Tai-Pan is the next book in James Clavell’s “Asian Saga”; it concerns the founding of Hong Kong at the time of the Opium Wars between Great Britain and China. More particularly, it concerns Dirk Struan, the Tai-Pan, or “Supreme Leader”, or perhaps simply the “Big Shot”, of a firm of China traders called the “Noble House” because of its great wealth; indeed, Dirk Struan is not only Tai-Pan of the Noble House, but is known to one and all as The Tai-Pan, supreme among all of the traders.

Struan has big ideas; he has big enemies; he has big schemes, and so do they; he makes big fortunes and takes big losses, and he brings his Noble House through it all. That’s the plot in a nutshell.

What’s interesting about this book is the same thing that was interesting about Shogun and King Rat—the portrayal of a faraway and exotic land, with its exotic people. Like the Anjin-San and Peter Marlowe, Dirk Struan is a survivor, and does what he must to survive. Like them, he more or less goes native, changing his ways to those of the Chinese, the better to understand them, to work with them, and to make money from them. He has much more freedom than the Anjin-San or Marlowe, and his transformation is not as full as theirs, but he is every bit as trapped in his new land. And just as the Anjin-San is manipulated by Toranaga, so Struan, while thinking himself in charge, is manipulated in ways he cannot even begin to recognize by his Chinese hosts.

The book is loosely based on real history and real persons, with the names filed off and new names put on, just as Shogun is; Struan & Co is based on the firm of Jardine-Matheson, which exists to this day. One or the more interesting figures is the Chinese convert of a Lutheran missionary; he appears only once, and is mentioned only two or three times after that, but from the description he is the man who founded a rebellion called the “Tai-Ping Heavenly Kingdom” that gave the Qing emperor a run for his money.

If Tai-Pan is neither as memorable as Shogun, nor as harrowing as King Rat, it remains a fascinating book, and I enjoyed it. Cautions for sex (because, of course, Chinese sexual mores differ from European).

I spent the last week or so re-reading all of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. For those who aren’t familiar, Father Brown is a small, round, mild, dull-looking priest—whose dull face hides keen powers of observation and a deep understanding of human nature, much of drawn from his many years of service in the confessional. (No, he doesn’t talk about his penitent’s confessions.)

The stories are good fun, if a little goofy, and most of them have a point; and it’s fun to revisit them once in a while.

I’m doing most of my reading on my iPad these days using the Kindle app. Given the volume of space in my house that’s taken up with books, it’s nice to know that when I bring a new book into the house, I’m not adding to the clutter.

I also have the Kindle app on my desktop machine, but have almost never used it. Today I started it up because my iPad is charging, and discovered two things that surprised me.

• You can select and copy passages from the book to other apps, e.g., you can pull quotes to your blog without any typing. Woohoo!
• You can report errors in the book text, as I suggested six months or so ago. Interestingly, I made that suggestion on 19 October 2011; the version of the Kindle app I’m using on my Mac is dated 23 October 2010. Apparently I was behind the curve.

It doesn’t appear that you can do either of these things on the iPad; but on the other hand, anything I highlight on the iPad I should be able to see on my desktop. So this is very interesting, and potentially quite useful.

Continuing my progress through James Clavell’s canon, I read King Rat last week. It’s a fascinating book, and very different than Shogun. It seems that during WWII, Clavell was held in Changi prison, a Japanese prison camp in Singapore. Two decades later, he wrote a novel based on his experiences…and that’s what I knew when I opened the book. It was not what I expected.

What I expected was the story of how he was captured, and of interrogations, and sadistic torture, and hot boxes, and solitary confinement—you know, “Bridge over the River Kwai” kinds of things. What I got was very different.

The book begins some months before the end of the war. The Japanese and the prisoners have worked out a sort of detente: the Japanese (or their Korean guards) patrol the outside of the wire, and the British, Australian and American officers keep order inside the wire. Clavell’s stand-in, Lt. Peter Marlowe, is an RAF pilot who was captured in Java. As the novel opens, he befriends (or, really, is befriended) by an American corporal named King, known to all in the camp as “the King”. He’s the King because he’s the guy who can sell things for you and get you money. He can get stuff for you. He, in and of himself, is pretty much the black market in Changi prison. Because of his position, he’s the best dressed man in the camp: he’s got a complete uniform. Few of the others, including the officers, have anything so nice. And because of his position, there are many in the camp, including Grey, the Provost Marshall, who want to see him tumble from his position. Because of their friendship, Marlowe gets tarred to some extent with the same brush.

As I say, this is not a book about sadistic prison guards. But life in Changi is hard, very hard, very, very hard. But the prisoners have learned to survie. They have learned to grow greens, and fertilize them with urine, so that they don’t get scurvy. They have learned to capture cockroaches from the latrine pits, and harvest their protein. The lucky ones keep chickens, because eggs are rich in vitamins and without the vitamins you die of beriberi. There are many different ways of coping, and we see them all. It warps the men…but by the end of the book it begins to seem normal, somehow.

And then the war ends. And the relieving U.S. and British forces come in to save the prisoners and bring them home. And we see the prisoners with new eyes, with the eyes of the newcomers…and we are appalled.

This is not a book for kids; by no means is it a book for kids. Nor is it a book for the squeamish…though, I admit, it didn’t make me squirm nearly as much as your average Stephen King novel. It’s a very good book, and I recommend it.

One last note. As first written, the book had vignettes concerning the wives and the sweethearts of some of the prisoners, and how they coped with their loved ones being gone for years on end. On first publication, these pages were removed. In the current edition, they have been restored…and the book is much stronger for it, I think.

Amazon kept pushing The Hunger Games at me, and so I finally broke down and got a copy of Suzanne Collins’ book. I suppose most everybody but me already knows about it, but here’s the basic premise.

We have a post-apocalyptic society in North America. There are thirteen places where people live: the twelve districts, which produce goods, and the Capital, which consumes them. At some point in the past there were thirteen districts, but the districts rebelled against the Capital, and were put down. District Thirteen was completely destroyed. And to punish Districts One through Twelve, the poorly-named Hunger Games were devised.

Every year, each district must provide two “tributes”, one boy and one girl, to participate in the Games. The Games are a test of survival and blood-thirstiness: twenty-four lads and lasses go in, and only one comes out. The tributes must find food and water, defend themselves against their fellows, and ultimately kill the other survivors in order to win. Our heroine, Katniss, is one of the tributes for District Twelve, a poor district whose tributes almost never win.

Now, the first thing to say about this milieu is that it’s looney tunes. It’s never explained why the Districts put up with the Games or with the drones in the Capital, and since all of the raw materials and food come from the Districts (so far as we can tell), it would seem like starving them out would be fairly easy. Now, the Capital does have access to high technology the districts don’t have, including a variety of flying “hovercraft”, but how they that maintain that technological base given the low population of Panem is unclear.

In short, I didn’t believe in the world for a minute.

That said, Katniss is an engaging heroine. She’s a survivor, and a thinker; she’s got trust issues; and if she’s touchy and inarticulate, she’s also loyal and well able to find food in the wilderness. She’s not been trained to play the Hunger Games, as some of the kids in the wealthier districts are, but her life to date amounts to the same thing. The course of the games is well told. There’s a romance of sorts (and Collins seems to understand teen emotions fairly well), and adventure, sacrifice and heroism. I was especially impressed with Katniss’ relationship with Peeta, her fellow District Twelve tribute. I can’t go into details without spoilers; suffice it to say that Katniss is thrust into an equivocal position, and the confusion in her mind and feelings is handled rather well.

The games are a tad harrowing but not too bad (Collins isn’t Stephen King). The book has a solid conclusion while still leaving the reader wanting more, and there are some obvious threads to be explored in the subsequent books.

So, all in all, not bad. I’ve got the second book, which I plan to read in the near term, and unless I really dislike it I’ll read the third as well, and we’ll see if Collins can stick the dismount.

Science fiction has sometimes been accused of having few memorable characters. John C. Wright does a survey, based on his own list of 50 essential science fiction authors. My favorite observation, simply because it’s so true:

Heinlein’s protagonists tend all to be the single archetypal Heinlein character: the eager young boy who grows into a wry but all-competent jack-of-all-trades and eventually into a wry and crusty old man, usually marrying a lusty jill-of-all-trades nudist redhead somewhere along the way. Asimov’s protagonists are much the same, but with less wryness and no redhead. Van Vogt’s protagonists are much the same, but with no wryness at all, sometimes with amnesia, and he evolves into a superhuman rather than a crusty old man.

Not surprisingly, characterization has improved over the years.

Everyone of a certain age has heard of Shogun, by James Clavell, because it was a massively popular mini-series back when network mini-series still meant something. I was in high school at the time, and gave the book a try; and I found it interesting and confusing by turns. I decided to give it another try, with the benefit of thirty years of additional life experience, and it’s amazing how much it has improved!

The book takes place circa 1600 AD, in Japan. At this time, the Portuguese (and a very few Spaniards) are the only Europeans with regular contact with the Japanese. The Catholic Church has been planted in Japan, and many Japanese lords (daimyos) have converted. The Portuguese are also responsible for most of Japan’s trade with China, including the all-important trade in silk. However, many daimyos dislike the Christians and would like to see their influence limited.

Shortly before this time, Japan was united under a powerful leader, known as the Taiko. He died, leaving a young son as his heir, and Japan under the control of a council of regents. As usually happens in such circumstances, the regents are jockeying for position; and the goal is the shogunate, absolute rule (in the name of the emperor) of all Japan.

Into this mix comes a Dutch ship piloted by an Englishman, John Blackthorne, the Anjin-san—the first Englishman to come to Japan. In those days, given the state of the art of navigation, you couldn’t simply decide “I want to sail to Japan.” It was a difficult thing, and you had to know the way. Blackthorne makes it pretty much by accident. And he is immediately of great interest to Toranaga and the other regents, because he is a skilled pilot, and because, being Protestant, he is not under the thumb of the Portuguese or the Jesuits. Much politics ensue.

Clavell does an excellent job of showing us Japanese culture through Blackthorne’s eyes; and, eventually, European culture as well, as he reflects on the differences between the two. I found it fascinating, much more so than when I was in high school.

There are a few places where I think he misses the mark. The remains of his Dutch crew are presented as little better than animals compared to the Japanese; I think he overdoes this. And his history is occasionally suspect, as when Rodrigues the Portuguese pilot equates the Inquisition with “witch hunts”. The Spanish Inquisition wasn’t looking for “witches” (but that’s another blog post).

I think the main reason I had trouble with this book those thirty years ago is that it isn’t really about John Blackthorne. It’s really about Toranaga, and his attempt to become shogun. Blackthorne is simply one of the pieces on his chess board, or, as Toranaga himself would put it, one of the hawks to his hand. Back then, I read the book as quickly as possible trying to follow the Anjin-san’s story, and missed the very things that would have made it make sense.

Anyway, highly recommended; but be aware that the Anjin-san’s response to the difference between Japanese and European sexual mores is one of the major themes in the book. The Japanese of that era were considerably more frank about sex than Europeans, and naturally this is reflected in the text.

Wow.

A couple of days ago, I gave John le Carré a “wow” for A Perfect Spy; today I’m giving Ted Chiang a “wow” for pretty much his entire output.

Here’s what I know about Ted Chiang. He’s a science fiction writer. He writes short fiction (his longest published piece is a novella). He knocks my socks off.

He’s written three books: Stories of Your Life and Other Stories, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. I’ve read the latter two, and about half of the first, it’s all been smart, moving, deeply, deeply human, and a little bit geeky (in the best possible sense of the term). He has a knack for taking a single scientific or technical idea, extrapolating from it, and then writing a story about the idea involving living, breathing human beings. The story isn’t simply an idea story with good characters; it isn’t simply a character story with good ideas. The two facets of the story build on each and require each other.

I suppose I had better give some examples, though I have to be careful: I don’t want to tell you too much, I simply want you to go read.

“Division by Zero” is about mathematics, and the early 20th century quest to prove that mathematics is complete and consistent. Kurt Gödel showed that it wasn’t complete, and that it couldn’t be proved to be consistent. In Chiang’s story, a mathematician proves that math isn’t even consistent, with drastic effects on herself and her family.

In the Nebula-winning “Tower of Babylon”, Chiang shows us the real Tower of Babylon…but in Chiang’s version, the universe really is as described in Genesis. There is the earth below and the firmament above, and the sun, moon, and stars whirling in between. The Tower has nearly reached the firmament…and our story follows the miners who have been hired to ascend the tower and dig a path through the firmament to heaven beyond. It’s a genuine science fiction story; it’s set in another world with different rules, but it plays fair with those rules. And it has truly important things to say about the relationship between God and His creation. (I have no idea what Chiang’s views on religion are, by the way.)

In the Hugo-winning “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, he posits a company that build “digients”, software constructs that live in a virtual world called Digital Earth. They are designed to mimic human consciousness, indeed seem to genuinely learn, grow, and love. What does it mean for software objects to be conscious? What does it mean to be human? I have philosophical reasons to think that software objects cannot be truly conscious even in principle…but if they were, would they be human? And would digient morality be the same as human morality?

Julie has mentioned Ted Chiang several times; the first time I was interested, and went to Amazon to look for his book Stories of Your Life and Other Stories, and nearly choked. His books are published by a small press in limited editions, and can easily run hundreds of dollars. I said, “He might be good, but he’s not that good.” But he came up again recently, and I looked again…and all of Chiang’s work is available at reasonable prices in Kindle format. Woohoo! And you know…now that I’ve read most of his work, maybe he is that good.

Wow. Just, wow.

A Perfect Spy is yet another of John le Carré’s spy novels; and yet, it’s almost completely unlike Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or the other George Smiley novels. This, far from being the tale of a particular intelligence operation, is a portrait of a man, Magnus Pym. Pym is a spy; and, as it develops, a double-agent. He’s also the son of a con-man, the charismatic, ever-optimistic, frequently broke and frequently opulent Rick Pym. And as it happens, these two things are directly related. Magnus grew up in a chaotic, criminal world, in world in which, heart-breakingly, the word “mother” is almost a generic word for “woman”. He wanted, more than anything else, to be loved, to be approved of, and like his father he soon became a skilled and constant liar. Pym is all things to all men, he is what they need him to be.

We see the whole of Pym’s career as he himself reviews it, from his earliest days to his last, as, finally and at last, gone-to-ground, he tells the truth. And we see also the reactions of his co-workers and friends as they search for him, as the whole house-of-cards comes down. The result is simply fascinating.

This is a long one, at over 600 pages; and it’s the best thing I’ve read in quite awhile. Highly recommended.