Pandemic Reads 8 & 9
These books have been out for around 10 years, and have been on my Amazon wishlist for a while. Sorry if this is old news!
The City & The City (China Miéville, 2009)
At first I was expecting this surreal novel, about two co-located cities where residents completely refuse to see or interact with each other, to be an allegory for something in current or recent history, either Berlin or the Israel-Palestine conflict. There is eventually a scene where the characters tsk at foreigners who make comparisons to other cities, and I started to accept the author’s world-building as its own thing. There was real development into how the two cities maintained borders and passports and taught their children, and it played into the story. I was reminded of Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel series where the rival cultures were described through a detective story. It also made me think a lot about maps and apps, especially when foreigners visit.
The investigation storyline seemed to drag in the second part, and the growing importance of Breach grated at me — the novelty of two cities overlapping each other was that it was ingrained into culture or law, not policed by (supernatural?) forces.
Coltan (Michael Nest, 2011)
This is a small, academic-style book about coltan mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), how it is part of the ongoing conflict there, and the nonprofit advocacy and corporate responsibility movements in the US, Europe, and Australia. Immediately after finishing the book, I looked up the most recent interview I could find with the author (Nov 2016) to see if there were any updates, and that interview covers the basics. I would summarize this book as: armed groups sustain themselves through any available raw materials, and coltan activism isn’t smart economics.
This is the first time I’ve read any insight into the conflict in DRC, and how it involves Rwanda and Uganda. Coltan was one of a few raw materials which militias (and the national army) could profit from in areas when they cannot develop law or infrastructure. A jump in pricing made it briefly prominent, but the author gives examples of news articles publishing and re-publishing baseless statistics about coltan. I was surprised to learn how much coltan was mined in Australia (at the time of publication), and that it’s uncommon for local peace initiatives to put smuggling coltan as any more important than gold or wood. The author also discusses countermeasures in supply chains and fingerprinting. Smuggling, Chinese trade, and the government sponsorship of some armed groups make all of these countermeasures less effective.
Next on my list:
The Forever War (Joe Haldeman, 1974 (2009 edition))
The Last Days of El Comandante (Alberto Barrera Tyszka, 2020 translation)
