Dilemma

I enjoy posting on this blog - otherwise, I would not be doing it - but I need a continual supply of material to post about. This is easy to find with relevant reading. However, I also want to make progress with rereading Stieg Larsson's third novel. I can point to some parallels with Anderson:

Swedish setting;
fictional treatment of intelligence services;
social issues of freedom and security.

There are also some (very remote) personal connections. Larsson, an anti-fascist journalist, worked with Gerry Gable, Editor of British anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight. My son-in-law, Ketlan, is a colleague of Gable. And, since Poul Anderson once briefly addressed me in a hotel room party at a World SF Con, I can claim to be a minor (very minor) link between them!

That last remark is not meant to be taken seriously! But it does emphasize that, while discussing the texts of novels, we can also remember the real life activities and interactions of the interesting and very different men who wrote them.

Sitrep

I will not start reading Eon by Greg Bear until I have finished reading the gripping, 746-page The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest (Millennium, Vol 3) by Stieg Larsson. However, reading Larsson is interrupted and delayed by:

posting about the Time Patrol;
real life - daily meditation, weekly meditation group, reunions with former colleagues from two work places, a 50th birthday party (not mine), family outings, domestic chores, physical exercise, supporting the Fire Brigades Union in its campaign about pensions and the quality of their service.

Larsson, like Anderson, knew how societies work - modern state apparatuses are complicated and sometimes secretive, are lubricated by personal contacts and networks and can generate internal conflicts, for example when a police department investigates crimes committed by members of a clandestine group within an intelligence service.

In Anderson's The Avatar, a group of world politicians conspires to suppress significant information and to maintain their own power but we learn that such groups, although powerful, are not undefeatable.