A wife goes missing, and DCI Barnaby must find her.

 

Caroline Graham. Faithful Unto Death (1996) A woman disappears, then a ransom note from her kidnappers demands 50,000 pounds. Her husband apparently suicides, but a couple of oddities attract DCI Tom Barnaby’s attention. Murder it is. And so a well-done police procedural proceeds.
   Graham’s Barnaby is a lot like DCI Wexford, but his sidekick DS Tory is nothing like Wexford’s DI Mike Burden. Like Rendell, Graham has a sharp eye for human frailties and self-delusion, but a much more acid tongue. I get the impression that she would have preferred to write a comedie humaine: the crime and its investigation are a pretext for character analysis and moral commentary. She has the gift of making every sentence and paragraph count: apparently throw-way asides add to ambience, sharpen context, clarify relationships, shift point of view. A good read. ***

What is Life? A comment on viruses.

There have been many definitions of “life”. I think the simplest definition of life is this one: Life a system that acquires the substances and energy needed to continue to exist and to reproduce. If it fails to do this, it ceases to exist. Any such system is an organism.

By that definition, a virus is alive. It’s the simplest form of life: a packet of genetic information that drifts about until it latches onto a cell that it can invade. It then uses the cell to acquire the substance and energy it needs in order to reproduce.

Since a virus needs another organism to survive and reproduce, it is a parasite. Most parasites either do not harm their hosts or provide some benefit. A few (mostly microbes) are necessary for their host’s well-being and even continued existence. A few parasites harm their hosts, and some kill their hosts. A parasite species will survive only if its hosts do not die out.

It’s likely that many viruses, like many microbes, are not merely beneficial but necessary for their hosts’ well being. We know enough about bacilli, for example, to know that without them, we humans would have trouble digesting much of our food. We don’t know that much about viruses. But we do know that some of them kill bacteria that are dangerous to us. We also know that viruses can transport bits of DNA between species, and that this sometimes results in beneficial changes to an organism’s genome.

What all this amounts to is that we are woefully ignorant of viruses’ roles in the web of life. The handful that bother us create the impression that we would be better off without them. That is certainly false. We just don’t know enough. Yet.

Footnote: Very early on, some programmers wrote small programs with a rather strange property: they would use the computer’s operating system to write copies of themselves into every available memory space. Rewriting these programs so that they would send copies of themselves to other computers was the next step. Thus the computer virus. Are any of them alive? Yes, any virus that can prevent the computer from shutting down, thus maintaining the energy it needs for continued existence. Are there such computer viruses? I don't know. But anything I can imagine, anyone with similar information can imagine. Therefore, someone has imagined such a virus. And when a programmer can imagine a program's functions, creating the program is just a matter of time and effort.

Covid Variant Mu

 Covid variant Mu: Some tangential thoughts.

The Guardian reports on a new “variant of interest”, labelled Mu

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/01/who-monitoring-new-coronavirus-variant-named-mu

Mu may turn out to be a problem if it is more transmissible than Alpha or Delta, and/or can evade immune system defenses better. It all depends on whether it makes people sicker and/or kills more people. So it could be bad. Hence the monitoring.

However,  if Mu turns out to be much more transmissible yet much milder in its effects than Alpha or Delta, it could be exactly what we want: A tolerable, flu-like version of covid. For higher transmissibility would enable it to outcompete the other variants. There would still be occasional epidemics of the more serious versions, as happens with the flu, but it’s likely that better treatments would blunt their effects.

In short, a highly transmissible but mild Mu could buy the time needed to develop good treatment and even better vaccines. Hope, or wishful thinking?

                                   

A Web re-tangled (Burley's Wycliffe and The Tangled Web)

 

W. D. Burley. Wycliffe and the Tangled Web (1988) Hilda Clemo, beautiful, intelligent, and 17 years old, tells her boyfriend and assorted other folk that she is pregnant. Then she disappears. Wycliffe sees the missing persons report, and a vague unease prompts him to order a more thorough search and investigation. The tangled web of the title refers to past and present relationships, but the one that leads to her murder is simple jealousy. Another satisfying concoction.

     Burley apparently preferred to write radio plays, and wrote the Wycliffe series because it paid. Radio play require the ability to suggest character and ambience in dialogue, skills that make his potboiler novels above average. Burley is very good at pacing the narrative slowly enough to create tension, and fast enough to maintain curiosity.
     A re-read. Either I’m mellowing, or I saw more in the story this time round, since I’m rating it half a star higher. ***

Trade and Music (Lapham's Quarterlies)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly XII-2: Trade (2019) Exchange of favours is not a human species-specific trait, but organised trade is. It’s one of the constants of human culture. All human societies regulate exchange, ranging from customs and conventions to formal rules and laws governing everything from weights and measures to contracts.
     The bits and pieces assembled here remind us that many humans will cheat if they can get away with it, hence the need for law. They also remind us that humans have co-operated from the beginning to gain advantages in trading, ranging from guilds and cartels to international agreements governing trade between cities and nations. The corresponding counter is conventions and agreements that give everyone the same opportunities for fair trading.
     Trading rules within societies (families, tribes, and eventually larger communities) ensured that essentials were produced and shared equitably. Trading between such groups ensured that necessary and desirable materials and products reached those who needed and wanted them. Trade made us what we are today: the most wide-spread and successful animal on Earth. It also encouraged the development of our most dangerous vice, greed, which has brought us to the point of no return in climate change.
     In short, trade is essential to human beings, and trade requires honest dealing and justice. It also raises a question: Was it trade that distinguished us from our sibling species, the Neanderthals, Denisovians, and others? Was it trade that gave us the advantages that enabled us to outcompete them? I see no obvious method for answering this question, but I think it’s an important one. Equally important is the question of how we can adapt our trading practices to survive climate change.
     Another good collection. Pretty well all past issues are available from the publisher; some have been reprinted as annual sets. ****

 Lapham’s Quarterly X-4: Music (2017) I enjoyed the pieces by the musicians and composers best. Mixes of memoir, technical discussions, and reviews. They gave me insights not only into how music-makers experience the world and their art, but also into why I find music an essential part of my life. Music “sounds the way feelings feel”, to quote a phrase from Suzanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1957). David Levitin’s researches into the neurology of music support that insight.
     There have been many speculations about the source of music’s power and of the human need to make it, and the attempts to justify or ban it on theological, moral, or philosophical grounds. The excerpts here are interesting as evidence of how all attempts at understanding ourselves are predicated on and hence limited by contemporary assumptions about reality. They may have satisfied the writers and their readers, but reading them now I was continually distracted by current knowledge of neurology, and a wider experience of music than some of these writers had. They also demonstrate the role of culture in music: in most cultures, music is assumed to be a finished art, and students are taught to emulate and replicate music as defined by their predecessors. The notion that art should be new, that an artist should create new and original works even when within a tradition, that notion seems to be peculiarly European, and a recent one, too.
     There are several fascinating bits about the instruments. All are versions of the three basic technologies: pipes, strings, and drums. ****

Clocks mark the Crime. (Christie's The Clocks)

 

 

Agatha Christie. The Clocks.  (1963) An absurdly complicated murder: Sheila Webb, a typist from an agency, arrives at her supposed client’s house, goes into the sitting room as directed, and finds a dead man behind the sofa. Miss Pebham, her supposed client, denies having asked for her. The dead man’s jacket pocket yields a business card for a non-existent insurance agency. And so begins a very tangled story, which Poirot does not solve until (as usual) a chance remark rearranges the facts into a satisfying solution.
     The problem and solution is pure Christie: improbably complex, made plausible only because of the careful plotting and characterisation that creates the illusion of character-driven choices. It’s the asides that makes this book worth reading. There’s a charming passage in which Poirot pontificates on his reading of crime fiction (having exhausted the available true crime literature with which he has enlivened his retirement). There’s a suitable young man, Colin Lamb, whose secret service career is the reason for his being on hand when Sheila rushes from the house screaming with fear. There are venal and over-confident baddies, persons of interest, red herrings, and enough ambience to satisfy those of us who read Christie for the nostalgia.
     All in all, a well done entertainment, above average for Christie. ***½

Two Sci-Fi Anthologies: Pohl and Nebula Awards

 

Frederik Pohl. Day Million (1970) In his introduction, Pohl says that these tales have only two things in common: One is they were written by “myself” – I put it like that because I’m not really entirely sure that that 20-year-old who banged out It’s A Young World is much like the 50-year-old who is telling you about it now. The other is that are all “science fiction.” He goes on to puzzle over the label for the genre, noting that much “science fiction” contains no science at all. At the time he wrote, the genre was still widely dissed as adolescent trash. But many of the classics Gulliver's Travels, 1984) are in fact what we label “science fiction”. If we consider any fiction to be an extended answer to “What if?”, then all fiction is “science fiction”.
     Pohl wrote for the pulps, which means he had to write stories that sold, which means that they couldn’t be too different. Readers expect both the familiar and the new, but the new had better be a variation or extension of the familiar. Johnson said that the purpose of art is “to make the new familiar and the familiar new”. “Science fiction” is the art that specialises in that endeavour. Pohl was a master. The story he wrote when he was 20 years old still stretches the reader’s expectations. The world it describes has been set up to enable the immortal leaders of the stellar empire(s) to recover their psychological equilibrium and emotional strength.
      Any of Pohl’s tales is worth reading. *** to ****

James Blish. Nebula Award Stories Number Five (1970) The three award-winning stories, plus three add-ons, and a couple of essays about the state of science fiction in the 1960s, which I didn’t read. The stories are all worth reading. The best I think is Ursula Leguin’s Nine Lives, a meditation on what makes us individuals, via the fancy that a team of ten clones would feel and act as one. When nine of them are killed, the survivor is faced with the a life of appalling loneliness.
   Terror also figures in Silverberg’s Passengers: he posits invasion by entities that “ride” humans by taking over their brains. It’s a literal take on enthusiasm, which originally meant being inhabited by a god (en- “in” thus- “god” -(i)asm “state or condition”). Recall Shakespeare’s “As flies are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.”
     *** to ****