Out With The Old....

Books read today: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (David Simon), Iron Sunrise (Charles Stross)

Happy New Year!

Today's two volumes are quite different; a gritty, well grounded and impeccably researched piece of investigative  journalism about the workings of an inner city detective squad, and a fascinating piece of speculative fiction that examines the way in which modern technology will and won't change human nature - a work that even manages to take the tired and stale sci-fi antagonist cliche of Nazis! In! SPACEEEEEEEE! and make it new and interesting.

David Simon's Homicide is a brilliant piece of journalism, and (equally interesting for a Wire junkie like me) gives details on the real life events that inspired many of the scenes in the Wire. It's a generally very sympathetic portrait of a police department in the process of losing the trust of the public, and a very stark reminder of the way in which modern policing (well, all policing really) depends upon the consent of the policed. If witnesses won't talk and juries won't convict, the best investigative system in the world isn't going to help much. I say a police department in the process of losing public trust because it's clear from the various epilogues and postscripts (at least in the Kindle edition - I don't know about the print version) that things got much, much worse in the 90s and 00s (the book follows the Baltimore city homicide squad for the year 1988). The only issue I have with the book is that it is perhaps too sympathetic towards the police it covers; the officers are obviously close friends of the author by the end of the year, if not at the beginning. I think that a certain amount of fraternisation is inevitable in the circumstances (or at the very least, the book wouldn't be much good if there weren't close personal relationships between the author and his subjects), but obviously that personal relationship is going to slightly skew the book's perspective. For exactly that reason, I'm looking forward to reading Simon's next book, The Corner, which examines the war on drugs from the other side.

Charles Stross' Iron Sunrise (a sequel to Singularity Sky) is a very different beast. Charles Stross is one of my favourite living science fiction writers (along with Richard Morgan), and he shares with Morgan the ability to write books that feel like they're about the future, rather than the past; it's fairly easy to take past events and replace cannon with laser cannon, sailing ships with space ships; it's much harder to write a believable, exciting and interesting book that portrays societies which are both unfamiliar and futuristic, yet simultaneously feel real. Richard Morgan manages this very well, particularly in his Altered Carbon series, and in Iron Sunrise   Stross also manages that difficult balancing act (although, being more generally upbeat in tone if not content, the result is less depressing). What Stross considers in Iron Sunrise is the problems of the politics of plenty; what if anyone, anywhere can produce anything (which looks quite likely in the near future - a combination of advances in nanotechnology, the internet and current 3D printing technology could well mean than if you know  what you want to make, you'll be able to construct it in your garden shed).

Of course, an abundance of everything doesn't mean an end to conflict; it just means lots more new, interesting and painful ways in which human beings can hurt each other. Which is why the book opens with a piece of performance art gone horribly wrong; a professional (syphilitic) Idi Amin impersonator with his own personal thermonuclear device. The book also reboots the (by now rather cliche) concept of Nazis in space by examining the ways in which a fascist ideology (and its adherents) infiltrate and take over a polity. It's an interesting (and more than a little scary) examination of the corrupting influence that a totalitarian belief system can have on those in positions of power (a bit like Invasion of The Body Snatchers, but with Nazis). This is a big difference, and the most refreshing thing about this book; most works that reference the Nazis use them as little more than a villain label: we all agree Nazis are evil, these villains are Nazis, ergo they are evil - there is little discussion or consideration of how such a obviously and transparently evil ideology was able to spread and gain influence - of how men like Seyss-Inquart and Quisling were able to build fascist fifth columns.