Timmy and Tanya

Timmy is a Hermann’s Tortoise who lives in the Tortoise Sanctuary in St. Austell’s, Cornwall. When he arrived at the sanctuary and was introduced to the other residents, he did not hit it off with them. In fact, the established tortoises bullied Timmy and he had to be separated from them. However, he seemed to be a bit lonely, so he was provided with Tanya to be his friend. Tanya is only a plastic toy tortoise, but Timmy gets on very well with her. He brings her food (and seems untroubled by her not eating it), spends a lot of time nuzzling her, and will only go to bed if Tanya is put into his hut ahead of him.

Timmy is 60 years old, and is one of 450 tortoises in the sanctuary.

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Cat or Seagull?

Pooh is named after a bear, but he is actually a seagull. However, he may think he is a cat. He was adopted by the Grimwood family in Shoreham-By-Sea when he fell down their chimney as a chick. He was brought up with their cats before leaving the home when he learned how to fly.

However, the Grimwoods had not seen the last of Pooh. Each year, he comes back with his lady seagull friend to nest on their roof. While nesting, he drops in every day and helps himself to the cats’ food. The cats' views on this have not been recorded.

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Classic Book Club: a reminder

Hello members of classic book club, do not forget, you need to have James Hogg's Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner read by next weekend. I suggest that we should meet in the library bar of the Central Hotel at 5.00 pm on Sunday the 18th July. What say you?

EDIT: OK so the plan has changed following discussions, we will actually meet at 8.00 pm on Sunday 18th July, still in the Central Hotel.

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"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card

This is a post about about a book I read for SF book club. If you are interested in SF book club, come along to the ILAC library at 6.30 pm on the second Tuesday of the month.

Warning: Here be spoilers.

The book's set up is in some respects similar to that of Starship Troopers, with humanity locked into an interminable war with the Buggers - insectoid alien sodomites*. The main character is a small child called Ender Wiggins** who is sent off to the star fleet school for promising youngsters. The high command reckon that, on the basis of his genes and his test scores, he could potentially be turned into the genius commander they need to win the space war. The story then follows Ender as he goes through his training. Much of this focuses on the playing of games, with Card impressively having him play electronic games far beyond on anything on offer when the book was written (in the early 1980s, based on a short story from the previous decade).

As the book goes on, the space war games Ender plays become more and more complex. From playing against the computer, he is now up against the great commander of the previous Bugger wars. He has several of his pals from the school to help him, but the games keep getting harder and harder, with more and more Bugger ships to fight in each battle. The final game seems to be his final test, with various star fleet big wigs coming in to see how he does in a simulated battle where his ships are outnumbered a thousand to one. When he still manages to triumph, he is struck by how the watchers' reactions seem a bit over the top, but then he realises the truth – he was not playing games, he was commanding the actual star fleet. The war is now over because he has exterminated the Buggers. He is thirteen years old and has committed genocide.

That is the book's big twist. I gather that Ender's Game started as a short story, so originally there probably was not more to it than the twist. If that was all there was to the novel then it would be a bit slight, but fortunately there is a good bit more. One whole strand involves Ender's (slightly) older sister and brother. Like him, they are hyper-intelligent, but unlike him they were not deemed suitable for battle school. Back on Earth, they manage to use an analogue of the Internet*** to manipulate world politics.

What really raises the book up to another level is the sequence from after the Buggers' annihilation, where Ender joins a colony on one of the aliens' former planets. The Buggers were somehow able to sense Ender as the agent of their destruction, and they manage to leave behind a psychic message for him. In a few pages Card throws us this incredible impressionistic picture of a profoundly alien psychology and form of social organisation. Ender learns that the war with the Buggers was a tragic mistake – the Buggers invaded our solar system without realising that humans were sentient, while humanity's genocidal assault on the insectoids took place when the aliens had realised their mistake and decided to leave us alone. Ender finds himself with a preserved but fertile egg of a Bugger queen – it is in his gift to bring the creatures he exterminated back into being.

And that is how the book ends. Has anyone ever read anything else by Card? I notice that he seems to have a lot of books out there with "Ender" in the title, suggesting that he has spent the rest of his career recycling and further exploring the ideas in his most successful book. I am tempted, but I fear that diminishing returns would rapidly set in.

The one thing I never really bought with this book is how young the characters are meant to be. Ender is something like six when the book starts, twelve or thirteen when it ends. But for all that he is meant to be hyper-intelligent yadda yadda yadda, he never really seems like someone that young. The same is true of the other children at Battle School, who all come across as being at least late teens (in fairness, maybe they are? Ender is meant to be younger than they are).

One other thing I had heard about Card is that he is right-wing, or conservative, or whatever reactionary Americans call themselves these days. I was wondering whether this kind of mindset would infect his writing, but I did not see too much sign of it here. The book is ambivalent about the military, rather than revelling in a Heinlein-style Starship Troopers fascism. The book seems to be broadly against genocide and in favour of non-violent solutions to conflict situations, for all that it does not preach at us about the military people who turn Ender into a weapon of mass destruction. Maybe the one thing that puts the book on the not-liberal side of the map is how it treats religion: when the religious backgrounds of characters are mentioned, it is not to scoff at them or to have the usual SF thing of a religion just being a front for some kind of cynical and manipulative clergy.

*they are not actually sodomites.

**a name that could only have been conjured into being by someone called Orson Scott Card.

***Card was writing when the Internet barely existed and the World Wide Web had not yet been conjured into being.


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Somewhat Socialist Realist Uniformed Woman,

Battlefields: Motherland #1 of 3, by Garth Ennis and Russ Braun

Garth Ennis is a bit of a patchy writer. At worst, his output displays a nasty and distasteful edge that anyone of taste and discernment avoids. His work also sails close to the rocks of creepy homophobia. For all that, he is a man of actual talent. In the war comics he has been writing over the last while he seems to have really found a new voice, producing material that escapes from the blind alleys into which his failings sometimes lead him.

Anyway, this one is set on the Russian Front* in the Second World War, just before the Battle of Kursk, and is about a woman fighter pilot, of whom there were surprisingly many in the Soviet air force. In some respects we are in familiar war story territory – she plays by her own rules, lacks the necessary respect for the NKVD political officer, etc. – but it still has a certain pizzazz. There are also some great air combat scenes, and people like me who love accurately drawn pictures of various bits of military hardware (Focke-Wulf 190s! Stuka tankbusters! Yakovlevs!) will find much to enjoy here.

I am hoping that subsequent issues feature the air war aspect of the Armageddon that was Kursk – total thrillpower.

*you can tell this from random letters in the comic's title being backwards.

The Grinning Leer of a Black-bearded Pirate

Batman: the Return of Bruce Wayne #3 of 6, by Grant Morrison, Yanick Paquette, and Michel Lacombe

I skipped the first two issues of this, thinking it looked like Grant Morrison taking the piss, but over on the internet I read indie pop sensation M.J. Hibbett saying that he liked it so I decided to give it a go. This is the third issue in and I bought it thinking that if I liked it I would go back and get the first two.

So what happens here? Well as part of the general return of Bruce Wayne storyline running through the Bat-titles*, this sees Wayne somehow travelling back in time to the colonial period, where he finds himself crossing cutlasses with notorious pirate Blackbeard (for no obvious reason given the name Edward Thatch rather than Teach). Yarrr. They explore the mysterious bat-infested caves under what will one day be Wayne Manor, and various strange things happen. It is rather intriguing, but it is a bit unclear as to what is going on – some kind of psychic time travel thing or something? Maybe reading the first two issues would make things fall into place, but knowing Grant Morrison I doubt it.


*Bruce Wayne seems to have not been dead for very long, even by the standards of comics characters and their tendency to resurrect at the drop of a hat.

The Worst Comedian In The World

When I was in Cuba I got a bus from Viñales to Havana. For some reason the bus company decided to subject us to a DVD of the worst comedian in the world. He is some American cockfarmer who tells lamer antediluvian jokes and does ventriloquism with puppets. At one point he played that "Could you hear us? We could hear you!!!!" gag on some unfortunate member of the audience who had just come back from the toilet. My research suggests that this joke was already old and tired when the following piece of dialogue appeared in Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona:

Enter Margate.

CLOWN: Good morrow, sir! Tell me, whilst thou wert away, attending to thy business, wert thou able to hear us engaged in our merriment?

MARGATE: Marry, sirrah, I heard you not.

CLOWN: Well sir, we heard thee right well, and thou in stool.

I gather something similar appears in the third tablet of Gilgamesh.

But back to the worst comedian in the world. His politics seemed as conservative as his humour. Homosexuality was something he kept coming back to, with his homophobic "jokes" having a distinct air of protesting too much. Racial stereotyping was another staple of his craft, with one of his puppets being a hilarious blaxploitation African American and another a Cuban. The latter in particular made me marvel at bus company Viazul's entertainment programming policies.

When the excruciating routine ended I felt a great sense of relief, only to have my hopes dashed by another concert recording of his starting up. The horror. Still, I reckoned I could handle it. But you know how it is when you are in a terrible situation – you slip in to thinking that things cannot possibly get any worse, and then they do. Thus it was on this bus of doom. The worst comedian in the world had been chatting away to one of his puppets about suicide bombers (a perennially fertile subject for comedians), when he said to the audience: "You know, there's been a lot of crazy stuff going on in the Middle East lately. I've often wondered what it would be like to talk to one of those suicide bombers… and now we have the chance! So ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Ahmed The Dead Suicide Bomber!"

Fortunately for everyone I was not wearing a bomb belt.

Other passengers found all this hilarious.

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People firing guns

Commando: Fire!, by Ferg Handley and Macabich

A rare instance of this war picture library title not being set in the Second World War, Fire! features an Austrian artillery company who somehow find themselves caught up in the American Civil War. This is not great, frankly. The Austrians find themselves fighting on the side of the South, which allows for plenty of plucky against-the-odds action, but presenting all the Northerners as cackling villains seems a but odd. The book also fails to give any impression whatsoever as to what the war was about, surely a bit of a missed opportunity.

Red Skull, Charging Heroes

Batman, Doc Savage, The Spirit: First Wave #2, by Brian Azzarello and Rags Morales

I accepted the advice of those who said to stick with this, but it still is not doing it for me. In some respects the teaming up of all these pulpy characters in a retro-1930s setting has a lot going for it, but I keep thinking that I would probably be a lot better off reading original Spirit and Doc Savage stuff.

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Girl Pretty To Left, Rancid Zombie Face To Right

iZombie #1, by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred

This is about a cute girl who is actually a zombie – she has to keep eating brains or she will stop being cute and start being a shambling zombie. And then she eats someone's brain and finds out he was murdered so he decides to find out who killed hm. But to make it all worse, this turns out to be set in some stupid town where every second person is a ghost or a werewolf or a vampire. So not really the thing for me then.

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