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Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh Brackett
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this 1963 novel combines two short stories Brackett wrote for Planet Stories in the mid-1950s. The premise: in the far future, interstellar travel is possible, but the solar government has forbidden humans from flying their own ships anywhere in space – only robot-controlled ships are allowed. This gets up the nose of former space pilot Kirby, who joins an underground plot on Mars to refit an old freighter into a space ark, fly it to an uninhabited Earth-like planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, escape the regime and start a new colony – only the planet isn’t as uninhabited as they think.
Whether intentional or not, Brackett is channelling Heinlein here – not just in terms of interstellar space adventure, but also the template of the hard-headed libertarian protagonist defying unreasonable govt authority to do whatever the hell he wants to do, if only because the govt is telling him not to do it. The twist is Kirby’s obsession with flying to the stars has a cost that other people have to pay, from the families onboard to his telepathic Martian wife Shari. Far from being a frontier hero, Kirby comes across as a stubborn jackass who can’t admit when he’s wrong, even if he knows full well that he is.
All of which is interesting. However, the prose feels rushed, the dialog clunky and the characters underdeveloped – particularly Shari, who plays an important role in the story but is essentially written as supportive wife – her Martian heritage simplified down to “she’s a telepath”, with no real explanation. Maybe that’s the product of 50s magazine editing, or the fact that this is essentially two unrelated short stories jammed together. There’s a decent story here, but it may require more time and space to tell it than Brackett perhaps had at the time. Anyway, it’s not terrible, and I prefer this to her planetary romance stuff, but Brackett has done far better work.
The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age: A Novel by Robert Rankin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is Rankin’s second instalment in his revisionist steampunk series, in which the Martian invasion in The War Of The Worlds actually happened, after which Charles Babbage and Nikola Tesla reverse-engineered Martian technology, the British Empire expanded to Mars, and Victorian London has become a technologically advanced steampunk city with ray guns, spaceships, wireless electricity and things of that nature generally. There’s also a talking monkey named Darwin, who is the only character from the first book (The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions) to appear here.
In this one, Colonel Katterfelto – a veteran of the Martian war – is down on his luck due to a failed attempt to build a Mechanical Messiah, which he believes will bring about a Utopian society on Earth. He is keen to make a second attempt, but success hinges on taking a party of Jovian tourists on a game-hunting safari on Venus, where people are prohibited from landing. Meanwhile, private detective Cameron Bell – the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, despite bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr Pickwick – is attempting to find out who is disintegrating top-billed acts at the Electric Alhambra Music Hall onstage – and why his acquaintance Aleister Crowley desperately wants to acquire the Ring of Moses. Bell must also protect Alice Lovell, a music hall artist who conducts a team of acrobatic kiwi birds – and has been through the looking glass, if you see what I’m saying.
If that sounds like a lot, well, it is. It’s a very busy novel even by Rankin standards, and it takes awhile for everything to more or less cohere. But then Rankin specializes in keeping the reader (hopefully) entertained with running gags, lyrical description and general weirdness while the story percolates in the background somewhere. So it’s entertaining, if you like that sort of thing – which I generally do. That said, I did feel Rankin overdoes it a little here, jamming in as many ideas and Victorian pop culture references as he can, so it feels a bit bloated and unfocused at times. On the other hand, he does seem to enjoy himself.
(FUN FACT: Someone actually did try to build a Mechanical Messiah in the 1850s in hopes of creating a Utopian paradise – you can read about it here. Be advised that Rankin’s version bears little resemblance beyond the name.)
Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today by Anna Feigenbaum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was sort of an impulse buy at a local indie bookstore (Bleak House Books, which closed last year), but it was relevant to my interests, as police use of tear gas was a hot topic during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, during which police fired roughly 16,000 rounds of tear gas in a six-month period. There was quite a bit of debate about it at the time – both in terms of improper and indiscriminate usage (frequently violating the police’s own operational guidelines) and the possible health consequences of firing that much gas, as well as the fact that tear gas is literally banned by the Geneva Convention in warfare, so why do the police get to throw it around?
This book tracks the origins of tear gas during World War 1; how it was commercialized as a “less lethal” tool for dealing with protests (“Look, it’s either this or shoot them, right? Which would you prefer?”); how proponents sold the narrative that tear gas was generally harmless (despite being banned in war as too inhumane); how it became a huge business; how its use by police forces worldwide has become normalized; and how increasing police militarization has led to tear gas being frequently misused as a way to punish peaceful protesters and escalate violence rather than simply getting crowds to disperse.
Anna Feigenbaum isn’t a neutral observer here – the book has a political and moral POV, and what you make of this will likely depend on where your own sympathies lie. But it’s not wrong either – it’s a concise and well-researched history of how we got here, and offers some suggestions on what we might do about it. But then I’m not exactly neutral either (and not just because I've experienced CS gas first-hand and can assure you it's a form of torture). This book was published before the 2019 HK protests, but tear-gas / police brutality anecdotes from 2019 would fit in seamlessly here. Which goes to show that what happened in HK is actually normal in other parts of the world. When the HK govt justified its actions by saying the police conformed to international policing standards, turns out they were right – just not in a good way.
View all my reviews
I can’t breathe,
This is dF
Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh BrackettMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this 1963 novel combines two short stories Brackett wrote for Planet Stories in the mid-1950s. The premise: in the far future, interstellar travel is possible, but the solar government has forbidden humans from flying their own ships anywhere in space – only robot-controlled ships are allowed. This gets up the nose of former space pilot Kirby, who joins an underground plot on Mars to refit an old freighter into a space ark, fly it to an uninhabited Earth-like planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, escape the regime and start a new colony – only the planet isn’t as uninhabited as they think.
Whether intentional or not, Brackett is channelling Heinlein here – not just in terms of interstellar space adventure, but also the template of the hard-headed libertarian protagonist defying unreasonable govt authority to do whatever the hell he wants to do, if only because the govt is telling him not to do it. The twist is Kirby’s obsession with flying to the stars has a cost that other people have to pay, from the families onboard to his telepathic Martian wife Shari. Far from being a frontier hero, Kirby comes across as a stubborn jackass who can’t admit when he’s wrong, even if he knows full well that he is.
All of which is interesting. However, the prose feels rushed, the dialog clunky and the characters underdeveloped – particularly Shari, who plays an important role in the story but is essentially written as supportive wife – her Martian heritage simplified down to “she’s a telepath”, with no real explanation. Maybe that’s the product of 50s magazine editing, or the fact that this is essentially two unrelated short stories jammed together. There’s a decent story here, but it may require more time and space to tell it than Brackett perhaps had at the time. Anyway, it’s not terrible, and I prefer this to her planetary romance stuff, but Brackett has done far better work.
The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age: A Novel by Robert RankinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is Rankin’s second instalment in his revisionist steampunk series, in which the Martian invasion in The War Of The Worlds actually happened, after which Charles Babbage and Nikola Tesla reverse-engineered Martian technology, the British Empire expanded to Mars, and Victorian London has become a technologically advanced steampunk city with ray guns, spaceships, wireless electricity and things of that nature generally. There’s also a talking monkey named Darwin, who is the only character from the first book (The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions) to appear here.
In this one, Colonel Katterfelto – a veteran of the Martian war – is down on his luck due to a failed attempt to build a Mechanical Messiah, which he believes will bring about a Utopian society on Earth. He is keen to make a second attempt, but success hinges on taking a party of Jovian tourists on a game-hunting safari on Venus, where people are prohibited from landing. Meanwhile, private detective Cameron Bell – the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, despite bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr Pickwick – is attempting to find out who is disintegrating top-billed acts at the Electric Alhambra Music Hall onstage – and why his acquaintance Aleister Crowley desperately wants to acquire the Ring of Moses. Bell must also protect Alice Lovell, a music hall artist who conducts a team of acrobatic kiwi birds – and has been through the looking glass, if you see what I’m saying.
If that sounds like a lot, well, it is. It’s a very busy novel even by Rankin standards, and it takes awhile for everything to more or less cohere. But then Rankin specializes in keeping the reader (hopefully) entertained with running gags, lyrical description and general weirdness while the story percolates in the background somewhere. So it’s entertaining, if you like that sort of thing – which I generally do. That said, I did feel Rankin overdoes it a little here, jamming in as many ideas and Victorian pop culture references as he can, so it feels a bit bloated and unfocused at times. On the other hand, he does seem to enjoy himself.
(FUN FACT: Someone actually did try to build a Mechanical Messiah in the 1850s in hopes of creating a Utopian paradise – you can read about it here. Be advised that Rankin’s version bears little resemblance beyond the name.)
Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today by Anna FeigenbaumMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was sort of an impulse buy at a local indie bookstore (Bleak House Books, which closed last year), but it was relevant to my interests, as police use of tear gas was a hot topic during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, during which police fired roughly 16,000 rounds of tear gas in a six-month period. There was quite a bit of debate about it at the time – both in terms of improper and indiscriminate usage (frequently violating the police’s own operational guidelines) and the possible health consequences of firing that much gas, as well as the fact that tear gas is literally banned by the Geneva Convention in warfare, so why do the police get to throw it around?
This book tracks the origins of tear gas during World War 1; how it was commercialized as a “less lethal” tool for dealing with protests (“Look, it’s either this or shoot them, right? Which would you prefer?”); how proponents sold the narrative that tear gas was generally harmless (despite being banned in war as too inhumane); how it became a huge business; how its use by police forces worldwide has become normalized; and how increasing police militarization has led to tear gas being frequently misused as a way to punish peaceful protesters and escalate violence rather than simply getting crowds to disperse.
Anna Feigenbaum isn’t a neutral observer here – the book has a political and moral POV, and what you make of this will likely depend on where your own sympathies lie. But it’s not wrong either – it’s a concise and well-researched history of how we got here, and offers some suggestions on what we might do about it. But then I’m not exactly neutral either (and not just because I've experienced CS gas first-hand and can assure you it's a form of torture). This book was published before the 2019 HK protests, but tear-gas / police brutality anecdotes from 2019 would fit in seamlessly here. Which goes to show that what happened in HK is actually normal in other parts of the world. When the HK govt justified its actions by saying the police conformed to international policing standards, turns out they were right – just not in a good way.
View all my reviews
I can’t breathe,
This is dF
