Richard Kettlewell

Humble Bundle are selling a bunch of ebook comics cheap. Sketch opinions so far:

Bee And Puppycat [*]. Magical temp worker and her cat perform daft assignments. I found it a bit thin.

Bravest Warriors [*]. Cupcake deathmatches, two-headed space kittens, sapient celery, clowns. A small band of cartoon characters save worlds from bizarre threats. Give me more.

Curse. Werewolves and dying children. Excellent artwork but I found the story depressing.

Day Men. Vampires employ humans to do their waking-hours dirty work, and consequently this is mostly about v-on-v feuding. I’d rather watch a few episodes of True Blood.

Dead Letters. A man wakes up with no memory of his past and almost immediately comes under attack. Then things get weird ... he spends the next four episodes learning about the background and odd properties of the world he’s in and playing the violent political game of its inhabitants. I really liked this.

Evil Empire. Slightly unlikely US political thriller with the occasional page revealing bits about the mid-future outcome. I didn’t find this that exciting. I don’t think I’ll buy more.

Hacktivist. Computer security thriller inspired the Arab Spring apparently written by someone who knows annoyingly little about computer security. Improves once it gets over the technobabble, on balance I liked it despite the initial irritation.

Hit. Hardboiled 1940s LA police take to shooting criminals who they can’t bring to justice by legal means, only to find things are dirtier than they look. Good but not quite excellent.

Imagine Agents. MIB types keep children’s imaginary friends under control through high technology and dust-ups. Not bad though fairly predictable.

Lumberjanes [*]. Resourceful girl scouts confront bizarre supernatural threats and earn the occasional badge. Fun, would read more.

Six-Gun Gorilla. A depressed librarian repurposed as a human camera stumbles around a war zone with bizarre physical laws, gradually learning a bit about what’s really going on and starting to affect it, with occasional assistance from the revolver-wielding simian of the title. Interesting and entertaining.

The Midas Flesh [*]. Starts well, with dinosaurs in space, and continues by elaborating the implications of Midas’s wish. Good stuff although I thought the body of the story held up better than the final revelations and conclusion.

(…time passes…)

The Woods. A US high school is mysteriously transported to another world. Some of the children head into the surrounding woods, encountering very hostile and friendly creatures there; the staff and the rest of the children stay in the school, trying to fend off monstrous incursions and rapidly descending into an unpleasant internal power struggle despite their precarious situation. The bundle includes the first three issues (of I don’t know how many). I’m curious what happens next.

Translucid. Nonlinearly told story of a superhero’s struggle, first with his childhood demons and then with his complicatedly motivated nemesis. First three issues of six, feeling a bit undecided about whether I care enough about the characters to buy more.

Suicide Risk. A policeman in a force largely overwhelmed by supervillians himself acquires super powers and starts to fight back. The action is made a bit more interesting by Leo’s initial inexperience and relative weakness and the villains’ numerical superiority, meaning that he has to deploy sneakiness rather than just brute force, though by the end of the second volume he’s overcoming some of these disadvantages. There is also some backstory about the origins of the superpowers and the occasional vignette concerning some individual villain. You could hardly say the concept was original but it does do a good job with it.

Polarity. Bipolar artist discovers that if he stops taking his meds he gains superpowers. Thumpings ensue, plus some discovery of what’s really going on, plus a romantic subplot to motivate the main character a bit. Entertainingly drawn and (at least at the ‘quip’ level) scripted but structurally speaking it didn’t impress.

Fairy Quest. Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf flee the brutal Mister Grimm, who runs Fablewood with an iron fist. Naturally they meet a variety of familiar characters on the way, variously helping or hindering their escape. Another highlight.

Protocol: Orphans. A collection of young secret agent types with a slightly creepy naming scheme fight various kinds of bad guy. Much of the plot is driven by betrayal, unfortunately none of it really surprising enough to raise an eyebrow.

[*] indicates you need to pay $15 or more to get these four. Underline marks what I thought were the real hits.

General notes:

• Major spoilers for everything on the ballot!
• Reviews in order of reading/watching.

My current ranking is:

1. Gravity
2. Frozen
3. Pacific Rim
4. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
5. No award
6. Iron Man 3

General notes:

• Major spoilers for everything on the ballot!
• Reviews in order of reading/watching.

My current ranking is:

1. The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
2. The Lady Astronaut Of Mars
3. The Waiting Stars
4. The Exchange Officers
5. No award
6. Opera Vita Aeterna

General notes:

• Major spoilers for everything on the ballot!
• Reviews in order of reading/watching.

My current ranking is:

1. Selkie Stories Are for Losers
2. The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere (but it’s hard to order this with Selkie Stories).
3. If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love
4. The Ink Readers of Doi Saket

Spell It Out: The Singular Story Of English Spelling, David Crystal, ISBN 978 1 84668 567 5

The bulk of this book (and for me most of the interest) is an account of how English spelling got the way it is today. Although superficially a mess, a lot of the steps from the (relatively) straightforward Anglo-Saxon conventions to the present made a reasonable amount of sense in the contexts in which they were made - but the composition of those steps yields a rather complex system, and the context has changed a lot.

For example, the C16th introduction of a silent b into debt wouldn’t have been particularly confusing in an age when many literate people knew Latin, but today most users of the language aren’t likely to have any idea why the word has such a bizarre spelling.

The historical chapters are divided up by quotes from various authors touching on spelling one way or another. The end of the book discusses how detailed knowledge of the history of spelling might be used to improve its teaching.

There aren’t any citations for the specific statements about the develop of English spelling, but there is a “further reading” section.

Well worth a look if you’re at all interested in the subject.

Afgantsy: The Russians In Afghanistan 1979–89, Rodric Braithwaite

I didn’t really know much about the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and what I did know was, of course, very from much a Western viewpoint. Despite the British author this book presents a Soviet perspective.

There is a good chunk of narrative history here; if you want an overview of why the USSR went in and why it eventually gave up and left, there are surely worse places to start. Whether the KGB backed the original communist coup is left uncertain (people who ought to know deny it), but it did not do the USSR any favours; it badly destabilized the country. The initial Soviet reaction was not soldiers on the ground but advice and support for Taraki’s new regime, which they considered to be brutal and incompetent and with thoroughly counterproductive policies and methods. Matters came to a head when the internal power struggle among the Afghan communists resulted in a second coup. The Soviet reaction was to (equally violently) replace Amin’s government with one more to their taste, and put in (at its peak) over a hundred thousand troops in an attempt to put down the anti-communist rebellion.

In retrospect of course this was a disastrous error but it’s less clear what a realistic better policy would have been once the first coup had happened - staying out from the beginning would probably have resulted in an unstable, fundamentalist or American-backed regime on the southern border of the USSR, none of which will have been attractive prospects in Moscow.

Much of the book is concerned with the Soviet men and woman who served Afghanistan. There is an interesting section on the music and poetry composed by serving soldiers, for instance. Of more political significance are Anatoli Tkachev’s negotiations with Ahmed Shah Masud. At a lower level Alexander Kartsev’s experiences are an insight into the on-the-ground relations between the Soviet troops and the locals; at one point he is kidnapped to help out a mujahedin commander who has shot himself in the foot; later he persuades the same commander to release some prisoners he had been planning to kill.

In the end despite the fact that it “won all its major battles and never lost a post to the enemy” the Soviet army in Afghanistan withdrew in defeat; the current American campaign has largely the same goals and many of the same opponents, arguably making it a single conflict of three decades and counting. I can’t say this book offers a great deal of hope for the outcome.

Visigothic Spain, Roger Collins, ISBN 0-631-18185-7

Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ISBN 0-14-00-5471-5

Montaillou is a village in southwestern France. In the early 14th century many of its inhabitants were Cathars - a variety of Christian heresy - and as such came to the attention of the Inquisition. What makes it particularly special is that the written record of the resulting interrogations, made under the aegis of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers and later Pope Benedict XII, survives to this day. The book at hand is a study of that record and its subjects.

We watched City Beneath the Waves: Pavlopetri. Pavlopetri is an ancient Greek city that was inundated, probably as a result of earthquakes, three millennia or so ago; various modern techniques are being used to map it and attempt (necessarily speculative!) reconstructions. There’s some evidence for trade with Minoan Crete, which given its location - you don’t get much closer to Crete on mainland Greece - is not very surprising.

One thing I don’t recall being mentioned is the reason given for the name of the city; it looks like it might be “Paul’s rocks” or perhaps “Paul Peter”. However (although I don’t actually speak Greek, and therefore going by a combination of Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Google Translate) the morphology doesn’t look quite for either.

I also watched Kissinger, which was excellent. The program consists largely of old footage, Kissinger’s remarks in more recent interview and extracts from the Nixon Tapes, with only the most occasional question from Niall Ferguson. (Surprisingly it had previously not occurred to me just what a treasure trove those tapes must be for historians.) As I may have remarked before a lot of modern documentaries waste a lot of time getting between the viewer and whatever subject material and genuine expertise they may have to hand, and this program did a good job of avoiding that error.

It must be said that there is not much independent analysis here. Ferguson is supposed to be producing a “warts and all” biography of Kissinger, which hopefully will rectify this. Still, as an insight into Kissinger’s own experience it is remarkable. Nixon’s goals, as articulated here, and the horrendous destruction incurred in achieving them, seem entirely relevant to America’s wars today.