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It’s obviously a refutation of the bizarre assertion that sf is not concerned with climate change; the scene is New York in 2140, after a couple more economica and climatic crises; the sea level worldwide has risen by 16 metres, and most of our numerous viewpoint characters live in and around the MetLife building, whose base is submerged but which has become accommodation for about two thoiusand people. As with the Mars books, the different points of view add up to make a whole; as it turns out, the viewpoint characters all end up on pretty much the same side, which is to bring about the fall of capitalism in America.

I felt the first part of the book, which builds to a couple of satisfying plot climaxes at about the half-way mark, was better than the second, where the fall of capitalism is plotted but mostly happens off stage, boosted by a natural disaster whose emotional impact comes across as somewhat blunted. It will be obvious by now that it’s a very political book, but it is more wonkish than angry, which is my own personal style as well, but doesn’t necessarily make for great drama. There’s also a frankly silly sub-plot about a young woman who broadcasts nude from an airship and attempts to transplant polar bears to Antarctica.

I've always been fascinated by Penang, where my father was born in 1928 but I have never been. This was the first novel by Tan, whose second novel The Garden of Evening Mists I enjoyed a few years back. The narrator, son of a marriage between an Englishman and a Chinese woman, finds himself playing a key role in the Japanese administration of occupied Penang during the second world war, and many years later encounters the lover of his Japanese best friend and tells her his story. The cityscape is vividly realised, as is the interaction of cultures, and the brutality of the Japanese regime. It gets a bit sanguinary towards the end, but this was true of that period of history in fact. I felt the prose was not as smooth as in the later book; one can feel that this is a first novel. However, well worth reading to deepen my own appreciation of my father's birthplace.

Quite a short book (270 pages) about a big big topic: the forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, following on the Treaty of Lausanne which officially ended the First World War, but also put a full stop to the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-22 and notoriously stipulated that Muslims living in Greece (except Eastern Thrace) and Orthodox Christians living in Turkey (except Istanbul) would be transferred to the other country. This meant 1.2 million Christians and 400,000 Muslims, many (possibly most) of whom did not speak Greek or Turkish respectively as their first language, if at all, suddenly became citizens in lands where their ancestors had never lived; historic communities were unmixed, cultures were wiped out, and unspoken traumas endured.

Bruce Clark wrote this book at the beginning of the century when a fair number of eyewitnesses were still alive, if elderly, and prepared to talk about what had happened to them eighty years before; I shouldn't think there are many eyewitnesses left now. So he combined historiography of the early Greek state, late Ottoman Empire and nascent Turkish Republic with powerful first-person accounts. These eyewitness stories are not only of violence and expulsion. A surprising number of his interlocutors were happy to talk about the happy times before the conflict, when villagers all lived together without fussing too much about whether they went to the mosque or the church. This nostalgia had survived eight decades of indoctrination by the Greek and Turkish states.

One fascinating (and sad) aspect is that in fact the Christians and Muslims who were displaced were a lot more diverse than the cultures into which they were assimilated. I was already familiar with the Bektashi sect of Islam, which flourished in what is now Greek Macedonia and is now basically restricted to the Albanian-speaking world. I wasn't previously aware of their neighbours the Valaades, or of the crypto-Christians of Anatolia, populations whose identity depended on the mixed cultures of their environments.

All of this is set against the high politics of the negotiations between Venizelos and Kemal (not yet Atatürk), who were both very much in favour of unmixing their respective populations, but both also faced significant internal opposition - both were nominally democracies with elected parliaments, but we should always remember that even autocratic states can have vigorous internal politics. (The subtitle of the book uses the word "forged", which of course means both making and faking.) There were significant interventions in managing the displaced populations from external players as well, notably in Greece which was very dependent on external aid from the British government and American individuals such as Henry Morgenthau.

It did make me wonder about an alternate timeline where Greece actually won the 1919-22 war. I don't think the territorial gains on the Aegean coast could have been sustainable in the long term, given Turkey's much greater population and advantage of strategic depth. The new Turkish state (Kemalism would not have survived) would have aligned firmly with the Axis in the second world war, rather than the neutrality of our timeline, and would surely have taken back all or most of the territory, with a second huge wave of human displacement.

Clark doesn't especially look at other cases of forced mass population movement - he mentions Cyprus in passing (tragic indeed, but on a much smaller scale) but one could add the Partition of India, which was an order of magnitude bigger on the human scale, or the Balkans in the 1990s, or indeed the place where both Clark and I come from which saw thousands forced from their homes in 1969. It's enough to look in detail at this one particular situation. He does however assess the outcome as a success for both the Greek and Turkish states, considered in their own selfish and brutal terms; a success gained at the cost of vast human misery.

(Also, Japan was part of the Allied military occupation of Constantinople/Istanbul! I had no idea!)

A great book, very readable I think even for those who are less familiar with the history and geography of the subject. 

I am thoroughly enjoying the Lethbridge-Stewart books published by Candy Box. Here we have the Brigadier and colleagues fighting snowstorms in deepest Scotland, along with a cell of feminist activists which has in fact been taken over by alien forces. There are layers of uncertainty and deception, and a major plot twist in the developing plotline of the overall series. I enjoyed it a lot, as I have enjoyed the others. 

Peter Davison's Book of Alien Planets (1983), on the other hand, contains eight stories, only two of which are original - one by the editor, and one by Mary Gentle, who at that time had published only one novel, A Hawk in Silver, several years before; she had two more stories published in Asimov's that in 1983, and of course has never looked back. The others are all classics by the likes of Emond Hamilton, Ray Bradbury and two by Arthur C. Clarke, "The Star" and "History Lesson". From Davison's foreword, it appears that these were very much chosen by him as personal favourites. Most of them have a grim twist at the end. It is the more solid of the two anthologies, but you are more likely to have the stories in it.

Peter Davison's Book of Alien Monsters (1982) includes nine stories, eight of which are original and were presumably commissioned for this book (the exception is "Beyond Lies the Wub", by Philip K. Dick). But most of the other eight are by major British authors - Robert Holdstock, Dave Langford, Michael Scott Rohan, Christopher Evans and one woman, Dyan Sheldon (her first SF publication, according to ISFDB, and last for several years as well; she is better known as a YA writer). They are decent enough, but only the Kilworth story has been subsequently published elsewhere.

Carbone ("Carbon") and Silicium ("Silicon") are two artificial intelligences constructed in the near future, given humanoid bodies, and observing and participating in the gradual decline of humanity and the end of the world in environmental catastrophe. It's much slower paced than, say, Barbarella, but thoughtful as well as grim. As my regular reader knows, I'm not a huge fan of stories with anthropomorphic robots; however this somehow worked for me.

it's a pretty dry and detailed biography of the major figure of Geneva's history, what he was trying to do and what he did. As usual (I keep saying this about theology books, but it's true) the ideological points mostly soared over my head, but I found a lot of interesting stuff. Calvin lived from 1509 to 1564, and from 1541 became the most important person in Geneva - he never held public office, but politics in the city became completely polarised between his supporters and his opponents, and usually his supporters won. (But not always.)

There's a lot here about the politics of Geneva as a city-state and Calvin as an individual with regard to France (where he was born and brought up), vs the Holy Roman Empire, vs Berne and the nascent Swiss Confederation (which Geneva did not fully align with until 1584, twenty years after Calvin's death). I'd have liked a bit more reflection on how Geneva became a theocracy in the first place - it had been an ideologically Protestant republic since 1536, before Calvin arrived - and also how it managed to survive as such, when other such experiments failed (for instance in Münster shortly before). But the books is about Calvin, not Geneva.

Calvin's wife died in 1649 after only nine years of marriage; he is not reported to have had other partners, but his brother Antoine was a major supporter throughout his career, and he had many other close friendships, some of which went sour when ideological differences emerged. He is remembered for his writing - and his output at the peak of his career was phenomenal - but his preaching was clearly an important factor as well; none of that survives, apart from a few second-hand notes taken by people in the congregation. Gordon is clearly a fan of his subject (most biographers are) and does his best to find in his favour, performing particularly intense gymnastics when it comes to the execution of Michael Servetus.

The most interesting part for me was the relationship between Calvin and England. He actually had something resembling a personal relationship with Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and regent of England in the first couple of years of the reign of Edward VI (1547-1549). But Somerset was overthrown, and when Edward died in 1553 his Catholic sister Mary took over. Calvin had hopes of winning England back when Elizabeth, a Protestant, came to the throne in 1558. However, in what Gordon calls "perhaps the worst mistiming of the European Reformation", that same year saw the publication in Geneva of Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women and Goodman's How superior Powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects, both of which opposed the legitimacy women as rulers. Knox and Goodman had been thinking of Mary I of England and Mary of Guise in France, but Elizabeth took huge offence and returned Calvin's correspondence unopened, and although he still had some powerful sympathisers in England, he never again had the access to the top in London that he'd had ten years before. He was much more successful in Scotland, but there is surprisingly and disappointingly little about that here; he was of course less directly involved, Knox being the main figure.

Anyway, really a book for specialists only, but I got a bit more out of it than I had expected.

I'm afraid this is the end of the line for my reading of Faction Paradox. The City of the Saved is a place where all humans who have ever lived or died are resurrected; but they then engage in the usual city hall politics of any small state, and I failed to really engage with any of the characters. So I have put it down after 100 pages, and won't be going back.

When I read Ron Chernow's biography, on which Hamilton: The Musical is based, I reflected that New York itself comes across as a major character in the story, and this little (70-page) guidebook efficiently links the relevant moments of the show to the real places associated with the events it portrays, concentrating largely on the city where Hamilton lived and died, with a few excursions to New Jersey and further afield. It's a little jewel of a book, with history and geography neatly packed into two pages for each of the New York and New Jersey places mentioned, and proposed walking tours depending on how much time you have and whether you're Team Hamilton or Team Burr. The Room Where it Happened was at 57 Maiden Lane, which no longer exists; but a number of other places do, including in particular the Grange, Hamilton's home for the last couple of years of his life, which has been moved twice but is open for visitors in non-pandemic times. Recommended for Hamilton fans, or people who want a slightly different walking tour of the history of New York.