My Friend Maigret
By George Simenon

I found three Maigret books in a Free Library near me. I've heard very good things about Simenon and his detective so I picked them up and have now read one. My first Simenon went very well.

My Friend Maigret is a short and incisive crime mystery set on a French island off the Riviera. A small cast of characters are in focus after a murder, with Maigret accompanied by Mr Pyke, an observer of his methods from Scotland Yard. There is humour with the wry interaction of Maigret and his quite taciturn colleague, who he seems to slightly resent but also admire, and also great local colour. This all takes place in the Fifties, and shows its age in some ways of course (telegrams, for instance). However, it is extremely readable and I found the prose sharp and quite witty. Human behaviour, and the types you might find in a place like this, are timeless though, and crime will always be familiar. Very well done novel and I look forward to the next one.

Helix Wars
By Eric Brown

Helix Wars is Eric Brown's followup to his Helix novel, a book I liked a lot. Whilst I would not rate this as quite as highly, it is a very worthy sequel.

Taking place about two hundred years after the first, the human colony has made its home on the Helix and been assigned a "peacekeeper" role by the Helix Builders. When one of the alien races on the Helix decides to wage a war of conquest on another, a human inter-world pilot is shot down and dropped into the midst of the terror and ravages of the war.

What we end up with is a great action and adventure story, with a chase, a rescue attempt, an alien partner, high technology and a brutal foe. Like the first book, Brown is good on the interaction and relationship between people, here alien people. We empathise with the alien point of view completely, and the morality of killing is explored as the characters debate and argue about what sort tactics to use and how justified killing is. It is an excellent science-fiction thriller: easy to read and pacy like the first book.

I will say that I don't particularly like the cover of the paperback I have though. It makes the book look like a video game, or some sort of "role-playing" fiction! Getting past that though, a straightforward action book I enjoyed reading a lot. Now to find the next Brown book to pick up: they are not all in print anymore I think.

The Chrysalids
By John Wyndham

This is my third Wyndham novel, and it is one some people consider his best. Another great adventure story, this time told from the point of view of an adolescent boy.

The story takes place in a much changed world after some sort of cataclysm (called the "Tribulation"), almost certainly nuclear given the descriptions of the state of nature and fear of mutation. We open with humans living in very basic circumstances in a farming community run under extremely strict religious law. David's father is the tyrannical and brutal leader of the farm clan, obsessed with rooting out any "deviation" from the True Image. In the Bible, Man is created in the image of God. God does not have six toes on a foot. Outside "civilisation" is a very different society, populated by people banished or born to live on the fringes and eke out a much harsher existence. Here, there is no "true" image and existence is very mean. In the world of the farm we encounter a child, then a few more, who have an extra ability of telepathy, more easily hidden than, say, a sixth toe. Until it is noticed.

David and his friends communicate long distances through their minds, and from an early age are aware of the danger they would be in if their difference is discovered. The books leads inevitably to this and their escape attempt. It turns out that being able to communicate in this way imparts some advantages.

A short book, it tells a well known story of the evils of persecution and the need for tolerance of difference. A shared humanity. But also considers what sort of "improved" human evolution might produce: perhaps even a "superior variant" of Homo Sapiens. I thought that the conclusion was a little quick and perhaps a bit pat. It also lapses into some polemic regarding evolution and change near the end, with Wyndham getting up on the podium to lecture. With this said, I enjoyed it, even though I would place it slightly below the The Day of the Triffids in my estimation. Many more good books and short stories of his to try next.

I visited the National Gallery of Scotland in the first week of 2025 to have a look at the Turner watercolours, shown once a year in January. I do this every year.

I am now very glad I went early, because the week after there was a big queue to get in, and earlier this week (Thursday 10am), another even longer queue. I have never seen queues before: snaking out the front door and up the side of the gallery building.

A reason might be that the exhibition was of the Vaughan Bequest from the National Gallery of Ireland this year for the first time. Maybe a good enough reason itself, or maybe good marketing, advertising or an "influencer" somewhere. They are such good paintings that I am just glad I managed to have a look.

From the National Gallery of Scotland site :

In 2025 the National Galleries of Scotland will commemorate the 250th birthday of beloved British artist JMW Turner with a once-in-a-lifetime, free exhibition. For the first time, visitors will be able to marvel at over 30 Turner watercolours from Dublin.

I over-heard a gallery assistant saying that Dublin has not got queues like this.

Adam Bede
By George Eliot

It was that moment in summer when the sound of the scythe being whetted makes us cast more lingering looks at the flower-sprinked tresses of the meadows.

I found Adam Bede, George Eliot's first full length novel, extremely moving. Yes, perhaps a bit romantic and sentimental, but nevertheless, a strong emotional response. Some chapters were almost unbearably difficult to get through because of the strength of feeling it brought forth.

It is easy to begin reading and get wrapped up in the world of the small English village of Hayslope at the turn of the 19th Century. Eliot has such beautiful prose, the countryside and people come to life and you are swept away to "Loamshire", her fictional English county.

There is a lot of sympathy for the lot of the common workers she pictures in her books. She has sympathy but also a sharp eye and the world she describes is not always one of dappled sunlight and radiant meadow. People might be grey faced and pinched as well as rosy cheeked and dimpled. The story itself is a well known and time-worn one, as the author, publisher and reader knew: the central event is based on a story Eliot heard from her aunt when she was young. A squire falling for a farm girl was a tale commonly melodramatic but here made fresh, immediate and more realistic.

It is a slow book and infused with Christian thought and speech, with strong moral sentiment. There is also a huge amount of empathy, love, respect and humour; there are some very funny observations by Eliot (as an occasional narrator) and her characters. Mrs Poyser has a sharp and witty tongue, not sparing anyone, not her husband or even her landlord, the old squire. The scene where she gives him a piece of her mind when he tries to push her into an unwanted business arrangement is a real gem. When Hetty Sorrel, her beautiful but very vane niece, lets her imagination run and struts in front of her bedroom mirror "with a pigeon-like stateliness", we see it and laugh, but it also becomes heart-breaking later. I felt for Hetty even though Eliot does a lot to expose her vacuity, thoughtlessness and vanity.

The book is not without faults, Adam himself is perhaps a little too unblemished after all, but the novel is one of the greatest I've had the pleasure of reading.

Dying Inside
By Robert Silverberg

I have not read any Silverberg and he is a giant of the science-fiction genre, so it is time I rectified that. I think Dying Inside was an excellent book to start with.

First published in 1972, Dying Inside concerns a man born with the ability to read people's minds. Imagine how great that would be? Well, not so fast! Set in mid-seventies New York, David Selig is now in his forties and has lived a decade or so with the realisation his powers are waning. This causes him much anxiety, to say the least, but the "gift" he was born with has been a blessing as well as a huge curse in his life. What might a life be like if you had this ability? Would you always want to know what people really thought of you?

Selig is not a particularly likeable man. He is cynical, unhappy with his station in life and full of guilt about his power. In fact, ignoring the telepathic ability, he exhibits many of the traits of the stereotypical New Yorker, and a Jewish one at that. I have not read much Roth, but perhaps he would be at home in a Roth novel. Or think of Woody Allen, minus the jokes, but plenty of black humour. Dying Inside is sometimes called "literary" science-fiction (descriptive terms like this can be fuzzy); in fact it is barely "science-fiction" at all. At least so far as most people would think science-fiction is (consider: Orwell's Nineteen Eight Four is science-fiction).

Perhaps "literary" because of this. Silverberg is a well read and erudite man and he has spent time polishing his prose here, inserting clever and thoughtful literary and philosophical references. He also conjures up the atmosphere of the New York of the times, especially the Seventies, post JFK and King assassinations, and the cultural, social and educational milieu (and dysfunction).

Not a long book, I found it quite a pleasure to read.

Good news everybody ...

I've been very angry about the Economist App performance this year, particularly how much it was crashing. I was having to do a factory reset on my tablet every 8 weeks to get a decent experience reading the magazine on my tablet. I am very pleased to say that things seem to have significantly improved however.

There was an update sometime in early November I think and since then it feels a little more responsive and also much more stable. So far, I have really noticed it behaving better. Now the ratings and comments I see on the Play Store are still quite bad but, for me, it seems like the update has fixed the biggest issues I had. I'm still cautious of course, but I am happy to report this. I should rate and comment about this on the "store" sometime soon as well.

This is the site of the former Royal Bank of Scotland building on Dundas Street in Edinburgh. A huge building, it was demolished recently and now sits empty beside King George V park. The development has hit a snag.

The original plans have changed and the developers are after new permissions from the council. The work is expected to include a lot of new student accomodation of the sort that has been put up throughout the city. Also a lot of rental, residential and a bit of office. There is a lot of pressure on housing: the amount available is insufficient and the costs are high and rising, but I have mixed feeling about this for a variety of reasons. Let's see what happens ...

More information is on the Spurtle.

There's a great article in The Atlantic called The Crumbling Foundation of America’s Military. It is a very sobering look at how far the war fighting capability of the USA has shrunk over the last thirty years. The war in Ukraine has put this into very sharp focus.

It turns out that a lot of America's industrial production of things like 155mm howitzer shells (see right) is via a process almost unchanged for a hundred years. Slow and expensive. The article notes that when Russia invaded Ukraine :

At that time, the U.S. was manufacturing about 14,000 shells a month. By 2023, the Ukrainians were firing as many as 8,000 shells a day. It has taken two years and billions of dollars for the U.S. to ramp up production to 40,000 shells a month—still well short of Ukraine’s needs.

There is a huge amount of dysfunction, inefficiency and cost involved throughout the supply chain. The USA is having to seriously consider a future conflict with a "peer" adversary, not armies like Iraq or the Taliban. They can produce technically advanced weaponry but at massive cost: the Houthi's launch drones that cost a few thousand dollars each. Tomahawks that are fired to intercept these are expensive :

When American ships began striking Houthi targets in Yemen in January, they fired more Tomahawks on the first day than were purchased in all of last year.

How inefficient and sclerotic is the industry? This was a painful read :

One of the most famous examples of this dynamic was an unmanned aircraft invented by the Israeli aerospace engineer Abe Karem originally called Albatross, then Amber, and finally the GNAT-750. He won a Pentagon contract in the 1980s to design something better than the drone prototype offered by Lockheed Martin, known as the Aquila. And he delivered, building a machine that cost far less, required just three operators instead of 30, and could stay aloft much longer than the Aquila could. Everyone was impressed. But his prototype vanished into the valley of death. Although it was a better drone, Aquila looked good enough, and Lockheed Martin was a familiar quantity. But Aquila didn’t work out. Neither did alternatives, including the Condor, from another of the Big Five, Boeing. Only after years of expensive trial and error was Karem’s idea resurrected. It became the Predator, the first hugely successful military drone. By then, Karem’s company had been absorbed into General Atomics—and Karem lost what would have been his biggest payday.

The Atlantic article is worth reading in its entirety.

It is a new and very dangerous world, much easier and cheaper to sow destruction and hard to defend against. The best thing we can all do is to avoid going to war, not at all costs, but certainly make extra effort not to. Wars have a habit of going in very different directions than the one we expect. I have just been listening to the brilliant podcast The Rest is History and their talks on the diplomatic failures that lead to the First World War. We need to learn from history and be much cleverer in how we deal with threats. We can't afford not to.

Greybeard
By Brian Aldiss

I was between books, picking new ones up wondering what to to go for, read the first few paragraphs of this and didn't want to stop. I liked the prose and seemed to be in just the right mood.

Greybeard is the story of people thrown together by circumstances and travelling down a river to the sea. Unfortunately, the "circumstances" are the end of the world, or at least the end of the human component to the world. A few decades ago, an "accident" has rendered humanity and some animals sterile : children have vanished and people are getting old. With the general collapse, nature is now rapidly reclaiming the world and what people survive exist in small isolated pockets, aging and some reverting to an existence informed by rumour, myth and fable. Forests reassert themselves and the nights are dark.

Greybeard is a melancholic story told in a beautifully lyrical style. Aldiss has a way with words in a sometimes spartan way. Great descriptions of the new natural world taking shape as Man diminishes; mist, water, oak and badger come into focus now. The characters, especially Algernon Timberlane ("Greybeard") and his wife Martha, come to life in a special way I think and their love is beautifully described. Martha has a great wit.

I hesitate to call the novel "gentle", it is a story of the end of the world after all and there is certainly some violence depicted. But this is not dwelt upon and no brutality. There is always a background possibility of danger of course. I've seen it described as "pastoral", and I think this fits and what makes the book so good. I've read three great novels from Aldiss now: Non-Stop, Hothouse and now this. I think Greybeard might be my favourite.

The Time Machine
By H.G. Wells

I am embarrassed to say I have never read any H. G. Wells. I have rectified this recently however by reading his first novel, The Time Machine.

I should have done this years ago, perhaps as a teenager, because it was such a great book. I can understand why it was such a big success on publication in 1895: people were introduced to an author with a huge imagination and perhaps the first true science-fiction story. I enjoyed reading this immensely.

Not only an exciting adventure but thought provoking in a way that must have been quite unsettling to the readership back then. We not only travel to an almost unimaginably distant future of 802,701 AD but come to see what human evolution might mean; Darwin's theory being only a few decades old and still troubling to many. Wells was certainly not one to predict a heroic future progress of humanity. This might be one reason some critics and readers found him difficult. From Brian Aldiss' Billion Year Spree :

His audience is accustomed to powerful heroes with whom they can unthinkingly identify. A mass audience expects to be pandered to. Wells never pandered.

Perhaps a quote more applicable as his output increased, but a story where the human species can split into two, with one predating upon the other and all thought of science or art banished must have been hard to take. Even the idea of a deep "geological" time was fairly new (With Lyell's Principles of Geology published in 1830).

Wells' novel is brilliant. Now for The War of the Worlds I think.

The Kings of Eternity
By Eric Brown

Having read Eric Brown's Helix and loved it, I thought I'd read some more of his work.

The Kings of Eternity is a good science-fiction story that switches between the modern day and the 1930's. Three friends encounter an otherworldly portal that opens in the woods, and then an alien contact. This changes their lives, as you would expect, and over the years they have to come to terms with this and what it entails.

Brown manages to convey the protagonists well as men of the earlier 20th Century: their language and understanding of the situation is of that time. Luckily, the scientific advances at that point mean they have some sort of framework within which to place the strange events. The book is always very readable and engaging, even with a bit of a slow start. It is not an action packed story, although there is some action, but it gets into its stride quickly. What they encountered years ago endowed them with a gift and each has to come to terms with this. In fact, the novel is as much about relationships as "science" (or adventure), and in the end, a love story. So, a "scientific romance".

Well written and quite lyrical in parts, there is a lot to like about this book. In some ways, old fashioned (in an H.G. Wells way), but it is an uplifting and positive read.

It is that time of year again, and the Open Eye Gallery opens its 2024 Small Scale show.

Selected artists are invited to submit works in any medium, unframed, with the only restriction limiting the dimensions to 15 x 21 cm, the classic ‘postcard’ size.

Small pictures usually reasonably priced. Lots of good ones from good artists.

Below:
Left: Nestled off the Loch by Megan Burns, Acrylic on board, 15x21cm [link]
Right: Full Moon Afternoon by James Tweedie RGI, Acrylic on card, 15x21cm [link]

Below:
Left: Patience by Clare Mackie, Acrylic on canvas, 15x21cm [link].
Right: A Squirrel for Mary by Tracey Johnston, Acrylic on board. 15x21cm [link].

Most of the paintings are priced £200 to £600 but there are one or two priced much higher. I'm not sure why. Have a look and see what you think. The show is online only.

Across Realtime
By Vernor Vinge

This is the omnibus edition containing the novels "The Peace War" and "Marooned in Realtime".

Warning: perhaps minor spoilers.

The Peace War

What price would you pay for peace? What would it cost you? And what about costs to society? These are some of the things Vinge considers in his 1984 novel "The Peace War".

In the book, peace is imposed through a "Peace Authority", a world-wide government that has a monopoly on a powerful weapon: a weapon that can enforce and isolate threats, small or large. Through this, they keep society at a "safer", lower level of technological sophistication. The USA and other sovereign states do not exist anymore.

The weapon is a "bobble": an impenetrable force-field bubble around a space (and it turns out, a time). This can be used to completely isolate and neutralise a threat, whether people or missiles.

There is a resistance of course: a mix of clans, tribes, gangs and technology devotees Vinge called "tinkerers": or tinkers. The novel describes how the ungoverned and tinkers fight back against the "Peacers". Vinge is obvious about where his sympathies lie but he give the Peace Authority its due as well.

I thought this was a great adventure novel. Exciting and full of good extrapolations of the new technologies coming online in the 1990's and early 2000's.

Marooned in Realtime

In the sequel, Vinge shows us a consequence of having such "bobbling" capability. The story is sets millions of years in the future: because (in effect) these things act as a one-way time machine. This book is a murder mystery story and quite different to the first novel. I found it just as enjoyable though.

Vinge, who died earlier this year, had an abiding interest in and sympathy with the quest for knowledge and scientific progress. A Professor of Maths and Computer Science at San Diego State University in California, in many ways he epitomised the Californian techno-optimism of the 1980's and 1990's. The era of the early internet, the birth of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and magazines like Wired (founded 1991). I definitely sympathised with this vision, and still do, even though it can seem naive today and has been overtaken by the reality of the modern world (and everything this entails). We are less optimistic about technology today, sadly.

Science-fiction is a great genre for exploring all the different ways science and technology can change the world, and ourselves. I like Vinge's books: this is the second time I've read these novels. I liked them before and this time I think I liked them even more. If you're in the right mood for a book then it makes all the difference. I am sure I'll come back to them in the future again.

Chocky
By John Wyndham

John Wyndham's 1963 novella (it's a slight book) is about a twelve year old boy, Matthew, who has a friend he talks to: however, this conversation is only inside his head. The friend is called Chocky.

Not completely unusual in a child (the imaginary friend) but Chocky is unusual. Leaving aside the indeterminate sex (Matthew settles on "she"), Chocky asks some very strange questions, such as why are there two sexes? "She" also has some very odd views of the world. Matthew's parents become very concerned but are not sure what to do exactly. In situations like this, you can do a lot of harm trying to do the right thing.

This is a short read but a good one. The family (two parents and two children) are perfectly normal other than the fact of this strange unwanted interloper to Matthew's head. This is a long way from a story of a "demon" child or one of "possession" and it is all the better for that. Another worthwhile Wyndham read.

Do pet owners look like the pets they own? There are two paintings in this show by Alice McMurrough that would seem to point this way.

The show is an exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery (show now closed) of works by Alice McMurrough and Neil MacDonald, husband and wife. I've admired their work separately so it was great to see a roomful of the two side by side (they're married, something I didn't know).

Both are a bit surreal and dreamlike. McMurrough being more heavily infused with the surreal end of the dream spectrum. Quite odd with both human and human-like animals often taking part on her stage. Macdonald is a bit more restrained and paints the Scottish landscape, not necessarily using a straight-edge for buildings. I like both artists a lot. I am sure they both get tired of being described as "quirky".

Right: Moon Shadows, St Clemet's, Rodel, Neil Macdonald, oil, 38x44.cm

Right: Together as One, Alice McMurrough, oil, 30x30cm

The show closed on November 16th but you can see the paintings and read more at the gallery site.

The Mall Galleries are hosting the 2024 exhibition of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. A big selection of some great painting, big and small. I am always inspired by work I see here. If you can, a visit is best: you can't beat seeing a painting in real life. But online is good enough for me. I love big mixed shows like this.

Right: Coffee Followed by Beer by Rob Burton, oil, 23x17cm [link]

I like the "painterly" aspect to this. Really captures the dark and warm atmosphere.

Right: Unravelling by Felicity Starr, oil, 18x13cm [link]

Some beautiful works, some very small. This painting is a case in point and shows that even the most mundane subjects can be worth capturing in paint.

Many more pictures at the Mall Galleries web site.

A Room with a View
By E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster's 1908 novel is a completely different book to the last one I read. It is full of human emotion and human relationships.

Set in the early 1900's, Lucy Honeychurch is on holiday in Florence, chaperoned by her cousin Miss Barnett. They meet the Emersons, father and son, who give up their own rooms because they have a view, which the women had been promised. From there, it becomes a story of the boy's attraction to the girl and if this is reciprocated. It is a familiar enough story (girl meets boy etc.) but written well and told in a very witty way. There is plenty of good old-fashioned class based prejudice of course, but overcome in the end. Oddly, it is clear that tourism was a bit of an affliction even back in the 19th Century. Forster would be speechless at the sort of things that go on now.

Beautifully written and sharp, my one main fault would be with the older Mr Emerson's speech at the end to Lucy, explaining his son's predicament. It was a little too flowery and overwrought to be natural. Other than that, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. The Merchant/Ivory film adaptation is also supposed to be good.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle
By A. E. van Vogt

This book comes from the "Golden Age" of science-fiction - a period usually thought of as being the 1940's. The novel itself was published in 1950 but is composed of four stories published the previous decade (a so-called "fix-up" novel). Van Vogt is a new author to me.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle is considered a classic of the science-fiction genre and contains some of his first or earliest published work. It has had a significant influence on later science-fiction, especially films like Forbidden Planet and Alien, as well as TV series like Star Trek. The setting is a spaceship on a scientific survey mission, much like Darwin's original Beagle. It encounters some alien creatures, most of whom are hostile and dangerous. As well as some exciting action, the book explores the workings of science, in particular, Vogt's ideas of the compartmentalisation of the various scientific fields - his "nexialism" discipline aims to bring them together as a whole. The book also explores relations on board between the scientists and their leadership. There is a form of democracy on the ship but also a surprising amount of discord between some members of the scientific body.

This is a short read and one that contains plenty of action, even though some of it feels slightly dated. The "Discord in Scarlet" section includes a particularly horrifying and dangerous alien, one that could inspire some nightmares in a reader less inured to modern science-fiction horror (like Alien). It might be a little old-fashioned sometimes but this is mainly the way the men (there are only men on board!) interact and think: the civilian scientists have a somewhat military bearing as well. In some ways it is refreshing: direct and to the point. Like an older black and white film, men are in suits perhaps but the film is still great. I will read more van Vogt.

As a last word: it is not uncommon for people to believe that we're cleverer today, more intelligent and sophisticated than those that came before us. At least those before the twentieth century. But this is not true. People of the Middle Ages, for instance, certainly had less scientific or technological knowledge, but were no less intelligent. I had a slight prejudice against older science-fiction in the same way but realise now how wrong this is, having read a bit now and thought about it. It is a genre of ideas and the science or technology is just one aspect, and not necessarily an important one.

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia has an entry on the Golden Age of science-fiction. This is a great resource. Online only now but I was very lucky to find a paperback copy going cheaply in a charity shop a few months ago.

I visited the Burrell for the first time a few weeks ago. I've been meaning to visit for years.

The main reason to go was a look at the Degas exhibition before it closed. Being a huge admirer of the works of the great French artist, the exhibition was the big push I needed to get over there. I took the bus for a change, then a short (two stop) train journey from Glasgow Central (to Pollokshaws West), a short walk through the lovely park and arriving at the newly refurbished and fixed Collection building. It's been closed for a few years to have its roof fixed.

What can we say about Degas? He's usually classed as an "Impressionist", having exhibited in their exhibitions over the years (from 1874), but his work always differed substantially from the other artists so described (like Monet). He is famous for his portraits of people at work, whether ballet dancers or washer-women. An artist of the city and modern life. He did not paint en plein air as most of the Impressionists did (in fact, he was highly critical of the practice). The Burrell Collection shows how great a draftsman he was: drawings in pencil or pastel, a favourite medium.

I had a look around the rest of the collection of course and it's impressive. A bit like a mini-Victoria and Albert museum, with a collection of furniture, tapestries, carpets, armour and ceramics: amongst many other things. I was lucky on the day, with the sunshine streaming through the windows and showing off some stained glass to good effect. I'll definitely visit again. With this and the Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow has some great attractions.