Lives of photographs #107

This photo of burning coals in the fireplace at my old house in England has just been sold by Getty Images to a Zimbabwean tobacco company, Savanna Tobacco, for its United Arab Emirates website. Unlike some agencies, with Getty you can't say who you don't want your images sold to, so being passionately anti-smoking I'll settle for being happy to relieve the cigarette industry of some of its profits.

2012 books

1) Ahmed Khaled Towfik, Utopia, 2009
Sometime in the mid-21st Century, Utopia exists as a large enclave of well-off Egyptians, living behind high walls on the north Egyptian coastline and protected by the US military. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has been left to descend into anarchy and barbarism. One of the sports favoured by the affluent and bored Utopian youth is to venture outside Utopia's walls and return with a trophy – usually a body part of some semi-feral non-Utopian – and when one such venture goes wrong the antagonists are on the receiving end of an unexpectedly beneficial turn of events. You could reasonably expect Utopia to be a rather brutal bildungsroman, but the life lessons taught to the selfish Utopians are not learned, in fact they're rejected in favour of a restatement of their born superiority. This is a well-written and rather chilling book, as might be expected of the Arab world's leading writer of horror and fantasy, and is one that I cautiously recommend. Towfik spares no polite sensibilities the reader may have – no characters are particularly likeable or even admirable, and they are all put through their own versions of hell. Utopia was first published in Arabic in 2009 more than a year before the so-called 'Arab Spring', yet in a brief note at the beginning Towfik states he believes a place like Utopia will certainly exist in Egypt in the near future. Such is the depth of cynicism on display here that I doubt any of that sentiment will have changed.

2012 books

2) Larry Niven, Ringworld, 1970  ( RE-READ )
Still very much into my exploration of early Niven, I do wonder how Niven feels today about most people still reckoning his crowning moment was something he wrote more than forty years ago. I think I first read this in 1976 and Ringworld has lost none of its energy, particularly the opening few chapters which positively sparkle with crackling dialogue and quickly-sketched scenes that still manage to come vividly alive. The argumentative quartet of humans and aliens setting out to explore the Ringworld artefact were memorable enough for me to want to revisit this universe when the first sequel appeared in 1979 yet that's something I never got around to, so Ringworld was a rather necessary re-read before picking up The Ringworld Engineers. Yes, it felt great to read this again.

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A belated Very Happy Fannish Birthday to pigeonhed, and the on-time variety to asfi.