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Timo Arnall/Immaterials and Improving Reality

Notes from the Immaterials show and the Improving Reality conference, Brighton, Sep 2013.

(Immaterials: Light painting WiFi project by Timo Arnall)

Immaterials

• the show by Timo and Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen, Jack Schulze and Matt Jones at Lighthouse is put together well - beautiful images and films that make visible the RFID, Wifi, GPS and machine sensor fields we walk through and bathe in.
• The Fischli & Weissy Nearness film with Schulze is delightful. The early Experiments in Field Drawing. (Confession: it's impossible to review something with Timo, Schulze and Jones in it with any objectivity.)
• The faint wobbliness in the light lines in Light Painting WiFi - the experimenter's unreliable hand.
• Tiniest quibble: the stills from Wireless in the World fall slightly short of the rest, by appearing decorative.
• The twitchy object rec algorithms in Robot Readable World.
• The recent Satellite lamp is beautifully sputnik. 
• Timo's background to the show.
• [and this is how much I like it!]

Timo's talk at Improving Reality

• Technology: the frictionless and seamless glowing, slidey, textureless glass rectangles. Little of the technology is apprehendable or graspable (think of Heidegger: ready to/present at hand).
• The importance of making the invisible visible (of showing the seams) so that we can understand the tech, the system. The difficulty of the same, because seamlessness is so desirable and seductive.
• And yet in our experience technology can often be a lightning rod for very human concerns (as if an antenna receiving and amplifying). When you deploy a new application on new mobile phones to an organisation, human questions are immediately raised: do we have to use this? Does it track us? Is this why X lost their jobs? 
• So the technology might be invisible, but it can also make human concerns visible.
• Light painting - the photographic technique - came from employee time and motion studies
• user Stockholm syndrome (Sterling?) - the act of becoming dazzled by user considerations/needs and forgetting the other parts of the jigsaw, eg materiality
• Julian Oliver et al, Critical Engineering Manifesto.

Keller Easterling

• Extra-statecraft
• Dense talk - a sense that there's some substantial stuff to unpack here, but hard to follow. (Performative exemplification? Or I am stupid.)
• Contemporary architecture's power-ideological bias, cartoons unfolding in time.
• How to un-develop, to subtract architecture?
• "ESC researches global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Some of the most radical changes to the globalising world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of infrastructure [... infrastructure] generates emergent new constellations of national, international, intergovernmental and transnational administration and generates undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate it" - from Extrastatesraft.

Frank Swain

• Entertaining on the fictions in maps. 
• Though of course all maps are fictional to some extent. Though of course so is reality.

The second session, Re-imagining reality, was energetically hosted by Simon Ings. What a shame though that we didn't hear from him directly - his books (The Eye, Dead Water, etc) are excellent.

Paul Graham Raven

• Raven's An Introduction To Infrastructure Fiction.
• Infrastructure fictions, a manifesto rather than a literary mode - explicitly a call to "think about the box", not to write, er, more stories about bridges
• Intent: lightbulbs were invented to sell electricity - source? (related?).
• Resist "flat-pack futures" - Scott Smith.
• A preoccupation with engineering ("how", goal) vs design/art ("why").

Maja Kuzmanovic

• Baffling. 
• "'patabotanists" was good. "Prehearsal" however sounds like "pretending".

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

• Food for astronauts is always constrained to flat, light high energy seaweed and other nutridusts, but what feeds their psyche? 30 tonnes of food needed to sustain a team to Mars and back.
• GM bacteria that change colour - as health diagnostic. Bacteria-tinted shit. "As someone with crohns disease. Shit as an interface would would be super useful".
• Human foot-cheese bacteria cheese (same bacterium as certain cheese so why not make it into real cheese), armpit bacteria cheese.
• Why is it that everything we can separate from or expel from the body revolts us as soon as it is separated? Shit etc obviously, but think of hair and saliva. And even when it is identical to something else - foot-cheese bacteria - it remains no less revolting.
• bacterial-mediated fruit that grow on electricity rather than sunlight
• Is synthetic biology part of/apart from nature?
• Questions about design vs art, science vs culture, science vs non-science

Tobias Revell

• Get your futurism bingo cards ready!
• "Design can be a political movement [...] technology can be a territory" - now when stuff like this comes from my own keyboard it is a string of shining pearls, but when someone else says it in a talk I just hear reckony air - ah, such is the hypocritical tyranny of the spectator in a hot, dark room. Sorry.
• His 88.7: Stories From The First Transnational Traders was very good.

Tom Armitage/Jeff Noon, The Literary Operator

• Charming story machine by @infovore and @jeffnoon: you stroke a book with its puck and it Burroughs into the text, printing you a voucher.
• Eg this from Chandler's The Big Sleep: "Our breaths met and mingled, our eyes were slaty [...] Canino look like a clock".

Farida Vis, Georgina Voss, Paula Le Dieu, Justin Pickard

• Unfortunately the improving reality of life intervened, and I missed the third part.

There's no reason why Improving Reality cannot simultaneously appeal to realism and attempt to augment/transcend it, but even so I am slightly uncomfortable about the conference's name. 

Cruising above both show and conference is the invisible drone-father James Bridle, and in the luminous clouds above, Ben Cerveny and Kevin Slavin watch over us and keep us real.

A list of writing tools is a displacement activity

Writing, focussing, assembling, editing, collaborating, feeding back, researching, structuring, outputting and publishing. (Updated Feb 2014.)

Focus through constraint:

• iaWriter - "Keep your hands on the keyboard and your mind in the text". Has good reviews.
• Byword - "Simple and efficient text editing". Also has good reviews.
• Writeroom - appears a generation older than iaWriter and Byword.
• Textmate - does text, html and a zillion other developer's things.

Quality:

• Hemingway - "makes your writing bold and clear".

Research speed and convenience:

• nvALT - Speeds up that did-I-already-write-about-this? moment, auto-saves, does text files, Markdown. Nice. I'm writing this post in it.
• Pinboard - elegantly executed webpage bookmarking.

Collaborating and community feedback:

• Draft - its drafts are neat version control, has premium "ask a pro", updates frequently. (Has a no-going-back Hemingway mode, thought isn't the same as the Hemingway above.)
• Poetica - "Get feedback about your writing from people you trust, wherever they are" - not released yet. Amusingly, screenshot critiques Word track changes and Google Docs. Reviewed by Rev Dan.
• Google Docs - good at collaboration and export, auto-saves. Has automated versioning but without actual version *control*.
• Editorially - "makes collaborative writing easy", via here but sadly shutting down.
• Penflip - "helps you write better with others".
• Authorea - "the collaborative platform for research. Write and manage your technical documents in one place".

Assembling, structuring, editing and eBook workflow:

• Ulysses 3 - "All your texts. In one place. Always." Not tried, but this review says "the app reimagines the text editor in a way that visually resembles Mail and conceptually sits somewhere between iA Writer and the project-based Scrivener". Which sounds like quite a thing.
• Scrivener - looks a bit of a mess to be honest. They also have Scapple, a mind map/words-on-sticks app.
• LeanPub - "Publish Early, Publish Often - Authors and publishers use Leanpub to publish amazing in-progress and completed books". Costs $0.50 plus 10%.
• Lacuna books - "the best way to write and publish a book". Big on structuring, rendering chapters and ebooks easily.
• Quip - "Beautiful documents on any device".
• Marquee - "a full-stack publishing platform...  to help everyone, from editors to designers and developers, come together to make great content for the web".

Formats and outputs:

• Marked,  because between text and html, Markdown is the popular "intermediary" format, (like nvALT) is good at simultaneous preview.
• Mou - good at simultaneous preview of Markdown, custom css etc, always seems to recover well from its frequent crashes.
• And a simple Google Apps script to convert a Google Drive Document to markdown.

Online publishing and attention:

• Medium - "A better place to read and write things that matter" - becoming a centre of gravity for serious writing, per-para commenting interesting.
• Wattpad - an ebook platform/store/agora that isn't Kindleland.

Back to it now. Again.

Tom McCarthy, Transmission and the Individual Remix, 2012

McCarthy's Transmission is a good account of the prosthetic polyphony, the hearing before speech, in literature and authorship. For more, see Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book (1989), a challenging read, but excellent on Freud and Derrida, and much of the latter's work, particularly on presence, speech and writing.

Highlights:

I have nothing to say. Indeed, I’d go as far as to claim that no serious writer does. [Location 42]

year 458 BC. This is the year that Aeschylus’s Oresteia premiered at Athens’s Festival of Dionysus. This trilogy of plays appears to me, despite its ripe age, eminently modern. I mean that in the sense that it lays down the structural and thematic contours that literary works will trace and retrace right up to our own era. We see the roles and concepts of the house, the family, the city or city state (polis in Greek, base of the English ‘politics’), practices and rituals of mourning, institutions of the law and the very notion of justice itself being not simply represented but actively produced, configured, put into the world. [Location 54]

the beacon’s coded message (‘Troy is finally ours’) is demoted, downgraded, enjoying only secondary importance: what dominates the monologue, what Clytemnestra emphasises constantly, is the means by which the signal moved from Troy to Argos. The beacon visible to them is the final one in a long chain of beacons, each one visible only to the next. She names each of the signal’s staging posts, [Location 65]

When listened to attentively, Clytemnestra’s speech starts whispering a truth I hope to amplify and echo in this essay: that we are always not just (to use a dramatic term) in medias res, i.e. in the middle of events, but also simply in media. In the beginning is the signal. [Location 74]

The ‘first’ poet, as everybody knows, is Orpheus. He’s Greek too, of course – although it’s in the work of the first-century AD Latin writer Ovid that he makes what’s generally held up nowadays as his ‘original’ appearance. (To put it another way, he comes to us already reconfigured and repeated.) [Location 79]

you built a temple there inside their hearing. [Location 106]

his short 1959 text The Way to Language that ‘For the longest time – before it comes to be said, that is, spoken – the poet’s work is only a listening.’ Thinking, Heidegger continues, should also take the form of listening: [Location 144]

Thus, it is a listening not while but before we are speaking.’ The proposition is quite paradoxical; it requires that time be first split up (speaking right now, I am inhabiting a previous moment, a moment of previousness, of which the now, right now, is but an echo), then coiled back into itself in an endless feedback (speaking is listening to speaking, which, as we’ve just learnt, is listening – round and round). [Location 149]

as Freud himself put it, ‘by adjusting himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone’ [Location 162]

for Freud, technology can best be understood as prosthesis. In a famous passage from Civilisation and Its Discontents he describes engines as mechanical muscles, telescopes and microscopes as synthetic upgrades of the eye, cameras and gramophones as material extensions of memory. [Location 163]

we are promoted and demoted at the same time; augmented, but in diminished form. Technology might allow us to pass unpassable borders, penetrate and traverse impossible distances, to move even into and through the space reserved for gods – but this move also entails anxiety, bereavement. If you’ve got an artificial body part, it means you’ve lost an arm, a leg, that you’re an amputee: like Orpheus, you’ve had your limbs ripped off. [Location 171]

As a student, Alexander stole an ear from a morgue so that he could try to reproduce its inner workings mechanically; [Location 179]

The second brother did die, and Bell invented the telephone. [Location 182]

remained a sceptic vis-à-vis the question of existence after death – but only because his brother never called. The desire for that call was there, wired into the very apparatus, haunting it. [Location 183]

in the original, that ‘box’ was a coffin: so well has His Master’s Voice been reproduced (the implicit visual strapline went) that the dog doesn’t even know he’s dead. [Location 189]

recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’s or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became, for them, a kind of miniature tomb. [Location 192]

‘marks the site of some secret burial.’ [Location 197]

from being a point of distribution, of transmission, he became transmission itself, turned into the network – and in so doing, or in so being done to, disappeared. [Location 207]

In fact, like the first act of the Oresteia, with its beacon-telegraph so lyrically eulogised by Clytemnestra, Orpheus was always, from the off, a story about broadcasting technology. The broad-casting, or scattering, of Orpheus, his disappearance, doesn’t end his singing; on the contrary, it has the opposite effect of expanding its area of coverage: his severed head continues holding forth long after its dismemberment, conveying his song to all of Greece. [Location 210]

(here’s my second point), given that Orpheus is the Ur-writer figure within Western culture, that literature was also always, from the off, a question of broadcasting technology. And now a third point rears its head: if literature is, and always was, a comm-tech issue, then, as we’ve already seen, it can’t be separated from the topics of dismemberment and death, of loss, dissolution, vanishing. [Location 214]

In his short seminal 1955 text ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, Blanchot identifies in the Thracian poet’s fatal backwards glance towards Eurydice an enactment of the very origin of literature. [Location 220]

a moment where desire, surging and unmanageable, sweeps away all the writer’s previous concerns in a huge wave of ‘unconcern’ that carries the literary work itself beyond all boundaries, not least the very ones that gave rise to it in the first place [Location 222]

the core, the primary spark, the Big Bang moment, of all writing – and yet, at the same time, it’s a moment that could only ‘happen’ after Orpheus’s poetry had already brought him to the Underworld and ushered him past its bouncers. ‘Which is to say’ (Blanchot concludes) ‘that one can only begin to write if one is already writing’ – which is to say that writing has no origin. Or, to be precise, it means to say that writing’s origin will always lie within this blind spot off the map and out of time – a spot whose retrieval is both impossible and the sole true task of any good writer (every significant literary work enacts, or re-enacts, in some way or other, the doomed escapade of attempting to retrieve it, and surrenders itself to the consequences): an unsolvable quandary that leads Blanchot to tie writing to the act of suicide. [Location 226]

The work’s (or oeuvre’s) true, fundamental purpose, he argues here and elsewhere, is désoeuvrement: ‘un-working’, an unravelling from within through which the very content that the work purports to convey or recover becomes lost, the avenues and relays through which it promised to deliver this to the reader become degraded. [Location 243]

‘the vanishing, broken off by static’ [Location 250]

When an author tells you that they’re not beholden to any theory, what they usually mean is that their thinking and their work defaults, without their even realising it, to a narrow liberal humanism and its underlying – and reactionary – notions of the (always ‘natural’ and pre-existing, rather than constructed) self, that self’s command of language, language as vehicle for ‘expression’, and a whole host of fallacies so admirably debunked almost 50 years ago by the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. [Location 257]

If literature, on the other hand, is to do anything worthwhile (and I don’t mean socially or even philosophically worthwhile; I mean truly and profoundly useless in a way so powerful it devalues use itself) – if it’s to be worth the paper or the screen it’s written on, it needs to appreciate its own interruptedness, its disarticulation; to understand its own embedding within media, and mediation; to understand that media’s own history is always and automatically at play in it, the shift from one-to-one to one-to-many to many-to-many networks in which sender and addressee are simultaneously masked and multiplied; to understand that it not only broadcasts, but is subject to the logic of broadcasting (of dissemination) – and to embed this understanding too, and broadcast it again, regressively. [Location 266]

Most of all, it needs to appreciate, with vertiginous exhilaration, the unique and ultra-paradoxical condition that’s at once its blessing and its curse: namely, that it only works because (as Blanchot so profoundly understood) it doesn’t work. [Location 272]

As such, their activity is a secondary one – yet secondary in a universe that, truly speaking, has no origin, whose origin is no more than a point of disappearance. Which means, paradoxically, that in being absolutely secondary – that is, in carrying the logic of secondariness to its most extreme configuration – they achieve a kind of primacy within this universe. [Location 279]

he has uploaded the right verbal remix software. He has read and memorised his Dante, his Shakespeare, his Eliot – to such an extent that his activity as a composer consists of giving himself over to their cadences and echoes, their pulses, codas, loops, the better that these may work their way, through him, [Location 294]

Cervantes was remixing Montalvo, Ariosto, Apuleius and any number of picaresque authors – and doing this with such delirious self-consciousness that at one point he even makes the characters of Don Quixote pause to take stock of the library, the engine room behind their mad associate’s re-enactments, perusing it as though it were some kind of source-code – which it is. [Location 300]

With The Cantos, he kept up this furious enterprise for five whole decades, ramping its intensity up and up until the overload destroyed him, blew his mind to pieces, leaving him to murmur, right towards the end: ‘I cannot make it cohere.’ [Location 305]

Thus, the sending out (in German, ‘transmission’ is Sendung), the dispatch, loss, or scattering of signal and identity (when I sit at a transmitter, both my words and I dissolve into the aether) also brought about, contained, entailed, a coming back together. [Location 311]

Erect no gravestone, only let the rose year after year bloom in his memory. For that is Orpheus. His metamorphosis through this or that. We do not need to look for other names. When there is poetry, it’s Orpheus singing. He come and goes. [Location 317]

It reverberates with everything I’ve been tracing here: loss, anxiety, dispersal, interruption, retrieval in which loss repeats itself, on and on endlessly. [Location 335]

old Krapp angrily fast-forwards, cursing – as though rectifying his misplaced youthful assumption that he had something to know, to tell the world; and at the same time, of course, creating the very type of blank, cut or elision in the current text’s surface that we should by now have come to recognise as so important to the writing process. [Location 340]

M.J. Hyland, This is How, 2009

M.J. Hyland's This is How appears slight, almost uneventful, the protagonist awkward, which might not sound promising... but it is affecting and lingers. The claustrophobia of the common place, telling details. Hard to describe. It is very good.

I hadn't read any of her work until I'd seen her brave and clear-eyed piece in the Guardian about MS and brain enhancers, in which she wrote 'In the stuffy, darkened house of my head, all the windows and doors seemed to have been flung open and the air was crisp and cool'.

The highlights:

‘Let me take your coat,’ she says. ‘I’m not bothered,’ I say. ‘I’ll keep it on.’ I want the pockets for my hands. [Location 46]

There’s an old man sitting at the bar. He’s got a lit cigarette in the ashtray, but he lights another and I get why he craves the start of things. All the hope that goes with the new thing. [Location 266]

It’s like something from James Bond.’ ‘Do you like those films?’ ‘I haven’t seen From Russia with Love yet, but I liked Dr No. Have you read the books?’ The chat flows easily and I don’t even lie to her and tell her I’ve read the books. [Location 1966]

Welkin’s not in the room but he might as well be. We’re in the company of his absence. [Location 2067]

I step forward, lift the wrench in my right hand and bring it down. Only once, a good, certain blow to his temple, not heavy, and the wrench bounces. [Location 2203]

My hands are numb, a tingling in my fingers, much stronger than pins and needles. [Location 2224]

the drink machine’s out of order. There’s a handwritten sign on the front and the word THIS has been crossed out and someone’s replaced it with the word TIME. It says: TIME MACHINE IS OUT OF ORDER and I stare at it for a while before I know what it means and I’ve got a sickness in my gut. [Location 2257]

A heat goes down the front of my body and it’s as though I’m standing by a fire, the heat of shock, and it spreads all over my chest and head. [Location 2280]

I take a tissue out of my pocket. He looks away, waits a bit, looks back. ‘Okay?’ he says. He takes off his jacket and hands it over. ‘Thanks.’ [Location 2444]

During the long cold night, when I sank into sleep, it was short and shallow and I saw what I did to Welkin, saw it over and over, and I was in a stupor so close to screaming that I went in the dark and slammed my fist on the cell door. [Location 2607]

The windows are blacked and nobody can see me, but the people on the street waiting to cross at the lights, all of them look at the van with faces full of hate. I close my eyes. [Location 2729]

‘You’d better get yourself a dog face,’ says Stevenson. [Location 2968]

‘Here comes the snout-baron,’ [Location 2985]

what I did adds up to no more than the act of raising and lowering a hand. My mind played hardly any part, but my body acted and, as far as the law’s concerned, my body might as well be all that I am. [Location 3045]

he’s moving documents in and out of his black folders as though he hopes that moving them will erase what’s there and replace his watery words with better ones. [Location 3756]

Perkins speaks now as though he has a pen between his teeth. [Location 4046]

This blow is like a dose of poison in my veins, a hot sharp shot through my legs and arms, through my bowels and bladder. I’ve a mind to release a hot flood of shit and piss right where I sit. [Location 4809]

But then, after a long gap, the silence between us starts to cover me, almost like being touched. The longer the stretch of silence, the more it feels like we’re touching each other. [Location 5372]

 

Carrion thought: Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male, 1939

My highlights will hint at what I would have written about this strange, compelling book, and those from the excellent intro by Robert Macfarlane do the job better than I would have (this recent edition is the one with the Macfarlane intro, most of which you can also read here, and whose recent book Holloway is part inspired by the Rogue Male landscape).

I will say though that you mustn't let it put you off - with the distance of about 75 years, the book now appears horribly classist and racist at times, but it is excellent, weird, psychological and exciting. I missed the radio dramatisation last year. Rogue Male is a dark 39 Steps. 

From the intro:

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) – in which Alan Breck and Davey Balfour are chased across the Scottish Highlands by English redcoats in the 1750s – began the ‘hunted-man’ genre. [Location 53]

John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) – in which Richard Hannay is chased across the Scottish Lowlands by German agents [Location 54]

Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale (1936) – in which a hired killer called Raven is chased from Central Europe to the British Midlands [Location 56]

From Joseph Conrad, I think, Household learned how to pattern a novel intricately without slowing down its story, and he also learned restraint: in particular, the technique of omitting explicit description of key events. [Location 58]

In Rogue Male vital incidents go similarly un-detailed: the torture scene, the death in the Aldwych tunnel, the narrator’s first visit to the holloway with his fiancée. Only the outcomes (wounds and scars, guilt, repressed trauma) of these episodes are alluded to; they are experienced chiefly as their aftermaths. It is no coincidence that the narrator’s eye is brutally damaged early on, leaving dancing patches of shadow where light should be; [Location 61]

Camouflage and cover are the novel’s preoccupations; enigma, disguise and indirection its styles of telling. Even the narrator remains nameless throughout, only an ‘I’ [Location 66]

There are paired concepts – ‘cover’ and ‘open’, ‘surface’ and depth’ – that repeat and weave. There are images and figures – notably the sunken track, the tunnel, the cave or den, and skins and skinning – that recur dozens of times in different forms. There are tiny details of incident or comment that anticipate or recall earlier versions of themselves. [Location 71]

the sustained analogy between land and mind, whereby the narrator’s access to his buried emotions is enabled only by means of a literal digging down [Location 74]

for as well as becoming part-animal he also becomes part-earth, part-rock and part-tree – a hybrid version of the landscape itself. [Location 99]

The episode might be understood as an early study of Stockholm Syndrome, as a Catholic confessional in which the den’s ventilation shaft serves as the grille, or as an extended psychoanalytical session. [Location 159]

The narrator’s psychological interior is the novel’s last hidden terrain, and its access completes the book’s ongoing processes of digging and rupture [Location 166]

The highlights:

There was a pulped substance all around me, in the midst of which I carried on my absurd consciousness. I had supposed that this bog was me; it tasted of blood. Then it occurred to me that this soft extension of my body might really be bog; [Location 225]

a creature of mud, bandaged and hidden in mud. [Location 230]

I had gone beyond worrying about the state of surfaces. [Location 257]

I felt deliciously secure, for I was not looking forward at all; I felt as if I were a parasite on the tree, grown to it. I was not in pain, not hungry, not thirsty, and I was safe. [Location 266]

I had allowed my body to take charge. It knew far more about escaping and healing than I did. I must try to make my behaviour intelligible. [Location 295]

I might have been transparent. [Location 324]

The flotsam of the nation is washed together into an unrecognized, nameless, formless secret society. There isn’t much that the bits of scum can do to help one another, but at least they can cling and keep silence. [Location 485]

At need I could walk very slowly and correctly, hanging on each foot, as if waiting for somebody. [Location 537]

I was comfortable enough, more relaxed than I had been since the first week on the river. The darkness and the six walls gave me an immediate sense of safety. I had gone to ground after the hunt, and the cold iron of the closed tank was more protective than the softest grass in the open. [Location 674]

the first of my dens, and I think that it provided me with the idea of the second. [Location 676]

After all, we once went to war for the ear of a Captain Jenkins – though Jenkins was an obscurer person than myself and had, considering the number of laws he broke, been treated with no great barbarity. [Location 712]

No, I was an outlaw not because of my conscience (which, I maintain, has no right to torment me) but on the plain facts. [Location 762]

I’d be lucky if I ever perceived more than light and darkness, [Location 773]

I passed him on the level of the Central London, and went down the escalator to the west-bound Piccadilly Tube. [Location 845]

I pretended I had forgotten something, and shot out of the exit, up the stairs and down a corridor to the north-bound platform. [Location 848]

I noticed that the shuttle train at the Aldwych left from the opposite side of the same platform. This offered a way of escape if ever there were two trains in at the same time. [Location 849]

I took the second escalator to the surface, and promptly dashed down again. [Location 853]

At the bottom of the Piccadilly escalator you turn left for the north-bound trains, and continue straight on for the west-bound. To the right is the exit, along which an old lady with two side parcels was perversely trying to force her way against the stream of outcoming passengers. [Location 859]

I ran on to the north-bound platform. An Aldwych shuttle was just pulling in, but there was no Piccadilly train. I shot under the Aldwych line, down to the west-bound platform, into the general exit, jamming him in another stream of outcoming passengers, and back to the north-bound Piccadilly. There was a train standing, and the Aldwych shuttle had not left. I jumped into the Piccadilly train with the Major so far behind that he was compelled to enter another coach just as the doors were closing and just as I stepped out again. Having thus despatched the Major to an unknown destination, I got into the Aldwych shuttle, which at once left on its half-mile journey. [Location 862]

After half a minute in the Aldwych shuttle I realized that I had panicked like a rabbit in a warren. The mere couple of ferrets who had been after me had been magnified by my escape mechanism – a literal escape mechanism this, and working much faster than my mind – into an infinity of ferrets. [Location 869]

I turned back and re-entered the shuttle. The passengers were already seated in the single coach, and the platform clear; but a man in a black hat and blue flannel suit got in after me. That meant that he had turned back when I had turned back. At Holborn I remained seated to prove whether my suspicions were correct. They were. Black Hat got out, sauntered around the platform, and got in again just before the doors closed. [Location 873]

As we left again for Aldwych, Black Hat was at the back of the coach and I was in the front. We sat as far away as possible from each other. Though we were both potential murderers, we felt, I suppose, mutual embarrassment. Mutual. I wish to God he had sat opposite me, or shown himself in some way less human than I. [Location 879]

I can still hear them, and the sound of steps and his scream and the hideous, because domestic, sound of sizzling. They echoed along that tunnel which leads Lord knows where. A queer place for a soul to find itself adrift. It was self-defence. He had a flash-light and a pistol. I don’t know if he meant to use it. Perhaps he was only as frightened of me as I was of him. I crawled right to his feet and sprang at him. By God, I want to die in the open! If ever I have land again, I swear I’ll never kill a creature below ground. [Location 897]

ALDWYCH MYSTERY was occupying half a column of the centre page. [Location 937]

rigour of the climate was not inviting. My own county, though I carried the ordnance map in my eye and knew a dozen spots where I could go to ground, had to be avoided. [Location 963]

The business that had taken me to Dorset was so precious that I kept it to myself. [Location 971]

Though the precise spot where I was going was no more nor less present in my consciousness than the dark shadows which floated before my left eye, I knew I had to have a fleece-lined, waterproof sleeping-bag. [Location 975]

I took a train to Guildford, and thence by slow stages to Dorchester, where I arrived about five in the afternoon. I changed after Salisbury, where a friendly porter heaved my roll into an empty carriage on a stopping train without any corridor. By the time we reached the next station I was no longer the well-dressed man. I had become a holiday-maker with Mr Vaner’s very large and dark sun-glasses. [Location 995]

He had the perfect self-possession and merry eyes of a craftsman. One can usually spot them, this new generation of craftsmen. They know the world is theirs, and are equally contemptuous of the professed radical and the genteel. [Location 1010]

I admitted to myself now where I was going. [Location 1079]

I passed out of the chalk into the sandstone; the lanes, worn down by the packhorses of a hundred generations plodding up from the sea on to the dry, hard going of the ridges, were fifteen feet or more below the level of the fields. [Location 1102]

There is not, any longer, enough to do. I am not affected by loneliness nor by the memories of this place. [Location 1199]

I am uncertain of myself. Even this journal, which I was sure would exorcise my misgivings, has settled nothing. [Location 1200]

Well, I suppose I wished to save myself pain. But I cannot even remember her face, except that her eyes appeared violet against the tawny skin. [Location 1214]

I wrote to Saul for books: meaty stuff which I could reread throughout the winter, penetrating with each reading a little further into what the author meant rather than what he said. I did not, of course, sign the letter, but wrote in block capitals, asking him to send the books to Professor Foulsham at a sub-post office in Lyme Regis. [Location 1218]

There is no animal but man which can be hunted simultaneously by two different packs without the two becoming one; [Location 1274]

carrion thought [Location 1286]

it worried me that I had come to move with such instinctive quietness. I was already on the look-out for all signs of demoralization – morbidly anxious to assure myself that I was losing none of my humanity. [Location 1459]

Eggardon affected me as a city. The camp was haunted. I didn’t feel the presence of its builders, those unknown imperialists who set their cantonments on the high chalk, but I was suddenly terrified of the sleeping towns and villages that lay at my feet and clustered, waiting, [Location 1502]

I was obsessed by this sense of all southern England crowding in upon the hill. [Location 1507]

The lifeless centre seems full of gases, unsatisfying in themselves and carrying in suspension the brown dust and debris that fall from above [Location 1696]

All initiative is at an end. All luck is at an end. We are so dependent on luck, good and bad. I think of those men and women – cases faintly parallel to mine – who live in one room and eat poorly and lie in bed, since their incomes are too small for any marked activity. Their lives would be unbearable were it not for their hopes of good luck and fears of bad. They have, in fact, little of either; but illusion magnifies what there is. [Location 1702]

to hide I am ashamed. So I endure without object. [Location 1712]

Admit it now, my dear fellow, you could get along perfectly well without any State!’ ‘Yes, damn you!’ [Location 1917]

Yet I was mad with grief and hatred. I describe myself as then mad because I did not know it. The tepidity of my sorrow was not indifference; it was the blankness which descends upon me when I dare not know what I am thinking. [Location 1994]

Her skin was not a surface; it was an indefinite glory of the palest rose and orange that chose to mould itself to those tense limbs. [Location 2002]

My fantasy had developed as far as shooting my way out of the magistrate’s court [Location 2438]

My Dear Saul, I write this from a pleasant inn where I am accustoming myself to a new avatar. [Location 2467]

One should always hunt an animal in its natural habitat; and the natural habitat of man is – in these days – a town. Chimney-pots should be the cover, and the method, snapshots at two hundred yards. [Location 2479]

.

Image source.

Some books, May 2013

Will Storr, Bad Blood, The Mysterious Life and Brutal Death of Alexander Litvinenko
Good, long Matter article by Will Storr on the 2006 poisoning of ex-KGB man Litvinenko in London. Its editor Deborah Blum notes that the poisoned cup of tea has literary precedent. Peter Clarke (then CTC boss at the Met) investigated. Has some excellent Arsenal trivia: one of his alleged poisoners went to see CSKA Moscow play at the Emirates (0-0 - perhaps the polonium distracted Henry and Rosicky). His seat was so radioactive that it had to be securely burned.

Andy Weir, The Martian
Rollicking read. Astronaut is stranded on Mars and must endure Shackletonian challenges and journey - luckily he is both a botanist and mechanical engineer, which allows for MacGyverist victory. Hard science NASA-porn (technology is the love interest), and the astronauts are the rightest of right stuff. The shift between viewpoints isn't always comfortable. Weak end - I increasingly hoped for a Ballardian failure. (For an alternate, darker take on the stranded astronaut, see Bester's classic The Stars My Destination.) Currently only available as an audiobook it seems. Weir's website.

Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
More to say on this later, but it's still excellent.

John Scalzi, The Human Division
Serialised starting here (you could measure the success of the book by tracking each episode's sales ranking). Here he is talking about it and here is Warren Ellis doing the same. Serialized fiction is interesting, but I think the whole suffers slightly, and it crushes your Kindle recommendations.

NASA's Space shuttle

I watched the BBC's excellent The Challenger last night, a dramatisation of the Rogers commission into the 1986 Challenger disaster, and was reminded what a hero Richard Feynman was.

The shuttle. Conceived in the 1950s, designed from the late 1960s and through the 1970s, five built, flew from 1981, mothballed in 2011, two terrible disasters. Some reading:

1986 - Feynman's Appendix F - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle

Richard Feynman's appendix to the Rogers Commission Report. Showed NASA and partners' management failings, and that vested interests deliberately or accidentally caused statistical truth and safety policies to be ignored. Striking for its clarity and, I think, humanity.

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. [...]

We have also found that certification criteria used in Flight Readiness Reviews often develop a gradually decreasing strictness. The argument that the same risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. [...]

the computer software checking system and attitude is of the highest quality. There appears to be no process of gradually fooling oneself while degrading standards so characteristic of the Solid Rocket Booster or Space Shuttle Main Engine safety systems [...]

If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers. [...]

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

1996 - Charles Fishman's They Write the Right Stuff

On the team that wrote software for the shuttle. Reading this in the late 1990s, I remember being struck by the cultural and procedural differences between this team and the wider "speed at all costs" culture of startups.

The article follows the Capability Maturity Model in arguing that there's an evolutionary spectrum of development practice, from immature chaotic "fix it on the server" death marches through to a measured "perfection". The truth though, proven by successful agile methods (which have themselves matured), is that the approach should fit the business need and context. When change is expensive, get it right first time; when change is cheap, change it when you need to. From the perspective of 2010 and later, this seems obvious - perhaps it wasn't in 1996.

the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. [...]

That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip -- but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step -- when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough -- then it's time to grow up. [...]

"People have to channel their creativity into changing the process," says Keller, "not changing the software." [...]

The specs for the current program fill 30 volumes and run 40,000 pages. [...]

"Most people choose to spend their money at the wrong end of the process," says Munson. "In the modern software environment, 80% of the cost of the software is spent after the software is written the first time -- they don't get it right the first time, so they spend time flogging it. In shuttle, they do it right the first time. And they don't change the software without changing the blueprint. That's why their software is so perfect."

2005 - Maciej Cegłowski's A Rocket To Nowhere 

The space shuttle program as white elephant - this was a punch to the gut, the space bubble pricked.

Most of the really wrong design decisions in the Shuttle system — the side-mounted orbiter, solid rocket boosters, lack of air-breathing engines, no escape system, fragile heat protection — were the direct fallout of this design phase, when tight budgets and onerous Air Force requirements forced engineers to improvise solutions to problems that had as much to do to do with the mechanics of Congressional funding as the mechanics of flight. In a pattern that would recur repeatedly in the years to come, NASA managers decided that they were better off making spending cuts on initial design even if they resulted in much higher operating costs over the lifetime of the program. [...]

Having failed at its stated goal, the Shuttle program proved adept at finding changing rationales for its existence. It was, after all, an awfully large spacecraft, and it was a bird in the hand, giving it an enormous advantage over any suggested replacement. [...]

In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong. [...]

The Apollo program showed how successful the agency could be when given a clear technical objective and the budget required to meet it. But the Shuttle program has shown the flip side of NASA, as rational goals detach from reality under constantly changing political and funding pressures. NASA has learned valuable bureaucratic lessons - it knows to spread its work over as many jurisdictions as possible, it has learned that chronic funding is always better than acute funding, however much money a one-time outlay might save in the long run, and it has demonstrated that ineffectual projects can be sustained indefinitely if cancelling them is sufficiently awkward. But these are lessons we have already learned for far less on the ground, with Amtrak, and building a more photogenic, spaceborne version of the Sunset Limited in orbit hardly seems like a space policy for the 21st century.

And there are many more interesting articles, but so little time to read them in.

Laurent Binet, HHhH, 2010

Laurent Binet's HHhH weaves together a strong history of the assassination attempt on Heydrich in WW2 (interesting telling of a terrible mind and time) with an account of its own making. So it's funny and self-absorbed - I think the English publisher reinstated some or all of his comments on Jonathan Littell that had been cut from the French edition. Fans of David Shields's Reality Hunger will love it, fans of Sebald may love it.

The highlights

In German, Nachrichtenoffizier means ‘transmission officer’, while Nachrichtendienstoffizier means ‘intelligence officer’. It’s because Himmler, notoriously ignorant about all things military, makes no distinction between these two terms that Heydrich – who used to be a transmission officer in the navy – is sitting opposite him today. [Location 725]

Having got wind that the head of the British intelligence service calls himself M (yes, like in James Bond), he decides in all seriousness to call himself H. [Location 743]

‘Has there ever been a biographer who did not dream of writing, “Jesus of Nazareth used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking”?’ She smiles as she reads this to me. I don’t immediately grasp the full meaning of the phrase and, faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuk! Then I ask her to pass me the magazine and I reread the sentence. I am forced to admit that I would quite like to possess this kind of detail about Heydrich. [Location 753]

I’VE BEEN TALKING rubbish, the victim of both a faulty memory and an overactive imagination. In fact, the head of the British secret service at this time was called ‘C’ – not ‘M’ as in James Bond. Heydrich too called himself ‘C’, and not ‘H’. But it’s not certain that, in doing so, he wished to copy the British: the initial more probably referred to der Chef [Location 811]

‘Oh, really, it’s not invented?’ No, it’s not invented! What would be the point of ‘inventing’ Nazism? [Location 920]

In other words, when the Nazi leaders are – for once – ordered to show a degree of moderation, they are unafraid to thwart the Führer’s will. This is interesting when you consider that obedience to orders, in the name of military honour and sworn oaths, was the only argument put forward after the war to justify these men’s crimes. [Location 1114]

So for several hours on March 13, 1938, the head of the Czechoslovak secret services is travelling through Nazi Germany by train. [Location 1125]

seeking the victims’ active cooperation. The Jews are always invited to make themselves known to the authorities, and in the vast majority of cases – whether for emigrating in 1938 or for being sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz in 1943 – this is exactly what they do. [Location 1173]

Chamberlain makes sure that his diplomats do not promise more than is contained in this muddled phrase: ‘In the event of a European conflict, it is impossible to know if Great Britain will take part.’ [Location 1259]

All he does is sniff the Nazis’ shit.’ [Location 1273]

Daladier, former defence minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defence not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week – one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. [Location 1303]

He was reportedly seen throwing himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Among people still hostile to Nazism, these demented fits quickly earned him the nickname Teppichfresser (‘Carpet Eater’). [Location 1326]

‘But, Mr Ambassador, in the end this agreement must be a great relief, no?’ Silence. Then the Foreign Office secretary sighs: ‘Oh yes, a relief … like when you do it in your pants!’ [Location 1357]

Churchill sums it all up with his immortal phrase: ‘You had to choose between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour. You will have war.’ [Location 1384]

All the synagogues are burning, but Heydrich, ever the professional, has ordered that any official records to be found in them must be sent to SD headquarters. Boxes of documents arrive at Wilhelmstrasse. The Nazis love burning books, but not files. German efficiency? Who knows if the SA didn’t wipe their asses with some of those precious archives … [Location 1435]

Two days later, Göring chairs a meeting at the Air Ministry to find a way of making the Jews bear the costs of all the damage. As the spokesman for the insurance companies points out, the price of broken windows alone comes to five million marks (this is why it’s called ‘Crystal Night’). It turns out that many of the Jewish boutiques are owned by Aryans, which means they must be compensated. Göring is furious. Nobody had thought about the economic implications, least of all the finance minister. He shouts at Heydrich that it would have been better to kill two hundred Jews than to destroy so much valuable property. Heydrich is upset. He replies that they did kill thirty-six Jews. [Location 1445]

I never thought of giving it any other title than Operation Anthropoid (and if that’s not the title you see on the cover, you will know that I gave in to the demands of my publisher, who didn’t like it: too SF, too Robert Ludlum, apparently). You see, Heydrich is the target, not the protagonist. [Location 1693]

I’m not sure yet if I’m going to ‘visualize’ (that is, invent!) this meeting or not. If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything. [Location 1821]

Essentially, the work of the Einsatzgruppen – a detailed written account of which would take up thousands of pages – can be summed up in three terrible letters: etc. Until they reach the USSR, at least: at that point, even et cetera’s suggestion of infinity will not be enough. [Location 1875]

Sonderfahndungliste GB, the special search list for Great Britain better known as the Black Book. It is a list of some 2,300 people to be found, arrested, and delivered to the Gestapo as quickly as possible. At the head of the list, unsurprisingly, is Churchill. Among the other politicians, British and foreign, are Beneš and Masaryk, representatives of the Czech government-in-exile. So far, so logical. But the list also contains the names of writers such as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and Rebecca West. Freud is there, despite having died in 1939. And Baden-Powell, too, the founder of the Scout movement. [Location 1919]

exclaims: ‘What do you mean, “The blood rises to his cheeks and he feels his brain swell inside his skull”? You’re making it up!’ I have been boring her for years with my theories about the puerile, ridiculous nature of novelistic invention, and she’s right, I suppose, not to let me get away with this skull thing. [Location 2134]

but I don’t know what he was wearing on that particular day. He might just as easily have been in white, for example. I’m not sure if this kind of scruple still makes much sense at this stage. [Location 2202]

the SS – before shooting them – first made them descend to the bottom of the ditch, where a ‘crammer’ was waiting for them. The job of this ‘crammer’ was similar to that of an usher at a theatre. He led each Jew to a pile of bodies and, having found a suitable place, made him or her lie facedown, naked and alive, on top of naked corpses. Then another guard, walking on the dead bodies, put a bullet in the back of the neck. [Location 2245]

it has no place in my novel. But one of the great advantages of the genre is the almost unlimited freedom it gives the author. [Location 2254]

I’m worried that there are some errors in what I’ve written: since this subject has no direct link with Heydrich, I haven’t had time to investigate more deeply. But I didn’t want to write about Kiev without mentioning this incredible story. [Location 2286]

Finally, I will be something more than the Reich’s dustbin!’ The Reich’s dustbin: so that’s how he defined his duties as head of the Gestapo and the SD. [Location 2332]

Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory. No reader could possibly retain this list of names, so why write it? For you to remember them, I would have to turn them into characters. [Location 2943]

– a high-level German Abwehr officer called Paul Thümmel (code name A54; alias René). [Location 2979]

his letters: ‘It’s History, I know that. But if a novel is as boring as a scientific book …’ He also felt that he was writing ‘in a deplorable academic style,’ and then ‘what bothers [him] is the psychological aspect of [his] story,’ [Location 3036]

…’ This problem goes hand in hand with that of veracity: ‘As for my archaeology, it will be “probable”, that’s all. As long as no one can prove that what I’ve written is nonsense, that’s all I ask.’ [Location 3039]

Chacko’s art resides in his skill at integrating historical fact – Heydrich really was nicknamed the Blond Beast – into psychologically acute dialogue. It is through dialogue that he turns history into fiction. And I must say, loath as I am to use this method, that he does it very successfully: [Location 3070]

Sorry, I don’t have the faintest idea who this Gregory could be. And just so my falsely offhand tone doesn’t give you the wrong idea: I have tried to find out! [Location 3343]

This scene is not really useful, and on top of that I practically made it up. I don’t think I’m going to keep it. [Location 3453]

The dog probably won’t have a decisive role to play in Operation Anthropoid, but I would rather jot down a useless detail than risk missing a crucial one. [Location 3510]

I WONDER HOW Jonathan Littell, in his novel The Kindly Ones, knows that Blobel had an Opel. If Blobel really drove an Opel, then I bow before his superior research. But if it’s a bluff, that weakens the whole book. [Location 3686]

THIS IS WHAT I think: inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, in the words of my brother-in-law, with whom I’ve discussed all this: It’s like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence [Location 3708]

the whole city seems to be covered in writing – and not only adverts. There are Vs everywhere: originally they were symbols of the Czech Resistance, but the Nazis appropriated them as an exhortation to the Reich’s final victory. There are Vs on tramways, on cars, sometimes carved into the ground; Vs everywhere, battling it out between two opposed ideologies. [Location 3720]

‘Better solutions, more advanced and more productive, are on their way.’ Then, his audience hanging on his every word, he adds abruptly: ‘All the Jews in Europe have been sentenced to death.’ [Location 3759]

How did I not see it before? Suddenly, everything is clear. The Kindly Ones is simply ‘Houellebecq does Nazism.’ [Location 3922]

I THINK I’M beginning to understand. What I’m writing is an infranovel [Location 3924]

Yes, I must travel to Prague. I have to be there when this happens. I have to write it there. [Location 3932]

I had to cheat sometimes, to betray my literary principles – because what I believe is insignificant next to what is being played out now. [Location 3950]

HE FIRES, AND nothing happens. I can’t resist cheap literary effects. Nothing happens. The trigger sticks – or perhaps it gives way too easily and clicks on nothing. [Location 4138]

When I quote an author, I must be careful to cut my quotations every seven lines. No longer than seven lines. Like spies on the telephone: no more than thirty seconds, so they can’t track you down. [Location 4178]

My story has as many holes in it as a novel. But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I’m incapable of making that decision. I flick through the photos of the funeral cortège crossing the Charles Bridge, going back up to Wenceslaus Square, passing in front of the museum. I see the beautiful stone statues on the balustrade of the bridge with swastikas beneath them, and I feel slightly sick. I think I’d rather take my mattress to the gallery in the church, if they’ve got a bit of room for me there. [Location 4731]

they do not anticipate the worldwide repercussions that will be provoked by news of the village’s destruction. Up to now, the Nazis, if somewhat halfhearted in the concealment of their crimes, have nevertheless kept up a superficial discretion that has enabled some people to avert their gaze from the regime’s true nature. With Lidice, the scales have fallen from the whole world’s eyes. [Location 4772]

All the same, no one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich’s death was good for anything. Perhaps I am writing this book to make them understand that they are wrong. [Location 4799]

Everyone is playing for high stakes today, even on the German side, where a lack of results can easily look like sabotage to the leaders – all the more so when they have to conceal their own errors or quench their thirst for blood (and here both factors are in play). Scapegoats at all costs – that could be the Reich’s motto. [Location 4957]

Most of the time, the spy who accepted the offer to swap sides – even if he had until then resisted the worst kinds of torture – cracked very suddenly. From the moment he made his decision, he (to use Trepper’s memorable expression) ‘wallowed in betrayal as if in mud.’ [Location 5187]

‘Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive,’ said Roland Barthes. There you go – some good advice I never took. [Location 5270]

Keith Ridgway, The Spectacular, 2012

Keith Ridgway's short story 'The Spectacular'. He seemed a bit ambivalent about it at the time but it's very good - a low-readership literary author decides to write a best-selling thriller about a terrorist plot at the London Olympics in order to rake the cash in, and gets embroiled in matters. His places are particularly resonant. My single highlight:

Guilt is always available. It just needs the stimulus of punishment to make itself known. [Location 501]

John Varley, Millennium, 1983

A DC-10 and 747 collide. In the distant future, a time travel team prepares to snatch passengers, leaving prefabricated smoking bodies behind. And an air disaster investigator will get a phone call that changes his life ... and the end of the world as we know it.

This is an old favourite - aircrash time-travel save-the-future SF. I like it because (1) the 1980s aircrash investigation milieu is interesting, (2) the protagonists are quite unsympathetic and they're enjoyably unreliable as narrators (in fact the whole time travel thing lets the unreliability of the narrator be performed and multiplied). And (3) the whole thing is a gigantic shaggy dog story on "deus ex machina".