Mary Wellesley (2021)

Everyone associates mediæval manuscripts with monasteries and monks, but nuns had an enormous part to play as well, including in some of the best-known works. That’s the central observation of this extremely enjoyable book. It’s niche in the sense of really appealing to caligraphers and classicists, but it also serves to show (once again) that the Middle Ages (and before) were a socially richer period than we often imagine.

As well as Latin, we’re exposed to a lot of Old and Middle English, carefully translated and glossed to make the context comprehensible. I can imagine that experts might object to some of the modernisation, but for an non-specialist it was quite clarifying.

About the only negative point was that I suspect the book emerged from Mary Wellesley’s PhD thesis – and that sometimes shows in places where she feels the need to justify herself vaery carefully against the existing literature. None of that spoils the readability and insightfulness, though.

5/5. Finished Friday 1 September, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Merlin Sheldrake (2020)

I often avoid books like these, as I worry that they’ll focus on a single aspect of the environment and try too hard to make it all-consumingly special. This isn’t a book like that. Perhaps because it’s written by a scientist, it’s balanced and carefully supported. It covers all the parts of fungi you’d expect, in all their strangeness: we talk of things being “animal, vegetable, or mineral” and ignore the fourth possibility (although we should perhaps also include bacteria, archæa, and viruses too).

The “wood wide web” of communications between trees mediated by fungi gets an excellent treatment, both its mechanics and in terms of how evolution might have brought it about by allowing co-operation to complement individual competition (shades of Peter Kropotkin‘s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution). There’s also extensive consideration of the psychotropic effects of fungi and the chemicals they produce, both on humans (which can be pleasant) and insects (which can be far worse). And there is also the far-less-known ability of fungi to act as decontaminators to break down chemicals that are otherwise extremely difficult to deal with and lethal to most plants – and even more remarkably, that this ability seems to be amenable to being trained or at least steered in useful new directions.

I have to admire Sheldrake’s creativity and perseverance in studying fungi. They’re clearly a hard topic to research, not least because the fruiting bodies are only a visible clue to a far larger and more diffuse underground body that’s a challenge to detect, let alone sense or explore.

5/5. Finished Thursday 31 August, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

A.E. van Vogt (1951)

3/5. Finished Tuesday 1 August, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Joshua Yaffa (2020)

A study of the compromises needed to live in a totalitarian society, and the difficulties this causes for anyone wanting to operate there.

The simple view of an oppressive regime is that everyone is ground down and cowed by the corrupted police and courts, But some people always manage to succeed, and even more manage to soften the edges of the system by acts of kindness and rememberance. This book is about the latter group, and how they manage to keep some pieces of a gentler vision alive.

Yaffa knows Russia well, and understands the arbitrariness of it: it’s never entirely clear what is permitted and what is forbidden, and even the written rules provide little guide. He observes that people manage to find the edges of what the authorities will permit, and stay within within them voluntarily – meaning that the actual application of oppression or terror become less necessary as time goes by and people self-censor.

Along the way he meets several people who are doing just that. Perhaps the most interesting are the lady providing health services in conflict zones, which she manages only with the co-operation of the State – who can therefore claim some credit and whitewash their own behaviour by pointing to her humanitarian activities. Or the founders of a museum to the Gulag, who are driven out of their leadership positions and replaced by someone who better understands the authorities’ goal for the museum, subverting its message without actually closing it down.

It’s hard to know what to think about these actions. On the one hand, one might hope for a more forceful and uncomprimised rebellion against oppression; on the other, such a rebellion would need to be widespread to stand any chance of success, and the individual costs would be horrific. Perhaps the situation that Russians have arrived at is good for now, while they wait for the winds to change in a more liberal direction. They could have a long time to wait.

4/5. Finished Saturday 29 July, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Chris Miller (2022)

Part history and part prediction, this is a book that takes a deep-dive into semiconductors both as a technology and as an agent of political and economic change.

The history of semiconductors is fascinating in itself: a rivalry between individuals and companies, each striving to improve the features of chips and the yields of their manufacturing processes. Chips are now so ubiquitous it’s sometimes hard to imagine that the first recognisable microprocessor debuted in 1971. But even before that the world was being changed, as electronics started to appear in consumer devices and – more critically – weapons systems, with the US Paveway laser-guided bomb revolutionalising precision munitions delivery. (The description of how this system works is a eye-opener in its simplicity.) The exponential growth in the speed, power, and capability of semicondictors has brought us the modern world.

But where Miller really shines is in taking this history and placing it in the context of grand strategy. Having a electronics industry incentivised the US (and NATO more generally) to invest in “smart” munitions, and therefore reduce the size of their armies while increasing their lethality – and the cost of using them. That decision made sense in the context of the Cold War, but now looks more shaky given the rise of a China that has a home-grown semiconductor and IT industry of rapidly increasing sophistication. Is this a cause for concern? Miller thinks so. But he also argues that the West has sufficient levers to retain control, not least because building the latest generations of semiconductors relies on a very few “choke” technologies, each essential to the process, each requiring as astonishing degree of know-how, and each monopolised by a single company. It is this that allows technological sanctions of the sort that the US has imposed to be so effective.

One can always imagine new techologies being developed entirely independently, or more innovative uses of older processes: there’s a lot one can do with older sensing and processing systems, for example, which are still almost unbelievably powerful in comparison to those of only a few years ago. So control of the techological frontier may not be enough to prevent hostilities breaking out.

5/5. Finished Sunday 25 June, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)