The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971

I polished off quite a few novels while we were traveling in June, and I’m still in the process of writing up my impressions. So here’s another one:

George Orr has a problem. His dreams can alter reality. He dreams that the world is different in some way, and then reality actually shifts to oblige him. He once dreamed his creepy aunt was out of his life, and then he woke up to find she’d died six weeks previously. Retroactively. And he is the only one consciously aware that the new reality isn’t the way things have always been.

Orr is understandably terrified that he has this power, and he’s been abusing illicit medication to keep himself from dreaming. Eventually the authorities catch up with him, and he ends up with a court-ordered therapist. This turns out to be one Dr. William Haber, who has been experimenting with a machine called the Augmentor to induce dreaming.

At first, Haber naturally thinks Orr is delusional, but with close proximity to his patient, Haber also becomes aware of what is really happening. He comes to see Orr as an invaluable tool to change the world for the better, to put an end to climate change (already a major worry in the world of the novel, published in 1971), to war, to overpopulation.

For instance, Orr inadvertently "solves" overpopulation by dreaming up a plague that retroactively ravaged humanity years earlier, reducing the Earth’s population to a manageable one billion people. Who could possibly have ethical problems with this?

Orr is a meek, humble man who is frightened by Dr. Haber’s grandiose schemes, but legally has no choice but to cooperate. He seeks out a lawyer, Heather Lelarche, who becomes the novel’s third viewpoint character, but the nature of her relationship to Orr shifts as the universe drifts further and further from where we began.

This was actually the first Le Guin I ever read that wasn’t set in the Hainish universe (somehow I managed to avoid the Earthsea books as a child), and it was a quick read. Wikipedia gives the page count as 184 pages. Sometimes it seems like writing novels of this length is a lost art now.

One odd random thought I had was that this is a rare 1970s novel set in the early 21st century that doesn’t seem dated. I mean, the details of current events are all invented of course (Portland, Oregon as unpleasant overcrowded megacity), but the broad worldbuilding isn’t -- a hypothetical screen adaptation produced in 2018 could set the story in our 2018 and it could be roughly faithful to the original narrative. Of course, it helps that the world of the story quickly mutates beyond the relatively mundane universe it starts in.

(Only after I finished tLoH did I learn it's already been adapted for TV not just one, but twice. I have not seen either version.)

The Lathe of Heaven moves very quickly and a lot happens. The plot summary I wrote above doesn’t even cover the vast weirdness of the second half of the novel, as oddities keep piling on cumulatively. As I said, the novel is just 184 pages, and yet I feel as if I’ve read SF novels three times the length that don’t have nearly as much plot. I don’t necessarily mean that negatively -- I have dearly loved some novels that took their time to unfold -- but it’s also good to come across a short, satisfying read, of the sort that SF authors put out more commonly in decades past.

A Modest Taxonomy, For Your Consideration

I’m not naturally a confrontational person. I’m a consensus builder by nature. Now, my natural inclination is all fine and good in certain situations, but I am fully aware that consensus building isn’t always the best way to go. For example, you wouldn’t want to build a consensus with someone who wants to grind up half the population and feed them to cattle, and absolutely refuses to budge from that position. And you can’t build a consensus with someone who just joins disputes for sport. These people exist and they know how to use the Internet.

This taxonomy is what I’ve gleaned from watching arguments unfold online. I’m limiting it to specific patterns of behavior that are never useful, no matter the context, and are therefore a giveaway that the person is not engaging with others in good faith. I blame my non-confrontational nature for the fact that, in the past, these behaviors have annoyed me so much that I've been driven to master them by describing them, and by so doing hopefully make them seem silly and uncool.

I always try to remember that we can never truly know what another person is thinking, especially over the Internet. But there are so many times when I can only assume someone’s sitting behind the computer at home giggling and thinking “I sure annoyed those people good, didn’t I?”

I've observed all of these multiple times on Facebook, but they're not by any means limited to there (just last week I saw an excellent manifestation of a Learned Expert on a classy, heavily curated comment thread, which was the main impetus for me to write and post this), and I suspect that if I used Twitter regularly, this taxonomy would be twice as large as it is. I have every intention of expanding this as I start discerning more patterns in the wild.

The Being of Pure Energy

Join a discussion and be antagonistic. Tell people they’re wrong, cast doubt on their good intentions and basic knowledge. But whatever you do -- and this is critically important -- don’t say anything of substance.

Then when people inevitably complain you’re being a jerk, you get to complain that they’re just making personal attacks but they haven’t responded to any of the points you’ve made. Of course, this is because you didn’t make any points -- in fact, you’ve said nothing that can be engaged with.

The Learned Expert

Insist that someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t feel any need to be brief; some Learned Experts do this over the course of several posts, while others prefer one very long post.

But -- and this is vitally important -- don’t say why they’re wrong. Don’t say anything specific that could reveal your own level of expertise. Don’t make any statements about the topic at hand that others could engage with. Truly high-level Learned Experts can do this without ever explicitly acknowledging what the topic of discussion even is.

Sanctimonious Flounce Type A: The Scuttler

When people disagree with you, say something like “You shouldn’t get your panties in a knot just because someone has different opinions!” or “Personally, *I* like engaging with people with different points of view!” and then exit the conversation permanently. For added effect, block the people you were arguing with.

Note that this is the most ridiculous of the behaviors in this taxonomy. As a result, there’s a risk that your victims will just find it funny. Of course, since you blocked them, you will never know, so you can imagine them getting really annoyed and then giggle at your own mental fantasy.

Sanctimonious Flounce Type B: The Hypocrite

For this one, it’s fine to say things of substance. But you also need to be annoying or needlessly antagonistic in some way. When people predictably respond in kind, or call you out for being a jerk, say something like “I’m usually happy to engage with people with different points of view, but your rudeness has turned me off so I’m outta here.” Needless to say, the more sanctimonious you make this sound, the better.

Now I need to shift gears. Out of this whole taxonomy, the Sanctimonious Flounce Type B is the one that bugs the most when I see it in the wild. But I think that’s because there’s something different about this particular pattern. Sanctimonious Flounce Type B is the most subjective item in this taxonomy, because rudeness is inherently an “eye of the beholder” kind of thing.

That’s why, unlike the other behaviors I’ve outlined here, whenever I observe a Sanctimonious Flounce Type B in the wild, I wonder if maybe they're genuinely acting in good faith. We’re all the protagonists of our own stories, and maybe in their minds, they’re not the ones being irritating; maybe they think they’re the ones dealing with online nitwits.

And that’s why, for me, this is also a lesson in being self-aware. We all must be aware of how we come across to others, and I don’t ever want to accidentally play the role of a Sanctimonious Flounce Type B.

How to Use This Guide

If you don’t feel like increasing your self-awareness, I suppose you could try on these roles yourself, although any amusement you get may be outweighed by losing friends, and frankly you’ll deserve it. Better to treat this taxonomy as a field guide to behaviors you may be lucky enough to spot in the wild. “I saw an actual Sanctimonious Flounce Type A today on Facebook,” you may tell your significant other when they get home from work. “Naturally, he scuttled away before I could get a closer look.”

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Infomocracy

Infomocracy

by Malka Older, 2016

Infomocracy is one of many books I’ve read in the past few years that could be called near-future political thrillers. However, it’s the one that leaves me most keen to start reading the sequels. We’ve got a very strong combination of storytelling and worldbuilding skills here.

Here goes. I’m going to describe the worldbuilding first.

Imagine there’s no countries.

“It isn’t hard to do”, you say? Well, hold on. There’s still religion, and possessions too. Plenty to kill or die for. No brotherhood of man here. All we’ve got is a radical change in how political power has been organized.

The world has been divided up into political units of 100,000 people each, called “centenals”. Every ten years, they all hold simultaneous elections to decide which governments will be in charge for the next decade. The largest governments, with names like Liberty (libertarian-leaning) and Policy1st (technocrats focused on good governance), regularly capture centenals on every continent. Others are more regional; for instance, at least two major governments are primarily based in China, though there’s always a chance they could win in the odd centenal outside their power base.

The government that wins the most centenals becomes the “Supermajority”, effectively a limited form of world government. The current Supermajority is called Heritage, which seems to be a vaguely right-of-center party with strong corporate backing, though it’s anyone’s guess if they’ll still be in power after the next election.

The other distinctive feature of this world is “Information”, an independent entity that has apparently replaced the news media, and seems to be generally trusted by people of all political stripes around the world (a very impressive achievement, in my own humble opinion).

The current year is never mentioned, but technology is moderately more advanced than our own. (One notable change is that gun-neutralizing technology is now ubiquitous, and as a result knives, swords and shuriken have made an impressive comeback.) Older only vaguely glosses over how this system of government came into being, which is a wise choice. I would have a very difficult time accepting that humanity as I know it would accept the advent of Information so easily, but present it as a fait accompli and I’m happy to speculate about what will happen next.

Our story takes place in the days leading up to the third global election under this system. Our primary protagonists are Ken, an operative working for Policy1st, Mishima, an agent of Information, and Domaine, a dissident who is skeptical of the whole centenal system. Each of these characters does quite a bit of hopping around the globe in the run-up to the election, with East Asia as the novel’s geographical epicenter -- Tokyo, the Ryukyus, and Jakarta all see quite a bit of action.

Domaine is an anarchist working to bring down the system that Ken and Mishima believe in, but he is not written as a bad guy and his views are presented sympathetically. The novel’s true villains are the shadowy interests within certain governments who are determined to stir up trouble, and perhaps tamper with the voting. Mishima is convinced that one of the big governments is deliberately trying to stir up old-timey nationalistic warmongering, in extremely subtle ways tailored to the local cultures around the world. (What I remember best is the ad that runs in China with imagery of a great continental power rising up and enveloping a suspiciously Taiwan-shaped island.) But this isn’t enough to prove that they’re up to anything….

In Malka Older’s day job, she has worked for several years in international development, humanitarian aid and disaster relief. She has created a complex world here, and she’s willing to contrast political positions with some subtlety and empathy.

I have a habit of reading Book 1 of this sort of series and never continuing to Book 2, so it’s high praise that the next book, Null States, is on my reading list.

Stonemouth

Stonemouth

by Iain Banks, 2012

Scottish gangsters. That’s not a noun phrase that bounced around my brain before I read Iain Banks’ 2012 novel Stonemouth, but maybe that’s just my blinkered view of the world.

Stonemouth is a Scottish town dominated by a pair of wealthy families, the Murstons and the MacAcetts, both with deep links to organized crime. It is also the hometown of our protagonist Stewart, who is returning home after a five-year absence. He has done quite well for himself while away, getting hired by a prestigious London firm, but he didn’t leave Stonemouth by choice. He’d been engaged to be married to a Murston girl named Ellie, but something happened . . . and ever since, it’s been clear that if Stewart returned to Stonemouth, the consequences would be unpleasant, painful, and possibly fatal.

So what happened? Banks doesn’t tell us at first, rather letting us put the pieces together as we follow Stewart’s cautious return to his hometown. The patriarch of the Murston clan has died, and it’s been agreed that Stewart’s attendance at the funeral will be tolerated, as long as he doesn’t stir up trouble in town, he stays away from Ellie, and he doesn’t overstay his welcome.

Needless to say, Stewart stirs up trouble, at least as the Murston clan reckons it, by speaking to rather too many people and asking inappropriate questions. Some time after the messy end of the engagement, one of Ellie's gangster brothers, Callum, plunged to his death off the town’s landmark suspension bridge. The death was officially a suicide -- case closed. Why is Stewart so oddly interested in what happened, anyway? Doesn’t he know it’s none of his business? the Murstons must be thinking.

The answer is that Stewart wants clarity. He wants to know exactly what happened to Callum, who’d been one of his old schoolmates. And he wants to clear up some niggling unanswered questions from the events that surrounded his breakup with Ellie . . .

Stonemouth is the most conventional Iain Banks novel I’ve read (comparing solely to other no-middle-initial Iain Banks books); it’s also the most recently written of the Banks novels I’ve read, by a considerable margin. Perhaps he mellowed quite a bit as he aged. (It’s very odd to read an Iain Banks novel set in a universe where Family Guy exists: it’s why Stewart hates it when people call him Stewie.)

Stonemouth does have one signature bit of Iain Banks grotesqueness, a lengthy flashback, near the middle of the book, in which Stewart as a child witnesses the violent demise of one of his friends. It seems completely superfluous to the plot. And yet I don’t think it’s gratuitous -- remove it, and the general mood of the book seems to be off, somehow, in a way I have trouble precisely articulating. Maybe the book needs this bloody middle to provide balance to the bloody ending that by then we readers are all aware must be coming.

Banks was a tremendously skilled writer who knew how to persuade readers to keep turning pages: I read Stonemouth beginning-to-end within a 48-hour period. He was playful with language and references; I am absolutely convinced, for instance, that he named an overgrown, dim-witted boy George specifically so readers could chuckle and think “That’s not George, that’s Lenny!” Sadly, though nobody knew it at the time, Stonemouth would turn out to be Banks’ penultimate book; just a year after it was published, Banks was diagnosed with aggressive cancer that quickly brought his life to an untimely end.

In the end, Stonemouth leaves me with an overpowering mood of what living in small-town Scotland is like. Also, the lesson “Don’t mess with gangsters”.

The Kitchens of Canton

The Kitchens of Canton

by Isham Cook, 2018

This novel was so heavy on the sexual body fluids I expected it to make my Kindle wet and sticky.

In all fairness, the book's not just sex. There's really weird time travel, too.

Was I reading Robert Anton Wilson? Maybe early-period Tom Robbins, perhaps Kurt Vonnegut in one of his more excessively weird moments? No, it was Isham Cook, Anglophone writer based in China, with a book of time-traveling weirdness that I’m not going to pretend I fully understand after just one reading but I will say I found weirdly entertaining.

Our hero is Jeff Malmquist, a semiotics professor (not, as people persistently misunderstand, a “semi-automatics professor”) who finds himself bouncing around time and space. He finds himself in a late-21st-century USA where the locals stockpile guns, paranoid about the ‘pedos’ they believe are lurking around every corner. Then there’s a 22nd-century America that’s become a Special Administrative Region of China following societal collapse -- too much paranoia about ‘pedos’, which was being stoked the whole time by foreign governments eager to see the USA tear itself apart.

Even more bizarrely, Jeff is unwillingly transported to an “Ancient Rome” theme park for rich Chinese pleasure-seekers, staffed by actual Italians who are also actual slaves. And finally, Jeff also finds himself in actual Severan-era Ancient Rome. In all of these locations, a large amount of sex happens, in very large quantities. With a special appearance by the Roman Emperor Elagabalus.

There’s a lot of untranslated dialogue in Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian and Latin, which effectively conveys Jeff’s sense of panicked uncomprehending confusion towards the kaleidoscoping alienness that he finds himself hurtling through. Why is he bouncing back and forth through time? Does it have anything to do with this T-shirt that combines cutting-edge smart clothing technology with… bizarre bad English?

I’ll end this post here -- except to say that this is the sort of narrative where I could probably connect the dots quicker if I were high when I read it. If that statement attracts you to this book -- if the author names I tossed off above for comparison purposes attract you to this book -- if the combination of ancient Roman decadence and modern political satire attracts you to this book… then by all means give this book a try.

Excession

Excession

by Iain M. Banks, 1996

Culture Novel Number Four. Just so we’re all caught up, here’s my description of what the series is all about: The Culture is a powerful and immensely wealthy interstellar state whose citizens are free from all material concerns and can lead lives of leisure. That’s actually quite boring from a narrative perspective, which is why the series primarily focuses on the Culture’s problematic foreign policy...

The Excession is a mysterious object in interstellar space that seems to be older than the Universe itself. It is believed to be a portal that can allow two-way travel between universes both older and younger than our own, and if it were to come into a government’s possession, the balance of power in the galaxy would be significantly altered. The Culture is, understandably, very intrigued by the possibilities. So are the Affront, a ludicrously unpleasant interstellar empire that the Culture has been tolerating for centuries. Personally I'm awfully judgemental about the Affront and have no problem calling them evil, but the Culture is far too urbane and cosmopolitan to label them as such. That said, they consider them to be very distasteful indeed, and they would really rather not see the Excession fall into the Affront’s hands (or tentacles).

The Culture is ruled by super-AIs known as Minds -- ordinary citizens of the Culture are basically their pet monkeys. This is the first novel in the series where the Minds really come to the forefront as major characters with individual agendas. It seems that some Minds see the Excession as the perfect opportunity to deliberately provoke a war against the Affront. The Culture will almost certainly suffer casualties on a vast scale, but the Affront are just plain unpleasant and the galaxy will be better off if their ambitions are checked now….

And that is part of the story of Excession, a novel with more viewpoint characters than all previous Culture novels combined and easily the most complex plot of the series so far. I’m happy I read it on paper and not on a Kindle, as I frequently had to flip back to re-read old sections to properly keep track of what was going on. (Tip to readers: yes, it is indeed important to keep the names of the various Minds straight in your head.)

This is the book that popularized the term Outside Context Problem, a wonderful idea for us history geeks to add to our mental lexicon:

... something most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop ... The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

The Excession, of course, represents an Outside Context Problem for the Culture, the Affront and the rest of galactic civilization, and unless it somehow decides to go away by itself, life as we know it will change forever.

Unfortunately, I really wanted to like Excession more than I did. To be clear, I didn’t hate it. The plot is well-thought out, and Banks is always a pleasure to read. The basic problem is that I didn’t care about the characters. None of the Minds are really relatable for us humans. The most prominent human character, an eccentric citizen of the Culture who seems to genuinely enjoy spending time with the Affront, is an interesting enough oddball that he might have been able to carry a novel as the sole protagonist, but his impact on the story is diluted by the fact that he shares narrative space with other characters who are either too enigmatic to really care about or just plain not interesting. This is where I really miss The Player of Games, with one main character who we stick with for the entire book.

After finishing Excession, I formulated a rule of thumb: My enjoyment of an Iain M. Banks novel is inversely proportional to the number of viewpoint characters it has. (Note: This only applies to Iain M. Banks, not Iain Banks.)

Other assorted notes:

• Vernor Vinge’s famed space opera A Fire Upon the Deep was published in 1992. Excession was published in 1996. I see a pretty clear and obvious influence of the former on the latter. I’m not the only one, am I?
• Banks seems to be making his characters more subtly alien now. In the previous Culture novels, the galaxy was unaccountably full of humans who’d happened to spring up on different planets; there were also more alien aliens (most notably the Iridians) but they seemed to be a minority. Here, aside from introducing the Affront, another weird-looking race, he’s also giving more hints of alienness to otherwise humanoid characters -- this retired war criminal has scales, that generic official has an oddly shaped head. (That doesn’t count the bit where the dude with wings sleeps with the lady with four arms; I figured they were both into body modification.)
• Is it just me, or is Displacer technology (basically a Star Trek-style transporter, but it runs on different technobabble) suddenly much more commonly used here than in the previous books? I figure it could just be because The Player of Games and Use of Weapons were both more planet-based and Excession is more starship-based, but it still comes across as a shift in the established technology of this universe.

Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator

Robert Harris’s trilogy Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator takes ancient Roman politics and makes it easily comprehensible for us moderns. His Romans are depicted as dissembling, duplicitous schemers, with motivations that we can easily get our heads around.

The trilogy centers on Marcus Tullius Cicero, influential politician of the first century BC and one of the best-documented individuals who lived in that world. Our narrator is his secretary, all-round right-hand man, and literal slave Tiro. Cicero was one of the few prominent Roman politicians who did not have a notable military career, which means this story is relatively light on the military side of things but very heavy on the life of a high-flying Roman lawyer and the machinery of politics. This was the period when the Roman Republic entered its death throes, with the machinery of the state breaking apart as powerful men tried new and creative methods to subvert it.

When you cover Cicero, you cover the Republic’s final decades. The first book, Imperium, deals with the first part of our protagonist’s public life. He rose to fame through his successful prosecution of the corrupt governor of Sicily, and used the case to launch his political career; the novel ends with his election as Consul in 63 BC. This was when Pompey and Crassus were the most powerful figures in Rome. Everyone knew Julius Caesar as a politician on the rise, but he had not yet begun his formidable military career.

The second book, Lustrum (or Conspirata in some countries) covers Cicero’s time as Consul and the years immediately after. This was the age of Lucius Sergius Catilina and his failed coup d’etat which inadvertently gave Cicero his greatest chance to shine in the history books. It was also the age of Publius Clodius Pulcher, the ancient world’s version of an Internet troll who found himself in a position of power. Book Two ends as Cicero’s political enemies force him to leave Rome in 58 BC; he goes into exile in Greece, where he sits in the dark and angrily obsesses about all that has been done to wrong him.

In the third book, Dictator, Cicero returns to Rome and navigates the tough political waters of the final years of the old order, as the Republic collapses amid civil war and dictatorship (hey title drop!). In the end, he is assassinated by agents of the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC. I hope that hasn’t spoiled too many potential readers, but in all fairness, very few prominent Romans of this time period managed to die of natural causes.

Robert Harris sticks close to the historical facts, sometimes in remarkable detail. More than once I went to Wikipedia to read up on the real-life counterpart to what Harris described, only to find that his depiction of events was basically quite accurate. If you don’t yet know much about the shaky final decades of the Republic, a great deal of what you’ll learn from these books will actually be correct! But this is still a work of fiction. Cicero is one of the best-documented people of his century, and yet the patchiness of the historical record gives Harris ample room to speculate and confabulate, particularly around the quotidian details of Cicero’s life and certain episodes from his public life. This was perhaps most true during Cataline’s attempted coup: I think it was Dan Carlin who pointed out in one of his podcasts that it’s impossible for us moderns to really know what happened in the conspiracy, as most of our sources ultimately trace back to Cicero’s version of events -- obviously not an objective source of information!

In our times we’ve got this subliminal idea that the ancient Romans were these dignified men in togas, striking a pose and making a speech, always in an upper-class British accent for some reason. At least, that’s how I used to imagine them. Then the more I learned about what they were really like, the more they struck me as, basically, Klingons. Violent and more than a little alien. Harris’s Romans aren’t like us -- for example, basically all upper-class Romans own slaves, but they’re not defensive about it like nineteenth-century American slaveholders, because it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that slavery might be considered morally wrong. And there’s plenty of casual misogyny that comes with the era, of course.

What’s more, the weirdness of antiquity is presented in a very matter-of-fact way. Many things about this Rome are strange to us; not only does this large city not have a police force, but there doesn't even seem to be an ancient police analogue that provides a similar function -- when someone hires a gang of thugs to harass you and explicitly threaten your life, you either barricade yourself in your home and wait it out, or you find your own gang of thugs.

And of course the schedule of important public events involves publicly slaughtering a bull and examining its entrails; why wouldn’t that be a thing you do?

Yet, if time travel really allowed us unfiltered access to the real people of this culture, I wonder if their mindsets wouldn’t be even stranger to us than Harris’s recreation.

Cicero himself comes across as a very intelligent and hard-working schemer whose moral core allowed him to operate with considerable flexibility. I’m sensing a very cynical view of politics in these books, though it’s hard to feel idealistic when describing this particular time period. I can overlook Cicero’s rampant bribery, on both the giving and receiving ends (assuming Harris’s depiction is approximately accurate), if this is indeed how things were done at the time. And while I don’t have to like it, I can’t single out Cicero for being a slave owner when Rome was a slave state.

What I cannot overlook is pushing through the executions of several Romans without trial in the wake of Cataline’s failed coup. Not cool, Cicero. I might have admired you as something of an admirable character at the remove of 2,000 years, but I’m afraid those summary executions are a dealbreaker, Cicero.

I can just imagine you here right now, rolling your eyes and muttering “Here we go…”. I know you never lived down those executions. For the rest of your life, your political enemies used them as a cudgel against you. But you see, that makes it worse. That means executing people without trial was not considered normal in your society. That means you don’t get special consideration by being a Long-Ago Person who followed different rules. Robert Harris did his best to conjecture what the hell motivated you, but as a modern person who grows more opposed to authoritarianism with every passing year, I must say you crossed a line on that day in 63 BC.

Or, to put it another way, now I’m righteously indignant about something that a politician did almost twenty-one hundred years ago. And it’s all thanks to Robert Harris bringing him to life.