Book Review: Hothouse (aka The Long Afternoon of Earth)

Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brian Aldiss never disappoints. This novel, which first came out in the U.S. with the title THE LONG AFTERNOON OF EARTH, won the Hugo Award in 1962. Rich in style and evocative in its imagery, it follows a band of some of the last survivors of humanity in the far future. The Earth has stopped rotating and the sunlit side is now a thick jungle dominated by a continent-spanning banyan tree.

Plant life has almost entirely taken over, with many strange and improbably plants species imitating forms previously known as animals and insects. Most plants are extremely deadly, and Aldiss kills off characters with reckless abandon.

Aldiss was criticized at the time for the lack of scientific believability in this novel. Indeed, it's almost science fantasy. Suspend your disbelief, however, and it's an absorbing read.

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Civil War Photo Friday: Soldier in the Indian Home Guard

During the Civil War, the Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) was as divided as the rest of the nation. Many Native American leaders hoped to get a better deal from the Confederacy than the years of lies and broken treaties the Federal government had given them, so at the beginning of the war much of the Indian Territory joined with the rebellion.

Some remained faithful to the Union, but after a series of defeats they had to flee to Kansas in the middle of the winter, on what the refugees called "the trail of blood on the ice." From these refugees the Federal government recruited men to create three Indian Home Guard units. This guy, whose name is now sadly lost, was one of them.

The Indian regiments faced prejudice from white civilians and soldiers. They were commanded by white officers and were required by law only to fight in the Indian Territory. That they did. Starting in the summer of 1862 the Indian Home Guard fought to retake their homes. The Confederate Indians never got many supplies from the resource-strapped Confederacy and support for the rebellion waned. By the end of 1863, most of the territory was back in Union hands.

Fighting continued until the very end, however, and the land was laid waste. An untold number of civilians died of exposure, disease, and starvation.

For a snapshot of the other side of the conflict, check out my post on the Cherokee Confederate reunion of 1903.


Photo courtesy National Park Service.

Guest blogging about my time in Iraq

Yesterday I was over at the Post Modern Pulp blog talking about my time with the various armed forces during my trip to Iraq. I also have a post on the Osprey Publishing blog today about some curious Ottoman artillery I saw in Baghdad. There are plenty of interesting photos in both of these posts.

So check them out, or my buddy here will level his machine gun at you. Also check out my Iraq travel series on Gadling.

China has taken over my domain name!

A couple of months ago I let my subscription for the domain name seanmclachlan (dot) com lapse. I wasn't getting nearly as many hits on that website as I do on this one, plus I was dissatisfied with my hosting service, who could never get the graphics-light website to load at a decent speed.

Shortly after my domain name became available it returned, this time with different graphics and entirely in Chinese! Google Translate shows it to be a real estate website. It's not very well done and I think they're just squatting on the domain hoping to sell it later on.

Who's behind this? I'm thinking it's the People's Liberation Army, who have been accused of lots of cybercrimes lately. That's too bad, because I really like their propaganda posters, like this one from World War Two. Whoever is behind it, Chinese domain squatters are on the rise.

Luckily my old domain name has been going down in the Google Ranks. Search for "Sean McLachlan" and it used to come up first. It's now in the middle of the first page.

This blog, however, doesn't show up until page 5. I've added my name to the header and the metadata, something I should have done from the start, and I'm adding my name to the tags for each post.

I could still use some help. If you have the time, share this story on your own blog, using my name, Sean McLachlan, as the hyperlink back to this blog. Let's get my blog to be the first thing that shows up when you search for me, or at least on the first page!


Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

A rough winter for Union troops in Civil War Missouri

Life was tough for Union troops in wintertime Missouri. The winter of 1862/63 was an especially harsh one. Back in January, Union garrisons in the southern part of the state had to scramble after Confederate General Marmaduke's cavalry raiders coming up from Arkansas. They defeated them and sent them on a long freezing retreat back south, during which the rebels lost many horses to exhaustion and men to exposure.

After Marmaduke's raid, Missouri fell into a deceptive calm. Scattered skirmishes kept the Union garrisons on their toes and reminded them that not all rebels had fled. Recruiters still rode around rural areas trying to enlist men to join the Confederate army in Arkansas, and some guerrillas wintered in Missouri rather than Texas like the larger bands. These caused periodic trouble for the Yankees.

One such recruiter was Lieutenant J.D. Brazeau from St. Louis, who was with a small rebel group in Bloomfield, Missouri, recruiting and gathering supplies. On Feb. 28, Major Edward B. Eno led an advance guard of the Eighth Missouri State Militia Cavalry to capture them. They found the bridge across the Castor River destroyed and had to swim their horses across the icy water before dawn.

Arriving in town at the break of dawn, the Union troops completely surprised the rebels. Some fled while others surrendered. Brazeau leaped on his horse, fired at the advancing troops, and tried to gallop away. He was shot from his saddle and killed instantly. The Eighth Missouri captured a large number of horses and equipment.

Eno's report doesn't say what they did for the rest of the day. I suspect they found shelter, dried their clothes, and drank some moonshine beside a roaring fire. That's what I would have done if forced to swim across a freezing river and fight a battle before sunrise!

As the weather began to heat up in late March, the war heated up as well.


Photo courtesy flickr user lcm1863. It's actually of a historic farmhouse in Gettysburg, but Missouri can look like this some winters!

Reader News for February 3, 2013

Two interesting books are the subject of today's reader news. Sharon Bayliss has just published her first novel The Charge, an alternative history set in the Texas Empire. I'm curious as to how Texas became an empire. Did it never join the U.S.? Went its own way after the Civil War? I might have to check this one out.

Yesterday I finished doing a beta read on COMMANDO: Operation Bedlam, the sequel to COMMANDO: Operation Arrowhead, which I reviewed here. It's not coming out until later this year, so I won't steal any of Jack's thunder by going into detail. I'll just say that it was as much of a kickass action adventure as his last World War Two novel. British Commandos fighting Nazis? I'm there.

Do you have any news to share? Drop me a line at the email address on the left-hand column of this blog.

Civil War Photo Friday: Black Union soldiers kidnapped for the Neo-Confederate cause

This photo shows a unit of black soldiers and their white officer. It's obviously a Union unit because of the officer's uniform and a belt buckle saying "US" on one of the figures. I've zoomed in on him; he's the man in the center in the photo below. The uniforms on the soldiers look very light, but often Union troops wore a light shade of blue that appears gray in these old photos.

Nothing is otherwise known about this photograph or what unit it represents. That's what gave it new life.

In an article titled Retouching History, Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr., describe how a doctored version of this photo was put up for sale by a self-styled "Rebel" website as a photo of the First Louisiana Native Guard, a Confederate unit in New Orleans made up of free blacks that never saw action and was opposed by many Confederate officials. It isn't even clear if they were ever fully equipped. It seemed they were only kept around for the propaganda value. When New Orleans fell to the Union, some of these men joined the Union army.

This is retouched the photo:

As you can see, that pesky Union officer has been cropped out. A closer inspection of a larger-format version of this photo (which you can see in the original article) shows that the US belt buckle has been blurred over. Also, the font is a modern one called "Algerian", developed in 1988.

Neo-Confederates assert that thousands of blacks fought for the Confederacy. This is used to bolster their claim that the war wasn't about slavery, despite the fact that Confederate officials repeatedly said it was about slavery and that there is no evidence whatsoever for thousands of black soldiers fighting for the South. Did a few blacks (like maybe a dozen) fight for the South? Yeah, probably. Does that change what the war was about? Nope.

Since most of my readers are American, Canadian, or British, let's play an imagination game. Imagine you're surfing the net and see a photo of one of your relatives who fought in World War Two, but the photo has been doctored so he now wears a German uniform. The caption says, "An American volunteer in the Wehrmacht!" How would that make you feel?

Photos from the original article, used under the terms of "Fair Use", the justification being that they are being used for nonprofit, educational purposes and the original image is in the public domain. If the folks who doctored the photograph want to sue me for infringing on their creative copyright, feel free to expose yourselves in the comments section.