May 2020

Ackroyd, Peter. London Under. New York: Anchor Books, 2011. ISBN 978-0-307-47378-3.

Unlike New York, London grew from a swamp and its structure was moulded by the rivers that fed it. Over millennia, history has accreted in layer after layer as generations built atop the works of their ancestors. Descending into the caverns, buried rivers, sewers, subways, and infrastructure reveals the deep history, architecture and engineering, and legends of a great city.

 

Ringo, John. The Last Centurion. Riverdale, NY: Baen Publishing, 2008. ISBN 978-1-4391-3291-3.

Three interwoven stories chronicle the consequences of a feckless U.S. withdrawal from the Near East leaving a mass of materiel and only one Army company behind to “protect” it, a global pandemic exploding from China which killed a substantial fraction of the world's population, and the onset of a solar-driven little ice age which, combined with a U.S. administration that went far beyond incompetence into outright wrecking of the nation, brought famine to America. Heroism, integrity, and a relentless capacity to see things as they really are the only resources Army officer “Bandit Six” has to cope with the crises.

 

Hossenfelder, Sabine. Lost in Math. New York: Basic Books, 2019. ISBN 978-0-465-09425-7.

Many of the fundamental theories of physics: general relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics, for example, exhibit great mathematical beauty and elegance once you've mastered the notation in which they are expressed. Some physicists believe that a correct theory must be elegant and beautiful. But what if they're wrong? Many sciences, such as biology and geology, are complicated and messy, with few general principles that don't have exceptions, and in which explanation must take into account a long history of events which might have happened differently. The author, a theoretical physicist, cautions that as her field becomes disconnected from experiment and exploring notions such as string theory and multiple universes, it may be overlooking a reality which, messy though it may be, is the one we actually inhabit and, as scientists, try to understand.

 

Shlaes, Amity. Great Society. New York: Harper, 2019. ISBN 978-0-06-170642-4.

Adam Smith wrote, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”—even though nations and their rulers may adopt ruinous policies for a while, a great nation has deep resources and usually has time to observe the consequences, change course, and restore sound governance. But, as this book shows, the amount of ruin in a nation is not unlimited, and well-intended policies which fundamentally change the character of the citizenry and their relationship to the state can have ruinous consequences that cast a long shadow and may not be reversible. Between 1960 and 1974, under three presidents: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, the United States, starting from peace and prosperity unprecedented in the human experience, reached for greatness and tragically embraced top-down, centrally-planned, deficit-spending funded, and socialist (in all but the forbidden name), policies which, by the mid 1970s, had destroyed prosperity, debased the dollar and unleashed ruinous inflation, wrecked the world's monetary system, incited urban riots and racial strife, created an unemployable underclass, destroyed neighbourhoods and built Soviet-style public housing in their place, and set into motion the destruction of domestic manufacturing and the middle class it supported. It is a tragic tale, an utterly unnecessary destruction of a once-great nation, as this magnificently written and researched but unavoidably depressing history of the era recounts.

 

Sharfman, Peter et al. The Effects of Nuclear War. Washington: Office of Technology Assessment, 1979. LCCN 79-600080.

This book-length (154 page) report by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment was commissioned by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and delivered in May, 1979. It should not be confused with the similarly-titled The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, an entirely different technical treatment of the physical effects of nuclear detonations. The present work undertakes “to describe the effects of a nuclear war on the civilian populations, economies, and societies of the United States and the Soviet Union.”

Four scenarios are explored: an attack on a single city, using Detroit and Leningrad as examples; an attack on oil refineries using ten missiles; a counterforce attack, including one limited to ICBM silos; and a broad-based attack on military and economic targets using a large fraction of the existing arsenal of the attacking power. For each, the immediate, medium-, and long-term effects are assessed, including the utility of civil defense preparations and the prospects for recovery from the damage. The death toll from the best to worst case scenarios ranges from 200,000 to 160 million. Appendix C presents a fictional account of the consequences of a large nuclear exchange on a city, Charlottesville, Virginia, which was not directly hit in the attack.

A scanned PDF edition of this report has been published by Princeton University.

 

Weinberger, Sharon. The Imagineers of War. New York: Vintage Books, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8041-6972-1.

Since its founding in 1958, as a reaction to the perceived humiliation of the United States by the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which over the years has dropped and restored “Defense” on several occasions, being sometimes known as ARPA, has been the central research organisation for the U.S. military, working independently of the military services, whose rivalry was considered one of the reasons for the slow progress in development of missile and space technology. Originally seen as a “space agency”, it quickly saw that function assumed by NASA. DARPA, largely unconstrained by Pentagon bureaucracy and scientific peer-review, has often been “out there”, pushing speculative technologies on (and sometimes beyond) the cutting edge of the possible.

This book chronicles the world-changing successes of DARPA, including ARPANET, which developed and demonstrated the technologies upon which today's Internet is built, unmanned vehicles, missile defense, and smart weapons. DARPA has also had its share of failures, the inevitable result of trying to push technologies beyond the state of the art. On occasion, DARPA has veered into territory usually associated with mad scientists and Bond villains, such as a scheme to power a particle beam ballistic missile defense system by draining the Great Lakes in fifteen minutes into caverns excavated by nuclear bombs to power generators. This is a fascinating look behind the curtain of what seems almost impossible: a government agency which has, for more than six decades, remained agile in pioneering speculative technologies on a modest budget.

 

Brunner, John. Stand on Zanzibar. New York, Orb Books, [1968] 2011. ISBN 978-0-7653-2678-2.

In 1968, veteran British science fiction writer John Brunner (his first novel was published in 1951) decided to show those upstart “New Wave” authors how it's done. The result, Stand on Zanzibar, won the Hugo award for best novel in 1969 and became the quintessential 1960s science fiction novel. Set in 2010, it explores The Happening World through parallel interwoven plots and a huge cast of characters, using a chaotic narrative with sections titled “Context”, “Continuity”, “Tracking with Closeups”, and, of course, “The Happening World”.

How does it hold up more than half a century later, with 2010 already receding in the rear view mirror? Astonishingly well: the novel is not at all dated and in many ways prophetic. Brunner foresaw the ability of giant technology companies to manipulate public opinion and make government increasingly irrelevant; the mainstreaming of homosexuality and recreational drugs; the influence of pop philosophers on culture; the hook-up culture; chaos in Africa; the authoritarian governance model in Asia; the collapse of printed newspapers and all media moving down-market; stagnation in technological innovation compared to the first half of the 20th century; the end of the Cold War and its replacement by economic competition; the risk of a genetically-engineered plague originating in China, which remains nominally communist but is becoming a powerhouse that rivals the West. A prominent political figure on the world stage is a West African named Obomi.

Stand on Zanzibar forever changed my own writing style and influenced the way I look at the future and this increasingly crazy world we inhabit. It is a landmark of science fiction and a masterpiece worth revisiting today.

 

Schlichter, Kurt. Indian Country. El Segundo, CA: Kurt Schlichter, 2017. ISBN 978-0-9884029-6-6.

In his 2016 novel People's Republic (November 2018), the author describes North America in the early 2030s, a decade after the present Cold Civil War turned hot and the United States split into the People's Republic of North America (PRNA) on the coasts and the upper Midwest, with the rest continuing to call itself the United States. This book, the second to feature Turnbull, is a “prequel” set shortly after the split, which was along the borders of the existing states. This left regions whose natural allegiance would have been to the other side trapped within states governed by those they detested.

This situation was acute in southern Indiana, where the population had little in common with the cities of the north who increasingly oppressed them. Turnbull, whose military experience included extensive operations in counter-insurgency, is recruited to go to the area and assist the population in mounting an insurgency, with the goal of making the region such a thorn in the side of the state government that it will be willing to cede the area to the U.S. as part of a general territorial settlement along the borders. Turnbull is told to foment a nonviolent insurgency, but then he is not really the guy you send when that's your goal. Turnbull himself has no illusions about the human cost of resisting tyranny and tells those seeking his aid what they are getting into.

This is a worthy addition to the People's Republic saga, and along with the action Schlichter has his usual fun mocking the pretentions and insanity of the dysfunctional progressive ideology of the PRNA.