Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, January 2016

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Mark Thompson, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915--1919

A well-told narrative history of the war, mostly from the Italian side. He covers all aspects, from the back-and-forth of the twelve (!) battles of the Isonzo and diplomatic machinations to war literature and the cults of vitalism and "mystical sadism". One of my great-grandfathers was an engineer in the Italian army during this, and a vague tradition of a grossly incompetent, futile conflict had come down to me, but before reading this I had no idea of just how bad it was. Or just how much the war helped set the stage for Fascism.

Tremontaine

Mind candy: a "fantasy of manners", combining spherical trigonometry, the chocolate trade, aristocratic intrigue, and the authors toying with the characters' affections. It's a prequel, of sorts, to Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, which I read long enough ago that I remember only a vague atmosphere.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

A deservedly-classic memoir of the British Antarctic expedition of 1910--1913. The writing is vivid, the conditions described are alternately wonderous and appalling (admittedly, much more appalling than wondrous), and the feats of physical endurance and stoicism remarkable. What's even more astonishing, now, is the sheer futility of it all. "We were primarily a great scientific expedition, with the Pole as our bait for public support, though it was not more important than any other acre of the plateau": but that publicity stunt killed five people, and thoroughly set the agenda for all the rest of the expedition. Or take Cherry-Garrard's titular "worst journey in the world", over a month on foot through the darkness of an Antarctic winter, at temperatures up to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit below freezing; by rights it should have killed the three people who attempted it, and nearly did many times over. It had more of a scientific purpose, namely to collect embryos of the Emperor penguin, but that goal was itself based on a thoroughly bad theory, that the penguins are the most "primitive" of birds, and "If penguins are primitive, it is rational to infer that the most primitive penguin is farthest south". When we talk about science advancing funeral by funeral, this is not what we have in mind.

Near the end of the book, Cherry-Garrard makes a rousing call for creating, and funding, a proper scientific presence in Antarctica; whether this helped lead to the modern British Antarctic Survey I don't know, but I'd like to think so.

There is an essay to be written about the anxieties about British masculinity and national degeneration on display in the opening and concluding chapters. There's another essay to be written about this as a source text for At the Mountains of Madness, for everything from the Antarctic crinoids to the fusion of doomed science and masculinity (*). Probably both of these essays have been written. They'd be worth writing because this is a great book.

ObLinkage: Maciej "Idle Words" Ceglowski, Scott and Scurvy

*: "Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them .... [P]oor Old Ones! Scientists to the last — what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!" (At the Mountains of Madness, Chapter 11)

Warren Ellis and Gianluca Pagliarani, Ignition City

Warren Ellis, Declan Shalevy and Jordie Bellaire, Injection, vol. 1

Comic book mind candy. Ignition City is Ellis playing around with space opera of the old Flash Gordon / Buck Rogers mold; it's fun but not much more. Injection goes deeper, to some place where worries that the future is coming at us to