Violence justified

Steven Poole and John Dugdale on Terrorism for Humanity | The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction | Electric Dreams | Goya: A Life in Letters | Parallels and Paradoxes | The Cross and the Crescent

Terrorism for Humanity, by Ted Honderich (Pluto Press, £15.99)
Someone detonates a bomb that kills five people. I fail to contribute a sum of money sufficient to prevent five deaths to international aid organisations. You have an intuition about which is worse. But by how much is it worse, and why? Such difficult questions arise in this revised version of Ted Honderich's 1980 book Violence for Equality. The new title is perhaps more arresting in the apparent incompatibility between its terms. For one conclusion of these six essays of political and ethical philosophy is that there can be such a thing as "terrorism for humanity"; that is, political violence that is justified and good. In what circumstances and exactly how are questions that are teased out by Honderich with much serious ingenuity. It is, as he remarks, "a dark time of need, a time of attack on moral intelligence", and so such a book must be welcomed: dense but rewarding, a set of tools for thinking with. SP

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, eds Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge, £16.99)
If you want to know exactly what manner of beast is a "hard SF space opera" and why writers of them should avoid an "info-dump", Mendlesohn's fine introduction explains why SF is not a genre so much as a mode, in which many kinds of plots can occur but the real hero is the idea. "The sense of wonder is the emotional heart of SF." The contributors' essays take us from early 20th-century pulp magazines through 1960s New Wave to modern SFX-heavy cinema; they walk us through available sub-genres; and see how the literature rubs up against queer theory or Marxism. Especially good is Gwyneth Jones's brief but evocative discussion of "The Icons of Science Fiction"; elsewhere there is some academic indulgence. William Gibson's Neuromancer is described as an example of "schizophrenic écriture", a phrase (originally of Frederic Jameson's) that is not, I think, any the less silly for being half-French. SP

Electric Dreams, by David Redhead (V&A, £14.95)
This words-and-pictures book tells the story of the fruitful collision of design and electronics from the early 1980s, when they were still known as "brown goods", to present-day concepts for mobile phones and PDAs. Fun to see the postmodern strain of "bootleg objects", in which the chassis of a 1970s Bang & Olufsen stereo, all teak effect and beige plastic, is stuffed with mp3-playing electronics. Redhead charts the increasing use of independent designers by corporations, issuing in such lovely objects as circuit-board Prada loyalty cards. "The best design is not created by a democratic process," one designer tells the author. "It is forced through by powerful and talented individuals." The modern hero, of course, is Brit Jonathan Ive, designer of the iMac - after which everything became colourful and translucent - and other lovely Apple things, culminating in the new G5, after which everything may well go all austere and aluminium for a while. High-class gadget porn. SP

Goya: A Life in Letters, ed Sarah Symmons, trans Philip Troutman (Pimlico, £12.50)
A shame we get only a handful of photographic reproductions of Goya's letters here, since he was an inveterate doodler. Here is a barber's bowl with a hand and other appendages sticking out of it; all of them mysteriously boasting eyes in the middle. Here is a flintlock rifle and a pair of shoes (which Symmons thinks are also penises, and who am I to argue?); there is a caricature of the artist himself with prognathous jaw; there is a dog at a picnic. The text, despite Symmons's excellent introductory chapters, is not stunningly revealing. Goya's most expressive letters are those to his childhood friend, Martín Zapater, the rhetoric of which relationship is conducted at an almost romantic heat: yearning expressions of devotion at a distance; hysterically angry complaints of not having had a reply to his last letter; and occasionally placid gratitude: "I thank you for the 12 bars of nougat." SP

Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, by Daniel Barenboim and Edward W Said (Bloomsbury, £7.99)
Civilised, brainy and wide-ranging, these six public discussions between the pianist/conductor and the author, academic and amateur musician took place in New York between 1995 and 2000 and have been edited by Ara Guzelimian. The two friends brought together Arab and Israeli performers in the same orchestra, but they disagreed often enough to prevent any dwindling into courteous blandness. Their dialogues resemble a piano duet, with motifs appearing, receding and reappearing: Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg; Israel; the relationship between writer and composer, score and text, and tonality and the idea of home. While the dash and eloquence of the conversations is exhilarating, they're also shaded with sadness - partly due to the illness that took Said's life last year, but also because both men sense that music is losing the cultural status it had in their childhoods. JD

The Cross and the Crescent, by Richard Fletcher (Penguin, £7.99)
Beginning with Mohammed's revelations in 610, Fletcher's shortish chronicle of early Christian-Muslim interaction covers the first Muslim conquests - creating an empire from the Atlantic to Afghanistan within a century of the prophet's death - to the Crusades; with plenty of conflict and persecution in between. What he stresses, however, is that alongside these hostile encounters were others (diplomatic, commercial, professional, scholarly, artistic, sexual) that were amicable. Apart from the argument that medieval Islam's disdainful incuriosity about Christendom was the seed of its downfall, Fletcher eschews a theoretical overview, instead logging contacts and references; but these are unfailingly absorbing, whether he's describing the elephant Haroun al-Rashid sent as a gift to Charlemagne, Spanish monks bedding infidel women, or the great traveller Ibn Battutah, who visited virtually everywhere except boring, backward Christian Europe. JD

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