Hemmed in by geography

I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment called Prisoners of Geography: ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics, by Tim Marshall. I think the subtitle is slightly overstated. 'Everything' isn't true, because some countries aren't included: Australia gets three brief mentions, and New Zealand one. Plainly our politics aren't global enough.

But what the book does tell you is fascinating. It brings a whole new light to so much world news, and some breadth to just who holds power in the world. And who doesn't.

For instance, Russia, which is a vast nation in terms of real estate, is in reality only a relatively small country, because so much of the area it covers isn't much good for human beings to live in (as anyone sent to Siberia will tell you). The Russia we mostly think of is a smallish area to the West.

Furthermore, there are considerable problems with Russia's location: it's far more landlocked than it would like to be. And that's what Marshall is discussing: countries are bound far more strongly by where they're physically placed on the earth than by many other considerations. If there's no real access to waterways, then that can be extremely inhibiting. A number of countries are completely landlocked. If there are mountain ranges on your borders, then this may be helpful in terms of stopping invaders, but it's also a nuisance when it comes to trying to get over the mountains yourself.

And it helps to have good neighbours. Many countries don't, and spend a great deal of time fighting those next door.

Marshall also points out how the 'countries' we know in the world at present are, in some cases, relatively new on the world map. They didn't exist in this form a couple of hundred years ago. The British are to blame for some of these changes (along with the French and other empire-building nations). For example, the Brits, once they'd done with their Empires, tended to make hasty decisions about who would live where after the Brits themselves had gone. India and Pakistan's problems stem in part from this. Pakistan is one of the youngest 'nations' in the world, because basically it didn't exist less than a hundred years ago. Bangladesh is ever younger.

The Brits also drew lines across vast swathes of the Arab world, causing some of the problems we know today - though not all of them. The Arab tribes have been at war with each other for centuries, in one way or another. But a somewhat laissez-faire approach to map-making has had some huge consequences for those living in the region. You wouldn't expect maps to change the way nations see themselves; maps, after all, are only pieces of paper. (Unless of course they're magic, as the map in my latest children's fantasy is.)

Marshall manages to get to the nub of different countries' problems in succinct ways, and leaves you with a clearer understanding of what's going on around you. While his thesis is that geography itself is partly to blame for much of the world's infighting, he also shows how the movement of peoples around that geography can have beneficial or disastrous effects on other people, ones who were there first, as it were.

Marshall's point about geography, of course, affects us all even at a micro level. I live on a hill, which affects how I get to the city retail areas which are mostly on the flat. But it does mean I have great views of the Harbour and sea. I'm unlikely to be flooded, because water runs off our property easily, unlike some of my fellow citizens in areas that have been reclaimed.

New Zealanders, for the most part, live on two relatively equally-sized islands (imaginatively-named by our forebears as North and South). The gap between these two islands is a nuisance for travellers. Either we have to fly from the South to the North or vice versa, or we have to spend a considerable time going over the Cook Strait, a choppy bit of water that isn't always kind to travellers.

The North Island is warmer, as you'd expect, and has more population in its bigger cities. But in spite of what North Islanders think, the South isn't that cold: Scotland is much colder in the winter; many cities in the USA have snow for months at a time. We here in Dunedin, for instance, are lucky to get it once a year.

So geography and weather make a difference, as Napoleon found to his cost when he lost thousands of his French soldiers to the Russian weather - as Hitler also did with his German troops. For all our sense that we live in a world of vast choice, the reality is that we're hemmed in considerably by geography...

Marshall's book is fairly up to date, but the world keeps changing. He extends his book's range on his website The What and the Why.

Disenchanted Wizard takes another step forward

My latest children's book, The Disenchanted Wizard, has now been revised again, and is about to go before my editor/structural advisor/picker-upper of errors and inconsistencies...

It was nearly ready the other day, I thought, and then just as I was about to send it off, I realised that I could improve the ending considerably. This took some rewriting of a couple of chapters and reshuffling of more. However, the result was worth doing, and I think the thing is better altogether for it.

This story has a brief reference to Grimhilda!, so it can justifiably be considered as part of the Grimhilderness series. I'm even thinking of a sequel to it (already) which will tie up its links to Grimhilderness still more. But that's not quite ready to get up and running yet.

The story concerns a 12-year-old girl, Della, whose cousin, Harold, has just received a new map - it's his hobby to study maps. This map is a bit unusual in that it has some badly drawn pictures around the sides. Which would be all right, except that one of the pictures moves...

It turns out that Della's father was involved in a very strange event about fifteen years before, and is now in danger. And of course, he's not the only one.

Anyway, that's just a taster of what's in it. I'm hoping to have it e-published before the end of the year. It's taken a lot longer to write than I'd expected, so I'm not promising that it will actually appear in 2015, but let's hope so!

Not The Disenchanted Wizard

Back in November I got myself involved in the NaNoWriMo competition which requires you to write a 50,000 novel in a month. I wrote about doing this at the time, when I was still only some 38345 words ahead. I finished the 50,000 words, but some of them were the scruffiest words you can imagine...which is not surprising if you're trying to write a novel almost from scratch in a month.

I know some people can write quickly and confidently. Some claim that their first draft is the only draft, and usually only needs tidying up. (Stephen King claims this is the way he works: comes back to it after a couple of months and removes all the excess adjectives and adverbs.) Some have a gift for storytelling that just seems to pour out of them, and though those works may have some flaws, they carry the reader along all the same.

My certificate, though the
book's title has now changed

There were some good things in my story, some interesting and fantastical events, and I knew where I wanted to finish up...roughly. But when I'd finished the 50,000 words (which included a lot of notes about what I was writing, which is how I write anyway) I had a big hole between the first two-thirds and the last couple of chapters. In fact, though I tried to write those last chapters, they were awful, because I wasn't sure how the characters had actually got to that point.

So over the last month or so I've been working at the story again, first by going through it and making lots of notes (yup, that's how I work), and then trying to work out some of the problems, and then trying to figure out a structure and then discovering, over and over, that if I did such and such then I'd have to answer the question as to why such and such...if you get my drift.

A few days ago I tried working backwards from those last chapters to try and figure out how things got to that point. Copious notes ensued. Copious notes, and oodles of questions. I'm getting sick of my inner editor asking, But why...? like a nauseating two-year-old that someone's left on your doorstep and you have to look after for the afternoon. (Having been through the two-year-old questioning stage at least five times, it's not a period of life that I find quite so endearing as I once did...)

Anyway, today I feel as though I'm making progress. I'm now in the position of being able to go back to the beginning to sort out the structure again, this time with a lot of the reasons for things happening already in place, instead of being guessed at. Of course there are still questions (Be quiet you nauseating child!) but we're managing to work things out.

As I said in my last post this is a prequel to Grimhilda! the first book in this series of children's stories, and explains, amongst other things, how the Maps came to be the Maps, and who they are (something I thought I knew back in November - I was proved wrong and had to give the original couple their dismissal notices).

The big climax was to have taken place in a different country altogether to the rest of the story. I finally realised late last night that this was just adding to my burdens, and ditched the whole idea, along with copious notes and things copied off the Net. Much more straightforward for the storytelling to keep the thing in one city; it's the third city to appear in these books. The first two were unnamed, but this one has a name, though whether it'll actually appear in the book is another question.

Anyway, at this point I don't have a deadline for finishing the story, but I think once I start writing the next draft, I'll get an idea of how from publishing it'll be. As long as characters don't keep wanting to change their motivations and backstories and refusing to do what they're told.

Sorting out the world

Just something quirky that my son showed me the other night.

It's well known that the maps of the world we usually see are distorted, with the Northern hemisphere countries being out of proportion to their actual size. (Here's a map that gives a better indication of relative sizes.) But what's really intriguing is that the map of Africa (the whole continent) comfortably swallows up countries that we normally think of as huge: the US, China, and India.

Population size doesn't equate to land size, which is why, as I was told yesterday, the Chinese invaded India back in the 50s/60s (sorry, not just sure of the date), in order to have more space. If they'd really wanted space, they should have shifted some of their population to Africa. The Africans might not have even noticed. Or to central Australia. No one would have noticed if they'd been quiet about it.

Anyway, here's where to find the map of Africa with China, India, the US, Great Britain, and all of Europe laid over it.

Russia doesn't fit, because, in spite of our general thinking, Russia has the largest land mass of any country, with Canada in second place - even though it's almost half the size. The US comes next (although it's in 4th place on this page) with China in the actual fourth place. Brazil and Australia follow.

There we go. Got the world sorted out at last.

Extreme Weather Events

I took Tim Jones’ first book of short stories, Extreme Weather Events, into hospital with me this week. His comment, before I went, was: EWE [is] a darker book, overall, than Transported [his second book], so it may not be ideal cheering-up fare if that is what you're looking for next week ... but that's up to you, of course. Well, EWE is certainly fairly dark in spots: Lizard, for instance, is plain horrible, in my reading of it, but it’s the darkest by a long way.
Some of the themes in this selection are similar to Tim’s second book: the apocalyptic destruction of the earth, climate change and the curious desire of people to worship in cultic groups where somehow morality is switched off.
Consequently, apart from the vile worshippers in Lizard, we have a bunch of them causing havoc in Temple in the Matrix, a sci-fi story with certain links to the film, The Matrix, and a vibrant language that’s sometimes unusual but never unreadable.
Maria and the Tree, the first story, takes place after some disaster has occurred in the world, and in spite of its gloomy tone, has a hopeful ending. Equally in the next story, Wintering Over, we know that there’s probably been a major nuclear disaster, but it’s only the background to the story of three scientists marking time in the Antarctic, rather than the main point.
In Tour Party some fairly large-scale disaster has happened, but we’re not party to the details.
These three stories lean to the pessimistic side of Jones’ writing, but, like many of his other stories, there’s a curious playful satire running across the surface. It’s not quite like the wit and humour of the second book (which was what encouraged me to read it), but it’s there.
The three short short stories, The New Land, The Kiwi Contingent, and The Pole, contain that delightful playing with a quirky idea that is Jones at his best, and The Man Who Loved Maps, quite apart from being set in my home town of Dunedin, is a warm-hearted story about a man who becomes the maps he so loves.
In another story, My Friend the Volcano, the female vulcanologist becomes one with Mt Taranaki via a bio-chip in her head. This story is told by a male narrator who falls in love with the girl, and who turns out to be surprisingly supportive of her rather odd approach to scientific study.
Black Box, the story of a kind of picture into the past that appears in the middle of Wellington one day (Wellington comes off rather badly in Tim’s world) ended a bit abruptly for me. I’d like to have explored further with the anonymous student who manages to break into the box, and discover what’s beyond its borders.
And finally, there’s Flensing, a very strange story about an abandoned fishing village and a church full of ghosts – and a family - father, mother and son - in which Oedipus might feel at home. There’s no doubt Jones has an imagination that hives off into peculiar corners. I can’t say I much liked this story (but then I’d just had an operation!), but it certainly sticks in the mind.