Review of Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

All of Russia – well, urban Russia anyway – is in turmoil in the middle of the nineteenth century and a semi-voluntary émigré, living in Germany, returns to the city of St Petersburg to establish the circumstances surrounding the death of his foster son. The son, Pavel, has apparently become embroiled in the notorious Nechaev gang of revolutionaries, who seem to be pursuing a campaign of anarchistic terror. Pavel himself is reported to have left behind papers, amongst which is a list of people to be assassinated. The step-father is a well-known novelist and an intellectual and, in Czarist Russia with its reliance on the secret police and suppression of political dissidence, this makes him automatically a figure of suspicion.

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Review of O’Brian’s The Road to Samarcand

Back to the 1930s and a freshly orphaned American teenager is taken on to a schooner by his uncle, who is seeking a way to return the boy to civilization (they are currently located in the South China Sea) so that he can take up an educational career suitable for a young member of the bourgeoisie. Alas, a typhoon blows up and all must take refuge on land, where the merry band (supplemented by large, partially-housetrained Swedish sailor, scholar wannabe Chinese cook, enormous species non-specific dog, and others) soon become embroiled in a series of adventures: Russian spies, Chinese warlords, Tibetan monks, Mongol nomads, the Yeti – all of human life is here.

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Review of Esslemont’s Stonewielder

After ten lengthy (sometimes very lengthy) novels about the Malazan Empire and its contemporaries by collaborator Steven Erikson and two more by the current author, not to mention various short stories and novellas, one might begin to wonder both how much more of the world is yet to reveal and, also, how long can the reader’s interest in it all be sustained? The answer to both these questions is that there is clearly a lot more to come.

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Review of Baxter’s Bronze Summer

Stephen Baxter has for years been demonstrating a fascinating interest in both long-term societal change and alternative history: in some cases on board a spaceship, in others in response to a natural or alien-enforced disaster, a disparate group of people are required first of all to survive the hardship of changed conditions second to try to plan and enact a better future while suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

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Is There a China Threat?

When people talk about a ‘China threat,’ they are usually talking in security or  military terms and this too will be the basis of this article. In terms of  economic threat, the entry of China into the capitalist world has had the effect  of contributing to spreading capitalism to every part of the world and to  intensifying the creative destruction that is characteristic of that system.

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What Is Nostalgia?

Nostalgia is the desire for the past, particularly for living in a past that has  an idealized form often quite far removed from the reality. To some extent,  nearly everyone indulges in nostalgia at one time or another. When times are  difficult, for example, it is comforting to remember some moment in childhood when safety and security were provided by other people and did not involve  personal responsibility.

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