Swabbed Again

Coronavirus swabbing is no better at second experience, and definitely not at before 10:30 on a Monday morning when you didn't get to sleep until after dawn.

Sent a text to my sister saying as much, and only noticed after I had pressed send that the speelchucker had changed "swabbed" to "stabbed", which of course my sister saw before I could send a hasty correction. *headdesk*

Boris's performance last night provoked much derision. He was doing better than I expected, right up until he got to actual policy, and people returning to work today, at 12 hours notice, when the government's guidance on COVID-proofing workplaces is still largely just TBD (not an exaggeration, major sections of the drafts released last week are blank, notably including the entire PPE section). And then he announced that Reception and Year 1 would be returning to primary schools at the start of June. Has he actually met a 4 or 5yo? How does he propose you maintain appropriate social distancing among 60+ of them, and their teachers? Just sent that one in as a question for this afternoon's Q&A, probably no chance it'll be picked, but likely to be lots of people asking similar. I strongly suspect my sister is circulating the appropriate web page around teacher news groups as I type.

It was patently obvious that Boris had been bullied by the airlines into rolling back implementing his 14 day quarantine proposals, which is pure weakness. It would have been better to say "we recognise this is catastrophic for the airline industry and will be providing financial support" and implement it anyway.

Overall, it was such a dog's breakfast that I'm wondering if they haven't deliberately set it up to fail: "Sorry, we gave you your chance, but R's going up again. So back into lockdown we go." Which handily transfers the blame for extending lockdown from his government to us.

Recent Reading:

I haven't felt much like reading recently, but I'm getting back into it:

Livia Lone, Barry Eisler

( Content Warning for mention of child abuse )

The Human Division (Old Man's War 5), John Scalzi

I've now read books 1, 4, and 5 of the Old Man's War series, as I'm picking them up when Amazon put them on offer. They're well written, but they're just not catching my interest in quite the same way as the Locked In books. In this case that might be because it's actually a fix-up novel of a bunch of short stories originally released on the Tor website. Lieutenant Harry Wilson was a secondary character in Old Man's War, he's now one of the three surviving of the seven 'Old Farts' from that book, which probably doesn't get quite as much attention from his superiors as it should considering John Perry, the original series protagonist and Old Fart, was responsible for the Earth finding out the colonies had been deliberately keeping them primitive in order to farm them for disposable infantry, which means Earth has now cut the colonies off, and is independently negotiating with the aliens who threaten the continued existence of the colonies. Harry got out of the front lines as a weapons scientist, but is now attached to the colonial diplomatic corps as a technical consultant and part of a shipload of troubleshooters. Only it's recognised that as troubleshooters go, this is definitely the B Team. So each story has Harry, or one of his acquaintances, getting involved with a situation with an alien race, or the Earthers, and trying to put out the fires, usually while completely out of their depth.

The tone feels just slightly off to me. The colonies reckon they have about 30 years at the outside, without the strategic depth of the Earth's teeming masses of 75yo infantry recruits, but a lot of the writing is played for laughs. And it's still a remarkably American future. I think the only non-American human characters are the ambassador Harry works for, who left Nigeria as a child, and a bunch of South African soldiers who are played as stereotypical stupid thugs. (I'm counting the colonists as American, because honestly that's how they're played, even though the first book specified they don't take Americans as colonists, only as infantry).

The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency 2), John Scalzi

Another cheap pick up from Amazon, and again I haven't read the preceding book, which apparently saw a series of assassination attempts/attempted coups leave Cardenia Wu-Patrick (previously the Imperial illegitimate spare) as newly-crowned Grayland II, Emperox of the Interdependency, which is a sort of combination Empress/Pope deal. As things open, about the only people who believe the Interdependency is facing an existential crisis because of the impending collapse of the flow streams on which in interstellar transport, and civilisation, depends, are Grayland and her pet scientist. Meanwhile the House of Wu is pissed with Grayland for disrupting trade with her wild theories, and the House of Nohamapetan is pissed with Grayland for surviving the various assassination schemes which left one it's three heirs dead, one stuck on the wrong side of a collapsed flow stream, and one jailed, facing treason charges.

So basically the entire book is Grayland and her small number of allies trying to convince everyone the sky is falling and maybe they should build a few shelters, while trying to avoid multiple schemes to unseat her.

I liked it, it's not a Locked In, but it hangs together better as a novel than The Human Division, and it doesn't suffer from that series' American-in-Space issue. There's enough context given you can survive without having read book 1, and I'm interested enough I'll probably pick up book 1 at some point, and whatever comes next in the series.