House of Suns -- Alastair Reynolds.

I finally got round to reading this (I really needed the escape) and enjoyed it immensely. Mr Reynolds also got double royalties from me due to my increasingly disfunctional memory – I bought one copy through either Amazon or The Book Depository, and then picked up another in Waterstones.


It has everything I want from him: huge concepts played out on a vast stage, enjoyable characters, gobsmacking technology (bollocks to nanotech, he goes straight for the jugular with femtotech) and a great story extending across aeons. I particularly liked the way, at one point, that he sneaked around causality. Some might think, with his adherence to the galactic speed limit, that he’s made a rod for his own back as far as story telling goes. It strikes me that a consequence of him limiting himself to sub-FTL travel is that the stage expands to somewhere approaching its true size. What Reynolds does best is give some sense of the true scale of what lies out there. Maybe that’s something difficult to achieve without spending years peering through a telescope and letting the vastness of what you see settle in your bones.

I’m probably speaking to the converted when I say, ‘Highly recommended,’ since most of you reading this blog have probably already read this book.

Footnote.

The character Purslane in this book received a hologram of an emerald beetle. I can’t find that particular section at the moment but it sticks in my mind because this bugger landed in Caroline’s lap only a week before I started reading the book.

The interconnectness of things? Just the inevitability of human brains full of experience and knowledge interfacing with large books full of ... experience and knowledge.

More Greek Stuff

We have a guy here who used to be a social worker in Britain and therefore accustomed to dealing with the socially challenged (scum). He expressed some concern about the boy up here in our village, opining that the kind who set fire to puppies as children tend to become even bigger shitbags when they become teenagers. I think it a given that most teenagers are shitbags – they have the total self-regard and lack of empathy of children combined with hormones, pre-adult bodies and, nowadays, a huge sense of entitlement. But I understood what he meant about us not wanting to set ourselves up as targets when this boy turns into the village hoody. I don’t think we need to be too worried.


It goes back somewhat to my previous post. In Britain, if a child was to do something like this, he would have done something completely outside of accepted mores. It would be an act of rebellion and a rejection of ‘society’, and regarded by most as something he should be locked up for. Here, with many adults hating dogs and having grown up in a time when if you hated a dog few people would object if you strung it up from an olive tree; here where many adults find setting fire to a puppy amusing, his biggest crime was not checking to see if the puppy had an owner before torching it.

It is also the case that this child, and his two brothers, are generally just boisterous boys. They play like boys did a number of decades ago in Britain before computer games, and TVs in the bedroom. They take the rubbish down to the bins, collect food from the veg delivery man and collect loads of wood – we often see the youngest labouring up and down the steep paths here with a heavy wheelbarrow. They work in their parent’s large vegetable plot, help with the olive harvest, are polite to us and bugger off when we tell them without any danger of one of them pulling a knife, and they get a belt round the ear when they do something wrong.

The problem here is that the casual cruelty we have seen is not regarded as something terrible. And I fear that the child concerned was just trying to be an adult – using an accepted method to drive off a stray dog and thus protect the family’s chickens.

Incidentally, going back to that dogs ‘strung up from an olive tree’. A recent case in mainland Greece actually resulted in prosecutions. Three dogs were strung up all together with the same rope, or wire, their back paws just touching the ground so as to prolong the entertainment.

Stress Diet:

Over a period of ten days I’ve lost about 8lbs. Stress, anger and lack of sleep certainly burn off the calories. Seeing an animal in pain is an appetite suppressant, and the smell of burnt fur, burnt skin, Betadine antibiotic commingled with with a hint of putrefaction certainly puts you off the meat course. Enjoy your lunch.

Some Greek Learned:

I believe Gamoto kakos apovrasma translates as ‘fucking evil scum’. I was going to go for ‘bastard’ rather than ‘scum’ but whilst my Rough Guide has that word as keratas my dictionary has it as nothos or palianthropos and lists keratas as ‘cuckold’. I tend to feel that it’s the Rough Guide that’s wrong because it contains so many mistakes. Opening it at random I get the standard one: anafero for ‘mention’ when it is ‘I mention’, again totally ignoring the verb endings I’ve mentioned before: anafero, anaferis, anaferoome etc (again the disclaimer: I’m no expert so correct me if I’m wrong).

No Happy Ending.

So, despite all the shit that has hit the fan this week the work on the ruin is looking good. All the ‘sovar’ or rendering has been done inside, the plumbing is in and there’s actually running water up there now, the electrics are also in and the ‘karistoo’ path has been done down the side. Last week, before the puppy incident, we visited a window shop to get some prices and later a guy stopped off to take a look at the work. He was another that Mikalis had put us onto and I warned him that if the price was a piss-take I would be saying, ‘Oshi’. As it turns out we were pleasantly surprised. The price was high, but not rip-off. We had already checked what it might be by looking at wooden windows for sale on the Internet in Britain, then adding extra for the shutters and the fact that these would be made to fit. It seems that very shortly it will be time for tiling, and then going out to buy things like toilets and sinks.

Thursday 17th

So here we are precisely one week after the subhuman child nearby set fire to a puppy. ... You know, I write the words but they keep seeming ridiculous to me. They are the kind of words you use metaphorically or in analogy: ‘He looks so pissed off you’d think someone set fire to his puppy’. Anyway, getting back to that child; what is subhuman or, more precisely, subnormal? In Britain, when a child does something like this, the reaction of 99% of people is disbelieving horror. An army of child psychologists and social workers would be on the scene to deal with this problem child and his problem family. But I’m pretty certain that’s not the case here.

In the evening last Thursday, after Mikalis and his crew had gone, the child and his little brother finally ventured out. This was not a good move on their part since, at that time, Caroline was out watering the plants, and she of course went after them and started having a go at them. Shortly after this, three men turned up, possibly relations or friends of the family, at which point I joined in (I was tending to avoid the kids as my reaction would not have been verbal). I explained to the men, ‘Vazi fotia se mikro skilachi’ which is, ‘He set fire to a puppy’. One of the men laughed then stopped when I said, ‘Oshi ha ha ha ha’ and he saw my expression. I also at one point had the little brat concerned by the throat so I guess they figured I wasn’t happy. I thought the laughter due to the man thinking, ‘Ah, the Englishman is no good at Greek and has said something silly’. Now I don’t believe that.

Ever since we arrived here three years ago, when we go shopping in Sitia, we stop for a giros and a frappe in a Greek fast food place. The wife in the family that runs the place likes chatting to her English customers and I’ve learnt some useful words and phrases from her. This week I went shopping whilst Caroline stayed home to look after the puppy. I stopped at the fast food place for takeaway giros and as usual got a cheerful, ‘Ti kanis?’ which means ‘How are you?’ but translates as, ‘What do you do?’ (I’ll figure it out one day). Rather than reply, ‘Ime kala,’ or ‘I am well,’ I replied, ‘Then kalo,’ or ‘Not good’. The woman asked me to explain, which I did, both in Greek and English. There could be no misunderstanding. Her reaction was precisely zero then, when she turned away to work at something on a nearby counter, she looked to me like she was smirking. As he handed over my two giros her husband, however, could not have been clearer. He was laughing, with tears in is eyes. He then asked me, ‘Spirito?’ squirting an imaginary plastic spirit bottle – sold in all the shops here – towards the ground. Perhaps he had misunderstood. ‘Neh,’ I replied, ‘Yes’. ‘I love that,’ he said, obviously carried away by the hilarity of it all. I snatched my order from his hand and left. In retrospect I wished I’d asked him how amusing he’d find it if I shoved his head in his chip fryer.

A little thought later and I realised something. Long straight burns on the puppy’s back had puzzled me. I now realised they were caused by the long thin streams of spirit from the squeezy bottle. Most likely the person using the bottle lights the tip first then uses it as a mini flame-thrower. Something else occurred: there’s a picture of a badly burnt dog in the Gecko Bar – someone collecting funds for its treatment. This, I reckon, is a common occurrence here and, quite probably, the mountains and ruins are littered with the bones of dogs that have died in agony, saturated either with burning spirit or hot oil (Mikalis’s first assumption). And now I see that to these people, a boy doing such a thing is just acting precisely as it has been raised and to his parents is just normal.

I asked Mikalis if the people of our village probably think we are crazy, and he didn’t hesitate when he replied, ‘Yes’. A lot of the old people of the village have known starvation and when dogs are in competition with humans for food they’re going to lose. They keep lots of free-range chickens too and I perfectly understand their dislike of strays wandering into the village, I also think that in these circumstances it is perfectly acceptable for them to shoot any dog that is a danger to livestock. I don’t, however, understand the fear many Greeks have of dogs – a phobic reaction with elements of hatred and disgust in it. And this was a small puppy. It would have run in terror from the massive chickens here. It probably ran up to the boy, wagging its tail, waiting to be petted. It probably followed him about while he went to get his bottle of spirit and light the spout. Plain ugly cruelty; plain joy in seeing an animal in agony.

Back to the puppy, because I guess some of you reading this will want to know. It is eating, drinking and manages to wander about a bit. The rest of the time it is crying in pain when trying to stand up or lie down, or sleeping. It still manages to wag its tail, surprisingly. In retrospect, however, I wish I’d picked up the nearest rock the moment we got hold of her and put her out of her pain, rather than have put her through this last week.

No Happy Ending, Wednesday 23rd.

Too much, in the end. As some of the puppy’s skin started to fall off I hoped this a sign that it was healing. More and more fell off and the creature ended up in much more pain. I knew, as it lost all the skin across its stomach, that the skin on its back would go next. It would probably lose 50% of its skin and even if it grew back it was doubtful there would be any hair on it. A dog with exposed skin on its back on Crete is never going to be able to go outside for long. It also stopped eating and its suffering was such that we knew it could not go on. We said we would take it to the vet in Ierapetra to have it put down – an hour and a half to two hour drive away. Mikalis said no and took it the 15 minute journey to his home to put it out of its misery. He, or a friend of his, had a gun.

A Bad Week for Mikalis, and for us, and for a puppy...

Crete seems to be a place of extremes, on one hand you have magnificent beauty and humbling kindness, and on the other extreme there’s greed, ugliness and unbelievable cruelty. So now I’m going to tell you about the week my builder has had, and the week we have had.

So, as you can see by the pictures here we’re reaching the stage where the electrics need to be installed prior to the interior walls being rendered. I already knew of an English electrician in Makrigialos who would do the job, but he’d told me that it would be three weeks before he was free. Mikalis informed me that he had an electrician who would look at the job and if his quote was okay he would start the following Wednesday. For an easy life I said to get him in for said quote. That weekend, the day before this electrician was to turn up, the English one called me up. I’d screwed up. Things had been so busy that I hadn’t realised that nearly three weeks had passed since I’d spoken to him. I had to apologise profusely and say that I had someone else in. Foolishly, because those Mikalis has had in for work have all been good, I didn’t forsee any problems with the coming quote. There were problems, it was an obvious out-and-out rip-off number. Even with the guy being on a hundred a day,for four days, the figures simply did not add up. Most likely that Greek calculation for ‘rich English’ was employed: think of what you want and double it.

I now had to eat humble pie and phone up the English electrician, fully prepared for him to tell me to fuck off. ‘Ah, you got a Greek quote,’ said he, then came up, looked at the work, and delivered a quote more in the range I expected – neither too high nor too low. I said he’d got the job and paid over part of the price so he could buy the materials. He drove to Ierapetra to buy the required wiring, plugs, fuse box etc. We knew this because he phoned to ask about leaving the stuff at our house. However, he got us on Caroline’s mobile because we were in Sitia that day, shopping.

This was also a day that Mikalis and his workers did not turn up, which was odd – he was normally here at 7.30 punctually every morning six days a week. I assumed he’d got a hangover and left it at that. Then, whilst we were in Sitia, I checked my phone and noted a missed call from Mikalis. I phoned him and, upon hearing that he’d had a bad day, jokily asked if he’d had too much raki the night before. No, his wife was in Agios Nikolias hospital and he was there with her. He then went on to inform me that I must stop my English electrician coming because if he does the Greek electrician along with other Greek electricians is going to cause big problems. I wasn’t sure whether these problems were tax related or whether they were going to come here and beat up my guy.

Not wanting any problems, and unable to talk face-to-face with Mikalis because, quite obviously, he wouldn’t be coming for a while, we decided on a course of action. We drove over to see the English electrician, paid him for the materials he’d bought and gave him an extra 50 Euros because he’d been pissed about. He seemed to accept that and agree that avoiding problems was the best course, though whether privately he thinks I’m a prat I don’t know.

That was Tuesday. On Thursday Mikalis arrived and I managed to talk to him. His wife was now back at their house with people looking after her. The Greek electrician was now nothing to Mikalis and, because it was through him that this problem arose, he was getting another electrician in who he would help, and he would pay the difference in price to the English electrician’s quote. Okay, fair enough.

Anyway, whilst I was learning all this, I noticed a little black and white puppy following one of the builders up and down the ramp to the ruin whilst he was pushing a wheelbarrow. I thought a stray had arrived (there’s too many of them here). Yes and no. Mikalis has a couple of dogs and apparently his mother wanted one. He saw this puppy abandoned at the side of the road and picked it up that day. Lovely little thing, all waggy tail and licking your hands, and it would sit on command, which was surprising.

Okay, some of you might like to stop reading now, especially those who turn away from RSPCA adverts or find Animal Hospital too traumatic. You’ve been warned.

Now, whilst Mikalis and crew were working, the puppy was happily wandering around with them until it wandered off a little way. Caroline and I were inside the house, mostly. Next thing we knew there was an uproar outside. I saw Mikalis charging down the path to a nearby house, hammering on the door and shouting. He managed to switch to his broken English to say to us, ‘Find dog!’ My immediate assumption was that one of the kids nearby had thrown a rock at it and it had run off, injured. It’s a pastime they enjoy with the village cats.

No, it was much worse than that.

A septic little cunt in this village had, allegedly, decided it might be fun to soak the puppy with something like petrol and set fire to it. I have to say allegedly even though there was only this shit and his little brother in the relevant part of the village, and puppies don’t spontaneously combust.

We found the dog, hiding in another nearby building. Mikalis wasn’t sure what to do, maybe some Betadine on the burns. I told him it needed to go into water, now. I used a bottle of cold water from the fridge and also filled up a bucket with a hose pipe and we dunked the puppy in that. It screamed, of course. We finally wrapped it in a wet cloth and brought it to our terrace. It got up and ran into our house, hiding in some bags under our spare bed. Terrified, in agony, stinking of burnt fur. Mikalis called the vet in Sitia, but he wasn’t there. Caroline called our nearby English neighbours – just outside the village – and Terry, the wife of the couple, immediately came over. She was very good. She managed to get the puppy out from under the bed – I didn’t want to grab it for fear of hurting it – sat it on her lap and put Lanocane on the burns. We then put the puppy in a box with towels and cloths for it to bury itself in. Terry then gave us directions to the vet in Ierapetra.

This was an hour-and-a-half drive. We first drove down to Makrigialos where we saw Jacko, a Dutch guy we know, walking down the road for his carafe of wine. We stopped and told him, mainly because he has dogs and almost certainly knew the location of the Ierapetra vet, which we were vague about. He got in the car and directed us there.

The vet used some sort of antibiotic powder on the burns, injected both antibiotics and a pain killer, then provided us with antibiotic pills, painkillers and cream. We brought the puppy back here to look after it for as long as necessary – if it survived – before Mikalis took it to his mother. Terry returned to find out how things were and, at that time, the subhuman village child, who had been in hiding all the while, showed his face out of the door to his house. Mikalis immediately began shouting at him, then rushed down to catch him and ... well, it was most satisfying, but nowhere near enough. That evening Caroline and I also had a go at the little cunt. The parents of this monster finally turned up at about 8 or 9 in the evening, and we told them what their little darling had done. Whether they are doing anything about it I don’t know. My guess is that they’re keeping their heads down until this all blows over, and that the child his planning his next animal torture session.

Friday Morning, Early.

The puppy is sleeping now, mostly, when not whimpering. She’s drunk water and drunk evaporated milk. This morning we haven’t had a chance to give her any pills because she hasn’t eaten anything. Mikalis is here and he will be going to have a word with the parents. I decided, last night, that if this puppy dies I will grab that village child, drag him up here, rub his face in the corpse whilst asking him if he likes it, in Greek, then I’ll make him carry it down to his parent’s garden and bury it. That’s if he doesn’t have some unfortunate accident on the way, you know, like falling into that large prickly pear cactus beside the path.

Monday Morning.

A traumatic weekend, of course. It’s very difficult to put on the cream the vet provided but now we’re there – I dribble it onto the burns whilst she is asleep. I also put aloe vera cream on the less serious burns. After some initial problems getting the pills down her I now wrap them in a piece of soft cheese, then hold her mouth open while Caroline inserts cheese and pill to the back of her tongue, then I hold it closed until she swallows. She’s now eating solid food – sardines in oil were the first success – and has managed to walk about a bit. She’s also well enough to complain about her pain. She also often wags her tail when she sees us, which is amazing, considering the pain we keep causing her whilst treating her. I still don’t know if she’ll survive – one infection and that’ll be it – nor do I know if she’ll ever see out of her right eye.

A Word on Words.

First I have to make a big disclaimer here: I’m no expert on Greek, far from it, and doubtless there are those who will read this and pick me up on all sorts of errors.


Learning Cretan Greek is like learning Glaswegian when all the tapes and books you want to learn from are in old-time BBC English, that’s the first hurdle when trying to learn the language here. But that aside, I’ll just focus on what’s called Athen’s Greek and pick on a few examples from my experience.

‘Expensive’ here is akrivos whilst that same word in a different context, tense, whatever, can also mean ‘exact’. This is of course an over-simplification when, for example, from the root word agapi for love (if it is the root) we get agapo for ‘I love’, agapoome for ‘we love’, agapoone for ‘they love’, agapi (again) for ‘he, she, it loves’ agapis for ‘you love’ or agapate if it is formal (polite) or plural. I’ll stop there because that agapi goes on to form over 50 different words depending on whether the word concerned is present, present imperfect, imperfect imperative ... you get the gist. Then of course, in Greek songs, you hear sagapo which, I’m guessing, is a contraction of se agapo, or ‘in I love’ or ‘I am in love’, but don’t quote me on that.

Though in the two versions of akrivos the stress is on the same sounding letter (though different letter; one is omega whilst the other is omicron), this stress on letters is very important in Greek (and context). Two buggers for me have been póteh and potėh, the first with its emphasis on the ‘o’ the second with the emphasis on the ‘e’. The first means ‘when’ whilst the second means ‘never’ – imagine the confusions arising from that!

Learning a language is full of confusions like this. ‘Then’ is meta, whilst then is ‘not’. Then thelis afto is ‘you don’t want this’ whilst then thelis afto meta prospathis ekino is’ ‘you don’t want this then try that’ ... but I’ve gone beyond three words here so probably got it wrong.

Some words are easy: blue is bleh, lemon is lemoni, stone is petra and water is nero. However, there are some big buggers it is difficult to get your tongue wrapped round like (opens dictionary at random) andilamvanomai for perceive or χristooyennitikos for Christmas – that first letter being khi, which in pronunciation is like you’re about to cough up something nasty. Oh yeah, don’t forget, this is all in a very different alphabet with different dipthongs that you need to learn before you can even read a proper Greek/English dictionary. And you need to, because phrase books are full of errors. Mine has beno mesa as ‘come in’ when it really means ‘I come in’. ‘You come in’ is benis mesa.

Stories abound of mistakes that can be made. I’ve seen some myself from the other side, and much hilarity has been had from our builder here confusing chicken and kitchen. Then there’s an English woman here who, whilst in the process of trying out her Greek, went into a bakers to ask for a large loaf of black bread and apparently ended up asking for a large black penis. Peos is penis whilst psomi is bread so I’m not sure how that happened – certainly some word I don’t know was involved.

And on that smutty note, consider that the verb endings I mentioned for agapo apply generally, then consider that the verb ‘I drink’ is pino. The English here generally choose the formal plural form of ‘you drink’ so as to avoid collapsing in giggles. But it’s one hell of a toast when you’ve had a few.

Let me re-iterate the disclaimer: the more I learn the more I know I know bugger all.

The Ruin -- Part Three (And Other Stuff)

Okay, more now from your correspondent in Crete. We are still occasionally getting clouds in the sky here, but 19 is the lowest the temperature has dropped in the last couple of weeks, and that in the middle of the night. Oddly, up here in the mountains the temperature has often been higher than down in Makrigialos, which is a first for us. Only yesterday we went to Sitia for shopping, came back pouring with sweat to then provide drinks for the workers who were likewise boiling. After they went, at about 3.00, we decided to go to Makrigialos for a swim, since the temperature up here was 30 in the shade. We didn’t swim, we sat in a bar shivering 23 degrees centigrade. Crazy.


With the change in the weather (and the lack of wind) the plants are really taking off. Here’s a picture of our datura tree grown from a cutting about eight inches high last year.

The aforementioned lack of wind has also enabled us to spend more time outside (though of course it is impossible to use a laptop there). Here then is a picture of a writer hard at work on our front terrace...

The ruin proceeds apace. Here’s a picture of the garden walls that have gone in, and a distant shot of ruin and house. Some stuff you can’t see, like the plastic tank that’s been buried beside the building, and the connecting pipework. Next is the ‘apothiche’ (garden shed), all the internal pipework, all the internal electrics, the concrete floor, the concrete path covered with ‘karistoo’ (lovely shiny stone from one particular Greek island), digging the ‘vothros’ (cess pit), the internal rendering and new walls, the windows and doors and then, of course, little essentials of life like a toilet, shower, sink ... oh, and tiles.

Damn but I need to work harder!

Insect Porn.

I photographed these two up on our pergola and, my goodness, an insect’s life might be a short one, but it’s certainly a merry one. These two were at it for three hours in the afternoon and then, the next day at about the same time they were still there, so maybe they were bonking for twenty-four hours. But then, considering what happens to a praying mantis male after he mates, maybe the male here (cricket or locust) spent all that time figuring out how to get off without being eaten. Anyway, it’s certainly springtime because shortly after seeing these two we noticed a couple of birds on the nearby roof occupying themselves similarly.

Our ruin now has a roof. Laying the concrete slab, the plaka, took six people: one up on the roof spreading the stuff, one mixing, and the others hauling up big buckets of mix. Luckily the weather was just right for the job: cloudy with a few spatters of rain. The problem with laying concrete here, when the weather is mostly hot and sunny, is that it tends to go off too quickly and crack. It is also the case that after it has been laid it must be frequently soaked. To keep himself occupied after the job, so he could periodically go up to the roof with a hose pipe, Mikalis suggested we use my new barbecue. He got the meat and I provided the salad and the beer.

At midday the concrete was down, the barbecue fired up, the beers in a cool box. The weather had improved by then so we all sat eating barbecued pork ‘brisolas’, salad heavy on the salt and olive oil, fresh bread that was so good it needed no butter, and supping chilled bottles of Amstel. You gotta love the attitude of these guys to the working life. Caroline and I retired after a few hours and left them to it, then after it was all over, I went up to hose the roof four times. Mikalis, obviously concerned that the thing didn’t crack, also turned up in the evening and hosed it down once more. Right now, as I type this, I can hear electric chisels going as they take out the old pointing and remove the old render from the walls ready for repointing.

Now, this is a science fiction writer’s blog, though you wouldn’t think so reading the last few posts here. Sad to say, with everything going on around here, I haven’t achieved as much as I would like to on the writing front. But not to worry. Since I managed to do the last two books well before time, I’m three months away from when I should even start the next book. Zero Point has reached 19,000 words and the story is progressing well. I don’t really want to say too much more about it, since you reading this have yet to see the first book of The Owner sequence, The Departure, which comes out in August 2011 when I am to deliver Zero Point.

The Ruin -- Part Two

The first work I was aiming to have done was to raise the height of the windows and door, put in another window, raise the height of all the walls, and seal the underground portion of wall at the back. The next job, which I thought would be silly money, was the roof. This would require new roof beams, a wooden ceiling, a fenizol layer (waterproof foam insulation), nylon and then a layer of reinforced concrete. The prices I got for both of these jobs were very good, so I told Mikalis to go ahead with them. He asked me when so I told him to get to work as soon as he wanted. He also did not require any money up front, and subsequently he, and two workers, turned up not the following day but the day after. The photographs here (dated) show the results thus far.

At this point I have to make it clear how good, how unusual this is. We spent the first two years here forever waiting for the Greek worker who never arrived. We’ve been ripped off on price, which both Greek and Albanian builders do a lot of here because, well, if you’re British the assumption is that you’re probably a millionaire. We’ve also heard nightmare stories about what some people have paid and, really, the builders often get away with it because the various ex-pats here are accustomed to British, German and Dutch building prices.

However, there are new circumstances to take into account. Greece is seriously in debt and the recent 95 billion loan the country received has come with some stringent conditions. The problem is exacerbated by Pasok having won the election last year. The Pasok government’s solution to a cash flow problem, like socialists across the world, is to tighten the screw on the rapidly diminishing number of those who earn the stuff. The result of course being that even less cash tends to flow.

Mikalis hasn’t worked in four months because, due to the taxes being imposed, people here are tightening their belts and putting off that roof repair or extension that seemed so essential a few years back. In Sitia, the largest town at this end of the island, only two building jobs are in progress. Here’s an example of one of the taxes: unleaded petrol is now 1.60 Euros a litre. Great way to generate wealth, don’t you think? Is it any wonder to learn, as I did in another conversation with Mikalis, that something like 80% of Sitia’s population is on some form of anti-depressant?

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The Ruin

Just a little to report this time round. My back is a lot better, possibly after stretching it a bit in the sea; I’ve sunk a water barrel in the front garden to take water from the shower and sinks which we now transport by bucket for irrigation; we’ve eaten our first radishes, lettuce, rocket and oriental red mustard; we are no longer using the stove – the temperature generally holding at about 22 in the house all night and outside during the day rising to above 25 – and things are gradually getting tidier. The main thing on my mind at the moment is the ruin around the back of our house (picture from 2 or more years ago).


We went to a ‘bring and buy’ sale at someone’s house in Makrigialos and a lady there mentioned she had a fairly new window for sale. I asked about the size and she told me it was 0.8 by1.0 metres, which to my recollection was about the size of one of the window gaps in our ruin. Enquiring further I found out it was a box frame with two opening windows and two shutters – precisely the same design as the ones in our house. At a price of 10 Euros I couldn’t really go wrong, so I said we’d have it. We collected it and it is fine – a perfect fit.

This then got me to thinking that I should talk to Mikalis, a Greek guy who did some excellent work on our house last year, about rebuilding the ruin. During the week, after our Internet session on Wednesday, we came back to the house to find a litre and a half bottle of raki on the doorstep. I thought Mikalis might have left it so gave him a call. It turned out that he didn’t leave the raki (just the carrier bag full of lemons the week before), but I did take the opportunity to ask him to come and measure up and give me some prices.

Mikalis visited during the day to check things out, then he and his wife came in the evening with raki, olives and artichokes (aginara, eaten raw with lots of lemon juice and salt). Not to outdone on the gift front he left us the raki we hadn’t drunk, which was about three quarters of a gallon of the stuff. Subsequently, this Sunday, he came for a further measure up of the ruin and discussion of the work.

The height of the windows and door needs to be raised, another window needs to be put in, the walls need to be pointed on the outside and raised to support a new roof. This is all before we even think about electrics, plumbing and everything else inside. For example, if we wanted to connect up a shower and toilet to the waste water and cess pit of the present house, that would require boring through metres of stone and concrete and probably wrecking the bathroom we already have. Better to install a tank beside the ruin and from that pump everything to a soak-away pit in the back garden since the plumbing there will only be used for a few weeks of the year.

I anxiously await those prices, which always scare the living daylights out of me.

Shadow of the Scorpion

And here'sthe French cover of Shadow of the Scorpion. Wonderful stuff!

The Voyage of the Sable Keech

WOW, AGAIN.

The Road -- Cormac McCarthy.

In the past, like many readers of genre fiction, I have been overcome with guilt about my addiction and a mistaken urge to self-improvement. I’ve fought narcolepsy through the first hundred or so pages of War and Peace, I enjoyed my journey East of Eden, been mildly irritated by To Kill a Mockingbird and been surprised at my enjoyment of The Life of Pi and the The Story of the Dog in the Night-time. Throughout an adult education English A Level I was first repelled by Congreve, Othello and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, then told the requisit exam-passing lies about how I enjoyed Richard II and The Bell by Iris Murdock. So when Julie Crisp at Macmillan suggested I read The Road by Pulitzer-winning doyen of the literati Cormac McCarthy, I did have some reservations.


Upon discovering that the present state of my back prevents me from doing light labour, and that sitting at a computer for too long results in me being unable to lie flat when I go to bed, I picked up The Road and decided to give it a try. I expected to struggle through twenty or so pages of pretentious twaddle then, depending on the strength of my reaction to that, either give the book to one of the free lending libraries down in the bars in Makrigialos, or usefully employ it in our stove here.

There was some to criticise here. The bare bones writing thing was taken too far with the dropping of apostrophes, which grated, and the lack of speech marks, which sometimes led to confusion. However, the only pretension I found was in the praise the reviewers heaped on The Road. Superlatives abounded in the descriptions of this shattering, searing, utterly compelling, haunting, gripping, brutal, heart-rending story. One twit linked it to global warming and nearly stopped me at the cover, but luckily I ignored that and read on. The Road is about the aftermath where the ‘math’ isn’t really important. If you wanted to be picky this seems to be set in that other possibility-hyped-to-catastrophe the nuclear winter. The reviewer concerned was just going with the ‘right-on’ lazy groupthink, as so many of them do.

So what is this book about? It is about a man and a boy struggling to survive in a burnt and lifeless world as they take the road south, where the man thinks it will be warmer, or rather, it’s about carrying on without hope. It’s the black, white and grey of the cover, stark, dismal, bleak. I read it in about 4 hours and never regretted a second. I even forgot about my back-ache. Recommended.

The Tudors

We’ve been watching the BBC2 series The Tudors, and thoroughly enjoying it. I have also been considering how much things have changed in the last 500 years, and how very much they’ve remained the same.


Treaties were made and broken faster than Kyoto resolutions and generally they were just an excuse for the upper echelons to go on an extended jolly. Rising members of Court were sent to Europe for negotiations which of course involved lots of big feasts, hunting trips, gifts and the purchase of essentials like jewels and silks and such. Alliances forged throughout all this led to numerous unnecessary wars whose justification most found difficult to fathom. If anyone wanted to rise in Court he had to loudly declare his adherence to current accepted belief, before finding out who to bribe. Corruption, plotting and nepotism were not where they system went wrong, they were the system.

I guess they lived a little more frenetically than we do. You would, wouldn’t you, seeing people dying all around you from unknown causes, and knowing that you’ll be lucky if your own span extends beyond the age of forty, and that’s before taking into account what might happen to you if you step on the wrong toes. Nowadays we at least stand less of a chance of being barbecued for our beliefs, that now being the territory of foreign fanatics rather than the state. And a small lesson to learn from this, and other historical dramas, is that those who rule have always stolen from the ruled, and probably always will. There has never been a time when things were better, and the corruption we see today has a long historical tradition.

Depressing thought, but a good series.

From Crete

News from the Cretan front. Damnit, I put my back out and have been walking about like an 80-year-old for the last three days ... hang on, my apologies to 80-year-olds, my Mother is 83 and gets about a damned sight faster than I have been lately. And no I didn’t do it while digging a hole, nor did I do it while lifting something heavy. As always with this sort of thing I turned at just precisely the wrong angle at the wrong speed in the wrong direction at the wrong phase of the Moon. Or something. Caroline did the same thing last year just sneezing.


I have, therefore, not achieved a great deal of work on the house. I did come up with an idea for getting across our garden, which at present is always in one of two states: dust bowl or mud bath. Here attached is a picture of slabs I’m making from beach stones cast in concrete, in a mould carved from insulating foam. About three-quarters of a bucket of mix goes into each – the remainder I use to cement some more stones on our garden wall around the back.

What else? Still cloudy and cool on some days up in the mountains, though mostly it’s bright sunshine and a temperature above 20. Down in Makrigialos, as ever, the temperature is always a minimum of 4 degrees higher. Did we move to the wrong area? No, later on those living down there will be in mosquito hell and will need the air conditioning on so they can sleep at night. Interesting thing about the mosquitoes: their population explodes with the influx of tourists then, when the tourists go, a huge hungry population of the buggers remains to compete for a much reduced food supply.

Everything is growing madly, the only seeds I’ve planted yet to germinate being chilli and aquilegia seeds. We’ve got radishes, lettuce, rocket, onions and carrots coming up in a raised bed, and in pots and elsewhere: coriander, basils, cherry tomatoes, sweet peas, snapdragons, coleus, lupins, some local succulents (don’t know the name) and various cottage garden mixes (and other stuff I can’t remember right now). I’ve attached pictures of these, along with a picture of one of our garden visitors. You get no sense of scale with that last picture – the little monster is only a centimetre long.

Started Zero Point

Okay, this is a first; I started the new book Zero Point on 16th April. This is a first because I have never before actually recorded when I’ve started a book, only when I’ve written the last line. 3500 words done thus far (yeah, I know, but I had holes to dig in the garden, seeds to plant, walls to scrape off and repaint etc) and, all being well, I’ll soon be getting on with my 2,000 words a day five days a week.


Other stuff to occupy my mind: planting a pomegranate tree, obtaining a big plastic container and burying it in the garden for the grey water, and translating a leaflet detailing a garden health plan here. The last comes from a guy who sold me pomegranate trees in Sitia. The simple exercise of going to him and buying four trees (some for friends) at a price I already knew, took half an hour whilst he told me everything I must do to plant them and look after them. He then had to detail stuff about a further two plants I bought – a cucumber and a melon. I have to wonder how he makes any money when an explanation for two simple plants at a total of 90 cents rambled on for ten minutes. Later he caught Caroline and I walking back to our car, and gave further explanations, along with the leaflet. You gotta love this place.

It’s nice to note that the banana tree I planted last year, which was a brown dead looking mass when we came back, is now throwing out new leaves. Also, in the same part of the garden, an avocado tree (about four inches high) has survived. This last comes from a meal of avocado and prawns eaten about two years ago – the pits shoved in a pot outside.

So, all the planes across Europe have been grounded for about a week. I didn’t realise until I saw the location of the volcano on a map just how close the thing is to Britain. Some people are stranded here too, though sitting in the sunshine drinking beer as they await notification of their flights. I don’t have any memory of this sort of thing happening in my lifetime and wonder what other effects there will be. Certainly, the European economy doesn’t need this right now, but what about the weather? I guess we can all be assured that the global warmers will have something on which to blame this coming year’s cold.

We walked to a place called Etia a couple of days ago. This is an old Cretan village containing a restored Venetian villa (and a taverna). People who buy houses there can restore them, but only to the period of the place, though I suspect that doesn’t mean mud roofs and no electricity. We had a nice meal in the taverna, with a couple of beers, then walked back, picking wild gladioli and flowering broom (shit, there went my street cred).

Still no joy with the Internet. I’ve put my name forward as one of the hundred required to get broadband up here. The woman, Marita, who I said could put my name down, tells me that we only need to find about 90 more...

Jon Sullivan cover for Polity Agent

Here's Jon's take on Orlandine from Polity Agent. Brilliant stuff yet again!

More Zero Point Stuff.

The three Zero Point Energy books progressed to a stack in the hall – ready to go down to one of the bars in Makrigialos that keep books to loan out to customers – but then I decided to bite the bullet and have another go with them. There’s certainly some interesting real science in them, like the Casimir effect, Casimir batteries, the possibility of solid-state rectification of ZPE and the Alcubierre warp drive. The problem I have is sorting the nuggets of gold from the crap-heap. The book that first detailed the stuff above included a piece by one Richard Boylan Ph.D suggesting that declassifying ZPE technology would be a good thing – that would be the ZPE tech the Americans obtained from ‘Star Visitors’, which included antigravity tech. Oh dear. It all read very coherently, but it was like a post I once read on the Asimov’s message board – a perfectly coherent explanation by a guy of why he believes the Earth is only 6,000 years old.


This sort of stuff puts me in mind of the state of play a few centuries back as real scientists researched electricity, magnetism and electric fields, and as new technology began to result from them. Whilst the real scientists worked with real problems and conducted real research, a whole crop of pseudo-scientists grabbed these new shiny toys and attributed to them the kind of properties previously attributed to holy relics, bathing at Lourdes or rubbing yourself down with damp celery to cure leprosy. Newspapers of the time were full of adverts for electrical or magnetic treatments to deal with every ailment from gout to cholera. Of course out of that crap-storm came some real stuff, like X-rays, ultraviolet light skin treatments (I choose those because we’ve been watching Casualty 1900s).

Here, according to the book I’m reading now, are the paradigm camps regarding ZPE:

1. Quantum physics is wrong. Quantum events can be explained classically using self-fields. ZPE does not exist.

2. Relativity is wrong. A material-like ether exists.

3. Quantum physics is correct, but ZPE is a theoretical artefact; it is not real.

4. The ZPE physically exists, but its magnitude is too small to be an appreciable energy source.

5. The ZPE physically manifests large fluctuations, but they cannot be tapped because of entropy; they are random and ubiquitous like a uniform heat bath.

6. The ZPE is a manifestation of chaos in an open nonlinear system. Under certain conditions it can exhibit self-organisation and therefore become available as a source.

7. The ZPE is a 3-space manifestation of electric flux from a physically real, fourth dimension of space. It can be twisted into our 3-space yielding alterations in the space-time metric. It can be tapped as a source, and doing so locally alters gravity, inertia and the pace of time.

I think I can live with number 7, just so long as the tech doesn’t come from greys from Alpha Centauri or secret Nazi projects, just so long as there are no homeopathic, acupuncture or crystal healing miracles involved, just so long as the Zero Point Field isn’t God and our souls don’t transmit to the fourth dimension when we die etc etc etc.

More Crete Stuff.

Still no luck with the Internet – it turns out that OTE just don’t provide it up here in the wilds. Basically they provide it where there will be sufficient users to pay for it and, since our village with its population of 60 has only two people who are likely to use it, I don’t see it arriving in a hurry. Our only option would seem to be something from Vodaphone, which I’m guessing is expensive and limited. Ah well. The plus side of this is that though my communications will be intermittent and my posts here not as frequent as previously, I won’t have my work interrupted by the Internet.


However, my work is being interrupted by something else. Despite asserting that I would never put games on my computer, I’ve done so. I’m playing various hidden object games and am presently on Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox. If I work at it I can kid myself that this is research...

It turned cold here for a few days and, since we were running low on wood and needed to keep the stove burning, I made some enquiries about buying some more. Gulp. 150 Euros for a pick-up truckload. I guess I have to remind myself that back in Britain, over ten years ago, a pick-up full of cut wood would cost £50 and, compared to Crete, Britain is covered with trees and full of people who use gas and electric heating. Here, when it’s cold, the chimneys are smoking constantly.

I bought the wood from an Albanian living here who, like them all here, has a Greek name as well as his Albanian one. His name here is Vangelis whilst in Albania he’s called Angelos. I don’t get that, since the latter is also a Greek name. The Albanian who did some work on our house is Yorgi to the Greeks but I call him by his real name: Miri, or Simira. A similar thing happened to me when we first came here. Our neighbours couldn’t quite handle Neal so renamed me Nico, yet they were perfectly alright with Caroline. Go figure.

Incidentally, look out for some Greek names and references in future books from me. In The Technician, for example, there’s an AI called Ergatis, which in Greek means ‘worker’.

Zero Point Energy ... or Not?

So, the first book of my new contract is to be called Zero Point. In the past I’ve read fragments about zero point energy and thought it seemed like a good science fictional tool I could employ. My plan was for the title to have a double meaning. Zero point energy would be employed as an inertia-less drive for a space ship, whilst there would also be a link to certain ‘year zero’ events I don’t really want to go into here. I therefore bought some books about zero point energy so as to learn more about the subject.


Oh dear.

I started reading then failed to finish three books on the subject. The impression I get is one of wish fulfilment, of, as one scientist has noted, ‘the modern equivalent of the search for a perpetual motion machine’. There’s plenty of science involved and zero point energy, according to current theories, does exist, but when I start reading about its connection to Chakra points and acupuncture, homeopathy, the soul and the ‘energies that bind us all together’ I start to consider whether the book might better serve as fuel for our stove here. That was one of the books. Another one started rambling on about how zero point energy would solve global warming, whilst another referred to Nazi technology and secret projects on American air force bases, and I put it aside before Area 51 got a mention too.

It seems to me that using zero point energy might be about as daft as having my heroes gunning each other down with lasers powered by cold fusion – also connected to zero point energy.

Now, I know, from the ‘Who Reads My Books?’ stuff here, and other contacts with readers, that an awful lot of you work in proper science-based professions. I know there’s a good chance that one physicist, two biochemists/geneticists and hundreds of high-function IT people will be reading this. I also know that there will be many others who love SF and understand science (the two are inextricably linked) who will be reading this. So tell me, what is your opinion of zero point energy?

Farlander -- Col Buchanan

Having attempted to read a couple of fantasy books within the last few months, and having failed, I was beginning to wonder if I was going off fantasy. Those other books felt derivative, laughably serious about what to me seemed plain silly. Maybe I had lost that vital ability to ‘suspend disbelief’ with fantasy? However, reading Col Buchanan’s Farlander I realised that no, I wasn’t going off fantasy, I’d just gone off the stuff that failed to engage me. I would still be able to enjoy something like Alan Campbell’s Scar Night, or anything by Gemmel, or Zelazny, or any number of excellent books I’d read before.


I’m a lot less tolerant nowadays. Life is too short to put up with a book that doesn’t come up with the goods. I know that if I haven’t been hooked within the first few pages it’s unlikely to happen, and if I’m still uninterested by the end of the first chapter it’s time to put the book aside. Two pages in to Farlander I was hooked and a chapter in I knew I wouldn’t be putting it aside.

Considering previous discussions about covers here I have to say that the picture on the front was too reminiscent of Star Wars and, when I discovered that the disposable soldiers of the Empire of Mann wore white armour and that the monkish swordsman Ash would be taking on an apprentice, I was a tad dubious. But the writing kept me engaged; kept me wanting to know more. As I continued to read I felt that Buchanan was attracted to fantasy toys, picking them up and giving them a shake, then realising they weren’t good enough for the story he wanted to tell, and discarding them. Throughout this there are scenes, tropes, characters and influences from other works – here a bit of Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer, there some definite Gemmel, over there a taste even of Robert E Howard, and as ever a little bit of urban fantasy too – but in the end Buchanan makes them his own.

Farlander is the first book of a series, but reads well enough on its own. I’ll certainly be reading the next book, for I have a feeling that it’s going to be even better. Nice one Mr Buchanan.