This is, as they say, a dark ride.
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
I can’t begin to tell you how depressing this book is.
“Parts of the bodies were missing,” she realized. “The skin and flesh were hanging from the bones. Some were carrying their own eyeballs.”
In this scenario, North Korea enacts a surprise nuclear strike on the US. It’s a limited strike. However, Jacobsen – with, I think, admirable restraint and clear sight – shows that not only can that limited strike not be defended against, but that it would undeniably trigger general nuclear world war and that we’d all be dead in an hour and a half.
I am very behind the times on general nuclear war theory, and I was not expecting that there is in fact no working defense against ICBM or submarine-launched missiles.
A nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered submarine is a nightmare weapon system. An object as dangerous to human existence as an incoming asteroid. These submarines are called many things: boomers, vessels of death, nightmare machines, handmaidens of the apocalypse.
It is all, in fact, worse than I thought. Probably worse than most people thought. There is no optimism here. Just cold hard numbers and a cold hard look at nuclear posture and the mindset it propagates. It’s as grim as THREADS. I picked this up because I read that Denis Villeneuve had optioned it for film. At the time, I thought, oh, he’d like his OPPENHEIMER. Having now read it, I can see why the end of the book might appeal to him – a speculative scene in the far future — but, damn, the rest of the book is a relentless horror and nobody will thank him for bringing that to cinematic life.
It’s an incredible read. You pretty much know from the start how it’s going to go, but it sets its hooks well and drives you through to the inevitable conclusion: that we still live in a state of utter irrationality regarding the threat of nuclear war.
NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US+)
I caught this on Talking Pictures TV last night, a wonderful cable channel that unearths all kinds of forgotten wonders.
“The Death of Adolf Hitler” is a 1973 British television play, an episode of ITV Sunday Night Theatre. It stars Frank Finlay as Adolf Hitler and Caroline Mortimer as Eva Braun. First aired on 7 January 1973, the drama details the last 10 days of Hitler’s life as World War II comes to an end and Allied troops close in on the Führerbunker. Michael Sheard (who played Himmler) and Tony Steedman (who played Gen. Jodl) would play the same roles in the American television film The Bunker in 1981. The play depicts Hitler as a tragic antihero tormented by both the past and present, unable to reconcile his hopes and dreams with the reality of the nightmare of his own making.
Finlay won a British Academy Television Award as Best Actor for his performance.
FInlay was around the same height as Hitler: I was struck by a couple of scenes where he appears a good deal shorter than the people around him, and I suspect either the rest of the cast were put on boxes or he was put in a hole to accentuate it. You can see why Finlay won an award – it’s a showy role, but he runs up and down pretty much his entire range within it.
Evidently, the author of the piece, Vincent Tilsley, intended it to be a six-hour series. When it was cut down to one hour forty five, amputating what he felt to be his best work, he quit writing and became a psychotherapist.
There’s a wonderfully horrible little cameo in there from Ray McAnally, too. It makes an interesting compare/contrast with the more recent and better known DOWNFALL. This piece is much more theatrical, much less restrained and measured in its effects. It makes a few departures from British tv of its period – no fake German accents, thank god, and also it simply translates “Fuhrer” – Hitler is referred to as Leader throughout. There are hallucination scenes, lines repeated like a mantra or chorus throughout – a really interesting construction.
There’s a chilling bit with children playing (a version of) Juden Raus. all the more awful for its matter-of-fact nature and everything it says about the insidious banality of evil.
And, hey, there’s a copy on YouTube as well as DVDS (UK) (US).
Terrible night’s sleep, it’s cold and the wind has been booming for twenty-four hours now. Amazingly, the rebuilt mini-greenhouse has stayed intact and upright even as pots and shredded branches were flying across the garden. It’s grim down south.
OPERATIONS: Same as yesterday, only with less sleep. Conferring with publishers on press releases. Need to make a start on the newsletter.
COMMS: Inbox 91, a lot to process later.
LISTENING:
READING: OCEAN OF SOUND, David Toop (UK) (US)
LAST WATCHED: THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER (UK) (US), which I will note later
THINKING ABOUT: exploring obscure musics on YouTube.
ORBITAL:
- The Hollywood contraction (is real)
- junk equipment jettisoned off ISS goes through roof of Florida home
- Ganzeer interview, Daily Heller
Wonderful John Harris piece found by 70s Sci Fi Art.
I love this Henry Gunderson piece – in the gallery he uses many other old Nokia phones in the same way.
2019. On a set with some friends, outer London.
Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia is reportage of the sort that shrinking foreign news budgets have made scarce. It is the story of the Wa, a people who once proudly collected the heads of their enemies, and who came to preside over one of the world’s most important narco-states in their homelands in the mountains of Burma. The author describes the culture of the Wa, who kept both the British and the Burmese military junta at bay, as being that of the “warrior-farmer, an anarchist who did as he or she pleased”.
https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/heroin/pugpig_index.html
Paris in the Twentieth Century (French: Paris au xxe siècle) is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The book presents Paris in August 1960, 97 years in Verne’s future, when society places value only on business and technology.
Written in 1863,[1] but first published in 1994, the novel follows a young man who struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced but culturally backward world. The work paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological civilization.
Many of Verne’s predictions are remarkably on target. However, his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, did not accept the book because he thought that it was too unbelievable and that its sales prospects would be inferior to those of Verne’s previous work, Five Weeks in a Balloon.
The novel’s main character is 16-year-old Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates with a major in literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only business and technology are valued. Michel, whose father was a musician, is a poet born too late.
Michel has been living with his respectable uncle, Monsieur Stanislas Boutardin, and his family. The day after graduation, Boutardin tells Michel that he is to start working at a banking company. Boutardin doubts Michel can do anything in the business world.
The rest of that day, Michel searches for literature by classic 19th-century writers, such as Hugo and Balzac. Nothing but books about technology are available in bookstores.
A team of archaeologists affiliated with several institutions in France and one in Germany has found that ritualized human sacrifice was common across Europe during the Neolithic.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });As they report in the journal Science Advances, the group studied the remains of three women found in a tomb in France who appeared to have been ritually brutalized sometime between 4000 and 3500 BCE and compared the remains with others like them found at sites in Europe.
The work began with the study of the remains of three women found in a tomb in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux—two of the bodies showed the women were buried in unusual positions, one on her back with her legs bent upward, the other in a prone position with her neck on the torso of the other woman—characteristics associated with incaprettamento, a murder technique used by organized criminals as a means of intimidation in modern times.