The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

I usually review nonfiction books on this blog (a likely cause of no one reading it). Sometimes I read a fiction book that I enjoy so much, I comment on it anyway.

The Peerless Peer is such a book. Philip Jose Farmer brings together Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan in the heart of Africa. Holmes and Watson are on a mission to retrieve a formula that could change the course of World War I by destroying all the fish and chips. Along the way, Holmes sorts out certain points of the Greystoke family history that are “wrong” in the sensational jungle king novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Farmer throws in cameos and name-dropping of a host of popular and pulp heroes. On their first two, back-to-back airplane flights, Holmes and Watson have the mixed blessings of being piloted by G-8 (possibly The Spider) and The Shadow. They obviously meet Tarzan, and unexpectedly meet the daughter of Allan Quatermain. Along the way, they interact with Henry Merrivale and Gideon Fell. As a player of The Game, Farmer describes how Watson’s previously unpublished manuscript came to him through a chain of provenance that included Lord Peter Wimsey.

If you’re looking for a short, fun, pulpy, nostalgic novel, this will do. It is fun.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

Pulp Art by Robert Lesser

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Water by Marq de Villiers

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about civil infrastructure, the environment and other matters of technology.

de Villiers, Marq. Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. 1999. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Marq de Villiers serves as a guide on a tour of water problems, conflicts and occasional solutions around the world. Though he is not an alarmist, his book seems to indicate that the problems have so far greatly outpaced the solutions.

There are several aspects of water problems and conflicts that de Villiers considers: natural, technological and political. In each area, he provides specific examples of water in or nearing crisis.

The natural distribution of fresh water in the world is uneven. That may be the fundamental aspect of water problems: even where it’s seemingly abundant, it doesn’t occur where and when people want it to make use of it. In parts of the world, this is a dire situation.

The technological solutions people have applied to correct this distribution have resulted in some amazing works of engineering since early in human history. It has also had many unintended consequences. Irrigation that made marginal land productive has made some of that land useless, even desert, through increased salinity. Dams, drainage and transfers have created ill effects in regional climates. Water mining, pollution and other human activity are also threatening the quantity and quality of water even in developed nations. There is hope in the technological area in that much of this harm may be reversible and the human ingenuity that created these technologies might also create sustainable solutions to our water needs.

Political considerations are very important to water issues, particularly when considering the possibility of conflict, even outright war, because of water scarcity. The Middle East and North Africa come to mind as hot spots where water is a critical issue; de Villiers enlightens both the current situation and history of these regions. Though mistrust runs deep between the nations in this region, even seemingly friendly ones, there is hope for solutions to their water problems. North America has its water problems to, and the problems on the Colorado River are surprisingly similar to those on the Nile. The differences in water availability in the United States, Mexico and Canada also makes for interesting relations between these close and usually friendly neighbors. China may present the largest political problems related to water and it’s food production and population that threatens to push it into crisis.

The book closes with four general strategies for dealing with the world’s water problems. First, get more water by either bringing it in from elsewhere or making it (i.e. desalination). Next is conservation and pricing to reduce demand and encourage using water in the most valuable ways. Third is population control; de Villiers seems relieved that world populations have been growing more slowly without major intervention. Finally, you can steal water from others. Since 40 percent people worldwide live in watersheds that cross national boundaries, it becomes a complicated matter of who has what right to the water and this is a potential source of water conflict, though not insurmountable.

Order this book here.

P.S., here is a little something extra for those of you interested in China, especially the probably fictional Emperor Yu the Engineer.

Elixir by Brian Fagan (245)

Fagan, Brian.  Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Unlike other authors of books about water, Brian Fagan in Elixir gives much more attention to the culture, as one might expect of an anthropologist.  In most of the cultures he discusses in his book, water is closely associated with ritual, often considered sacred.  Fagan’s interested in the human relationship with water goes beyond ritual and religion and includes politics and technology.

Fagan describes three phases of the human relationship with water.  In the first stage, water is an unreliable, often scarce, and highly valued resource.  This value is reflected in the careful management, ritual, and even sacred reverence of water.  In the second stage, from the Industrial Revolution to our own day, water is a commodity, little considered and treated as if it were superabundant.  In the emerging stage, water is a finite resource we need to conserve.

*

Most of the book is covers the first stage.  He discusses the historic relationship and management of water from around the world.  Some of these were famous for their extensive management of water, sometimes with equally extensive infrastructure, such as the Egyptian and Romans.  Others are lesser known, like the highly ritualistic and religious Balinese system that is still operating.  Some we know relatively little about in spite of their antiquity, such as the pre-Columbian Mayan and Andean cultures.

Because of this approach, Elixir is also a work of cultural and physical geography.  The reader can, in imagination, travel the world and see how civilizations are shaped by the sometimes harsh realities of the environment and how humans shape their environment.

The commodity stage is covered much more briefly.  To be fair, it is only a few hundred years old.  It is our age, when technology has allowed us to reach ever more difficult and remote sources of water.  Even in the industrial era, not everyplace has had truly abundant water.  Fagan points to arid and semiarid regions of Africa and Asia as locations poised on exhausting their water.  This is an issue in the United States, too, especially in the southwest, where politics and unrealistic optimism have trumped wisdom and reality for more than a century.

For the stage we are entering, the issue becomes conservation and sustainability.  Acknowledging that we are using our fresh water supply faster than it is regenerated, especially in some parts of the world, and making changes to our practices an technology, will require another cultural shift if we are to have sustainable water supplies.

When it comes to sustainability, I was surprised how much faith Fagan expressed in technology and human ingenuity.  Even so, he implies that we should look to our past.

In the early stage of our relationship with water, we valued it, even reverenced it, immensely.  It is time to place a high value on water again, even without religious aspects.  Also, in the past water management was a very local affair, and surprisingly democratic.  Though few of the governments Fagan discusses were democracies, they had mechanisms for hearing and considering the needs of everyone in the community.  Even in empires with powerful central governments that built and managed extensive waterworks, community-based water management operated alongside, and often it was the food surpluses of these local, village-managed operations that made empire-building possible.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Google

Water by Steven Solomon (204)

Solomon, Steven. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. New York: Harper, 2010.
.



Steven Solomon’s Water is an epic history of civilization from its roots to modern time. Solomon’s thesis is that inventively mastered their water resources have risen and those that have outpaced their available water or innovations have declined. There are lessons in this history for us who live in an age where some nations already experience serious water scarcity and even relatively water rich nations are squandering their natural fortune.

The book generally follows sequences of technology, geography, and politics. In technology, it moves through waters many uses from irrigation to transportation, energy and sanitation. The geographic motion of the book is from east to west, starting the early innovations of Asia, sliding to Europe, then jumping the Atlantic to North America. The political trend begins with ancient, totalitarian hydraulic societies and moves on to gradually democratizing nations and the splintered, competitive, yet surprisingly workable and cooperative, market-oriented Western republics.

In the final chapters of the book, Solomon deals with the threat of water scarcity. Some parts of the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, are already facing water shortages. Those fortunate enough to have other sources of wealth, like oil, are importing virtual water, especially in the form of food. Control of water resources is becoming a matter of international diplomacy, national security, and possible war in much the way oil was in the last century. This is especially true in the arid, populous Middle East and South Asia. Many of the water poor live in lands that are highly populated, arid, unstable politically, and have long-standing enmities with neighboring countries.

Relatively water rich nations, like the United States, have problems, too. Much of it stems from using water inefficiently and for less productive activities. This is especially problematic in the dry western states, where long-standing, vested interests have sought to protect their subsidized access to water while others, sometimes more efficient and high value users, pay great premiums for the limited remaining available water. This isn’t strictly a western problem; eastern cities are also droughts, growing populations, industrialization, intensive agriculture, and aging infrastructure that strain their water resources.

While the problems are serious, Solomon seems hopeful that, as in the past, we may be able to develop technological, organizational, and political solutions to these issues. He objectively discusses national and international efforts to solve the looming water crisis. He seems to have more faith that workable solutions well arise in the more water rich, democratic West, where a combination of government regulation, free markets, substantial local control, and varied regional solutions are giving rise to innovation.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris
Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury
Exodus
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
The Great Stink by Clare Clark
Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark
Water by Marq de Villiers
When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce