Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2015

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century

A very nicely written popular history of five movements that either began or reached a peak in 1979: the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet-Afghan War, Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in China, Margaret Thatacher's government in Britain, and John Paul II's first visit as Pope to Poland, viewed as part of a moral campaign against the Soviet Union. Caryl, quite rightly, views these all as anticipations of trends that have come to shape our world, and look like to keep shaping the 21st century --- the economic rise of China, the collapse of Soviet Communism, neoliberalism, Islamism. (I don't believe he ever uses the word "neoliberal" or its derivatives.) Beyond the coincidence of dates, he also links them through their opposition to what, for most of the 20th century, could have been seen as its dominant trends of secularization and socialism, though he's very careful to note how, e.g., post-revolutionary Iran retained and even amplified many modernization initiatives of the Shah's regime, or how Thatcher left alone much of the British welfare state. (He has a nice passage, which irritatingly I cannot find again, about how it's much easier to be a rugged individualist when you know you can go to a hospital for free if you're sick, and will have a guaranteed pension when you're too old to work.) He is also, mercifully, restrained in claiming causal connections between these events &emdash; the biggest is how much the USSR's military commitments in Afghanistan limited its ability to use force in eastern Europe — or abstract, thematic parallels. I think he's too inclined to give credit to Thatcher's economic policies, but otherwise I have few complaints or quibbles. Recommended.

Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer

If you enjoy this weblog, it is very likely that you are part of the target audience for an irregular comic, in which Lovelace and Babbage were hived off into a pocket universe in which they actually built the Analytic Engine, and used it to fight crime. This is precisely that comic, with footnotes and a bonus material about how the Engine would have looked and worked. I recommend it very highly.

Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning

A sort of soberer older cousin to Red Plenty; at least in the first edition of 1979, which is what I read. (I am curious to see what revisions Ellman made later, since 1979 was of course when things began to change radically...)

The book primarily attends to the USSR and its satellites in eastern Europe; the secondary focus is on China. (There are occasional discussions of Yugoslavia and Cuba, and mentions of the Communist governments of southeast Asia, but nothing about how they actually ran things; and I don't believe North Korea is ever named at all.) There was a lot of interesting and valuable detail about how the Soviets actually drew up plans and tried to implement them. About China Ellman had to be sketchier, because there was simply so little available information, and because the process was itself more chaotic. (While Ellman was evidently more skeptical about Maoism and the Cultural Revolution than many westerners were in the 1970s, this is one places where I hope he'd like to revise and extend his remarks.) Indeed, from reading Ellman, I find myself doubting that pre-Deng China really had economic plans, as opposed to mere orders...

Ellman's attempts to draw up some sort of assessment of the accomplishments and defects of state socialism tries to do this from both a liberal and a Marxist perspective. I think he wasn't harsh enough on the ways capitalist countries fail liberalism, or on the ways state socialist countries failed socialism. Whether what's come since in the former second world is an improvement from either point of view is a more complex question, which this book is necessarily silent on.

Gene Wolfe, Sword of the Lictor

In which Severian commits another crime of mercy, wanders in the wilderness (much of it consisting of relics of former civilizations), and is offered all the kingdoms of the world