Books read this week: The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF 6/10, The Book of Were-Wolves 7/10 (Sabine Baring-Gould)
Not a cheerful set of books this week. The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF is exactly what it says on the tin: an anthology of short stories divided fairly equally into stories about the end of the world as we know it, and stories set after the end of the world. I found the former generally more interesting than the latter: how people behave under extraordinary circumstances is fascinating, whilst predictions of life in the far future often aren't (especially when you suppose that as we've used up all our fossil fuel reserves any post-apocalyptic society will be necessarily neolithic, something which flies in the face of all human experience: it's not like the Romans or the ancient Greeks made extensive use of fossil fuels - certainly not to the extent that their societies couldn't function without them). Particular highlights include "The Clockwork Atomic Bomb", which is probably the best story in the book, but not really about an apocalypse per se: more about the years leading up to it: it's also one of the few stories here that isn't based entirely on a European or American perspective of the apocalypse, which made of a bit of a change. "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" and "Fermi and Frost" were also pretty good. "A Pail of Air" was memorable, but stretched my suspension of disbelief. "World Without End" is a fairly nice updating of the old myth of the Wandering Jew and the curse of immortality; the tale of an immortal London street walker with a vagina capable of mass-to-energy conversion. I wonder if the author drew from the sections of the Gilgamesh epic on Shamhat the Harlot for that story (I've always felt that Shamhat got a very raw deal).
It is also interesting the range of scenarios for the end of the world we have here: we have nuclear and biological as well as nanotechnological ragnaroks here, as well as out of control global warming and cosmic disasters. I wonder had this book been written twenty or thirty years ago, would we have so many different ways to destroy ourselves? Generally I'm very pro-technology, but it has to be said that as well as all manner of good things, science has also given us an ever-increasing variety of ways to destroy ourselves: as is so often the case, David Low put it perfectly: http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/LSE1258
Armageddon is depressing enough; somehow what people do when the world isn't about to end is that much more depressing. The Book of Were-Wolves is a fascinating 19th Century monograph: in theory it is an examination of the werewolf myth across the world, which would be interesting enough, but it is actually an examination of the way in which pre-enlightenment societies dealt with the kind of people we call serial killers today: Baring-Gould makes a very convincing argument that (unlike the various folk beliefs surrounding witchcraft) folk belief in werewolves is based upon the observation that occasionally individuals turn up who kill (and sometimes eat) other people for no readily apparent reason. With the knowledge of psychiatry we have today, we can begin to understand what can go wrong with someone, and how mental illness can lead them to commit otherwise inexplicable acts, but obviously if you're a medieval peasant and you find your neighbour eating your other neighbour you're probably just going to blame the devil and burn them. There is some discussion of the triggers for what we would call a psychotic break, and one gets the feeling that the first hesitant steps towards modern psychiatry are being taken.
The last part of the book is an interesting, although not very relevant digression into the history of some of the more famous mass murderers of the middle ages; there is a section on Elizabeth Bathory, which isn't particularly interesting, mainly because her crimes are sufficiently titillating that there's plenty of information about her life scattered across libraries, bookshops and the internet. However, the chapters on Gilles de Rais are far more interesting - not for the details of the crime themselves (horrific though they were; the descriptions of the silent villages where all the children had been stolen are like something out of a twisted fairy tale - except they were real and there was no happy ending) but rather for the way in which the investigation was conducted, and the efforts the secular authorities made to cover things up: in many ways the case reads like a lot of the child abuse scandals that hit the news today (although thankfully these usually end with a lower body count). First there is a reluctance to investigate such a high profile figure at all, then there is a failure to believe the evidence that is presented, and then, finally, there is an attempt to cover things up, because otherwise it'll be embarrassing. One also gets the feeling that de Rais found that, being part of the French aristocracy, most of the laws and conventions that ordinary people had to abide by didn't apply to him, and all he did really was to push the limits of what a rich aristocrat could get away with: he didn't realise that there were some actions so heinous that even his fellow aristocrats would (eventually) turn on him: one sees something similar in the Elizabeth Bathory's case. That said, the Duke of Brittany consistently tried to hush things up: it is to the eternal credit of the Bishop of Nantes that he refused to allow de Rais to creep away into a monastery, even when it would have been financially advantageous for him to do so. I almost wonder if there was a class aspect to this: the Duke of Brittany was (obviously) part of the French aristocracy, and displayed their typical contempt for the ordinary people of France. The Church, on the other hand, has always had a far more meritocratic structure, and so the Bishop may well have come from a relatively poor family himself (compare Henry II's early life with that of Thomas a Becket). Either way, it is fascinating how little the response of a large and powerful institution to a crime of this nature has changed over the centuries.
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