Breathing Just a Little

  This book is a tense, thought-provoking next-five-minutes dystopia with an unusual hook -it's focused on the increasing ways in which we are cluttering up space with our junk in the name of universal connectivity and resource pillaging, and the impact that is having both on us as people and on our ability to see and learn about the universe around us. The protagonist, Finley, is the daughter of an astronomer and an astrophotographer, based at Sliding Springs observatory at the edge of the Warrumbungles National Park in NSW, Australia (a real facility doing very similar work to that described in the book, although I suspect its actual administrative arrangements are quite different). The narrative does a bit of back-skipping to explain the scope of the dystopian moment and how it came to be, but it's mostly a quest story with an endpoint that I thought was telegraphed pretty clearly, although I was surprised to see other readers saying it came as a shock to them. The book is v...

I've read three excellent mystery novels this month, of completely different types. The first is a modern police procedural, set in Ireland, fourth in a series of which I haven't read earlier books. The second, part of is a science fiction mystery series I am low-key obsessed with, is set far in the future on a constructed colony world adjacent to Jupiter. The third, part of a cosy series I also very much enjoy, is a historical Jane Austen-esque mystery featuring the characters (and the adult children of the characters) from Austen's novels. All of them were terrific in their own ways! A friend gave me this to read, so I went into it with zero background on the writer or the series, but even without that context, I really enjoyed it.  A well-formed police procedural can be a thing of joy, and this was absolutely that - intelligent, engaging, well-paced, and with just enough grit to keep it real without becoming horribly grim. I guessed part, but not all, of the ending in ad...

So the whole "a poem every day" idea hasn't really happened, but I am still enjoying doing these when I can. It looks like I will end up with at least 15 poems for the month if the current pace is maintained, which is pretty good! Today is another pair of poems to represent days 17-23, on two similar-ish mysteries of contemporary history that have fascinated not just me but many professional and amateur sleuths over the years. One of them is much better known than the other, which is in itself somewhat interesting. These are the cases of Alfred Loewenstein and DB (Dan) Cooper. Alfred Loewenstein (11 March 1877 – 4 July 1928) was a Belgian businessman. At his peak in the 1920s, Loewenstein was worth around £12 million in the currency of the time (equivalent to £913.25 million in 2023), making him the third-richest person in the world at the time.  On the evening of 4 July 1928, Loewenstein left from Croydon Airport to fly to Brussels on his private aircraft along with six ...

The 2025 Hugo Awards for SFF works will be announced in August this year. I often like to have a stab at reading to the list for short stories, novels and novellas, and this time I had a big head start, having already read 4 of the 6 novels. Here are my thoughts on the novels! (Short version: I would give the award to either A Sorceress Comes to Call or Service Model, if I was making the decision :-) Best Novel Nominees 1. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky: 7/10 This is good, if grim, dystopian writing. As always, Tchaikovsky nails the voice - Professor Arton Daghdev, the prisoner ecologist protagonist-narrator, is vividly real on the page, and the fact that not all the other characters are fully built is actually a consistent representation of the POV we are given (very few of the other prisoner-exile characters become all that real to the narrator either).  The concept - thought enemies being exiled to a remote barely-habitable planet to end their lives in forced labour, in this c...

Well, as expected, I did not have time for poetry on my long weekend away in the Yarra Valley (which was awesome - a couple of photos provided for evidence!) Today, I used my work lunchbreak to compose two poems that together represent 5 days.  The first poem for today is based on the mystery of the Mary Celeste . The Mary Celeste was a Canadian-built, American-registered merchant brigantine ship that was discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores on December 4, 1872. She was discovered in a haphazard but seaworthy condition under partial sail and with her lifeboat missing (the assumption has always been that the people left on the lifeboat). The last entry in her log was dated ten days earlier. She had left New York City for Genoa on November 7 and was still amply provisioned when found. Her cargo of alcohol was intact, and the captain's and crew's personal belongings were undisturbed. None of those who had been on board were ever seen or heard from ag...

I did actually write the day 10 poem yesterday, but wanted more time to work on it, so I've held it back til today. I think these two make a good pair, anyway! One assumes an extra-terrestrial explanation and one does not, which is intentional counterpointing. I'll be trying to poem again tomorrow, but I'm away for a long weekend with friends Fri-Sun, so I've decided to pause operations for those three days. I'll resume on Monday. Day 10's poem is inspired by the Roswell incident. Most people know the outlines of this one, but the bare bones: in 1947, debris from a crashed aerial craft or object was recovered from the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. It later became the basis for conspiracy theories alleging that the United States military recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. The military released statements and papers in 1990 asserting that the object was a downed military balloon, intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests in the atmosphere, as part o...

I've slowed right down on my Christie re-read project, being busy with work, reading new books on prizelists, and my self-imposed June Month of Poetry commitment. That said, I have now made it through books 11-13, so time to post them! I don't expect 14-17 to be up in the next month though; I did think this was going to be a project extending over more than a year, and it looks like that is correct! This set is where the streams cross, and Poirot really hits stride while Marple has a less great one. Because I'm in a Hercule state of mind now, I'm going to change up my methodology and do the next four Poirots as the next set (The Big Four, The Mystery of the Blue Train, Peril at End House, and Lord Edgware Dies). After that, I'll do a Marple / Tommy and Tuppence set. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written in 1926, is really the first Christie novel where she did something ground-breaking in terms of the way she used the form and the reveal. It's quite a difficult o...

I missed Saturday and Sunday for poems as I was fully engaged at OzComicCon - both working at a stall and also enjoying the panellists, shopping, and most of all the rich variety of cosplays in evidence.  One of the parts I liked the best was the display set up to promote a Ren Fair being planned for next autumn (May) in Victoria, featuring a large green dragon as well as suitably faux-medieval dressed attendants. It got me thinking about the mysterious beasts of history, not so much cryptids (although there may be another post to come on the Yeti, still thinking about it) but more the array of dinosaur-like flying or swimming mythic creatures that almost certainly didn't exist, but maybe (maybe?) reference distorted folk memories or attempts to rationalise something else.  Historians disagree about what gave rise to dragon stories (which are found all over the world). Some have argued that that humans (like our distant cousins, the monkeys) have inherited instinctive rea...

Today in mysteries of history: the Voynich manuscript. The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex, hand-written in an unknown script referred to as Voynichese. We know it dates from the early 15th century (thanks carbon dating!) but know little else definitive about it.  Who wrote it, what it means, why it was written, what it's about, are all still mysteries: as Wikipedia puts it, "currently scholars lack the translation(s) and context needed to both properly entertain or eliminate any of the possibilities". The manuscript consists of around 240 pages, but there is evidence that some pages are missing. The text is written from left to right, and some pages are foldable sheets of varying sizes.  Some of the main theories for what it is include: a script for a made-up language a code that hasn't been broken yet (maybe used for espionage) a cypher or cryptogram a hoax a work of fiction As to what it is about , there's no really plausible guesses on that either. ...

The 2025 Hugo Awards for SFF works will be announced in August this year. I often like to have a stab at reading to the list for short stories, novels and novellas, and this time I had a big head start, having already read 4 of the 6 novels. Here are my thoughts on the novellas - another post to come on the novels!  If I was giving the prize? It would go to either The Butcher of the Forest or What Feasts at Night. This is a little surprising, as fantasy-horror is not one of my favoured subgenres usually, but these are two very good works. Best Novella Nominees 1. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo: 7.5/10 This is the fifth in a series of novellas. The Singing Hills novellas are set in a fantasy world that is closest in analogue to Imperial China, with shades of both Mongolian and Inuit influence. The central conceit and driving device of the series is the journeys of Chih, a travelling archivist and cleric, who gets themselves into a range of problems and adventures as they record ...

Today's historical mystery poem is about the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel refers to the people removed from the then-Kingdom of Israel after it was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire around 720 BCE. The tribes were: Reuben, Simeon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Manasseh, and Ephraim. Israel had earlier split into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah (which comprised the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin).  Side note on Judah: it survived until the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, and was later re-formed as an autonomous Persian protectorate when Judean exiles returned after the fall of Babylon about 50 years later. Judah became the area known as Judea in Roman times, until the expulsion of the majority if its Semitic population in two waves in 70CE and 135CE. Modern Jewish people are named after Judah, and primarily gain their descent from these people. Back to the ten tribes - the historians' assumption has always been that the c...

Today in mysteries of history poems: the Tunguska event. The Tunguska event was a massive aerial explosion that occurred around 7am on 30 June 1908 over a region in western Siberia, Russia. The explosion registered on instruments worldwide and led to noticeable atmospheric effects for months afterward, as well as levelling trees and burning land over a wide area.  The closest observers were some reindeer herders asleep in their tents in several camps about 30 km  from the site. They were blown into the air and knocked unconscious; one man blown into a tree later died. The scientific consensus is that the Tunguska event was likely caused by a fragment of a meteorite, but there is no conclusive evidence to validate this as no fragments have been found. Some scientists suggest that the cause may instead have been the explosion of a large natural gas reservoir underground, that had been experiencing leaks and that would have blown up due to ignition sources as lightning. Alternati...

Today's mysteries of history poem looks at three of the more famous "mysteriously died and we don't to this day know who they were or how it happened" people of the fifty years - specifically, Isdal Woman, Jennifer Fairgate, and Peter Bergmann. Isdal Woman is the name given to an unidentified woman who was found dead at Isdalen ("The Ice Valley") in Bergen, Norway, on 29 November 1970. The front of her body and her clothes had been severely burned, and her face was unrecognisable. Also located or placed near the body were a number of burned or partially burned items, with all identifying marks and labels removed or rubbed off. Her suitcases were later found at a railway station, again with all identifying information removed. Police launched an appeal for information in the Norwegian media regarding the case. The last time she was seen alive had been on 23 November, when she checked out of a hotel, paying her bill in cash and requesting a taxi. Her movement...

Today in mysteries of history poetry I am tackling Roanoke. This is a famous story, probably the most famous unsolved mystery of the early colonial years in America. It goes like this: In 1587, a small colony was founded on Roanoke Island off the eastern coast of North America. The settlement would have been the first permanent English colony in the New World, had the settlers not disappeared. What happened is this - the settlement started to flounder quickly, and it looked like starvation was going to be the outcome for the chronically unprepared and under-equipped settlers. Recognising this, a senior colonist, John White, hightailed it back to England to request resources and manpower. He returned three years later only to find the settlement empty.  Everyone was gone, including White's own wife, child (Eleanor), and grandchild (Virginia), who was the first English child born in the Americas. There was no evidence of mass graves or even any graves at all, which at least implies t...

This first mysteries of history poem is inspired by the so-called "dancing plagues" that occurred in Europe across the 14th to 17th centuries. It involved hundreds, or even thousands, of people dancing erratically but continuously for long periods of time for no apparent reason, without music (although sometimes music was added in as an attempt to treat the issue), with some or many of them dying from the exertion. While there are many theories about what caused it (the most popular are ergot poisoning from mushrooms and some kind of mass nocebo / mass hysteria effect), no one knows for certain, and it seems likely that we never will. That certainly doesn't stop me from speculating, though :-) Dance if one day you step outside your door and the air     doesn't seem like it did yesterday, and your neighbour          isn't beating out her rugs like she does every day but instead is staring, her eyes fixed,            ...