Reviews and Comments

Congratulations, Mr Spinrad. You can write disgusting fascist dreck. That it is faked doesn’t mean it’s not disgusting. So, yeah, important point to make about the stuff Cambell had published, but really, wouldn’t a short story have been enuf to make that point‽

So, yeah. Nice enough to leave through. I cba to read too much of the text, and the images were interesting enough for typography fans.

Eh. So, parts were quite interesting, but the list of everybody who ever had an idea for a irony or sarcasm mark was getting tedious. Also, i don’t believe the idea that # comes from ℔. The octothorpe is always just two pairs of perfectly straight, parallel lines. That is quite different from the & ← et story. The great variation of &s in different typefaces, many quite et-like, makes it very different from #. (Oh, and recently i learned about ⌗ along the better known ♯)

So, yeah. A detailed explanation of what was going on in the Kremlin in late 1940 until 22 June 1941, that is how it could be that Stalin believed that Hitler would not attack, at least not without warning.

This is touted as a reply to Suvorov’s Icebreaker. For that it is much too long.

Alles sehr orthodox – wir sind ja alle gute Katholiken hier in Schwaben.

Man sollte meinen, Dichter würden in ihren Gedichten ihre Gefühle ausdrücken, oder mindestens ihre Gedanken. Davon merke ich hier eigentlich nichts. Man liest ein Gedicht, und am Ende ist das Gedicht vorbei und mehr ist nicht. Was will uns der Dichter hier sagen? Gar nichts.

… aber die Meinungen teile ich nicht

Die etwas längeren Artikel über weniger Wörter ist genau dass, was ich bei »Interesting Stories about Curious Words« vermisst hatte.

Die Einträge zu »Eintopf« und »betreuen« (!) fand ich sehr interessant.

Aber »wir« sagen »innerer Reichsparteitag«? What. Ich hatte das nie gehört, und wäre nie drauf gekommen, den Ausdruck zu benutzen, und garantiert nicht positiv konnotiert. Und dann: »Die überwältigende Mehrheit der Nutzer (des Spruchs) will damit ganz gewiss keine Sympathie für den Faschismus ausdrücken.« Ja, nee. Wieso kennen Leute überhaupt noch so einen Nazi-Spruch? Was sagt das alleine über die unterschwellige Einstellung von Gruppen von Leuten aus?

I ges the author just went full TERF after this. So, yeah, there is transfobic stuff in there, but i’m not sure it is beyond what yu would get from the standard British transfobe.

Anyway. The rest of the book. My main complaint is that it is too long. Like the author was too famous to be be properly edited. Pretty much every paragraf should hav been edited down to half the length and about half the senes cut outright. For a 100 page crime novella it could hav worked. At this length yu ar expecting something more than a standard whodunit, but no, that is all yu get.

So, mostly a fun SciFi story, with callbacks to late 19th and early 20th century naval and general history.

The things that cost it a star for me are an number of smaller annoyances. The bits with the old admiral i didn’t like. There was generally too much going on, with the different factions attached to the festival. The romance subplot felt stitched on and could have been dropped.