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Peter Adolphsen's Brummstein is a peculiar little novella; the story of a weird, vibrating stone that's chipped off an ancient rock at the bottom of a Swiss cave in 1908, and its travels from hand to hand throughout the 20th century in Germany. It should be a drily humorous tall tale in the classic Scandinavian tradition (lately represented by Paasilinna, Jonasson etc), but it's ultra-condensed to 64 pages, with passages in allegedly untranslated German (Adolphsen is Danish), with long asides on tectonic plate theory and starting the story billions of years ago, both reducing and emphasising the changes of the last 100 years as just a blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things. And suddenly, the people who pass by become both completely inconsequential and completely alive, caught up in a whirlstorm of ideologies flashing by, all promising a revolution of political, spiritual, racial or artistic thought while the stone keeps humming with the same frequency it's done for millions of years. Weird. But I love it.

"I want you to know that they stole victory from us."

As always with Alexievich, it's made up of individual stories, lots of little moments of history.

She who followed her husband into war because they couldn't bear to be apart, and fought at his side until he fell.

We held our wedding in a trench, right before a battle. I made myself a white dress from a German parachute.

She whose fellow male soldiers had to explain to their superiors why they needed more t-shirts, the female soldiers had stolen theirs and ripped them up. Why? Why on earth would female soldiers need extra rations of cotton once a month? Um... well, see, Lieutenant...

She who had an abortion to be able to go to war, and avenged her unborn child with every German she killed.

She who returned from the war, only to realise her own mother didn't recognize her. She who returned home and was cast out as a whore, because everyone knows what women do at the front. She who returned home and only found a mass grave where there'd been a village and had to dig through rotting corpses to find her family.

When I returned from the front, my sister showed me a grave ... They'd buried me.

She who saw her fellow soldiers rape their way through Germany and many years later still didn't know how she felt about it after what the Nazis did to her own family.

She who always carried two extra bullets because she knew the enemy considered female soldiers spoils of war.

They'd impaled her on a stake ... The frost had come, and she was all white and her hair grey. She was nineteen. In her backpack we found letters from home and a green rubber bird. A toy.

She who let her seven-year-old daughter carry a bomb inside the German HQ in a food basket.

And on and on and on, the ones who 40 years later tell a journalist what happened to them, and often begin with some variation on "My husband told me to just talk about troop movements and bravery, so you're probably not interested in what I have to say, but is it OK if I just talk a bit about how it feels to go to war?" She who listens, takes notes, passes along, tries to get them to tell their own stories and not just repeat the same old Great Patriotic War heroisms.

In the late 70s, Svetlana Alexievich started travelling the Soviet Union, interviewing a few hundred of the millions of women who took part in WWII. Yes, they were there, even if their story had never been told; farmer's daughters, schoolgirls and wives who more or less voluntarily served as nurses, cooks, sharpshooters, infantry soldiers, pilots, engineers, telegraphists... Only to return home and, best case scenario, were told "There, honey, now don't worry your pretty head about that nasty business again, go sit down and take care of your man like a proper woman if you still remember how after wearing pants for so long." Who've carried it all for 40 years without anyone asking about it.

Taken one by one, the stories become little novellas spanning from the prosaic ("Four years in men's underwear!") to the deeply tragic. When Alexievich puts them all together, they become something entirely different, a choir of voices, often identified only by first name and rank, finally telling what they went through during one of the bloodiest wars in history, and of the other war they've had to live with since. Superior officers who hide behind chivalry and protectiveness so they don't have to treat them as equals, fellow soldiers who admit that yeah, she's almost as good as a man and I owe her my life, but who wants a wife who's almost a man?, a society that expects them to make sacrifices with no thought of reward or recognition while the men who do the same thing are treated as heroes. The complete edition of the book adds another layer by including and noting the sections that were excised in the 80s, including the censor's comments on why they must be stricken. Only now, when most of the participants are dead, do they get to speak freely. In a Soviet society where everyone was equal, the great patriar... sorry, patriotic war couldn't be presented as womanlike twaddle about feelings, that would imply that something had been excluded from the official story. No, the esteemed censor becomes downright offended on behalf of the poor old women who don't know when to keep their mouths shut.

Who'd be prepared to fight a war after reading something like that? Your primitive naturalism is a slap in the face of womankind. And of the female war heroes. You dethrone them. Turn them into ordinary women, into bitches. They must be held sacred.

Which I guess is a rave review as good as any.

By far the weakest Ngugi I've read. While it still has some of the same great characterisation and pissed-off political analysis as Petals Of Blood and Wizard Of The Crow, it far too often turns into something that reads more like a play than a novel, where characters representing various factions simply recite long monologues of Post-Colonial Marxism 101 at each other. The fact that he wrote it while imprisoned for political crimes (supposedly, the chapters are of varying length because he wrote it on whatever paper he managed to get a hold of - including toilet paper) probably explains that, the novel is more a call to action than a subtle allegory, but it doesn't necessarily make it a better book. The ending packs one hell of a punch, though.

In 2010, the SETI - Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - initiative celebrated its 50th anniversary. And so physicist/cosmologist/astrobiologist Paul Davies was asked to write something. Rather than just write a simple back-patting congratulation, he decided to try and write about the whole concept: Why are we looking for signs of alien intelligence, how are we looking for it, how likely is it to exist, how likely are we to find it (or they to find us), what would we be likely to find, how would we react...? Is it possible that the big fat Zero that's been the result of our search so far means that we really are all alone in the universe, or are we just looking for a very tiny needle in a very large haystack? To do this, obviously, he can't just write about radio telescopes, he needs to go back and revisit the fundamentals: how does life arise and evolve, how would you travel or communicate across large distances, how would we even recognise technology that's thousands or millions of years beyond our own?

The Eerie Silence is a great little primer on most of these subjects, though at 210 pages you'll probably find yourself wanting to dig deeper in some areas. Some of the stuff that fascinated me:

Our telescopes keep finding more and more planets outside the solar system - 846 identified ones as of today - and with all the stars out there, it stands to reason that there could be millions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone; ie planets made of rock, in the "goldilocks zone" (not too hot, not too cold), with liquid water and an atmosphere. Theoretically, there could be a lot of aliens out there. But habitable doesn't mean inhabited; the problem when trying to figure out how likely that is, is that we simply don't have any indication of how easy the step is from "theoretically habitable" to "practical rocket scientists". As far as we know for sure (though Davies presents some interesting speculations), life has arisen in the universe exactly once (around 3.5 billion years ago on Earth) and evolved intelligence exactly once (Homo, about 2 million years ago), and one single data point doesn't give us any indication of how likely the same thing is to happen on other planets; it could happen every time, or never. For all we know, the universe could be empty, or it could be teeming with life that never evolved "past" bacteria or dinosaurs (going with the common fallacy that some animals are "more evolved" than others), or the 6-7 billion years that the average planet has before its sun supernovas simply isn't enough time to perfect interstellar travel. If there are aliens out there to communicate with, why wouldn't they have already done so? It's a bit like Stephen Hawking's question: if time travel is possible, why have we never seen any tourists from the future?

What would we be looking for, and how would we recognise it when we see it? We take for granted that communication from other civilisations would come as, say, a radio signal carrying prime numbers, because that's what we can hope to read. If there are others out there, they may well be trying to communicate in ways we haven't even conceived of yet.

For that matter, what would other, more advanced civilisations even want with us? Science fiction is full of aliens looking to humans as cheap sources of food, labour or concubines, which is just silly - if you're able to communicate across light years, you can't have much need for manual labour. How do we know they haven't noticed us and decided not to bother with us until we show some sign of intelligence? After all, we've only been broadcasting weak radio signals for about 100 years (and have pretty much stopped by now, since we're mostly using fiberoptics and satellites these days), and anyone looking at us from more than 110 lightyears away wouldn't even know that we've mastered flight.

What would members of an ancient civilisation even be? Even assuming they started out roughly like us, we're already edging into cyborg territory ourselves; would a species that's had another 40,000 years of "civilisation" even be biological anymore? (Yes, Davies is an Olaf Stapledon fan.) Would we even recognise them as life? Would we recognise their technology as artifice?

For all the high-flying speculations, The Eerie Silence is a sober and realitic look at the possibility of finding and communicating with hypothetical extraterrestrial civilisations. In the end, Davies is very sceptical that they even exist, but that's not his worst nightmare, nor a reason to stop looking. The worst-case scenario, he claims, is this: we keep looking, and we discover that there's plenty of life in the universe, and that it's occasionally evolved into intelligent beings... and that none of them have survived long enough to communicate with others before they wiped themselves out. If that's the case, then that's definitely something we need to know.

Or, as xkcd put it:

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

The Noodle Maker (2004) is set during the early 90s, in a China supposedly transformed by Deng's reform politics; everything is for sale now, you can go to McDonald's, you can start your own business feeding, clothing or burying your fellow comrades, women are learning to wear western makeup and men to expect them to. Of course, deep down, not much has changed; communism falling in Albania and Romania and the Tiananmen square massacre pretty much go unreported in favour of renewed efforts by the Party to find new ways of maintaining control. As long as you can control what people read and watch, you control what they want to spend their newfound wealth on, and so you can sit back and let capitalism serve the greater goal.

The novel finds two friends sharing dinner: a writer, who never does anything but write what he's told, and a blood donor. That's his profession: he sells his own blood, is paid in cash, and spends his money on western goods and eastern women. The writer is complaining that he's been commissioned to write yet another book praising a revolutionary hero. You're the one who chose to be a writer, says his friend; what the hell did you expect? You can't change anything. And so the writer starts telling him what he wants to write but isn't allowed to. Cue a series of interwoven short stories about men and women he knows (or knows of, or just made up) and their attempts to find their way out of a situation where three seemingly opposing systems - old traditions, Maoist dogma and cutthroat capitalism - work beautifully together to keep everything as it was.

OK, it's not perfect; Ma is a little too fond of epithets (necessary in-story, of course, since the narrator can't name any names), and I'm honestly not sure if some of the views on women presented are supposed to be the characters', the narrator's, or Ma's. But what impresses me about The Noodle Maker isn't just how vivid the stories are, ranging from gallows humour (the way one character can't see a naked woman without praising Mao, for instance) to soul-hurtingly depressing, but also the way the narratives keep getting sneakily hijacked - by the narrator, by the propaganda that inevitably pops up everywhere whether it says "Praise the Party" or "Buy Coke". He does his best to subvert it, but he can never escape it; he can take control of the story as long as he doesn't say it out loud, but language itself has been politicized to the degree that writers can only write in slogans, and characters can only act by either serving something or heroically sacrificing themselves. Orwellian in the best and worst sense.

In 1953, a rich American who finds himself in Rome has an idea: The war is over, there's a new world being born... Why not start a newspaper? Not just any newspaper, but a Serious Newspaper, an English-language newspaper that reports news from all over the world, seriously and intelligently. Done and done: he hires two intelligent editors and they get down to business.

Fast-forward 50-odd years: it's the late 00s, the paper is still based in Rome, still reporting news, still with a loyal if dwindling readership... but both the paper and the people working there are going through a huge mid-life crisis. CNN and the Internet have changed the news irrevocably, the old newsmen have died of lung cancer or strokes ages ago, the owners have become professional investors, and the elephant in the room is trumpeting something that sounds like a last sad chorus.

"The internet is to news," he said, "what car horns are to music."

And at that point, this probably sounds like a serious and slightly crotchety tale of how oh my times have changed, dearie me, nobody has any yada yada yada anymore. Except here's what Rachman does: he visits a different character in each chapter - the editors, the journalists, the owners, the foreign correspondents, the trainees, the readers - picking up the story from their point of view, both of journalism and the world, and their whole lives; what's left of it when they've sacrificed almost everything to run a tiny Serious newspaper that everyone knows is dying. And every chapter, while carrying the plot forward somewhere in the background, subverts the previous one. There are almost no Network- (or The Newsroom-)style proud defenses of the role of journalism, and if there are, the next chapter is bound to turn them on their head by giving the talking stick to a character who thinks the previous one is a pretentious prat. And is happy to tell us about it in detail; someone has to be blamed for the fact that something is about to end, after all.

There are laughs, there are tears, there's love and heartbreak and ugly death, absolutely brilliant little character sketches that would work as separate short stories... but put it all together and you get this puzzle of a novel, sliding down so easily that you barely notice how Rachman piles on all the sneaky backstory and all the ways people can dedicate their lives to exposing The Truth, while living lives filled with lies and wishful thinking and things they cannot bear to see... y'know, life. There's the title, I guess.