Watching 300 last week it struck me how, like most things, pretty much everything everyone thinks they know about Sparta is wrong. Like, for example, everyone knows the Spartans were uniquely cruel in exposing children to the elements if they were considered weak.
(Part one is here) One of the very strangest things about the representation of Sparta in 300 is the treatment of the Ephors. If you’ve seen the film then you’ll know that they are portrayed as twisted and mis-shapen mystics, a kind of ancient race living high on a mountaintop above the Spartan city who […]
I’ve just finished reading Ascent, the newish novel by Jed Mercurio. It’s the story of Yefgenii Yeremin an orphan of Stalingrad and “the great patriotic war against fascism”. Yefgenii is blessed with a talent for mathematics and engineering and supremely acute eyesight. This combination of skills take him into the VVF, the Soviet air force […]
I’ve said before that, for a genre that so often finds its writers dealing with big political ideas, relatively few science fiction authors demonstrate any sense that they have a clue about how politics really works. This leads to things like the sci-fi revolution and improbable conspiracies (sci-fi governments are good at keeping secrets, real […]
Sometimes reading throws up odd sychronicities – and my experience of reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (a ‘mainstream’ writer’s take on both sf (alt-history) and the crime thriller in one book) came shortly after I’d finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and No Country for Old Men (a ‘mainstream’ writer’s take on both […]
This is a book that, for me, ended up being more than the sum of its parts. There was quite a lot here that I found disappointing, at first, but as McDonald interleaves the three different plot threads across three different worlds/times I found myself being drawn by the story and worrying less about the […]
I finished reading Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road yesterday. It’s a wonderful book – a straightforward action-adventure story in the very old style but lifted way into the stratosphere by Chabon’s mastery of language.