plausible, that almost
everyone who had come to power with the Nazi revolution turned out
to be a foreign agent and saboteur?
Stalin did all of these things. The damage inflicted upon the Soviet
military, at a time of growing threats, was horrendous. The terror
executed or imprisoned three of the five marshals of the Soviet Union,
13 of 15 full generals, 8 of the 9 admirals of the Navy, and 154 of
186 division commanders. Senior managers, diplomats, spies, and
party and government officials were wiped out in comparable
numbers in the all-consuming cataclysm. At the very moment the
Soviet state was facing threats from Nazi Germany in the west and
Imperial Japan in the east, it destroyed those most qualified to
defend it in a paroxysm of paranoia and purification from phantasmic
enemies.
And then, it all stopped, or largely tapered off. This did nothing
for those who had been executed, or who were still confined in the
camps spread all over the vast country, but at least there was a
respite from the knocks in the middle of the night and the
cascading denunciations for fantastically absurd imagined
“crimes”. (In June 1937, eight high-ranking Red
Army officers, including
Marshal Tukachevsky,
were denounced as “Gestapo agents”. Three of those
accused were Jews.)
But now the international situation took priority over
domestic “enemies”. The Bolsheviks, and Stalin in
particular, had always viewed the Soviet Union as surrounded
by enemies. As the vanguard of the proletarian revolution, by
definition those states on its borders must be reactionary
capitalist-imperialist or fascist regimes hostile to or
actively bent upon the destruction of the peoples' state.
With Hitler on the march in Europe and Japan expanding its
puppet state in China, potentially hostile powers were
advancing toward Soviet borders from two directions. Worse,
there was a loose alliance between Germany and Japan, raising
the possibility of a two-front war which would engage Soviet
forces in conflicts on both ends of its territory. What Stalin feared most,
however, was an alliance of the capitalist states (in which
he included Germany, despite its claim to be “National
Socialist”) against the Soviet Union. In particular, he dreaded
some kind of arrangement between Britain and Germany which might
give Britain supremacy on the seas and its far-flung
colonies, while acknowledging German domination of continental
Europe and a free hand to expand toward the East at the
expense of the Soviet Union.
Stalin was faced with an extraordinarily difficult choice: make
some kind of deal with Britain (and possibly France) in the hope
of deterring a German attack upon the Soviet Union, or cut a deal
with Germany, linking the German and Soviet economies in a trade
arrangement which the Germans would be loath to destroy by
aggression, lest they lose access to the raw materials which the
Soviet Union could supply to their war machine. Stalin's ultimate
calculation, again grounded in Marxist theory, was that the
imperialist powers were fated to eventually fall upon one another
in a destructive war for domination, and that by standing aloof, the
Soviet Union stood to gain by encouraging socialist revolutions in
what remained of them after that war had run its course.
Stalin evaluated his options and made his choice. On August
27, 1939, a
“non-aggression treaty”
was signed in Moscow between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
But the treaty went far beyond what was made public. Secret
protocols defined “spheres of influence”, including
how Poland would be divided among the two parties in the case of
war. Stalin viewed this treaty as a triumph: yes, doctrinaire
communists (including many in the West) would be aghast at a
deal with fascist Germany, but at a blow, Stalin had eliminated
the threat of an anti-Soviet alliance between Germany and Britain,
linked Germany and the Soviet Union in a trade arrangement whose
benefits to Germany would deter aggression and, in the case of war
between Germany and Britain and France (for which he hoped), might
provide an opportunity to recover territory once in the czar's
empire which had been lost after the 1917 revolution.
Initially, this strategy appeared to be working swimmingly. The
Soviets were shipping raw materials they had in abundance to
Germany and receiving high-technology industrial equipment and
weapons which they could immediately put to work and/or reverse-engineer
to make domestically. In some cases, they even received blueprints
or complete factories for making strategic products. As the
German economy became increasingly dependent upon Soviet shipments,
Stalin perceived this as leverage over the actions of Germany,
and responded to delays in delivery of weapons by slowing down
shipments of raw materials essential to German war production.
On September 1st, 1939,
Nazi Germany
invaded Poland, just a week
after the signing of the pact between Germany and the Soviet Union.
On September 3rd, France and Britain declared war on Germany. Here
was the “war among the imperialists” of which Stalin had
dreamed. The Soviet Union could stand aside, continue to trade with
Nazi Germany, while the combatants bled each other white, and then,
in the aftermath, support socialist revolutions in their
countries. On September 17th the Soviet Union, pursuant to the
secret protocol,
invaded
Poland from the east and joined the Nazi forces in eradicating
that nation. Ominously, greater Germany and the Soviet Union now
shared a border.
After the start of hostilities, a state of “phoney
war” existed until Germany struck against Denmark,
Norway, and France in April and May 1940. At first, this
appeared precisely what Stalin had hoped for: a general
conflict among the “imperialist powers” with
the Soviet Union not only uninvolved, but having reclaimed
territory in Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia which
had once belonged to the Tsars. Now there was every reason to
expect a long war of attrition in which the Nazis and their
opponents would grind each other down, as in the previous
world war, paving the road for socialist revolutions everywhere.
But then, disaster ensued. In less than six weeks, France collapsed
and Britain evacuated its expeditionary force from the Continent.
Now, it appeared, Germany reigned supreme, and might turn its
now largely idle army toward conquest in the East. After consolidating
the position in the west and indefinitely deferring an invasion of Britain
due to inability to obtain air and sea superiority in the
English Channel, Hitler began to concentrate his forces on
the eastern frontier. Disinformation, spread where Soviet
spy networks would pick it up and deliver it to Stalin, whose
prejudices it confirmed, said that the troop concentrations were
in preparation for an assault on British positions in the Near
East or to blackmail the Soviet Union to obtain, for example, a
long term lease on its breadbasket, the Ukraine.
Hitler, acutely aware that it was a two-front war which spelled
disaster to Germany in the last war, rationalised his attack on the
Soviet Union as follows. Yes, Britain had not been defeated, but
their only hope was an eventual alliance with the Soviet Union,
opening a second front against Germany. Knocking out the
Soviet Union (which should be no more difficult than the victory
over France, which took just six weeks), would preclude this possibility
and force Britain to come to terms. Meanwhile, Germany would have
secured access to raw materials in Soviet territory for which it
was previously paying market prices, but were now available for the cost
of extraction and shipping.
The volume concludes on June 21st, 1941, the eve of the Nazi invasion of
the Soviet Union. There could not have been more signs that this
was coming: Soviet spies around the world sent evidence, and Britain
even shared (without identifying the source) decrypted German
messages about troop dispositions and war plans. But none of
this disabused Stalin of his idée
fixe: Germany would not attack because Soviet exports were
so important. Indeed, in 1940, 40 percent of nickel, 55 percent of
manganese, 65 percent of chromium, 67% of asbestos, 34% of petroleum,
and a million tonnes of grain and timber which supported the Nazi
war machine were delivered by the Soviet Union. Hours before the
Nazi onslaught began, well after the order for it was given, a
Soviet train delivering grain, manganese, and oil crossed the
border between Soviet-occupied and German-occupied Poland, bound
for Germany. Stalin's delusion persisted until reality intruded
with dawn.
This is a magisterial work. It is unlikely it will
ever be equalled. There is abundant rich detail on every page.
Want to know what the telephone number for the Latvian consulate
in Leningrad was 1934? It's right here on page 206 (5-50-63).
Too often, discussions of Stalin assume he was a kind of
murderous madman. This book is a salutary antidote. Everything
Stalin did made perfect sense when viewed in the context of the
beliefs which Stalin held, shared by his Bolshevik
contemporaries and those he promoted to the inner circle. Yes,
they seem crazy, and they were, but no less crazy than
politicians in the United States advocating the abolition of air
travel and the extermination of cows in order to save a planet
which has managed just fine for billions of years without the
intervention of bug-eyed, arm-waving ignoramuses.
Reading this book is a major investment of time. It is 1154
pages, with 910 pages of main text and illustrations, and will
noticeably bend spacetime in its vicinity. But there is so much
wisdom, backed with detail, that you will savour every
page and, when you reach the end, crave the publication of the
next volume. If you want to understand totalitarian
dictatorship, you have to ultimately understand Stalin, who
succeeded at it for more than thirty years until ultimately
felled by illness, not conquest or coup, and who built the
primitive agrarian nation he took over into a superpower. Some
of us thought that the death of Stalin and, decades later, the
demise of the Soviet Union, brought an end to all that. And
yet, today, in the West, we have politicians advocating central
planning, collectivisation, and limitations on free speech which
are entirely consistent with the policies of Uncle Joe. After
reading this book and thinking about it for a while, I have
become convinced that Stalin was a patriot who believed that what
he was doing was in the best interest of the Soviet people. He
was sure the (laughably absurd) theories he believed and applied
were the best way to build the future. And he was willing to
force them into being whatever the cost may be. So it is today,
and let us hope those made aware of the costs documented in this
history will be immunised against the siren song of collectivist
utopia.
Author Stephen Kotkin did a two-part Uncommon
Knowledge interview about the book in 2018. In the first
part he discusses
collectivisation
and the terror. In the second, he discusses
Stalin
and Hitler, and the events leading up to the Nazi invasion
of the Soviet Union.
- Wood, Fenton.
Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2018.
ASIN B07H2RJK8J.
-
This is an utterly charming short novel (or novella: it is just
123 pages) which, on the surface, reads like a young adult
adventure from the golden age, along the lines of the
original
Tom Swift
or
Hardy Boys
series. But as you get deeper into the story, you discover clues
there is much more going on than you first suspected, and that this
may be the beginning of a wonderful exploration of an alternative
reality which is a delight to visit and you may wish were your home.
Philo Hergenschmidt, Randall Quinn, and their young friends
live in Porterville, deep in the mountain country of the
Yankee Republic. The mountains that surround it stopped the
glaciers when they came down from the North a hundred thousand
years ago, and provided a refuge for the peace-loving,
self-sufficient, resourceful, and ornery people who fled
the wars. Many years later, they retain those properties, and
most young people are members of the Survival Scouts, whose
eight hundred page Handbook contains every thing a mountain
man needs to know to survive and prosper under any circumstances.
Porterville is just five hundred miles from the capital of
Iburakon, but might as well be on a different planet. Although
the Yankee Republic's technology is in many ways comparable
to our own, the mountains shield Porterville from television
and FM radio broadcasts and, although many families own cars
with radios installed by default, the only thing they can
pick up is a few scratchy AM stations from far away when the
skywave
opens up at night. Every summer, Randall spends two weeks
with his grandparents in Iburakon and comes back with tales
of wonders which enthrall his friends like an explorer of
yore returned from
Shangri-La.
(Randall is celebrated as a
raconteur—and some of his
tales may be true.) This year he told of the marvel of
television and a science fiction series called Xenotopia,
and for weeks the boys re-enacted battles from his descriptions.
Broadcasting: that got Philo thinking….
One day Philo calls up Randall and asks him to dig out an
old radio he recalled him having and tune it to the usually
dead FM band. Randall does, and is astonished to hear
Philo broadcasting on “Station X” with amusing
patter. It turns out he found a book in the attic,
101 Radio Projects for Boys, written by a
creative and somewhat subversive author, and following the
directions, put together a half watt FM transmitter from
scrounged spare parts. Philo briefs Randall on pirate radio
stations: although the penalties for operating without
a license appear severe, in fact, unless you willingly
interfere with a licensed broadcaster, you just get a
warning the first time and a wrist-slap ticket thereafter
unless you persist too long.
This gets them both thinking…. With the help of
adults willing to encourage youth in their (undisclosed)
projects, or just to look the other way (the kids of
Porterville live free-range lives, as I did in my childhood,
as their elders have not seen fit to import the vibrant
diversity into their community which causes present-day
youth to live under security lock-down), and a series of
adventures, radio station 9X9 goes on the air, announced
with great fanfare in handbills posted around the town.
Suddenly, there is something to listen to, and
people start tuning in. Local talent tries their hands
at being a DJ, and favourites emerge. Merchants start
to sign up for advertisements. Church services are
broadcast for shut-ins. Even though no telephone line
runs anywhere near the remote and secret studio, ingenuity
and some nineteenth-century technology allow them to
stage a hit call-in show. And before long, live talent
gets into the act. A big baseball game provides both a
huge opportunity and a seemingly insurmountable challenge
until the boys invent an art which, in our universe, was
once masterfully performed by a young Ronald Reagan.
Along the way, we learn of the Yankee Republic in brief,
sometimes jarring, strokes of the pen, as the author masterfully
follows the science fiction principle of “show, don't tell”.
Just imagine if William the Bastard had succeeded in conquering
England. We'd probably be speaking some unholy crossbreed of
French and English….
The Republic is the only country in the world that recognizes
allodial title,….
When Congress declares war, they have to elect one of their
own to be a sacrificial victim,….
“There was a man from the state capitol who wanted to
give us government funding to build what he called a
‘proper’ school, but he was run out of town,
the poor dear.”
Pirates, of course, must always keenly scan the horizon
for those who might want to put an end to the fun. And so
it is for buccaneers sailing the Hertzian waves. You'll enjoy
every minute getting to the point where you find out how
it ends. And then, when you think it's all over, another
door opens into a wider, and weirder, world in which we
may expect further adventures. The second volume in the
series,
Five Million Watts,
was published in April, 2019.
At present, only a Kindle edition is
available. The book is not available under the Kindle Unlimited
free rental programme, but is very inexpensive.
- Roberts, Andrew.
Churchill: Walking with Destiny.
New York: Viking, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-101-98099-6.
-
At the point that Andrew Roberts sat down to write a new biography
of Winston Churchill, there were a total of 1009 biographies of the
man in print, examining every aspect of his life from a multitude of
viewpoints. Works include the encyclopedic three-volume
The Last Lion (January 2013) by
William Manchester and Paul Reid, and Roy Jenkins' single-volume
Churchill: A Biography (February 2004),
which concentrates on Churchill's political career. Such books may
seem to many readers to say just about everything about Churchill
there is to be said from the abundant documentation available
for his life. What could a new biography possibly add to the story?
As the author demonstrates in this magnificent and weighty book
(1152 pages, 982 of main text), a great deal. Earlier Churchill
biographers laboured under the constraint that many of Churchill's
papers from World War II and the postwar era remained under the seal
of official secrecy. These included the extensive notes taken by
King George VI during his weekly meetings with the Prime Minister
during the war and recorded in his personal diary. The classified
documents were made public only fifty years after the end of the
war, and the King's wartime diaries were made available to the author
by special permission granted by the King's daughter, Queen Elizabeth
II.
The royal diaries are an invaluable source on Churchill's candid
thinking as the war progressed. As a firm believer in
constitutional monarchy, Churchill withheld nothing in his
discussions with the King. Even the deepest secrets, such as
the breaking of the German codes, the information obtained from
decrypted messages, and atomic secrets, which were shared with
only a few of the most senior and trusted government officials,
were discussed in detail with the King. Further, while
Churchill was constantly on stage trying to hold the Grand
Alliance together, encourage Britons to stay in the fight, and
advance his geopolitical goals which were often at variance with
even the Americans, with the King he was brutally honest about
Britain's situation and what he was trying to accomplish.
Oddly, perhaps the best insight into Churchill's mind as the war
progressed comes not from his own
six-volume history of the war, but rather the
pen of the King, writing only to himself. In addition, sources
such as verbatim notes of the war cabinet, diaries of the
Soviet ambassador to the U.K. during the 1930s through the war, and
other recently-disclosed sources resulted in, as the author
describes it, there being something new on almost every page.
The biography is written in an entirely conventional manner: the
author eschews fancy stylistic tricks in favour of an almost
purely chronological recounting of Churchill's life, flipping
back and forth from personal life, British politics, the world
stage and Churchill's part in the events of both the Great War
and World War II, and his career as an author and shaper of
opinion.
Winston Churchill was an English aristocrat, but not a member of
the nobility. A direct descendant of John Churchill, the
1st
Duke of Marlborough, his father,
Lord
Randolph Churchill, was the third son of the 7th Duke
of Marlborough. As only the first son inherits the title,
although Randolph bore the honorific “Lord”, he
was a commoner and his children, including first-born Winston,
received no title. Lord Randolph was elected to the House
of Commons in 1874, the year of Winston's birth, and would
serve until his death in 1895, having been Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Leader of the House of Commons, and Secretary of
State for India. His death, aged just forty-five (rumoured
at the time to be from syphilis, but now attributed to a brain
tumour, as his other symptoms were inconsistent with syphilis),
along with the premature deaths of three aunts and uncles at
early ages, convinced the young Winston his own life might be
short and that if he wanted to accomplish great things, he
had no time to waste.
In terms of his subsequent career, his father's early death might
have been an unappreciated turning point in Winston Churchill's
life. Had his father retired from the House of Commons prior to
his death, he would almost certainly have been granted a peerage
in return for his long service. When he subsequently died,
Winston, as eldest son, would have inherited the title and
hence not been entitled to serve in the House of Commons. It
is thus likely that had his father not died while still an MP,
the son would never have had the political career he did nor
have become prime minister in 1940.
Young, from a distinguished family, wealthy (by the standards
of the average Briton, but not compared to the landed aristocracy
or titans of industry and finance), ambitious, and seeking
novelty and adventures to the point of recklessness, the
young Churchill believed he was meant to accomplish great things
in however many years Providence might grant him on Earth. In 1891,
at the age of just 16, he confided to a friend,
I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful
world, great upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such
as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London will be
in danger — London will be attacked and I shall
be very prominent in the defence of London. …
This country will be subjected, somehow, to a tremendous
invasion, by what means I do not know, but I tell you
I shall be in command of the defences of London and I
shall save London and England from disaster. …
I repeat — London will be in danger and in the high
position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the
capital and save the Empire.
He was, thus, from an early age, not one likely to be daunted
by the challenges he assumed when, almost five decades later at
an age (66) when many of his contemporaries retired, he faced
a situation uncannily similar to that he imagined in boyhood.
Churchill's formal education ended at age 20 with his graduation
from the military academy at Sandhurst and
commissioning as a second lieutenant in the cavalry. A
voracious reader, he educated himself in history, science,
politics, philosophy, literature, and the classics, while
ever expanding his mastery of the English language, both
written and spoken. Seeking action, and finding no war
in which he could participate as a British officer, he
managed to persuade a London newspaper to hire him as a
war correspondent and set off to cover an insurrection
in Cuba against its Spanish rulers. His dispatches were
well received, earning five guineas per article, and he
continued to file dispatches as a war correspondent
even while on active duty with British forces. By 1901,
he was the highest-paid war correspondent in the world,
having earned the equivalent of £1 million today
from his columns, books, and lectures.
He subsequently saw action in India and the Sudan, participating
in the last great cavalry charge of the British army in the
Battle of Omdurman, which he described along with the rest of
the Mahdist War in his book, The River War. In
October 1899, funded by the Morning Post, he set
out for South Africa to cover the Second Boer War. Covering
the conflict, he was taken prisoner and held in a camp until,
in December 1899, he escaped and crossed 300 miles of enemy
territory to reach Portuguese East Africa. He later returned
to South Africa as a cavalry lieutenant, participating in the
Siege of Ladysmith and capture of Pretoria, continuing to
file dispatches with the Morning Post which
were later collected into a book.
Upon his return to Britain, Churchill found that his wartime
exploits and writing had made him a celebrity. Eleven
Conservative associations approached him to run for Parliament,
and he chose to run in Oldham, narrowly winning. His
victory was part of a massive landslide by the Unionist
coalition, which won 402 seats versus 268 for the opposition.
As the author notes,
Before the new MP had even taken his seat, he had fought
in four wars, published five books,… written
215 newspaper and magazine articles, participated in the
greatest cavalry charge in half a century and made a
spectacular escape from prison.
This was not a man likely to disappear into the mass of
back-benchers and not rock the boat.
Churchill's views on specific issues over his long career defy
those who seek to put him in one ideological box or another,
either to cite him in favour of their views or vilify him as
an enemy of all that is (now considered) right and proper. For
example, Churchill was often denounced as a bloodthirsty
warmonger, but in 1901, in just his second speech in the
House of Commons, he rose to oppose a bill proposed by the
Secretary of War, a member of his own party, which would
have expanded the army by 50%. He argued,
A European war cannot be anything but a cruel, heart-rending
struggle which, if we are ever to enjoy the bitter fruits
of victory, must demand, perhaps for several years, the whole
manhood of the nation, the entire suspension of peaceful
industries, and the concentrating to one end of every vital
energy in the community. … A European war can only
end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less
fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the
conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The
wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
Bear in mind, this was a full thirteen years before the outbreak
of the Great War, which many politicians and military men expected
to be short, decisive, and affordable in blood and treasure.
Churchill, the resolute opponent of Bolshevism, who coined the term
“Cold War”, was the same person who said, after Stalin's
annexation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in 1939, “In
essence, the Soviet's Government's latest actions in the Baltic
correspond to British interests, for they diminish Hitler's
potential Lebensraum. If the
Baltic countries have to lose their independence, it is better
for them to be brought into the Soviet state system than the
German one.”
Churchill, the champion of free trade and free markets, was also
the one who said, in March 1943,
You must rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of
national compulsory insurance for all classes for all
purposes from the cradle to the grave. … [Everyone must
work] whether they come from the ancient aristocracy,
or the ordinary type of pub-crawler. … We
must establish on broad and solid foundations a National
Health Service.
And yet, just two years later, contesting the first parliamentary
elections after victory in Europe, he argued,
No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and
industry of the country could afford to allow free,
sharp, or violently worded expressions of public
discontent. They would have to fall back on some form
of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the
first instance. And this would nip opinion in the
bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and
it would gather all the power to the supreme party and
the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above
their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer
servants and no longer civil.
Among all of the apparent contradictions and twists and turns
of policy and politics there were three great invariant
principles guiding Churchill's every action. He believed that
the British Empire was the greatest force for civilisation,
peace, and prosperity in the world. He opposed tyranny in
all of its manifestations and believed it must not be allowed to
consolidate its power. And he believed in the wisdom of the
people expressed through the democratic institutions of
parliamentary government within a constitutional monarchy, even
when the people rejected him and the policies he advocated.
Today, there is an almost reflexive cringe among
bien pensants at any intimation
that colonialism might have been a good thing, both for
the colonial power and its colonies. In a paragraph
drafted with such dry irony it might go right past some
readers, and reminiscent of the “What have the Romans
done for us?” scene in
Life
of Brian, the author notes,
Today, of course, we know imperialism and colonialism
to be evil and exploitative concepts, but Churchill's first-hand
experience of the British Raj did not strike him that way. He
admired the way the British had brought internal peace for the
first time in Indian history, as well as railways, vast irrigation
projects, mass education, newspapers, the possibilities for
extensive international trade, standardized units of exchange,
bridges, roads, aqueducts, docks, universities, an uncorrupt
legal system, medical advances, anti-famine coordination, the
English language as the first national lingua franca, telegraphic
communication and military protection from the Russian, French,
Afghan, Afridi and other outside threats, while also abolishing
suttee (the practice of
burning widows on funeral pyres),
thugee (the ritualized murder
of travellers) and other abuses. For Churchill this was not the
sinister and paternalist oppression we now know it to have been.
This is a splendid in-depth treatment of the life, times, and
contemporaries of Winston Churchill, drawing upon a
multitude of sources, some never before available to any
biographer. The author does not attempt to persuade you
of any particular view of Churchill's career. Here you see
his many blunders (some tragic and costly) as well as the
triumphs and prescient insights which made him a voice in the
wilderness when so many others were stumbling blindly toward
calamity. The very magnitude of Churchill's work and
accomplishments would intimidate many would-be biographers:
as a writer and orator he published thirty-seven books
totalling 6.1 million words (more than Shakespeare and Dickens
put together) and won the Nobel Prize in Literature
for 1953, plus another five million words of public speeches.
Even professional historians might balk at taking on a
figure who, as a historian alone, had, at the time of his death,
sold more history books than any historian who ever lived.
Andrew Roberts steps up to this challenge and delivers a
work which makes a major contribution to understanding
Churchill and will almost certainly become the starting
point for those wishing to explore the life of this
complicated figure whose life and works are deeply
intertwined with the history of the twentieth century
and whose legacy shaped the world in which we live today.
This is far from a dry historical narrative: Churchill was
a master of verbal repartee and story-telling, and there are
a multitude of examples, many of which will have you laughing
out loud at his wit and wisdom.
Here is an
Uncommon
Knowledge interview with the author about Churchill and
this biography.
This is a lecture by Andrew Roberts on
“The
Importance of Churchill for Today” at Hillsdale
College in March, 2019.
- Kroese, Robert.
The Dawn of the Iron Dragon.
Seattle: CreateSpace, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-7220-2331-7.
-
This is the second volume in the Iron Dragon trilogy
which began with The Dream of the Iron
Dragon (August 2018). At the end of the
first book, the crew of the Andrea Luhman stranded
on Earth in the middle ages faced a seemingly impossible
challenge. They, and their Viking allies, could save humanity
from extinction in a war in the distant future only by building
a space program capable of launching a craft
into Earth orbit starting with an infrastructure based upon
wooden ships and edged weapons. Further, given what these
accidental time travellers, the first in history, had learned
about the nature of travel to the past in their adventures to
date, all of this must be done in the deepest secrecy and without
altering the history to be written in the future. Recorded history,
they discovered, cannot be changed, and hence any attempt to do
something which would leave evidence of a medieval space program
or intervention of advanced technology in the affairs of the time,
would be doomed to failure. These constraints placed almost impossible
demands upon what was already a formidable challenge.
From their ship's computer, the exiled spacemen had a close
approximation to all of human knowledge,
so they were rich in bits. But when it came
to it: materials, infrastructure, tools, sources of
energy and motive power, and everything else, they
had almost nothing. Even the simplest rocket capable of
achieving Earth orbit has tens to hundreds of thousands of
parts, most requiring precision manufacture, stringent
control of material quality, and rigorous testing. Consider
a humble machine screw. In the 9th century A.D.
there weren't any hardware stores. If you needed a screw, or
ten thousand of them, to hold your rocket components together,
you needed first to locate and mine the iron ore, then smelt
the iron from the ore, refine it with high temperature and
forced air (both of which require their own technologies,
including machine screws) to achieve the desired carbon content,
adding alloying metals such as nickel, chromium, cobalt, tungsten,
and manganese, all of which have to be mined and refined
first. Then the steel must be formed into the desired shape
(requiring additional technologies), heat-treated, and then
finally the threads must be cut into the blank, requiring machine
tools made to sufficient precision that the screws will be
interchangeable, with something to power the tools (all of which, of
course, contain screws). And that's just a screw. Thinking
about a turbopump, regeneratively cooled combustion chamber,
hydraulically-actuated gimbal mechanism, gyroscopes and
accelerometers, or any of the myriad other components of even
the simplest launcher are apt to induce despair.
But the spacemen were survivors, and they knew that
the entire future of the human species, driven in the future
they had come from to near-extinction by the relentless
Cho-ta'an, depended upon their getting off the Earth and
delivering the planet-busting weapon which might turn the
tide for their descendants centuries hence. While they
needed just about everything, what they needed most was
minds: human brainpower and the skills flowing from
it to find and process the materials to build the machines
to build the machines to build the machines which, after a
decades-long process of recapitulating centuries of human
technological progress, would enable them to accomplish their
ambitious yet utterly essential mission.
People in the 9th century were just as intelligent as those
today, but in most of the world literacy was rare and even
more scarce was the acquired intellectual skill of thinking
logically, breaking down a problem into its constituent parts,
and the mental flexibility to learn and apply mind tools, such
as algebra, trigonometry, calculus, Newton's and Kepler's laws,
and a host of others which had yet to be discovered. These
rare people were to be found in the emerging cities, where
learning and the embryos of what would become the great
universities of the later Middle Ages were developing. And
so missions were dispatched to Constantinople, the greatest
of these cities, and other centres of learning and innovation,
to recruit not the famous figures recorded in history (whose
disappearance into a secret project was inconsistent with
that history, and hence impossible), but their promising young
followers. These cities were cosmopolitan crossroads, dangerous
but also sufficiently diverse that a Viking longboat showing up
with people who barely spoke any known language would not
attract undue attention. But the rulers of these cities
appreciated the value of their learned people, and trying to
attract them was perilous and could lead to hazards and
misadventures.
On top of all of these challenges, a Cho-ta'an ship had
followed the Andrea Luhman through the hyperspace
gate and whatever had caused them to be thrown back in time,
and a small contingent of the aliens had made it to Earth,
bent on stopping the spacemen's getting off the planet at any
cost. The situation was highly asymmetrical: while the spacemen
had to accomplish a near-impossible task, the Cho-ta'an need
only prevent them by any means possible. And being Cho-ta'an,
if those means included loosing a doomsday plague to depopulate
Europe, well, so be it. And the presence of the Cho-ta'an,
wherever they might be hiding, redoubled the need for secrecy
in every aspect of the Iron Dragon project.
Another contingent of the recruiting project finds itself in the
much smaller West Francia city of Paris, just as Viking forces
are massing for what history would record as the
Siege
of Paris in A.D. 885–886.
In this epic raid, a force of tens of thousands (today estimated
around 20,000, around half that claimed in the account by the
monk Abbo Cernuus, who has been called “in a class of his
own as an exaggerator”) of Vikings in hundreds (300,
probably, 700 according to Abbo) of ships laid siege to a city defended
by just two hundred Parisian men-at-arms. In this account, the
spacemen, with foreknowledge of how it was going to come out,
provide invaluable advice to Count Odo of Paris and Gozlin, the
“fighting Bishop” of Paris, in defending their
city as it was simultaneously ravaged by a plague (wonder
where that came from?), and in persuading King Charles (“the
Fat”) to come to the relief of the city. The epic battle
for Paris, which ended not in triumph but rather a shameful
deal, was a turning point in the history of France. The efforts
of the spacemen, while critical and perhaps decisive, remained
consistent with written history, at least that written by Abbo,
who they encouraged in his proclivity for exaggeration.
Meanwhile, back at the secret base in Iceland, chosen to stay out
of the tangles of European politics and out of the way of
their nemesis
Harald Fairhair,
the first King of Norway, local rivalries intrude upon the
desired isolation. It appears another, perhaps disastrous, siege
may be in the offing, putting the entire project at risk. And
with all of this, one of those knock-you-off-your-feet calamities
the author is so fond of throwing at his characters befalls them,
forcing yet another redefinition of their project and a breathtaking
increase in its ambition and complexity, just as they have to
contemplate making new and perilous alliances simply to survive.
The second volume of a trilogy is often the most challenging
to write. In the first, everything is new, and the reader
gets to meet the characters, the setting, and the challenges
to be faced in the story. In the conclusion, everything is pulled
together into a satisfying resolution. But in that one in the
middle, it's mostly developing characters, plots, introducing
new (often subordinate) characters, and generally moving
things along—one risks readers' regarding it as
“filler”. In this book, the author artfully
avoids that risk by making a little-known but epic
battle the centrepiece of the story, along with intrigue,
a thorny ethical dilemma, and multiple plot threads playing
out from Iceland to North Africa to the Dardanelles. You
absolutely should read the first volume, The Dream of the Iron
Dragon, before starting this one—although there is
a one page summary of that book at the start, it isn't remotely
adequate to bring you up to speed and avoid your repeatedly
exclaiming “Who?”, “What?”, and
“How?” as you enjoy this story.
When you finish this volume, the biggest question in your mind
will probably be “How in the world is he going to wrap all
of this up in just one more book?” The only way to find
out is to pick up The Voyage of the
Iron Dragon, which I will be reviewing here in due
course. This saga (what else can you call an epic with
Vikings and spaceships?) will be ranked among the very
best of alternative history science fiction, and continues to
demonstrate why independent science fiction is creating a new
Golden Age for readers and rendering the legacy publishers of
tedious “diversity” propaganda impotent and
obsolete.
The Kindle edition is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.