The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

With the news that there will be a new David Mitchell novel out in the autumn called Bone Clocks I thought I reblog this review of his last book which I listened to on Audible.
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It took me a long time to finish this audiobook, initially because I wasn't completely convinced by it (and I was only listening to about fifteen minutes a day), then because I got a bit fed up in the middle portion (a change of narrator didn't help) and finally because it was so great that I was rationing my time with it and I didn't want it to end. Yes, it does take a weird left turn about half way in but all the strands come together beautifully, and the last third of the book is fantastic. The Go game scene near the very end had me on the edge of my seat...
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I've been a big fan of David Mitchell since I read Cloud Atlas a couple of years ago. He's one of the most gifted of the new generation of English novelists: intelligent, witty and a master of undemonstrative, elegant prose. Mitchell might actually be the best novelist writing in English today and in only a few years he's produced an impressive body of work. Thousand Autumns tells the story of a young Dutch clerk who gets posted to the tiny Dutch concession in late eighteenth century Nagasaki. He falls in love with a Japanese girl who is the daughter of an impoverished scholar. She gets sent to a convent when her father dies intestate and De Zoet suffers a professional disaster when he refuses to take a bribe. There are many more threads to the tale, but revealing them would spoil the surprises. I haven't read James Clavell's Shogun but if you liked that you'll probably like De Zoet and if you are an admirer of quality fiction this book should be near the top of your reading list. Absolute travesty that this didn't win the 2010 Booker Prize.

We Are Never Going To Go To Mars

It was very disappointing to get to the year 2000 and experience no flying cars. When I was a kid I just took it as a given that by 2000 there would be flying cars everywhere. It's going to be just as bad in 2015, the year Back To The Future was set, when I find out that none of what was predicted in that 1985 movie has come true: no flying cars, no hoverboards, no adjustable clothes, no wall TVs, no pocket fusion reactors, nada. Well, except for 3D cinema which just happens to give me nausea and headaches.
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Its obvious to me that not only are there never going to be flying cars, but now it looks like we are never going to go to Mars. Earlier this year President Obama cancelled NASA's Constellation programme which included plans for a ship to take us to the Moon and Mars. No replacement for Constellation was announced or is contemplated. In February of next year the last Shuttle flight will take place. The USA will thus have no vehicle whatsoever to put astronauts into space - this will be the first time America hasn't been able to put a man in space since 1961.

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We can't put a man into space so Mars is definitely out of the question. There's the privately owned but woefully underfunded Mars Society of course and they have a plan called Mars Direct which they say can get a team there and back for about fifty billion dollars. Fifty billion seems like a lot of money until you consider that that's what we spend in Iraq (yes we're still in Iraq) every seven months. Mars Direct is a great idea. We send the return rocket to Mars first. It distills its own fuel from the atmosphere (or something like that), then the astronauts go, explore and fly back on the fuelled rocket waiting for them. A mission to Mars wouldn't be landing a man on the Moon where there are few resources and a hostile climate. Mars is a planet with an atmosphere and oceans of water underground. Sending a team to Mars would be like sending a ship on a voyage to discover a new world in, say, 1492.
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But we're not going to do it are we? We, the West I mean, because the Chinese are certainly going to go there sometime in the next few years. China has an astronaut programme with a Moon landing planned for later this decade and a Mars exploration mission is next on their agenda. If I live long enough I will see Mars colonised and even terraformed, but it won't be by us.