“All of Mussolini’s monuments will be monuments to the strength of a weakling.”
A journalist’s account of Mussolini’s rise to (and exercise of) power, written by someone who both lived through parts of it and had significant contacts with the man himself. Despite being written at a time when Fascism was still being somewhat celebrated, and even admired, it’s quite a scorching read that dismantles many of its pretensions with both observations and data. It would have provided a lot of ammunition to those wanting to avoid fascist takeovers in their ovn countries to read exactly how imaginary the claims of Fascist Italy were, no matter how dramatically and repeatedly proclaimed.
Surprising for a book of its kind and date (it was first published in 1935), Hitler is conspicuous by his absence, mentioned only in passing: there are far more comparisons with Napoleon. It shows how different history looks when lived forwards.
The title is interesting: Shirer uses a similar turn of phrase to describe Mussolini in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (although he does not reference Seldes as a source). Mussolini’s will to power easily overrides any principles he may have had, which makes it hard to decide whether fascism itself had any principles or was simply the inflation of one man’s will: Mussolini seems to have been unclear about that himself, but resolving it may be key to understanding the modern trends towards authoritarian politics.
4/5. Finished Saturday 20 September, 2025.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
The lesser-known – now – precursor novel to cyberpunk.
A group of rebels engage in pranks and more serious data exfiltration using hallucinatory interfaces to computer-managed information spaces. If that sounds similar to Neuromancer then that’s because the parallels are unmistakeable. The two books appeared at roughly the same time, and initially True names seems to have been the more famous: certainly it attracted a lot of attention from some serious people in both tech and sci-fi. It’s interesting that Neuromancer emerged over the longer term as the more significant work: and I think that’s deserved, although True names remains a great read.
Both books address the issue of information overload and how it could be combatted by using broader-band neural interfaces rather than screens and keyboards. Gibson envisions a rather architectural metaphor, while Vinge goes for something more mythic and fantastical, a world whose practitioners form “covens” and interact with spells and monsters as a way to bring the available functionality into their limited view. It’s not something that’s actually emerged in what we now think of as cyberspace, which remains resolutely text-driven.
My edition of True names came with essays and an afterward by Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of AI. The essays in the main haven’t aged well, but Minsky’s critique of procedural computing still has some bite.
3/5. Finished Thursday 4 September, 2025.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
A take on evolutionary biology that sees cities and human-created environments as a positive force on ecology, without in any way diminishing the effects of human-caused demage.
It’s an interesting perspective. Ecologists and the popular press often only see the damage, not the opportunity, of human construction, and regard species being forced from their “natural” habitats as always bad. Schilthuizen argues quite persuasively that habitat destruction has been mitigated by habitat construction, by creating urban landscapes in which (often other) species can thrive possibly more than they did before. This is especially true when we also consider “invasive” species transported from elsewhere, which find niches in their destination cities (often around their ports of entry). In some cases we find species that no longer have or inhabit a “natural” habitat at all.
And habitat destruction often isn’t as complete as it seems. Schilthuizen example is the mice of New York’s smaller parks, which form islands of isolation that in turn cause identifiable genetic differences between the inhabitants of the different tiny patches of land. Singapore similarly has tiny trats of native forest surrounded by city and cut-off from each other. He uses this carefully to argue that evolution requires neither great distinctions in environment nor wide reaches of time in which to operate in.
This is a careful book that doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions that evolution inevitably raises. Plenty of the cases discussed involve a complex mix of genetic evolution, epigenetic adaptation, individual learning, and group-based “culture” to change the animals’ relationships with their environments. It’s good to take on this complexity head-on, and that makes this stand out as a great introduction and illustration of the wider powers of natural selection.
4/5. Finished Wednesday 27 August, 2025.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
