The Fall of Rome: A Novel of a World Lost

I just finished reading The Fall of Rome: A Novel of a World Lost by Michael Curtis Ford. This book has its moments - a lot of moments in fact. Even so, those moments, are weighed down by some serious shortcomings.

In no sense of the word is Michael Curtis Ford a bad writer. His characters, starting with his hero, a not-wholly-pleasant Germanic chieftain named Odoacer, are convincing enough. As for the action, the scenes of battle, pursuit, etc. are as gripping as any action novel reader could hope for - and then some.

The first problem with The Fall of Rome can be deduced from a description of the plot. The book starts at the death of Attila the Hun in 453AD and it ends at the overthrow of the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus in 476AD. Odoacer, as the history books tell us, was the man who overthrew this last emperor and the story is mostly told from his point of view.

On the face of it, this is fine. The problem is that it takes a remarkably capable writer to tell a story that spans twenty three years, several different rulers of several different nations, several different generals leading several different armies - and then fit such a mass of material into barely more than 300 pages. Mr. Ford is good but not that good. In trying to tell such a sprawling tale in such a short space he simply seems to have bit off more than he could chew. The result is a story that tends to be sort of choppy and episodic.

The other big problem with this book is the result of a problem that the author was not in a position to do much about.

In my reading I've been on a bit of a Roman Empire kick lately. One of the books I recently read was a history called, Caesar's Legion : The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome by Stephen Dando-Collins. The book's title tells you pretty much what it is about. As for when it was about, it focuses on a period of more than a century, from the Tenth Legion's foundation by Julius Caesar around 60BC, through it's capture of the fortress of Masada in 73AD.

Mr. Dando-Collins was able to write the history of a particular 5,000 man (give or take) unit of a particular ancient army because, for all the strife of the late Republic and early Empire, Rome remained the sort of settled and prosperous civilization that could create and preserve historical records that were, and still are, remarkably comprehensive.

After all, in order to ring true, historical fiction must rest very firmly upon historical fact. For the two centuries straddling the birth of Christ, enough material is available that authors can pretty easily place fictional characters and events against a very clear and convincing depiction of the era. So there are a lot of very good historical novels about this period.

The Late Empire is a different matter. It was not an era when people had much leisure to write about history. Nor was it a period which could guarantee that such written records as were produced would have a high probability of survival. It was a period of constant civil war, constant invasion and catastrophic economic decline.

The result is that that even an author who knows his history, as Mr. Ford clearly does, has to do a lot of guessing - using records from earlier or later periods to help fill in the blank spots that his novel's story line requires him to fill.

In some ways his guesses ring true. I don't know if there is documentation on why Odoacer led his troops to overthrow the last emperor. Assuming that there may not be, the reasons Mr. Ford gave for Odoacer's doing so might, to many, seem remarkably unlikely.

In a nutshell, upon hearing of the assumption of the imperial throne by the unworthy Romulus Augustulus, the legion Odoacer commanded rose in mutiny. Rather than attempt to suppress this mutiny, Odoacer regained control of his troops by joining it. Placing himself at the head of his troops, he marched on Italy.

Given the reputation for iron discipline still enjoyed by the legions of Rome, the idea of a general caving in to the desires of his troops and waging war on his superiors at their behest may not seem very plausible. As it happens, though, there are countless examples of exactly this happening throughout the history of Imperial Rome. In fact, Rome's inability to control it armies was one of the primary reasons for the empire's fall. So score one for the author.

Still, if you happen to know enough about the history of Rome, you may find that some of Mr. Ford's other guesses seem a bit off and result in some jarring anachronisms.

I am working from memory here and may be off a bit myself but let me lay out a few of these anachronisms.

In 378AD, the Roman Legions under the Emperor Valens were destroyed by the cavalry of the Goths near the city of Adrianople, in Thrace. If it hadn't happened even before this catastrophic defeat, certainly after it the Roman army began to shake its age old reliance on heavy infantry. More and more it seems to have become an army of horsemen. Yet, The Fall of Rome, writing about a period a hundred years later, features numerous legions of heavy infantry, as if little had changed in the intervening century.

Moreover the legions it features are the old five or six thousand man formations of the late Republic or the early Empire. I remember reading, though, that at about the time of Constantine (who died around 330AD, well over 100 years before the period Mr. Ford writes about) the infantry legions of the Empire had been drastically reduced in size, down to perhaps 2,000 men (give or take).

Then there's the placement of the legions.

During the reign of Augustus (the first Roman Emperor) the army was professionalized. This professional army, in which soldiers were enlisted for a period of, first, fourteen and, then, twenty years (yes - this does seem to be where the idea of retirement after twenty years of service originated) was permanently stationed on the frontiers. In Europe it was deployed along the Rhine and Danube rivers in three or four armies, each of which was built around a core of two or three legions of infantry.

For 400 years these Roman armies held the Rhine and Danubian frontiers. The river lines were occasionally breached, particularly after the civil wars that began in earnest after the death of the emperor Commodus at the end of the second century. (PS: Commodus was the evil emperor in the movie Gladiator) The borders were always restored, though, till the beginning of the fifth century.

Again, I'm working from memory here but, as I remember the story, the line of the Rhine was finally breached once and for all by the Franks on Christmas night in, I believe, the year 405AD. This was a major event in the history of Western Europe because it signaled the beginning of the complete loss of Roman control over Gaul (France).

More than Gaul, in fact. For instance, in 410AD, the need for troops to defend Italy, Gaul and other imperial lands, caused the Romans to withdraw the forces they had stationed for some 350 years in the Roman province of Britain. Left to their own devices the British population (including a certain war leader known as Arthur) was unable to mount a successful defense of the island against later incursions by barbarian Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. I don't know what happened to the Jutes, but I think we all know where the Anglo Saxons live these days.

So anyway, after the line of the Rhine was breached, the floodgates burst open for good. The Vandals sacked Rome itself in 410AD and then moved on to found a kingdom in North Africa. The Visigoths also crossed the borders and headed as far west as they could go, with the result that the provinces in Iberia were forever lost to Rome - replaced by the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain.

Even the Huns, a tribe of steppe people originating in Central Asia, crossed into what had once been Roman Gaul - though they were also defeated there in 452 by what was left of the Roman army, together with its barbarian allies.

What all of the above adds up to is another likely anachronism that sort of bothers me about The Fall of Rome. I read once that, after about 450AD, Rome had effectively lost control of most, or even all, of the Western Empire outside of Italy. Looking at what had happened since 405AD, how could it have been otherwise?

In The Fall of Rome, though, full sized 5,000 man legions still seem to man the Rhine and Danubian frontiers late in 475AD. How could that be? Probably there were still were Roman troops in the old provinces but the old river line deployments of infantry legions must, almost certainly, have gone by the boards by that time.

The author wrote of the late fifth century population of Rome itself as still being around a million people. That may very well be true. I've read that Italy actually wasn't driven into Dark Ages levels of poverty, depopulation and backwardness till the Eastern Emperor Justinian's attempt to regain the west triggered the mid-sixth century Gothic Wars.

Still, even if Rome's population remained quite large, as described in The Fall of Rome the Roman world of 476AD simply seems way too orderly to be (as it was) on the verge of utter collapse. That's not to say that the The Fall of Rome doesn't portray a civilization under serious stress. Rather it is to say that conditions must actually have been much much worse.

This must have been particularly true in the military and it is very hard to believe that, in 476, there were still organized legions under arms, led by experienced centurions, tribunes and legates. Representing as they did, a Roman state on the verge of collapse, the Roman armies of the day could not have been much better led, trained, organized or equipped than the barbarian hordes that provided them with most of their manpower.

The collapse of nations is fairly common in human history. The collapse of an entire civilization, though, into centuries of barbarism is actually quite uncommon. As a result the total collapse of the Roman west in the fifth century makes this a fascinating period in human history. It's most unfair, then, that having chosen a fascinating period of human history in which to set a story, the success of Mr. Ford's effort should be so seriously compromised by a scarcity of historical records on the period - a scarcity caused by the very civilizational collapse that makes the setting of his novel so fascinating.

That's the way it is, though.

No author's work has to be perfect before it can be worth reading. I read another book by Mr. Ford a year or two ago and, despite the flaws in this one, I'll be quite willing to read anything else he writes in the future. You have to wish that The Fall of Rome was better than it is but I still did enjoy reading it.

Shelby Foote's Civil War

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of volume 2 of Shelby Foote's three-volume opus The Civil War, A Narrative. I finished volume 1 a few weeks ago. This is a second reading for me as I originally read all three volumes about twenty years ago. Since it looks like it will be some weeks before I get my hands on volume 3, I think I'll write a few things about the first two volumes now.

For starters, I'd recommend that people not be intimidated by the heft of these volumes. The late Shelby Foote was a master at taking massive amounts of material and presenting the results in a lucid and engaging manner. Once you pick up his account of the Civil War, you will find it very hard to put down.

Otherwise, I'll limit this post to three main points.

My first point is that, unlike most books on the Civil War, the sheer size of Foote's history is about the only thing I've ever run into (short of the 100 odd volumes of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion) that gives the reader a notion of the true scope of the conflict. Anybody who has a passing familiarity with the war has heard of Chancellorsville, Manassas, Vicksburg and Shiloh. How many people, though, have heard of Pea Ridge, Bristoe Station, Port Hudson, or Kelly's Ford?

There were probably a couple of hundred of these mostly unknown, often desperate and bloody fights. Some of them, in fact (such as Pea Ridge and Port Hudson), were battles of critical importance. Yet the Civil War was so large that a battle had to be absolutely titanic for people to remember it. Foote describes dozens of these forgotten engagements in the scope of his history and, yet, manages to keep his history interesting, despite the obvious hazards involved in discussing countless battles that not many people have ever heard of.

My second point has to do with the quality of both the leaders and the soldiers who fought on each side.

It's impossible not to be impressed by the boldness and skill consistently displayed by Robert E. Lee and his generals. The problem is that the focus on Lee's victories has created an impression that all of the South's military leaders were in the same league as Lee. Foote makes it clear that they weren't.

The focus on the way Lee consistently ran rings around Federal opponents has also created an impression that Federal leadership was fairly inept. Sometimes it was. Often, though, it was anything but. To give an example, when it comes to leadership, no bold and dazzling maneuver ever made by Robert E. Lee ever surpassed the way Grant advanced on Vicksburg.

As for the soldiers, history has remembered many events such as the Federal rout at Bull Run, McClellan's retreat on the Peninsula and the collapse of Howard's corps at Chancellorsville and, then, at Gettysburg. The impression has come down to us that, unlike their Rebel opponents, the Yankees were often inclined to run.

Well, often enough, they did. So to though, as Foote points out, on occasion after occasion the Rebels did the same thing in just as embarrassing a manner. In fact, easily the most inexcusable rout of the war, a tale well told by Shelby Foote, was the collapse of a veteran Confederate army on Missionary Ridge.

For those who are not familiar with this fight, it happened just outside Chattanooga Tennessee, in late November of 1863. Ordered to make a frontal assault on a line of rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge, 20 to 25,000 men of the Federal Army of the Cumberland, did as ordered. They were not ordered to assault the ridge itself, though. Missionary Ridge was held by the bulk of the Rebel Army of Tennessee and regarded, by both sides, as impregnable. Turns out it wasn't. The Federal infantry, ignoring the orders of their leadership, just kept on going, stormed the impregnable 500-foot high ridge and utterly routed the Confederate Army of Tennessee.

Then there is another, fairly unexpected, matter that even the most casual reading of The Civil War, A Narrative makes clear.

Pretty much everybody familiar with the history of the Civil War is familiar with Lincoln's endless search for a general who would fight. Eventually he found his man in Grant.

Much less often remarked upon, though, is the interesting fact that after the death of the well respected but not exactly successful Albert Sidney Johnston (killed in April of 1862 at Shiloh) Davis had exactly the same problem in the West as Lincoln had in the East. Beauregard, Joe Johnston, Pemberton, Bragg, and others came and went and, in the case of Joe Johnston, came again and went again as Davis also hunted for a leader who would fight.

Years back a historian named Kenneth P. Williams wrote a multivolume history called Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War. Well, to his credit Lincoln found one but it certainly took him long enough to do it. In Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis found a general in the East in only about a year but, in the West, he never found one at all. The result was an endless series of Confederate disasters in the West.

The Civil War is to America what the Illiad is to Greece. If you want to learn about it, you can't do better than to read Shelby Foote's The Civil War, A Narrative.

A Drive to New York

Funny all the things you realize whenever you take a ride from Point A to Point B. All you have to do is keep your eyes open and your brain engaged.

For many years I've heard people ranting all about how we depend too much on our cars. We ought to build mass transit, they say, and isn't it a shame that city to city passenger trains have all but disappeared? In my case, that theory got put to the test this last weekend. Not for the first time I drove from suburban Washington to suburban New York and back. From this experience and others it has become sadly clear that trains have serious limits.

There are, of course, places where mass transit makes a lot of sense. Many trips into Washington D.C. have made it obvious to me that, without the Washington subway system, the city would be jammed into a perpetual state of gridlock. When I need to go downtown on a workday, I wouldn't even dream of driving a car.

The key here seems to be density. If there are a lot of people in close proximity to each end of a train ride then a railroad connection may be justified.

In theory, that means that city to city rail transit should also make sense. In the real world, though, It doesn't seem to work that way. It does, of course, if you are a business traveler going from city center to city center. If the cities involved are close enough together, like Washington and New York, going from Union Station to Penn Station simply beats the living daylights out of going from Reagan National Airport to LaGuardia. The train is comfortable and, if you take it, you don't have to endure the cab ride from LaGuardia into Manhattan. Even the expense, particularly if you are on an expense account, is endurable.

Then there's travel for the rest of us. How many people who live in the Washington area live near Union Station? How many people who live in the New York area live in close proximity to Penn Station? Not a lot, I can tell you. Many (most?) of us have to travel ten, twenty or even thirty miles just to get to the station. Twenty-first century metropolitan areas cover a lot of land area.

So, in most cases, the only way to travel from one city to the other is to drive. This is even more the case if you are driving as a couple or have kids. The one person, one way, non-premium fare from Washington to New York is over $60. Make it two people, two ways and you end up spending about $250. just for city to city transportation. Moreover, you then have to get to and from the station. From where I live - Silver Spring, Maryland - that means a cab to the Metro station and a subway to Union Station on the Washington end. On the New York end it means getting off of Amtrak in New York and getting onto the Long Island Railroad, followed by a cab or family pickup upon reaching my Long Island Railroad destination. Last weekend, this was my sister's house in Amityville. Also keep in mind that all of this entails constantly nursmaiding a lot of luggage.

Driving to Amityville and back isn't a piece of cake either. For one person to drive there and back in a reasonably fuel-efficient car (I drove a Honda Civic this past weekend) it can cost about $40. in gas and $40. in tolls. But for two people or three or four the rate stays about the same. Moreover, when you get to your destination, since you have your own car with you, you can make side trips - pretty important if, like my wife and I, you're visiting a whole bunch of people, none of whom live anywhere close to a railroad.

In other words, for all but a limited class of travelers, city to city rail transportation is not an option and, very likely, can never be an option. That's actually too bad because the drive is dreadful.

Depending on traffic, it can easily take five or five and a half hours each way. As for scenery, there are some pretty stretches of road (example - crossing the Susquehanna River on the Tydings Bridge) but they are balanced by some areas of absolutely stunning ugliness. Examples of the latter include the drive through Baltimore, the area around the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the entire section of the road that starts around the southern tip of Staten Island and ends at the western boundry of Long Island's Nassau County.

This last makes a point about the wonders of urban life.

New York may be one of the great cities of the world and Manhattan is, indeed, awesome but surrounding Manhattan is the industrial region in northeastern New Jersey and the often ugly and always congested boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens (ugly from the highway anyway - and often ugly even when you get off the highway). People complain a lot about sprawl and often seem to want to return to a vanished golden age when everyone lived within the boundaries of relatively compact cities. If New York is any example, that's fantasy. I can't see any way that you can have Manhattan without the miles and miles of industrial and residential sprawl that surrounds it. It's the industry that supports the beloved central city. As for the surrounding outer boroughs, if you don't have them, you don't have housing for the workers needed to make Manhattan viable.

So what else can you learn when you keep your eyes open on the drive between Washington and New York? Well, there's a lot you can learn about government and about infrastructure - some of it a bit surprising.

Take the roads. Everyone loves to hate the New Jersey Turnpike and everyone loves to point out how corrupt and incompetent the government of New Jersey happens to be. Well, I know little about the New Jersey government but, at this point in my life, I've probably driven the round trip length of the Turnpike from the Delaware River to New York at least a hundred times. You know what? The Turnpike is an excellent road. It's a toll road but the tolls are comparatively reasonable and the revenue from them seems to be well spent maintaining a New Jersey Turnpike that, overall, is well designed and well maintained. There are regular rest stops along the highway and, if you break down, the road seems to be patrolled by guys whose job it is to pull to the side of the road and help you. I don't know what this service costs but, when you need it (within limits), who cares? How many other roads offer such service?

Then, to take a comparison, you cross the Verrazano Bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn. Crossing is free heading west to east but costs you $9.00 going from east to west. What's the money spent on though? Certainly not on the upkeep of the bridge. The Verrazano is one of the great suspension bridges of the world but it's a safe bet that one day it's going to collapse for the lack of a paint job. I'm not joking here. Thirty years ago the elevated West Side Highway in Manhattan was closed after a truck fell through the roadway. The highway's steel supports had simply rusted away because the authorities hadn't protected them by painting them on a regular basis.

Not painting economically essential structures so that they will eventually collapse seems to be the way things are done in New York City. On the way home, my wife and I made a side trip into Queens to go to a wool store on Jamaica Avenue. While my wife bought wool, I waited outside and, with nothing else to do, started eyeballing the Jamaica Avenue El running about twenty feet over my head. You would not believe the rust I saw. I'm not taking esthetics here. I'm talking about serious structurally damaging rust on critical economic infrastructure.

To get back to tolls, there were other tolls on my Washington to New York drive besides the ones I've already mentioned. Some are reasonable. Others, though, really drive home the absolutely amazing rapacity of certain governments.

Here I'm talking about Delaware.

To go about 90 miles on the well designed, well maintained New Jersey Turnpike you are charged $4.25 each way. On the well designed and, mostly, well maintained 110-mile section of I-95 going through Maryland, there is one $5.00 toll, charged to northbound travelers only.

In the middle, though, you have Delaware.

Delaware is a state that is proud that it does not charge sales taxes to its citizens. Obviously, the citizens like this. The merchants like it too, since this lets them lure shoppers away from Maryland and Pennsylvania. Well, fair enough. If Maryland and Pennsylvania wish to use their sales taxes to put local merchants at a competitive disadvantage, it may be foolish but that's not any problem of Delaware's.

Still, like all governments, Delaware needs to raise revenues. How do they do it? Well, one way they do it is to pick the pockets of out of state residents.

About 12 to 15 miles of I-95 are routed through the northern fringe of the state of Delaware. Since this section of the road is, mostly, useful to get through Delaware rather from one Delaware destination to another, it doesn't take a genius to realize that it's more likely to be frequented by out of staters than locals.

So what kind of road is it? Overall, I think it accurate to say that it is the most poorly designed and most poorly maintained section of I-95 between Washington and New York (actually, from other trips I've taken, I'd lay odds that it is the most poorly designed and maintained section of I-95 between Florida and Maine).

If you run into traffic jams between northern New Jersey and the Washington Beltway, the tie-ups will most likely be located in Delaware. In fact, often they are actually caused by Delaware - specifically by the too-narrow toll plaza you go through every time you pass through the state. For little over a dozen miles of badly maintained, often congested, road you are hit with a $3.00 charge each way. If the infamous Jersey Turnpike charged this much per mile, my $4.25 toll would be about $18.00. I know it sounds like the most dreadful pun but on I-95 the state of Delaware really does engage in a most blatant form of highway robbery on a daily basis. Moreover, since their victims tend to be people from other states nobody seems to be in a position to do anything about it - even though I-95 is a federal, not a state, highway.

When you take a long drive, as your transmission goes into "Drive" your brain often goes into "Neutral." You only keep your eyes open to see signs, potential hazards, and golden arches. You shouldn't. Just keep your brain in "look at what's around me" mode. It's amazing the things you see and the things you realize.

Oil on the Brain

The other day I finished Oil on the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline by Lisa Margonelli. This journalistic survey of the worldwide oil industry attempts to make two points.

The first concerns the ogres who rip us off at the pump.

Ms. Margonelli begins her book at a local gas station. Gas stations are simple places, right? Well, if you don't know anything about them (I can't say I know much) they certainly seem to be. Learn something, though, (as the author took the trouble to do) and you find that running a gas station is not just hard work but also a remarkably risky and complex job. So, for that matter, is being a distributor who sells gasoline to gas stations or running the refinery that sells its gasoline to distributors. Drilling for oil isn't a piece of cake either. Unhappily, for the people who love to believe that we are victims of vast conspiracies, all too many of the oil industry employees Ms. Margonelli portrays in her book seem to be over-worked and under-paid. As for their, mostly small, businesses they function in such a ferociously risky and competitive environment that they are poorly cast in the role of ogre.

How about the big oil companies? They're still evil, right? Well in some ways maybe but, mostly, no. They too are caught between customers who want the world for a dollar a gallon and scapegoating by third world governments who themselves are characterized by a mix of corruption, incompetence and greed.

So where's the villain? Doesn't a good story need a villain? Yes it does and this leads to Lisa Margonelli's second point. It's not the people and it's not even the companies. It's the product.

Basically, oil is different than other commodity. There is something about its current indispensability that makes dealing with it at all, on virtually any level, a deal with the devil. To hammer home her point the author focuses on the oil state. She looks at four dreadful examples in particular - Venezuela, Chad, Iran and Nigeria.

Absent oil, none of these countries has ever had a lot going for it economically. Chad, in particular, is and always has been an economic basket case. The discovery of oil, then, should be economic salvation, shouldn't it?

That's the problem. It rarely seems to be. Indeed, it is often the exact opposite. Petroleum has the power to distort governments and economies to such an extent that, instead of creating wealth, oil often ends up creating conflict, corruption, environmental degradation and even more poverty.

As she does with the various players in the oil industry itself, the author's portrayal of the people caught in the web of the oil state is extremely sympathetic. Actually, in fact, I thought she was a little too sympathetic in her portrayal of the Iranians but, in terms of the overall point she is making about the oil state, that's neither here nor there.

It's easy to blame oil companies for every evil relating to oil. However, it is governments who are responsible for the well being of their people, not oil companies. So, if you want scapegoats, by all means blame the oil companies. If you want explanations, though, things turn out to be more complicated.

Basically, when oil is discovered in a poor country no government can refuse to give in to the temptation to exploit the discovery. Neither can oil companies fail to do what it takes to produce oil wherever they find it. After all, they cannot live without new supplies of oil. As for the population, naturally they expect to benefit from the windfall brought by oil. How could they not? So people innocently put up with the depredations necessary to extract the stuff.

Somehow, though, the ending is rarely happy. Local industries cannot compete with the salaries paid by the oil companies. So they die. Governments don't need to tax their populations to raise revenue. Sounds great but this also means that they do not need the cooperation and support of their populations in order to raise tax revenues. The result is usually autocracy - "no representation without taxation," as the saying goes. However, flush with money but lacking the institutions capable of handling their newfound wealth, the spending of oil state governments is often irresponsible and invariably corrupt. The result is tragedy.

So what's the solution to the dilemmas presented by oil? In the author's eyes there is only one solution. The world must wean itself off the stuff. Fair enough. It's not a particularly original conclusion but, given that she has done her homework, Ms. Margonelli can make it with some authority.

She uses alternative fuel developments in China to illustrate the direction she believes we should move in. My own sense is that her choice of location is interesting but a bit problematical. Yet, the direction the author clearly feels we should move in - to transition from an oil to a hydrogen based economy - is very probably (if it is technically possible) our best long term option.

Oil on the Brain was an easy and enjoyable read. Whoever knew that a chapter on gas station operations could be so interesting? Still, it deals with serious problems and draws serious conclusions.

The universal craving for endless quantities of petroleum in a world of limited supply has turned oil into the economic equivalent of an addictive drug. We need to get beyond scapegoating people and industries and start to deal with the reality of our addiction.

The problem is that, however destructive oil may have become, there are no panaceas. So going cold turkey is not really an option. Yet we do need to develop other fuels. This is hardly an original argument but Oil on the Brain does make it a persuasive one.

Bimbos of the Death Sun

I mentioned that one topic this blog would cover would books - the one's I've read anyway. Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb (originally published in 1987) is the first I've read (actually listened to) since I made this committment (threat?).

I'm actually a little embarassed by my selection of Bimbos. It's bad enough to be the most obscure of bloggers, without writing about books whose titles indicate that the obscurity is richly deserved. I mean, Bimbos of the Death Sun? Really! Wouldn't it have been nice if I could have started by telling the world what I think about Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or something?

My reading tastes actually tend to be all over the map but, even so, Bimbos is a bit of a departure for me. I only read it because I was looking for a short, unabridged, downloadable audiobook that would fit in some empty space on my MP3 player.

I have a long enough commute that I'm always listening to audiobooks in the car, while at the same time reading dead tree books at home. The problem with audiobooks, though, is that the selection tends to be limited. That is also their greatest virtue. Just to get something to listen to, you will listen to something in the car that you would never think to pick up and read at home. At times the results are tedious beyond imagining. Mostly, though, you explore strange territory and find it interesting.

Anyway, now that my excuses are out of the way, what about Bimbos?

It was a very pleasant surprise. The biggest surprise was that it is not a science fiction book. It is supposed to be a mystery but the mystery in the book is only a very transparent fig leaf behind which the author has pretended to hide a thoroughly enjoyable satire.

As such, it has only one obvious problem. The satire started early (on page one, in fact) but the murder that created the mystery only occurred very late in the story. Mostly this was fine but the reader had to go through a remarkably large portion of this title before the murder even happened. The result was that I spent much of Bimbos wondering where this story was going and how long it would take to get there. Still, this "aimless voyage" part of the book was a good deal of fun.

The action in Bimbos takes place over the course of a weekend at a second rate science fiction/fantasy convention held in a second rate hotel. At least I hope it's meant to be a second rate convention. I've been to any number of trade shows in my life and know enough to do some comparing. I would hate to think that this convention is even close to the best that the science fiction/fantasy world can offer.

It may be cruel to laugh and poke fun at our fellow human beings but there is a cruel streak in us humans, isn't there? And who can be easier to poke fun at than a collection of losers and misfits who don't just enjoy science fiction or fantasy but actually seem to think that it is more important than reality (I hope they're not correct) and put their real lives on hold while they focus on perfecting their not-real lives.

So for much of this book the reader is engaged in the cheap thrill of watching the author shoot fish in a barrel. Even a cheap thrill is still a thrill after all - one that most of us are quite willling to live down to if the target of our laughter is appropriately selected.

Done to excess, of course, satire can be little more than a sneering exercise in intellectual sadism and, in becomming so, it can lose a lot of its credibility. Sharyn McCrumb shows the good sense avoid this sort of excess. The fun she pokes at the more extreme convention attendees is made that much more believable by her sympathetic portrayal of a good many other characters - people who can enjoy a game without confusing the game with reality. It is further helped by the author's writing which is always good and, often, sparkles.

As for the murder mystery it's as clever as it needs to be and ties in nicely with the overall satirical theme of the book.

So what about the book? What happened and who did it happen to?

So you noticed that I haven't actually told you anything significant about the characters or goings on in Bimbos, have I? I won't either. Why spoil the fun of discovery? So, for the particulars, you'll have to read Bimbos of the Death Sun, which I would heartily recommend. It's not Proust (who I've never read and probably never will) but it is a fun read.

Why the url and title?

In my first post I made the following (remarkably tedious) promise, "As for why this blog has the title and url I've given it, that's a subject for a future posting."

Sorry but I guess a promise is a promise. Here goes.

About the url (http://ihopemomapproves.blogspot.com/) there's not much to explain since it is at least as obvious as your typical vanity license plate. Mom, being the exact ideal of what a good (great!) mom should be (I'm probably saying something about myself here.) enjoys a good deal of prestige in my eyes and in the eyes of my family. I've been known to cross her but, mostly, I prefer that she approve of things. So why not hard wire that preference into the fabric of this blog?

The title, Joe Says, may also seem obvious. Well, ha! It's not. Like the url, it does involve Mom, though.

I've always liked to think of myself as an only child, a habit my five younger brothers and sisters, for some reason, have been known to find annoying. Too bad. After all, the historical record is clear on this subject. There actually was a gloroius year and a half period when I was a bona fide only child and that's more than any of my siblings can say (Please don't tell any of them I wrote this.).

However, I wasn't the only person in the house who was impressed by my special status as first among equals. Apparently, at some level, Mom too seemed to realize that any right thinking person would also be impressed. So, unknown to me, when Mom wanted to emphasize a point to one or another errant brother or sister of mine, she would often preface her remarks with the phrase, "Joe says."

It was decades before I discovered this and, even when I did, I can't say that I found it annoying. For some reason, though, my brothers and sisters did.

Maybe that's why when a time came that rest of the brood decided to christen one of our number as "the good son," they didn't ask Mom what, "Joe Says" about who would be the most suitable candidate. Instead, they did an end run around both of us and selected one of my younger brothers for the honor.

I don't mind, though. Adolescent rebellion is just a fact of life and I can live with it. For sure, merit can't have had anything to do with their decision.

So, getting back to this blog, events made it impossible for me to call it, The Good Son Says. Joe Says works for me, though, and ihopemomapproves.

Why am I doing this?

There are people who start a blog to give the world an opportunity to bask in the glow of their opinions. That's not why I'm doing this.

I do, of course, have my own ideas about things but nobody really has a compelling need to hear them. Only a small number of people are deeply troubled when they find that the scope of their opinions exceeds the boundaries of their expertise. I doubt that I'm any exception to this general rule.

So why am I writing? It's definitely not so that I can add one more shrill voice to what passes for public discourse in this day and age. Actually, I'm writing for work reasons. I want to learn more about creating blogs and since you learn best by doing (an opinion!) I'm creating this one. Still, I'll try not to waste the time of anybody who who takes the trouble to read it.

It's not false modesty, of course, to say that I anticipate the tiniest reading audience imaginable. My only reader, in fact, may end up being some scholarly drudge in a future era who uses this blog as source material for his PhD dissertation on the lives of obscure people at the dawn of the Internet era. That's the breaks, I guess.

As for what I'm planning to write about, I intend to focus most of my attention on the books that I read, on the (mostly home) projects I'm involved in and on my assorted hobbies and (very limited) travels. I'll do my best to address larger issues only if they occur within eyeball range of wherever I happen to be sitting at the time they happen. In other words, I will do my best to focus my attention only on those areas where I can claim to write with some small amount of authority.

As for why this blog has the title and url I've given it, that's a subject for a future posting.