A review of the novel “The Three-Body Problem” by Cixin Liu
May 11th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
This is the first novel in the ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’ trilogy by the noted Chinese science fiction writer. It was first published as a book in 2008 and, when translated into English, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the first work by an Asian writer to win this award. It achieved even more widespread fame as the inspiration for the 2024 Netflix series of the same name.
As a sci-fi novel, this work has two very distinctive features.
First, reflecting its authorship, it includes lots of references to Chinese characters and history, stretching from the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who was born in 259 BC, to the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976. Many Western scientists and thinkers also make appearances in a fantastical online virtual reality game called Three-Body.
Second, the narrative raises a huge range of scientific issues, starting with the three-body problem in orbital mechanics and running through the development of atomic-level nano-materials and the eleven dimensional space-time of fundamental particles. One chapter has the wonderful title ‘Three Body: Newton, Von Neumann, The First Emperor And The Tri-Solar Syzygy’.
Fundamentally this enormously inventive work is asking some existential questions: If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, how would we know? If we could, should we communicate with such an alien civilisation? If we did, what would be the consequences?
A major problem for writers addressing such questions is the almost infinitesimal distances that would be involved. How could one communication, still less travel, across such vastness of space? Cixin Liu has some inventive solutions which means that, by the end of the novel, the very existence of humankind is threatened – but apparently not for some 450 years.
This first novel in the trilogy runs to 424 pages, but I devoured them, and now I need to move on the next book.
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A review of the classic 1946 movie “Notorious”
May 10th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The first film to be produced as well as directed by Alfred Hitchcock, this is striking for being both a taut espionage thriller and a moving romance. It has a wonderful cast, led by Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Raine in a triangular relationship in which each is both a spy and a lover. The film is black and white but the characterisations are far from it. The clever script was by Ben Hecht (who received an Academy Award nomination) and includes some sharp one-liners.
Set just after the Second World War, it was contemporary in depicting a German spy ring in Rio de Janeiro (although almost all the shooting was in studios) and featuring uranium (used in the the recent two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese). This was the time of the restrictive Hays Code (1934-1968) and there is a wonderful scene in which Hitchcock overcomes the three-second limit on kissing with a clever series of cuts that enables a two-and-a-half-minute smooch.
As always with Hitchcock movies, there is some memorable cinematography and here one of the smartest sequences starts with a high and wide shot of a party in a mansion and then tracks down and in on a hand holding a key. The final shot of the film is neat and dramatic.
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A review of the new film “The Fall Guy”
May 7th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
This action comedy is a kind of homage to stunt performers, the unseen and unsung heroes of so many movies. It is very loosely based on the 1980s television series of the same name (the lead actor from that series, Lee majors, makes a cameo appearance in a mid-credits sequence) and the director David Leitch started his career in the business as a stunt performer. A fun fact is that the work features a Guinness World Record stunt for the most cannon rolls (eight and a half) performed in a car.
What attracted me to the film – and what will ensure it does well at the box office – is the casting of two of my favourite actors: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. He is Colt Seavers, a seasoned stuntman who works as a stunt double for a famous action star, and she is Jody Moreno, a camerawoman who later obtains a debut directing role on an over-the-top movie called ‘Metalstorm’.
The script is rather silly, but there’s lots of action and humour and, of course, some romance plus a supportive dog and a lively soundtrack. It’s designed as a summer crowd-pleaser and it all makes for a popcorn movie – but I don’t eat popcorn.
I preferred the 1980 film “The Stuntman”.
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A review of the recent film “In The Land Of Saints And Sinners”
April 30th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The ‘land’ in question is the “forgotten county” of Donegal in the Republic of Ireland and the cinematography is so gorgeous that at times the film looks like an advertisement from the local tourist board.
Although the director is American, the scriptwriter and all of the cast and crew are Irish. Set in 1974 at the height of “the troubles” (I was working in the Northern Ireland Office at the time), it pits a team from the Provisional IRA against a local one-time assassin, so we have the juxtaposition of bloody violence in a beautiful landscape.
It works to a degree, but the main characters are somewhat unbelievable. It is hard to envisage someone played by the ever-watchable and ever-honourable Liam Neeson as an assassin for hire who’s killed so many that he can’t remember the number. And his sudden desire to give it all up and his friendship with the local Gardai are beyond credibility.
Then there’s the leader of the IRA team, a woman (played by Kerry Condon) who is so irredeemably foul-mouthed, aggressive and violent that she’d give Lady Macbeth a run for her money. But the final shoot-out is worth the wait.
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A review of “The Great Empires Of Asia” edited by Jim Masselos
April 29th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
Long before European powers encircled the globe, Asia was home to some of the greatest empires ever seen. This excellent work describes seven of those empires covering a wide range of geography and time. It does so in a concise and readable manner with each chapter having a short table of key dates and a helpful map. The book is edited – with introductory and concluding chapters – by Australian academic Jim Masselos and then each chapter is written by a different academic who is expert on that particular empire. The seven topics are:
- Central Asia: The Mongols 1206-1405 This was – and remains – the largest contiguous empire in history. By 1260, the empire stretched from the Sea of Japan in the east to the Mediterranean Sea and the Carpathian Mountains in the west and it could mobilise approximately a million men under arms. A remarkable aspect of this empire was its policy of religious toleration in an era of religious strife across much of Eurasia. The initial driving force was the man we now call Chinggis Khan, but other noted Khans were his second son Ogodei, Mongke and Hulegu.
- China: The Ming 1368-1644 As a consequence of this empire, for 276 years a population far greater than than of Europe enjoyed long periods of peace. Astonishingly, between 1405 and 1421, the emperor Yongle commissioned six major maritime expeditions under the command of Zheng Ye, reaching as far as the east coast of Africa. Yet the Ming period was one of technological stagnation and, as a result, China failed to make the transition to an industrial revolution. Instead Ming society was highly bureaucratised with an elaborate system of examinations involving an emphasis on Confucian classics.
- South-East Asia: The Khmer 802-1566 This was a long-lived empire that reached its apogee at the end of the 12th century, covering much of modern day Cambodia, north-eastern Thailand, most of the Mekong Delta area of Vietnam, and southern Laos. However, our knowledge of this empire is limited because so few written records from these times survive. What we do have is a a vast collection of temples and other edifices, most famously Angkor Wat which is the world’s largest religious monument. A key feature of this empire was the Khmer mastery of water resources with an elaborate system of canals.
- Asia Minor and Beyond: The Ottomans 1281-1922 Lasting over six centuries, this multi-ethnic and multi-religious polity was among the militarily most formidable, bureaucratically best-administered and culturally most splendid empires in world history. At its most expansive, it covered modern day Turkey plus much of the Middle East, the southern rim of the Mediterranean, all the Balkans, and even Hungary. Indeed, in 1529 and again in 1683, the Ottoman armies marched on the gates of Vienna (but both times were defeated). It’s capital – Constantinople, later Istanbul – straddled Europe and Asia.
- Persia: The Safavids 1501-1722 This empire reached its greatest geographical extent during the reign of Shah Abbas I ‘The Great’ in the early 17th century. It was shaped – as is modern day Iran – by a particular form of Shia Islam which revers the twelfth imam, a direct descent of the Prophet who disappeared in 873 and is expected to return at ‘the end of days’. The capital shifted from Tabriz to Qazvin to Isfahan, the last being the site for stupendous architecture which survives in the Image of the World Square.
- India: The Mughals 1526-1858 The Mughals – a corruption of the dynastic name Mongol – were a Sunni Muslim dynasty who ruled over a predominantly Hindu South Asia covering all but the most southern tip of the Indian sub-continent. The empire was founded by Babur who was succeeded by Akbar (who was the greatest of the Mughals), Jahangir (who took a Persian wife), Shah Jahan (who built the Taj Mahal) and Aurangzeb (who was the most conservative ruler). The end of the Mughal empire saw its acquisition by the British empire.
- Japan: The Meiji Restoration 1868-1945 It lasted only 50 years, but it was the only non-Western empire of modern times. Following a rapid modernisation of it military forces (with Western help), Japan defeated China and then Russia, later took over Taiwan and Korea as well as Manchuria, before allying itself with Germany and Italy in the Second World War and rapidly occupying most of south-east Asia. The defeat of the empire was sudden and total with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its occupation by the USA.
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Is there anyone out there? How would we know?
April 28th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
If there is an alien civilisation, it is probably on a planet circling a star, right? There are an estimated 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. A lot, right? So how come we have found no evidence for any other intelligent life?
I’d always assumed that evidence could come from the use of the electromagnetic spectrum for purposes such radio and television broadcasts and mobile communications. These signals would propagate through space for ever and we ought to be be able to detect them.
But, in an interesting article, Robin McKee, of the “Guardian” newspaper, quotes Chris Lintott, of Oxford University, as follows:
“We have relied in the past almost exclusively on radio telescopes to detect broadcasts from alien civilisations just as our radio and TV transmissions could reveal our presence to them. However, to date, we have heard absolutely nothing.”
Nor should we be surprised, Lintott argues. “Humanity has already passed its peak radio wave output because we are increasingly using narrow beam communications and fibre-optic cables, rather than beaming out TV and radio signals into the general environment.”
Humanity could become radio-quiet in about 50 years as a result – and that will probably be true for civilisations on other worlds, he added. “They will have gone radio silent after a while, like us. So Seti radio telescopes will need to be augmented with other ways of seeking aliens. We are going to have to be more creative about what we’re searching for in the data and find unusual things that reveal they are the handiwork of aliens.”
It could well be that we’ll never know if there is other life in the universe.
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Have there been lost civilisations? How would we know?
April 28th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
In this fascinating article, the wonderfully-named Flint Dibble – an esteemed archaeologist – effectively rebuts the arguments of Graham Hancock. He writes:
“It’s the quantity of actual archaeology, an enormous body of positive evidence, that proves the negative. There is no lost civilisation from the Ice Age that was global and used advanced technology to build monuments or grow crops. A civilisation that Hancock has stated was “as advanced as our civilisation was, say in the late 18th or early 19th century”.
He claims archaeologists haven’t adequately explored the Sahara, the Amazon, or underwater to disprove the existence of this civilisation. However, in each of these areas archaeologists have surveyed or excavated hundreds of thousands of sites. And the tens of thousands of Ice Age sites found show hunter-gatherer people resiliently thriving in difficult conditions.”
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A review of the stunning new film “Civil War”
April 27th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
Written and directed by the British Alex Garland, this action-thriller was not what I was expecting.
Sure, it’s a war movie – very much an anti-war movie – but there is no explanation for the war and the apparent cause (a secessionist alliance between the states of California and Texas) makes no sense, while there are no battle sequences, only a series of taunt and ultimately bloody encounters.
It is a road movie in that four characters seek to traverse a war-torn America, travelling from New York to Washington DC, but the travellers are not soldiers but reporters and the purpose of their immensely risky enterprise (an interview with the President) seems ridiculously impossible and even meaningless.
This sense of the absurd grows in strength as the film develops so that, by the end, I saw the narrative as a kind of parody with elements of both “Apocalypse Now” and “Dr Strangelove”. War makes no sense and reporting on it objectively is impossible. In the end, looking for the great shot or the snappy quote, makes the reporters complicit in the madness of it all.
So this is a genre-confusing work but it is brilliantly executed – always captivating, often very tense and scary, and visually arresting (a scene with a forest on fire is almost dreamlike).
Garland has written that his movie is intended to be “an attack on political polarisation” which makes it frighteningly contemporary. Perhaps nowhere is this sense of polarisation captured better than in a chilling scene where one of the reporters, in pleading for his life, asserts that he is an American, only to be answered by the gun-wielding solder: “What sort of American?”
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A review of the 1942 classic movie “The Magnificent Ambersons”
April 23rd, 2024 by Roger Darlington
When Orson Welles signed a two-picture deal with RKO Pictures in 1940, the result was the acclaimed masterpiece “Citizen Kane” followed by the butchered masterpiece “The Magnificent Ambersons”. Again Welles wrote, produced and directed, but this time he did not star – in fact, it was the only film that he ever directed in which he did not act – although he was the narrator.
The film is an adaptation of the 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington and narrates the decline of a family and a lifestyle at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, as epitomised by the replacement of the horse-drawn carriage by the automobile. It is a film about decline and nostalgia for the past and it is full of the virtuoso camerawork which made Kane so famous, such as a long, moving shot in a ballroom sequence.
As originally crafted by Welles, the film ran for 148 minutes. By the time it was released, it was only 88 minutes – as well as savage cutting which makes the storyline somewhat disjointed and sometimes hard to follow, the whole tone of the movie was changed by the studio to make the ending more up-beat. All this was done while Welles was down in Brazil and without any consultation with him. The director later opined that the studio had destroyed his work and, in doing so, had destroyed him.
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Holiday in Pakistan (12): conclusion
April 21st, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The conclusion of my holiday in Pakistan was almost as disruptive as the beginning, with a threatened flight change. At Islamabad airport, I was not given a boarding pass for the onward journey from Doha. Then, at Doha airport, I had to visit three desks of Qatar Airways, be told that my intended flight was fully booked, and have a suggestion that I fly home via Athens, before I eventually secured a seat on the same flight as the other group members.
The problem was unusually heavy rain in the Guif region which had substantially dislocated flight schedules. Climate changed is seriously impacting global travel now.
So, how to assess this holiday?
There are so few foreign tourists in Pakistan that all the hotels, restaurants, shops and tourist sites made us incredibly welcome. Everywhere ordinary people wanted to speak to us and be photographed with us. “How are you?” “Where you from?” “Thank you come to Pakistan” were said over and over.
Internationally, many view Pakistan as an unsafe destination. Certainly we experienced lots of road checkpoints and security at hotels and we saw armed guards, police and soldiers everywhere, but we never ever felt threatened. The danger is not to tourists: the day before our departure, two suicide bombers on motorbikes attacked a Japanese delegation in Karachi.
This was a wonderful trip in so many respects: the vibrancy of Lahore, the modernity of Islamabad, the historic sites, the mosques and markets, and above all the absolutely stunning mountain scenery of the Hunza Valley. We had some delightful accommodation and delicious food.
However, overall it proved to be the most challenging holiday of my life. I always expect some things to go wrong on long-haul ventures, but the scale and frequency of the set-backs this time were unprecedented.
Really, Pakistan – as I found in Ethiopia – is not yet ready for tourism and we paid the price for being pioneers. The country does not yet have the transport infrastructure, in terms of good roads and reliable flights, for large-scale tourism. We met so few foreign tourists outside a few from Thailand and Taiwan.
As far as the Jules Verne group was concerned, the biggest challenges were at the beginning and the end: a delay of over 40 hours at Heathrow airport, so that we lost two days of the programme, and that 18-hour road journey from Gilgit to Islamabad, when we lost a third day of the itinerary.
However, I am still pleased that I made the trip. It was a real adventure in a very different country. Geographically, the highlight was the glory of the mountainous Hunza Valley. Emotionally, the biggest buzz came from my mountain climb at Shigar Peak, the toughest climb of my life.
To summarise: Pakistan is a fabulous tourist destination but it is not for the faint-hearted or infirm tourist.
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