Ghost Brigades and Screwtape Letters

This week, I have been reading C S Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, and John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades.

The Screwtape Letters, for those not familiar with it, dates from the 1940s, and is a collection of short essays on how to be a good Christian, couched in the form of letters from a senior devil to a junior one, advising him on how to tempt his ‘patient’ from the path of light. I’ve encountered it before, and found it even funnier this time; but as an adult, especially having just read the same author’s Mere Christianity, I can see layers of philosophical meaning that passed me by the first time. It is now thought-provoking as well as funny. One of those books that has to be read in short chunks so one has time to digest the ideas.

The Ghost Brigades is the second novel in John Scalzi’s Colonial Union series. The first one, Old Man’s War, is reminiscent of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and outlines the CU universe by following a recently-recruited soldier through his training and early missions. The premise there is that every other race in the galaxy is fighting all the others for access to the limited number of habitable planets, and humanity has emerged in the midst of this. The book explores how far humanity might go in terms of modifying its soldiers to fight such a war, and what it would do with them afterwards; in this it covers similar territory to Timothy Zahn’s Cobra stories.  Towards the end it involves the Ghost Brigades – CU Special Forces, genetically engineered from scratch and literally trained from birth to be soldiers, with no other culture at all.

The Ghost Brigades explores what it would be like to be one of those, and also the question of how a being might be made to turn traitor to his entire species, both from the human and alien viewpoints. The overall storyline also progresses, as the simplistic CU politics outlined in the first book turn out not to be the complete truth. This feels like a middle book in a series, and like an exploration of interesting questions, not answered in the first book because they were tangential to that storyline. I did manage to put it down once, so can’t say it was impossible to put down; but it nearly was.

We Have Hunted the Zargot

Like many UK citizens of a Certain Age, I spent many happy hours as a child immersed in the saga of the Trigan Empire in Ranger, and later Look & Learn, which as “educational magazines” were exempt from any parental bans on comics (which to be fair were not imposed on me).

One of the legacies of this time is my habit of announcing my arrival not with the insipid “Hi honey, I’m home” but with the more robust “We have hunted the zargot, and now we return home!” This has puzzled many guests and family members over the years, but  thanks to the above website I am now able to show them what a zargot looks like…

Hunting the Zargot

Nick to present at RAL

No, really. Recently, Nick’s school had a guest speaker from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford; after the speech, Nick met him and they discussed Nick’s plans for space colonies. This must have made an impression, as Nick has now been invited to visit the lab, where he will be given a tour of the Central Laser facility and give a short presentation on nuclear fusion.

At times like this, being the proud father is quite easy.

So this was Christmas…

As ever, Christmas was busier than I expected, and the huge list of things I planned to do over the holidays is largely untouched. Instead, there were the usual DIY tasks, ferrying other family members backwards and forwards, and spending time with family and friends, all fine and worthy things to do, and enjoyable. So the lesson I take away from that is I shouldn’t assume I will have time to do anything on my task lists over Christmas – let’s call that a New Year’s resolution. Other resolutions this year include moving on from the Telford assignment, a life laundry (starting with all those backup DVDs on the shelf), and doing something about my embarassing lack of upper body strength. (Nick and I tried the local park’s exercise trail, and while we did well enough on anything leg-related, neither of us were able to complete the beginner’s level for arm exercises.)

And now (drum roll)… my personal picks of music, games and books for 2008. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are new, just that I discovered them last year.

Music

• “Running Wild” by Airbourne. A birthday present from my friend Ian; the sort of screaming, sweaty rock’n'roll we misspent our youths listening to, and which I thought no-one recorded any more. Closer to AC/DC than anything else, perhaps.
• “Operation Mindcrime” by Queensryche. One of those rock operas that occasionally pop up, an album of rock songs linked by the conceit of a brainwashed assassin revealing his past from the comfort of a padded cell. Good driving music.
• “Dark Passion Play” by Nightwish, a Finnish metal band which I first heard late one night in a Staffordshire petrol station while heading home from Telford. If you took an opera singer and a celtic folk band, locked them in a recording studio, and refused to let them out until they had made a heavy metal album, it would sound like this. Strange, different, and very enjoyable.
• “Follow You Home” by Nickelback. I encountered this because one of the tracks was used as background music for a furniture advertisement on TV, then discovered that Giulia already had it on CD. A mixed bag, but some of the tracks are so good that this is now a car-CD-changer regular.

Games

• “Savage Worlds” by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. This is a very fast, simple role-playing game fusing aspects of contemporary RPGs and tabletop wargames, and has become my RPG of choice because it drops preparation time and in-game record keeping almost to zero. That’s important when, like me, you still want to play but don’t have time to learn complex rules or prepare for sessions. With this one, I can just turn up and run a game. Perfect.
• “Munchkin” by Steve Jackson Games, or more specifically the third and fourth expansion sets, “Clerical Errors” and “The Need for Steed”. My daughters know that a Munchkin expansion is always a welcome present, and I spent many hours over Christmas playing with my children and Giulia’s boyfriend. I didn’t win a single game, but I was having such fun building the perfect henchman that I didn’t care – the best one was probably the Ancient, Sabre-Toothed Cleric surrounded by a Brood of her monstrous young, wielding a Mace of Sharpness. As I recall, I was playing a (male) Orc Warrior in a chainmail bikini and riding a giant chicken steed at the time. (There’s nothing in the rules to say a male can’t wear a bikini, and I needed the combat bonus.)

Books

• “Mere Christianity” by C S Lewis. Anna, who is much more devout than I, lent me this some time ago. I never thought much of Lewis as a writer, based on his Narnia and Venus series of novels; but this one shows just how clever he really was. As a converted atheist, Lewis understands all the niggling questions I have about Christianity, and answers most of them. Had I read this as a youth, I might well be a more religious person now; and who knows, I may be yet.
• “The Economic Naturalist” by Robert H Frank, a Christmas present. Now, I thought this it would answer questions like why does milk come in square containers and cola in round ones, definitively, which is what the packaging implies; but it doesn’t. I’m particularly suspicious of the explanation for why kamikaze pilots wore helmets, which ignores the idea that their radio earphones were inside them and focuses on supposed protective qualities. What the book does do well is use these questions to tell stories that explain economic concepts; having read it, I understand things like opportunity costs better than before, and for the first time grasp concepts like economic arms races and the laws that limit them. It also reinforces my perception that economics is much less of a science than politicians and practitioners would like us to think.