ABC Radio National ran a survey in October of the top 100 books of this century, as voted by listeners.  You could vote for up to 10 books.  My votes are shown in the image. Five of them are definitely science fiction (The Dark Forest, Oryx and Crake, The Passage, Terra Nullius and Klara and the Sun), one is apocalyptic fiction (American War), another is speculative fiction (Meanwhile in Dopamine City), one is historical fiction (The True History of the Kelly Gang), while two, for want of a better term, are literay fiction (The Slap and The Corrections).

Three are by Australian authors (Peter Carey, Christos Tsiolkas, and Claire G. Coleman), although the much-travelled DBC Pierre (Mexican/British?) is sometimes claimed as Australian as he was born here. Four authors are American (Cronin, Franzen, Akkad and Ishiguro) one author is Canadian (Atwood), and one is Chinese (Liu).

The Corrections made my list because one of its main characters had dementia, and I was looking after my father with dementia at the time. It had a real emotional impact on me. I live in Kelly country, so I was very interested in Peter Carey’s fictional account of Kelly and his gang in The True History of the Kelly Gang. Nearly every day, I walk past a railway bridge in Wangaratta, where, near it, Carey had the gang crossing the Oven’s river on horseback. Terra Nullius has a unique way of telling the story of how badly Indigenous Australians were, and continue to be, treated. The Slap is a fascinating book that goes behind the facade of a number of characters,  showing their lives are just tenuous fronts. It makes you wonder how much bullshit the people around you are putting on. The Passage turns it back on pretty boy vampires that are so common these days on television and in books, and displays them as vicious monsters they would be. Meanwhile in Dopamine City is a hilarious and clever send-up of where our social media-dominated world is heading. Oryx and  Crake is a very interesting take on mad scientists and their attempts to shape the world. It is the first book in a fantastic trilogy. American War is set after a second civil war, where skirmishes still occur, and one of its many factors is showing how a refugee whose relatives died and were persecuted in the war can be transformed into a terrorist.  Its scenario for the civil war is very believable. The Dark Forest is the second book in the Three Body Problem trilogy and, among other things, it investigates the reason we have not found any civilisations beyond Earth. Klara and the Sun is different science fiction as it is told from the point of view of an uninformed android who is trying to make sense of the world.

The list of the top 100 is here. Two of the books I voted for, The True History of the Kelly Gang and The Slap, made the top 100. I have only read eight of the books on the list. Many of the others I have no interest in reading.

Note: the misspelling of Jonathan is the fault of the ABC which had preloaded many books on its voting page.

I have been quiet on this blog because my mum died on the 23rd of December. It was unexpected. A fall, which seemed to do no damage, then a week later she died. With help from my sister, I organised her funeral. I loved my mum.

My eulogy:

Remember to speak up.

Thanks for coming.

My mum enjoyed a long life. A life of supporting her husband in his teaching career, raising a family, being a proud homekeeper and touring Australia and the world. She enjoyed the love of her husband, children, sisters, relatives and a small circle of friends.

Sadly, some of them have passed away, while others were too sick to attend today. But I know some are watching the live stream of this funeral.

Look at audience.

Mum grew up in Bairnsdale with two much younger sisters, Lynn and Cathy, whom she helped to look after. She went to Bairnsdale High School, where her best friend was Norma Alvin. As the Alvin’s were a Salvation Army family, Mum and her sisters joined up.  Mum sang with the Salvos chorus. Her sister Cathy tells me that Mum had a wonderful wobbly voice with a great range. When Norma’s mother died, Dot helped Norma look after her siblings.

Look at audience.

Dot left school around 14 and got a job in a dress shop. From her knitting, wool spinning and sewing throughout her life, it was clear that Mum enjoyed creating and working with clothes. But she didn’t like the way the dresses smelt after being tried on by many customers at the dress shop.

Her sister Cathy remembers Dot making her a lovely pleated skirt and knitting her a fuzzy wuzzy cardigan when she young. Mum even sold her knitting at a local shop in Wangaratta. I still, on very cold days, pull out a jumper she made 30 or so years ago.

Look at audience.

Dot and Norma went to dances. That’s where Mum met Dad. She married Neil in her early twenties. Children came soon after that, and she settled down to be the best mother she could be. Due to Neil’s teacher’s job, my mum lived in many parts of Victoria. Heathcote, Bendigo, Newry, Baxter, Heyfield, Wangaratta, to name a few.

Mum made the best of raising a family in the various education department houses we lived in. One of those houses was condemned while we lived in it. My parents finally purchased their own house in Wangaratta about 40 years ago. No more outside toilets, leaky roofs, sloping floors or long drafty corridors.

Look at audience.

Mum didn’t have a greedy bone in body. She always put others before herself. She just wanted to create a loving home for her family. When I was young and something had gone wrong, she loved to tell me a story about Dad when he was at teacher’s college. He had saved up for months to buy a wireless radio so he could listen to the footy and cricket. One day he came back to his room and found that the cleaner had knocked it off its shelf and broken it. Look at audience. We all have set backs.

Mum was a great traditional cook. She made a delicious lamb roast with spuds peas and gravy, a moist and fruit packed Christmas cake, and a pavlova that beats any others I have eaten.

Look at audience.

Mum was a bibliophile. She loved reading thrillers like Jon Cleary and Jack Higgins. She joined in with my Dad’s book collecting at fetes and second-hand bookstores. She collected Mary Grant Bruce and Enid Blyton books for herself.

Unfortunately, her eyesight weakened with age, so it was just as well she had gotten into listening to book cds. Her love of Bony Detective stories made it easy for me to get part of her Christmas and birthday presents.

Look at audience.

Mum loved musicals throughout her life. Her Aunt Edna used to take mum to pantomimes. Mum would get dressed up with gloves and everything, and then they would have high tea afterwards.

Look at audience.

Later in life, Mum was swept up in Dad’s travel fever. From trips around Australia to New Zealand and then to many other parts of the world, including Europe and North America.

One of Kay’s favourite memories is when Mum, Dad, and her were at Disneyland.  They went on the small world boat ride which travels through different countries while the song It’s a Small World After All is played. Mum loved it. She enjoyed it so much that they had to go back into the line and do the ride again. The following day, once the gates open, mum took off to do the small world ride once again.

Look at audience.

But one could never get past the feeling that Mum was happiest at home. Happy with the routine of cooking, shopping, knitting, reading and watching thrillers while catching up with friends and local shopkeepers.

Mum loved a coffee, frequently walking down the street to her favourite coffee shop where they would often give her free cake. On one of those trips, local independent at the time, Cathy McGowan came in, and mum told her that she voted for her. Cathy then invited her for a coffee. Oh to have heard that conversation.

Later in life, mum enjoyed Kay’s frequent visits to take her shopping and go for a coffee. She also loved talking to her sisters and Geoff every couple of weeks on the phone.

Look at audience.

Mum was always there to support her family. She made you feel like you had done the right thing, even when you may have been in the wrong. Mum tried to see the best in people, except for a few politicians. She just wished people would just get along.

She rarely whinged about life. Even though later in life she had a number of health concerns. All she wanted was for her family to be healthy and happy, as was shown by her signature telephone sign off of (pause) “Look after yourself”.

The story takes place on a mostly unexplored planet. An exploratory team has received permission from an all-powerful corporation to explore a part of the planet. They are warned not to stray from their assigned areas because of perceived dangers, so a reader will immediately think the corporation is trying to hide something on the other parts of the planet.

The small exploratory team is assigned a company-supplied self-aware android SecUnit for security and to probably spy on their activities. The story is told from the point of view of the android, who refers to itself as Murderbot due to its involvement in killing many humans on a previous assignment. The android is supposed to be linked to corporate control so they can get it to do their bidding if needed, including possibly wiping out the exploratory team if they discover something valuable to the corporation. However, Murderbot is a clever android who has managed to hack his system, so the corporation is unaware that it does not have ultimate control over him.

Of course, the exploratory team strays into other areas, and bad things happen. When they can’t contact another exploratory group on another part of the planet, everyone, including the reader, knows that Murderbot will have to save them from whatever happened to the other group. But will the android be able to prevent the corporation from regaining control of its systems or prevent its warlike nature from killing or deserting its team in self-preservation?

All Systems Red is a well-written science fiction adventure novel. As such, it is an entertaining, quick read. But it has little new to say about the relationship between sentient androids and humans. Its theme of keeping an android’s free will in check to use them as killing machines is somewhat overdone in science fiction. For a more nuanced look at sentient androids, I suggest reading novels like Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro or Annie Bot by Sierra Greer.

All Systems Red is a well-written page-turner but lacks inspiring, original and challenging ideas. It did have a bit of a surprise post-denouement, probably so the author could move the story to a completely new setting for the second novella in the series. I did not realise when I shelled out $22 (AUD) on Amazon for the book that it was only a 152-page novella. I doubt whether I will be purchasing the other novellas.

I will have to find new ways of promoting the posts as I have decided to stop using Facebook, which was my primary method of promotion. Although I enjoyed interacting with fellow writers on Facebook and some friends from high school, I wasted a lot of time on it. Facebook was also a source of great anxiety as I waited for responses on blog posts I had promoted on it, which often failed to eventuate. I think I am just interested in subjects and ideas that many of my Facebook friends had little interest in. I also think that I was not taken that seriously by some and treated more of a pretender when it came to writing, which in some ways I am, as I have failed to finish manuscripts. It is time to finish some of the five novels I have in at least first draft form and some of the multiple stories I have lying around.  To do this, I need to spend a lot more time writing.

I hope to join a blogging circle where science fiction, or more broadly, speculative fiction writers interact with their blogs. Or I could try to create such a circle if I can’t find a suitable one. If you know of such a group, please let me know in the comments.

I am also going to get back into critiquing, probably on critters.org.

For the moment,  I will stay on Bluesky, as I don’t spend much time on it. It will be somewhere to visit during my arvo coffee break. I will also continue to review books on Goodreads.

I really want to turn this impostor into a published author (even if it is self-published).

Due to the lack of likes and comments, it would seem either no one is interested in the subjects I blog about, I am a terrible blogger, the only things looking at my posts are bots, or maybe all three reasons. Although I enjoy writing the posts, it seems I would be much better off spending my time working on my novel manuscripts. Please comment or at least like my posts if you consider them worthy so I can believe I have some relevance to the universe. As it is, it seems sensible to stop wasting my time on this blog. I would save money on web hosting and software, too. Maybe my blog was always destined to dance off into oblivion.

“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

The word was first coined by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. According to the Guardian news site,  Doctorow says it involves:

“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

And ultimately, he says it should involve the demise of the platform.

I would like to nominate Facebook as a champion of enshittification. It used to be an excellent site where you found out what was happening in your “friends” lives and told them what was happening in yours, including how you felt and what concerned or amused you about the world. But then, Facebook did the following:

• It introduced algorithms that limit whose posts you see and who sees your posts. So you now have to go to each individual friend’s page to see what they have been up to, and your posts only come up in a small percentage of friend’s feeds.
• Facebook decided to lower the priority of posts that have links to outside websites, especially news sites, so they now are rarely seen by the poster’s friends. This has had many effects. It stops people from linking to the sources of information in a post, so it is much harder to check out whether a post’s information is correct, meaning there is now a greater chance of misinformation being spread by Facebook posts. This lowering of the priority of posts with links also makes it harder for writers like myself to plug their writing on Facebook.
• Facebook flooded feeds with advertising. Now, a Facebook feed has to be extensively scrolled to catch up with friends’ posts.
• Much of that advertising on Facebook is for scams. According to a series of recent articles in The Age newspaper, scammers love Facebook, and Facebook doesn’t care about stopping them: Social Media Scams and Psychopaths are the Best; Confessions from Inside the Scam Industry. Fortunately ads in feeds can be eliminated by installing the FB Purity extension in your browser. I have been using it for the past month.

I hereby declare Facebook a champion of enshittification. If there was alternative to Facebook, like Bluesky is to X, I would have little hesitation in leaving Facebook.

The novel’s main characters are nearly all members of the aristocracy. There are three main male characters:

Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov. He inherits the Count’s fortune when he dies early in the novel. Pierre is a freethinking and sometimes reckless man who wants to know the truth of what really is happening in Russia and the world at large. He is a genuine socialist who wants to improve the lives of his peasant workers.

Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky is the son of Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky. He is a brave and somewhat arrogant soldier who enthusiastically marches to war seeking glory.

Nikolai Rostov is the eldest Rostov son. He also enthusiastically enlists in the Russian military, but his war experience is very different from Andrei Bolhonsky’s.

The two main female characters are:

Natasha Rostov, who is a very naïve and self-centred teenager. She is engaged to marry Prince Bolkonsky but is happiest when she is in the presence of Pierre Bezukhov. Her faithfulness is tested by Bolkonsky’s frequent absences.

Princess Maria Bolkonskaya lives with her father, who treats her harshly in an attempt to break her will and any desire she has to get married and leave his side. Maria uses religion to find meaning in her life and spiritually escape her father.

Apart from being a story about war and whether the main characters will survive, the novel is somewhat of a love story. Prince Bolkonsky’s father is very much against his son marrying Natasha Rostov, as he considers her family inferior. Will they get married, or will she ditch her betrothed and end up with her confidante Pierre Bezukhov? Readers will also want to find out if Maria can escape the grip of her domineering father.

The blurb on the back of the novel says it gives a complete picture of the Russia of the day. It does not, as the novel overwhelmingly focuses on the Russian aristocracy. The peasants and working class of Russia barely get a mention except when interacting with the aristocracy, which usually involves them being ordered to do some tasks. In many ways, the lower classes seem completely disposable, such as when Emperor Alexander orders the aristocracy to send 10 per cent of the men working on their estates to fight in the war.

The novel could be seen as Tolstoy critiquing Russian society at the time or Tolstoy just showing it like it was without questioning the ethics of the aristocracy and their lack of caring about the proletariat. An example of this indifference occurs when the Rostovs are evacuating Moscow before Napoleon’s forces attack. They fill 23 wagons with their belongings while hundreds of wounded soldiers lie around their estate. Only when Natasha intervenes, in one of her more enlightened moments, do they decide to leave some of their precious possessions and take some of the wounded with them. During the evacuation, the Rostovs realise they have left valuable possessions at their estate, so they send servants to retrieve them, putting them at risk of running into the invading French army. Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, was born into the aristocracy, so maybe he was just showing the interactions between the aristocracy and the rest of society as they were at the time without any moral judgment.  If the aristocracy treated the proletariat in real life as they do in the novel, it is no wonder Russia had a revolution.

The novel is written in a different style from most novels. Many sections of the book begin with Tolstoy stating his preferred version of what historians said happened at the time. He frequently debates the reasons for specific events, and then the novel returns to the story. He ends the novel with 40 pages questioning the different versions of history around the Napoleonic wars and whether people’s actions during that war were guided by free will or necessity. He concludes that history is the product of necessity.

Tolstoy goes into a lot of detail with the battle scenes. He knew about war and the military as he served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War. He was involved in the siege of Sevastopol, which had around 250,000 casualties. During that war, Tolstoy was recognised for his courage and promoted to lieutenant, but he was appalled by the number of deaths he saw in that war and left the army at the end of the Crimean War. Some battles he describes in War and Peace have massive casualties, over a hundred thousand in a single day. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in 1867.

Some of the strategies and deceptions carried out by both sides in the novel surprise. At one battle, French officers, under a flag of truce, ride into a Russian camp and convince the Russian commander that the Russians have surrendered. The commander then lets the entire French army cross a bridge to advance further into Russia. In the novel, nations frequently swap sides, sometimes fighting with the French, as Russia did, sometimes fighting with the Russians against the French. Another surprise is that the Russian army retreats a lot and rarely engages the French in battle.  The Russians also have a hopeless chain of command complicated by too many generals who frequently ignore orders because they think they know better, don’t like the Russian commander, or think it might advance their careers to have the commander lose a battle.

Apart from the surprises in the war strategies, readers unfamiliar with Russian history would probably be surprised at the vast size of the aristocracy and their influence on Russian society at that time. Many of the aristocracy spoke French and had frequently visited France. The aristocracy immediately became officers when they joined the army, seemingly without military training. Officers had to buy their own uniforms (maybe this is why the aristocracy were made officers, as normal citizens could not afford to buy uniforms). Another surprise is that masons were allowed to operate in Russia.

As mentioned, the novel spends a lot of time with the aristocracy. The main role of women seems to be arranging dinner parties and balls while seeking men of their own social ranking or above to marry their daughters. They invite provocateurs to stir up debate at the dinner parties. The provocateurs often speak about the war, spreading totally incorrect rumours about how the war is going and who is responsible for a victory or loss. Pierre Bezukhov is one of the few who questions the rumours.

The novel does a great job of exploring its central characters. Like real people, the characters have many faults. Each of the central characters changes throughout the novel. But not all of them make it to the end. Pierre is probably the most admirable character as he tries to understand and make the world a better place. However, due to his non-aristocratic background, he is continually misled by those around him. His naivety also causes him to put himself in perilous situations. Another character who eventually grows is Natasha, who, after a particularly selfish act, starts thinking more about others than her own beautiful self.

The novel’s prose is easy enough to read, even if it is more formal and denser than in today’s novels. Tolstoy is big on landscape descriptions when describing battle scenes. However, he habitually calls characters different names or just uses their title, so the list of principal characters at the novel’s start becomes a much-used reference.  Tolstoy obviously loved his characters and wrote about them with great empathy, even the somewhat reprehensible ones. The book occasionally uses French terms or phrases, the meaning of which usually becomes apparent by the words around them. Readers might also find themselves googling items or events mentioned in the novel to find out what they are and more about them.

There are some questionable aspects of the novel, such as Pierre trudging through snow, day after day, with no proper boots in the freezing Russian winter. Would his feet not get frostbite and cause him to be unable to walk any further? And he is saved a couple of times by almost deus ex machina interventions.

Tolstoy was not a fan of the press back then. He felt it was full of falsehoods and propaganda. He called printed matter “the most powerful engine of ignorance”. He was also not an admirer of Napolean. Tolstoy did not think Napoleon was the genius many historians of the time said he was. Ultimately, the Russians didn’t beat the French; Napolean’s arrogance defeated the French, killing about three million people along the way.

War and Peace is a grand adventure with dramatic elements that can verge on soap opera. It is much more than just a book about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia; it gives the reader an insight into Russian society at the time and inadvertently shows why the Russians had a revolution. It is full of flawed characters who go on expansive growth arcs. It is an epic worth putting aside a couple of months to read. But it is not, as some claim, the greatest novel ever written. 1984 probably holds that spot.

“They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of ‘Israel,'” the group said.

According to Wikipedia, the Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library website founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitised materials, including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials. As of September 5, 2024, the Internet Archive held more than 42.1 million print materials, 13 million videos, 1.2 million software programs, 14 million audio files, 5 million images, 272,660 concerts, and most importantly, over 866 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Its mission is committing to provide “universal access to all knowledge”. 

As the Internet Archive contains an irreplaceable record of the web, this attempt to destroy the archive is the digital equivalent of the burning down of the Library of Alexandria.

As the Divine website, that I wrote for over six years, is no longer online, the Wayback Machine has enabled me to link to my stories mentioned on my website’s non-fiction page. But it being hacked and offline has me thinking: What if the Way Back Machine crashes permanently or goes out of business? I searched for other web archive services and found three, but none had links to the Divine articles.