The Saturday Morning Post (No. 65)

 

I'm still on a non-fiction history kick this week. But this week it's the American Revolution or if you're English, the American Revolt. The book I am reading is from the English point of view. 

Reading it has been a new experience. It's a library ebook, and usually our library service offers ebooks via Amazon for the Kindle readers, or in my case, my Fire tablet. However, some ebooks are offered via Overdrive and the Libby app. Usually, for these ebooks I can download them via my Kobo ebook reader, as Overdrive is owned by the owner of Kobo. But for some reason, this book though it was offered by the library via Overdrive would not show up on my ebook reader. I could download it to my computer, but I hate reading books on my computer, and for some reason, I rarely, if ever, get the downloaded book to transfer from my computer to my ebook reader, even though I've jumped through all the hoops to do so via the Adobe system to do so. I was, however, able to download the Libby app on my phone, and borrow the ebook via that app. So I started reading this book on my smartphone, a first for me. It was an okay experience, but I when I discovered that I could also download the Libby App to my Amazon Fire tablet, and sync the Libby App between my phone and tablet, I was able to read the last half of the book on my tablet which is a better reading experience.  Anyway, on to the book.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Fusiliers by Mark Urban  C+

This is the history of the British 23rd Welsh Regiment serving in America during the time of the revolt of those colonies. It is drawn from the memoirs, letters, and history of that regiment, as well as other contemporary accounts from other English regiments in that war. I find accounts from the English point of view interesting, as they offer a counterpoint to the American version and its founding myths. For example, he noted the fact that the continental armies executed a lot more of their men for desertion in order to discourage their soldiers from deserting than did the English. And that at least some of the American revolutionary armies killed their own countrymen who they suspected were still loyal to the King. The war, it seems, from my reading of this book, to have been pretty much guerrilla war, with a lot of ugliness on both sides.

I know that I have read one novel set in the period where the main character was an an American loyal to the Crown. Fifteen minutes of a Google Search brings up the most likely suspect, Oliver Wiswell, by Kenneth Roberts published in 1940, which sounds right, as I remembered that the book had the main character's name as the title. In any event, I did know that there were plenty of people in the colonies who were not revolutionaries, and that they didn't fare well in the end.

This book takes much the same route as A World On Fire, in that it follows characters connected with the 23rd Welsh Regiment throughout its ten years of serving in North America, using their experiences to drive the story. The problem with this approach, I feel, is that all the characters are drawn from preserved letters or official records, and are not really fleshed out characters. Each at best  has a page of bio spread throughout the book, and as such, are more of a distraction then a feature of the narrative. They're too thinly drawn to care about, and their stories are not all that interesting. These little episodes make for a somewhat cluttered and confusing read. I gather that the author used this approach for a Napoleonic era British rifle regiment as well, but he had a lot more written material to work from. I think that this story could have been told with less words and greater clarity in broader strokes, rather than as the narrow focus of the story of this regiment.

I think that to appreciate this book to its full extent, you need to be somewhat familiar with the American Revolutionary War in order to put the events described in the book into the larger context. While there is some background necessary to the story of the 23rd, there is a much larger picture surrounding the events that the 23rd participated in that is not fleshed out, so that you only get a small, and far from complete understanding of the events of that era. 

All in all, this is an interesting, ground level view of that conflict from the point of view of the English army. While I learned a lot about the American Revolution (or Rebellion), I feel that I would need to read a lot more about it to put what I learned in this book to fully appreciate it for what it is. 

My Universe - The Time Line

The history of my "universe" began with writing The Bright Black Sea. It did not start out as a fully fleshed timeline, but rather it evolved, with each book set in that universe adding another layer to it. I don't think that there are any revisions needed to the original time line, I just added more "data points" to it as I went along.

The hallmark feature of my timeline is that I set my stories in the far future - 50,000 to 100,000 years in our future in order to make it credible that humans had expanded beyond the solar system to colonize the worlds of other stars - without faster than light spaceships. I have no specific dates in mind. 

In The Bright Black Sea, I recall mentioning that the ships from Earth arrived some 40,000 years before that story was set to allow the time needed for humans to settle hundreds of planets and moons, and spread to uncounted of rocks and planets in the Drifts beyond the formal human civilization of the Nine Star Nebula, The Unity. Figure another 10 - 20 thousand years needed to reach the Nine Star Nebula from Earth, and you have 50 - 60 thousand years since they left the Solar System. There is also several human colony-ships within the Pela, that may've come from Earth, or perhaps a world settled by Earth long enough to have developed to the point where they can send out their own colony ships. Who knows? (I don't.) 

The Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure stories are set maybe a century before the events recounted in The Bright Black Sea, since they recount the tales of the youthful Rafe gil'Giles, the systems mate of the Lost Star, though under a different name. He uses a lot of names.

In the Tropic Sea stories, I had it take the colony ships from Earth 9,373 years to reach Dara, and those stories are set almost 5,000 years after the settlers landed on Dara. I have no idea when they left the Solar System. I haven't settle on any definite time line for the settlement of the planet I've set Chateau Clare on, save that it's been at a little less than 1,400 years since a revolution outlawed much of the high technology brought from Earth, labeling it sorcery. However, I would think six or seven generations of settlers would've lived prior this revolution - so say the planet may've been first settled around 3,000 years before the story told in Chateau Clare. 

Though I can't say when all these colony ships left the Solar System, I can say that they all left prior to the "Death" - the mass flowering of fungi that had been dormant in the lungs of three quarters of the humans of the Solar System. The flowering filled the lungs of everyone it had lodged in, sweeping across the Solar System killing three quarters of humanity in a week, and putting an end, as far as I know, to interplanetary travel within the Solar System, and of course, the interstellar colony ships. Again, I don't have any date in mind, but it would be tens of thousands of years in the future, as I envisioned it taking something like 10,000 years to terraform Mars, so there's no need for us to worry about it. Two of the three three Post Solar Age stories, Keiree and The Girl on the Kerb are set about 1500 after that event. The third, Beneath the Lanterns, which takes place on the terraformed Moon, is set sometime latter. Beneath the Lanterns was the first story in which I invented that event (though only in my mind), in order to use it just to explain my premise of a fallen civilization on a terraformed Moon. Because of the way timekeeping on the Moon works, and the fact that I had the event unknown by the narrator, lost in the mists of legends, so I'm not sure if I set an actual date. Still, my if my memory serves, I think it was more like 2,000 years before the events in the book, and thus, likely after Keiree and The Girl on the Kerb. This would suggest that interplanetary travel did not recommenced any time soon, if ever, since there is no evidence of it in that story. However, there is that other, unknown and unexplored, side of the Moon... Who knows? (I don't.) 

I guess I find it pretty easy to throw thousands of years around like decades, in part because generations are almost four times as long - five lifetimes per a thousand years. While this give me leeway to tell the stories I want without violating too many laws of nature, it does mean, as I mentioned previously, that I have to turn a blind eye to how humans might evolve over such a long time span. In any event, as you can see, there is no definite timeline to my stories, though I think that the stories set in the Nine Star Nebula are probably the outer limits of my timeline.

I have one more installment of this series to write - a piece describing all the things I had to invent to make my stories work. I make no claim to writing "hard science fiction" but I did try to keep things at least seem possible. Stay tuned for all my inventions.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 64)

 

The Sherlock Holmes of my readers are likely going to discover an ongoing theme with the books I am reading. There is an explanation for this, laziness and a lack of inspiration. But hey, I'm learning something, and this time a part of my current historical interest that I never even considered. 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

A World on Fire by Amanda Foreman  B

This is a long book. The paper edition runs 1040 pages. It boasts 5 pages just listing the illustrations, 4 plus pages of listing the photographs, a page plus listing the included maps, and 18 plus pages listing the "Dramatis Personae" i.e. the cast of historical characters that she follows over the course of her history of the English involvement in the American Civil War.

She writes that her original intention was to write a history of the English volunteers in the American Civil War, but she found their involvement part of a very complex web of interactions between England, The United States and the Confederacy. She says that recalling, "... Trevor Nunn's 1980 Nicholas Nickleby, and extraordinary "theater-in-the-round" production that brought together a vast panoply of characters through a combination of three-dimensional staging, shifting scenes, and running narratives that created  an all-enveloping experience for the audience. This memory became my guide and inspiration..." In short, she decided to tell the story of England and its peoples involvement on all levels in the Civil War through the letters. memoirs, and previous histories to paint this complicated picture.

She certainly succeeded in creating a complete and complicated account of this relationship, though if you're someone who must have a clear idea of who's who in a story, you'll have your work cut out for you reading this book, for, as I said, it has a cast of over 200 characters, some mentioned, some followed in detail throughout the history.

As I said it is a history of American/Confederate/English interactions, both diplomatic and personal during the Civil War. I learned a great deal about the Civil War from reading this book that I never knew that I didn't know. Things like how close the United States and England came to war during that period over various disputes, how popular the South was in England, seen as underdogs fight for freedom - as long as they turned a blind eye to slavery - and how much effort the South put into trying to get it recognized as a country. Her choice to include the personal accounts of so many people may have created a sense of how complicated all the issues were, but it makes it a challenge to keep track of more than just a few of the major characters, and makes for a long book.

A must read for serious scholars of that war, and an interesting read for history buff of England and the Civil war. But it is a long book. Still now I know what I didn't know that I didn't know.

My Universe - My Societies

In my last post I about the impact of a 200 year lifespan on my characters. But what about the society they live in?

In our society we rely on a constant turnover in the hierarchy of every aspect of our lives. You put your time in and over the course a several decades, move up the hierarchal structure, be it from kid to adult, to parent, to grandparent. Or in your career or job, from new hire, through various levels of management, to maybe, CEO, or from apprentice to master craftsperson. These steps involve often little more than a decade or two due to the span of our current lives. However, what would society and our lives look like if people could, in theory, stay in a position at the top for a century or more blocking everyone's advancement down the line? Would most humans be content to advance in their career at a glacial pace - spending 50 years to accomplishing what takes 10 years for people today? And then there is the question of how long would it take to get bored with any job? In my view, I see a society where most people would not want, or expect, to stay in the same job or even the same field for their full lifetime so that most people will periodically embark on new careers. This need and ability to start over a number of times would have to be built into the society one way or another.

Another related aspect of a long lifespan is how it would affect the shape and dynamics of the society over time. Given the time and opportunity to change not only relationships but careers, and a population of people with a wide variety of ages and experience, it would seem that society might by in constant flux. Change would happen because there was time to change and change again within one lifetime. 

And yet... We see that in our society, changes come very slowly, generation to generation. Paper newspapers are still printed, I have to believe because the generation that grew up reading them is still around. My wife still watches the half hour national news program everyday, even though all the news is available all the time on the internet. The life and outlook of people are formed early, and are retained, at least in part, throughout their lives. Would not this be true as well, if their lifespan was doubled or tripled? I'm sure the issue can be argued from both ways - frequent changes because people have time to change vs slow changes because people don't change.

I have generally adopted the latter view for my stories. I have my societies very static because of the innate conservative nature of people, which when held for the better part of two centuries, would tend to extend and impose the values and ideas of their youth on many subsequent generations, despite the multi-generation mix and flux of a long lifespan. And in much the same way, I think that families and children will be postponed or widely separated throughout a long life, especially with woman being able to control their fertility. 

I also use semi-utopian societies in my stories, unless the initially advanced civilization has collapsed for some reason - also a common feature of my stories, like my Tropic Sea stories. My assumption is that 50,000 years of civilization will slowly evolve into a single, homogeneous and inclusive society. In the stories set in the Nine Star Nebula, I pictured a very stable and secure society - The Unity - with a built-in safety valve that allowed the tiny percentage of people who do not fit into the main society to set up alternate societies - dissenting communities - on the various moons - just so long as they met certain human rights standards, and allowed their inhabitants to opt out of it at any time. For those who found even dissenting communities still to socially claustrophobic, they could immigrate to the "drifts" beyond the control of The Unity. This feature allowed me to easily set my characters in more historically backward locations, which I like writing in.

I also like portraying my societies without politics. Given a homogeneous society without outside threats in the form of other countries, I picture a society where all policy issues have been decided upon thousands of years before. Therefore, no new laws would be needed, and the society is administered to by a professional bureaucracy according to detailed long established rules as in the Earth of The Girl on the Kerb, and my upcoming novel Chateau Clare. Just dreaming.

All this said, I don't spend a great time on thinking about my societies, no more than I need for the story's backdrop. As I said, I'm not an ideas writer, I only invent things that I need to write the story I have in mind, and build a world of sorts as a backdrop.