Books Read in Majorca
I was given the Ig-Nobel Prizes 2 for Christmas. I have always assumed that these were a straightforward lampooning exercise but discovered from the introduction that they are to celebrate any achievement that makes you laugh and then makes you think. This gives them an odd juxtaposition of subjects from direct campaigning (the Association of Dead People which represents those declared legally dead in India despite being actually alive - usually through a combination of avaricious relatives and corrupt officials), campaigning by ridicule (various scam-merchants, TV evangelists and politicians), public understanding (useful/genuine but amusing science - e.g. why do shower curtains billow inwards?) and straightforward wierd science (the one about the effect of wet underwear on thermoregulation really got me - I was expecting it to have useful side-effects for arctic explorers and so forth but this was never mentioned). Sadly the book wasn't really written well enough (and was pretty badly proof read) for these disparate subjects to come together so the overall effect was rather jarring and the final impression was that ultimately they were more interested in the lampooning than the public understanding - which given the people involved I suspect is actually the reverse of the truth.
I read The Claycross Calamities by Terry Judge largely because my interest in genealogy has revealed that a number of my ancestors were miners living in Claycross (or neighbouring Pilsley) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Claycross Calamities documents three of the pit disasters at the Claycross company mines: one inundation and two explosions. The first gets considerably more detail, probably because the progress of the disaster was spread out over a longer period whereas coverage of the explosions really only deals with the aftermath. The book hints darkly at company cover-ups and the growth of miner's representation but can't really make the events support this thesis. It seems clear that the Clay Cross pits were some of the best run (for their time) and the use of candles, as opposed to safety lamps, which were the likely cause of the two explosions was part of a conscious pay-off in the minds of both management and miners of the risks of poor lighting versus explosions in pits where "firedamp" was rarely encountered. The Inundation was probably caused by inaccurate pit mapping (the miners breached a previously closed and flooded pit when they should have been 40 metres away from it) for which nowadays the company would almost certainly be held liable but it wasn't clear to me that their exoneration was because the jury was not composed of miners (the case implied by the book) or simply because Company/Health and Safety legislation was not appropriately in place at the time. The book was well-written however and an interesting and reasonably technical read should you be interested in the history of mining.
Erasing Sherlock by lordshiva is the fifth and final Faction Paradox novel. For those of you who have not been keeping up with Dr Who tie-in fiction Faction Paradox are a group of voodoo time-travellers who, generalising here, draw power from symbols. This is a pretty rich literary device and the Faction Paradox novels, in my opinion, are easily the most successful of the various tie-in lines. The line is possibly also successful because its only ever required its novels to be tangentially related to the faction allowing Lance Parkin, for instance, to deliver one of his best books in which Rome goes up against Nazi Germany (from respectively the alternate universe in which Rome never fell and the alternate universe in which the Nazis won WWII) - this is such an obvious idea that it wouldn't surprise me if there isn't an entire Romans vs. Nazis sub-genre out there. The faction don't play a large part in that despite the many, many alternate universes involved. But I digress. Erasing Sherlock is adapted from a previous online novel and I'm half tempted to go and find the original and then play compare and contrast. The Faction has relatively little to do until the end, and even then they merely provide the (rather thin) excuse for the extremely unpleasant modus operandi of the villain. The story follows Gillian Petra a wannabe history doctoral student from the near future who gets to travel back in time to study Sherlock Holmes and the birth of the detective method. At the point at which Gillian and Sherlock shag in the linen closet in Baker Street I began to get a whiff of Mary Sue about Gillian (using Mary Sue in its nicest possible fashion of author identification point and drawing a comparison here to Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey (only with more, and more explicit, sex)). Not that I in any way suppose lordshiva to be a thirty-something history student - its just the whole "modern woman gets to travel back and meet Sherlock Holmes who finds her modernity mystifying and attractive" smacks a little of some sort of wish fulfillment. I also doubt lordshiva is nearly as mind-numbingly stupid, not to mention self-destructive, as Gillian is on several occasions. Again a comparison with the original novel might be instructive, Erasing Sherlock begins with hints of mnemonic implants and Gillian uses a complex cryptographic code (largely unbreakable even for Sherlock) which seem at odds with her otherwise "ordinary 21st century academic" persona. I don't know enough about the seedier side of Victorian London to know if Erasing Sherlock is well-researched but it is written with an enthusiasm and vigour that suggests the author knows her stuff and careful thought has been put into the twenty-first century perspective on details that would have been insignificant to Conan-Doyle. Ultimately, although worthy of the line, I don't think this is one of the better Faction Paradox novels. There are too many plot holes (not glaring glaring ones, but ones one is left feeling require too great flights of the imagination to fill in), and despite the author's best efforts I don't think the Sherlock Holmes portrayed here has quite the steel of the original (although he is younger and less damaged). It's also not really a detective novel and since, based on the subject matter, I was all primed for a good bit of detecting I was disappointed in that regard. But if you are interested in Sherlock Holmes, time-travel novels and a comparison of 19th and 21st century mores then this is almost certainly worth checking out.
On a wider level I shall miss the Faction Paradox line of which this is the last. Even the lesser novels deliver something well-written, unusual and thought-provoking which is more than can be said for any other Dr Who line I've taken much interest in (i.e., all of them except the Time Hunter novels).