David Alex Lamb

Once upon a time, Analog Science Fiction magazine had a book reviewer named Spider Robinson. His reviews were always valuable, even if you didn’t agree with them, because his stated purpose was to tell you what you needed to know to judge for yourself whether you would like the book or not. He didn’t use stars, or at least not insofar as I recall. You couldn’t possibly encapsulate what he wrote in something as simple as a number from one to five.

The problem with his kind of review is that it is labour intensive on the part of the seeker of new books. You have to scan a lot of reviews, each a paragraph or two, which in these days of “TL:DR” is more time and energy than some people want to invest. Reading a book is one thing. Scanning through a lot of prose to find one book that could be interesting is a lot of work. And few people want to write reviews of that length anyway.

In fact, I often see one star reviews that say explicitly, this book is not the sort of book I want to read. Or worse, this entire genre of books is not something I want to read (in which case, why did you bother to read it at all?) For a seeker of new books, that is an utterly useless remark.

Low star reviews are very often an expression of feeling or prejudice. How often have we seen movies we really like get rating-bombed? I once heard a prominent award-winning speculative fiction writer say that they only read four-star reviews, because those are people in your intended audience from whom you can learn something.

So, it seems to me that in this world of mass communication, the masses can’t really communicate what we want to know. Now, most of the books I buy were recommended by someone I trust (good old word of mouth) or written by authors I know, either established writers whose books I’ve liked, or fellow writers I have met through conventions or online.

Nevertheless, I have been told that writing reviews and giving ratings is extremely helpful to the authors, even if the review is short. I haven’t been doing it much; maybe I can improve. But if I am inclined to give three or fewer stars, I am going to think carefully about whether the book was meant for people like me.

Back in the 1960s, when the FLQ was blowing up mailboxes in Canada, people started thinking, “you know, this isn’t just regular criminal activity; we need to call it something different.” The word they came up with was “terrorism:” criminal activity intended to cause fear in the general population for political purposes.

The first time it became really clear to me that the word was evolving was during the Arab Spring, in Syria, when the president started calling peaceful protesters “terrorists.” Yes, they had a political purpose, but they weren’t trying to cause terror in the civilian population: they were the civilian population.

Fast forward to January 2026, when apparently in the United States you become a “domestic terrorist” when Immigration and Customs Enforcement unalives you. PBS News has an article on how the FBI defines “terrorism” – a little differently from the zeitgeist of the 1960s, but still involving fear and political purposes. But the definition also includes the phrase “influence government policy by intimidation or coercion” as one alternative, and apparently some American politicians (and federal agents) are easily intimidated. As in Syria, peaceful protesters are getting called “terrorists.”

And the FBI phrase about influencing government policy is a bit suspect. Aren’t some kinds of lobbying or pressure from corporations and oligarchs “influencing government policy by intimidation?” At present, however reprehensible, it isn’t illegal, and thus doesn’t fit my 1960s definition.

Words are supposed to mean something. I’ve come to accept the Merriam-Webster “descriptivist” policy of defining words as they are currently used, but it is sad when an old meaning becomes unavailable (or, at least, inexpressible except via a long phrase).

We no longer have a quick way of saying what “terrorist” meant in my youth.

Last night (January 2-3, 2026) the United States invaded Venezuela to capture the President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an extremely expensive extraterritorial abduction to bring them to New York to face U.S. indictments related to drug trafficking. Well, at least, that’s the best summary I can write in a single sentence; there is a lot to unpack here, and my characterization is far from neutral. But what struck me as a Canadian during the late-morning press conference today was that Trump explicitly mentioned the Monroe Doctrine as a justification.

From my perspective as a Canadian, the Monroe Doctrine is also tied to the concept of “Manifest Destiny.” They are technically separate, but Wikipedia calls them “a closely related nexus of principles;” the two together can be vastly oversimplified as “the United States owns the entire Western Hemisphere.” Monroe was talking about the interference of colonial powers with U.S. interests anywhere in the Americas; it was part of his 7^th State Of the Union address on December 2, 1823. Manifest Destiny is more of a zeitgeist starting early in U.S. history (even before the Revolution) that the colonies had the right to expand westward, into “Indian land,” but, eventually, also into territory controlled by France and Spain. John Quincy Adams wrote in 1811 about taking over all of North America (a concept technically called “continentalism”). Apparently expansionist ideas about the Americas declined over the years, but in 1904 Roosevelt articulated a U.S. right to intervene in the affairs of Latin American countries. Hoover repudiated that idea in 1930 – but the 20^th century had many instances of the kind of interference Roosevelt was talking about.

So, in the context of Trump’s rhetoric in 2025 about making Canada “the 51^st state” as “an idea that made sense,” his reference to the Monroe Doctrine ramps up my concern about what (if any) limits there are on the U.S. unfairly pressuring Canada. We can at least expect a serious fight over the renewal of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, especially as Trump appears to reject the concept of win-win: a deal is “unfair” unless he wins and the other side loses.

Carney’s government is making a lot of effort towards reducing our dependency on the U.S.A, such as joining the European Unions’s Security Action for Europe, and expanding trade with many other countries. I just worry that he can’t get everything in place before we take a huge economic hit from the end of the USMCA. We elected him as the best person to deal with Trump; I just hope my fellow Canadians realize just how hard his job is if we start to suffer.

The banner at the top of my website says I am a “scholar, writer, computer geek.” As a good little scholar, when I write something based on other sources, especially if I quote them, I must give as close to a scholarly citation as I can. The point is that you’re not supposed to have to take my word for anything. You can go to the original sources and check things out for yourself.

There are rules for conventional scholarly sources like journal articles, technical reports, books and book chapters, and even “private communication,” such as what you heard from a friend over coffee break. But for more recent forms of writing, we have to come up with new conventions.

I’ve been citing websites for quite a while, which typically involves just giving page title, author and publication date if known, and a link to the web page. That is sometimes problematic, because some sites don’t provide absolute URLs, but require that you navigate from a homepage down through links that keep modifying your browser cookies to keep track of various things, such as whether you have climbed over their paywall. Fortunately, I haven’t had to deal with those yet, but I could probably justify not bothering to cite them, or using “private communication.” Perhaps one really needs to describe the navigation path, but life is too short.

Some website links, such as Wikipedia, take you to pages that will change over time. So for a web link, I ought to include the date on which I read the page, so you could use the internet archive (the Wayback Machine) to find the version that I was talking about. So far on this site I haven’t been especially careful, but most of my links in articles about writing are to blog posts that don’t change, at least not much.

I have now reached the point where for the first time I want to cite quotations in an e-book. For quotations from a conventional book, you put the prose in quotes and immediately cite the book and the page number. The trouble is, on my Kobo reader, the page numbers depend on the font size you are using. So far the best I can think of is to refer to a citation as “page 18 of 387” and force you to do the math to figure out where it will be with your favorite font size where your last page is 517.

If anyone has a better idea, let me know.

Yesterday was September 11, the anniversary of the inciting incident for Canada to join a war for the first time in five and a half decades. I’ve been reflecting on what that decision meant for my country, especially since that war ultimately proved futile.

In the view of many of my fellow Canadians, that decision compromised our post-1956 commitment to peacekeeping. We have a proud history as warfighters, but we don’t celebrate that as much as some other countries do.

At the time, we didn’t really have much of a choice. After the terrorist attack, the USA invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (the only time in history to this point where anyone used it). That article obligates all member nations to come to the aid of any member who suffered an armed attack. We perhaps could have “aided” without armed force, but the political pressure at the time was enormous.

It made more sense at the start: the Taliban refused to turn over Bin Laden, and an invasion might have seemed like the only way to get him quickly, before he could carry out another attack. Ultimately, though, he was taken out by a small elite team after being found by years of application of conventional spy craft. And the Taliban wound up back in charge.

I started thinking about all of this last week. It wasn’t that the 9/11 anniversary was imminent. Coincidentally, we had started a rewatch of Flashpoint, a CTV series about a fictional Toronto SWAT team somewhat based on a real segment of the local police.  Sam, the team rookie, had been a member of Canada’s elite special ops group, JTF2, and the side story was about an army buddy who had just committed suicide overseas. A teammate asked him if he was “going up to the Highway.”

Just about any Canadian paying attention to the news in that decade would know what she meant: the Highway of Heroes, a segment of the 401 between the exit nearest to the Trenton air force base and the one for the Toronto coroner’s office, along which most of our Afghanistan war dead made their last journey home. Long before the Powers That Be put up highway signs, ordinary people would crowd every overpass to honour our fallen as the processions drove slowly underneath. There was no fanfare, no ceremony, no big expression of the grief we felt. Just people quietly gathering.

At the time, in proportion to the size of our respective militaries, Canadian and Dutch soldiers were doing most of the dying. Those deaths were few in absolute numbers, but that meant that every one was noticed and deeply felt by many who never knew those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

The USA has massive memorials to their soldiers, out in public view. Our equivalent is much quieter, out of sight. In a very tall annex, front and centre in any picture of the Parliament Buildings, there is a small ground-level chamber. Its walls are lined with several large tomes, protected by glass covers, listing every identifiable member of the Canadian Forces killed in any of our few wars. Staff turn a page in each book every day, and inform any known descendants when their loved one’s name will soon appear.

It seems to me very Canadian that the annex is called the Peace Tower.