Star Trek 3, by James Blish

This third volume of breezy adaptations in prose of Star Trek episodes was first published in the US in April 1969, by which point the TV series had been cancelled. It was issued in the UK in August of that year, with a sticker saying “3/6”, just weeks after the series began broadcast on Saturday teatimes in what was usually the Doctor Who slot. I read it, along with Star Trek, Star Trek 2 and the original novel Spock Must Die! earlier this year as research for my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks, and I’ve also written a piece on the cross-pollination of these two series, “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49.

The cover takes the same format as Star Trek 2, though with a black background rather than white. Whereas that previous book featured a photo of two leading members of the cast, this has three — presumably to match the title. The three leads of the series here are Kirk, Spock and Uhura, making the latter a selling point. Indeed, the first interior page lists the main characters as Kirk, Uhura and Spock, in that order, and describes her thus:

“Lt. Uhura—Unbelievably beautiful, she is the most popular member of the Enterprise crew and also one of the most brilliant scan engineers around.”

The front cover notes Star Trek is now “award-winning” and promises “mind-reeling” and “eerie excursions into galaxies of probability”, and the back cover promises journeys into “the supernatural”. I’m not sure there are galaxies, plural, or forays into the supernatural. There’s a lot of cod psychology of various kinds, including Spock getting horny.

Blish’s preface, written in 1968, addresses the “award-winning” claim on the cover. First, he explains for the lay reader the annual “World Convention” of science-fiction fans — admitting that, at the time he wrote this, it had only been held outside the US on one occasion — and Worldcon’s Hugo awards for best sci-fi of the previous year. The Star Trek episode The Menagerie was nominated for “best dramatic presentation” in 1967, and in 1968 all four of nominees were from Star Trek; City on the Edge of Forever won. However, Blish adapted that story in Star Trek 2 (using elements from the draft script that didn’t make it to the screen), so this new volume presents the three other nominees — The Trouble with Tribbles, The Doomsday Machine and Amok Time. 

Oddly, he doesn’t include The Menagerie here (it’s in Star Trek 4, about which more anon). And though Blish notes that City on the Edge of Forever also won an award voted for by TV writers (a Writers Guild of America award for “best episodic drama on television; the episode The Return of the Archons was also nominated), it’s the accolade from the science-fiction fans that he clearly thinks most worthy of note. That’s despite feeling that, “s-f fandom and Star Trek fandom do not seem to overlap very much, certainly by no more than 10 per cent” (p. viii).

Blish goes on to say that he’d received more mail about his two Star Trek books than for the rest of his writing career (27 novels over 20 years, including a Hugo award winner), and then answers a number of frequently asked questions — no, he can’t supply photographs of or access to the actors; yes, there is a book about The Making of Star Trek and yes, he is writing an original Star Trek novel. From this, we get a nebulous sense of early Star Trek fandom, casual viewers hungry for information and communion.

The first story in the book is The Trouble with Tribbles from the script by David Gerrold, which got its own book in 1973. Blish starts by telling us that we don’t know where tribbles originate from, describing what they look like — “a cross between an Angora cat and a beanbag” (p. 1) — and that they are harmless. He underlines that point, setting up the harm to come.

The story twice mentions the Organian treaty with the Klingons from a previous on-screen adventure, Errand of Mercy, which is as per the TV episode. That episode was included in Star Trek 2 but there’s no footnote back to it as there would be from Spock Must Die! onwards. Indeed, I think Blish introduced footnotes with that novel to give his own, original story a sense of authenticity. Perhaps the references to the treaty here prompted him to revisit it in the novel. 

Then there’s stuff not in the TV episode. On screen, early on, Kirk asks under what authority Nilz Baris has put a whole quadrant on defence alert, and is told Baris is Federation Undersecretary in Charge of Agricultural Affairs. “That gives him the authority,” says Spock, on screen. But in the book, Kirk counters that it is, “A position with no military standing of which I am aware” (p. 3) — suggesting that Kirk and the Enterprise are part of the military. As per the original version of the script, the book version features Koloth, the Klingon from Errand of Mercy. That may mean Blish was working from draft scripts.

Other than that, the adaptation has Spock remark on an unusual monicker — “His name is Cyrano Jones, of all things” (p. 9) — which seems oddly out of character (who is he to judge?). And there’s an odd bit of character work:

“Uhura had never shown the faintest sign of sentimentality before, but [with the pet tribble] she seemed to be far gone in gooiness” (p. 7).

Not for the first time, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen when he wrote this.

Next up is The Last Gunfight, the TV episode Spectre of the Gun, in which our heroes find themselves in Tombstone on 26 October 1881, taking the place of the real-life notorious gunfighters — by coincidence, something that also happens in the Doctor Who story The Gunfighters (1966). 

Perhaps there is some direct crossover between this episode of Star Trek and Doctor Who. I wonder if the idea here, of god-like beings who intend to execute a person by putting them in a fantasy world drawn from their own memories, influenced Bob Baker and Dave Martin when they conceived Deathworld, the initial idea that became The Three Doctors (1972-73). Blish says the events are drawn from Kirk’s “ancestral memories—archetypes drawn from the collective unconscious” (p. 25), a concept not used on screen (but an element in Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970)). He also adds a reference to the events of City on the Edge of Forever (p. 26), again without a footnote, and tells us McCoy hails from Atlanta (p. 28).

When Chekov is apparently killed, Kirk finds his science officer’s cold response hard to take, thinking that he’ll “never get used to Spock’s hidden emotional life” (p. 31). Spock, out of character, refers to McCoy as “Bones” (p. 34), and adopts a Scottish accent to achieve rapport with Scott, “his voice suddenly taking on a dark, Caledonian color, as deep as that of a prophet’s” (p. 35). (Do prophets have dark, deep voices?) It’s an example of Spock’s psychological knowledge of, and love for, his various human shipmates, which earns the following response from Kirk — again not heard on screen:

“Privately, and for no other ears than yours, I think you are a sentimental bag of mush” (p. 37).

The Doomsday Machine features Brand, not Matt, Decker — I assume some relative of the Will Decker in the first Star Trek movie. The story involves an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy whole planets, but we’ve already had a story, Operation — Annihilate! in Star Trek 2, in which the Enterprise could itself do that. I think this story must have influenced the Doctor Who adventure Colony in Space (1971), about an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy a whole star, not least because it was novelised as Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon.

Scotty’s fluctuating accent is acknowledged here; we’re told he gets more Scottish when things are serious (p. 50) — in Spock Must Die! it is a sign of him being under stress. It’s also interesting that when Kirk is teleported, the room he was in, “faded around him” (p. 51) — we see it from his perspective, something rarely done on screen.

Assignment Earth begins with references to Kirk’s two previous experiences of time travel (in City on the Edge of Forever and Tomorrow is Yesterday, both in Star Trek 2). The plot involves the Enterprise travelling back from the 23rd century to Earth in 1969 to prevent Gary Seven and his cat from sending a rocket off course — the implication being to start a war. That was surely an influence on what became Day of the Daleks (1972), in which guerrillas from the 22nd century travel back to c. 1980 to blow up a man they think responsible for starting a war. In both cases, the action taken to prevent catastrophe is what causes it. I wonder, too, if the description here of the incongruous Gary — “a man impeccably dressed in a twentieth-century business suit” had an influence on the appearance of the Time Lord at the beginning of Terror of the Autons (1971).

On the same lines, I wonder if Mirror Mirror inspired some of The Curse of Peladon (1972), as it involves a storm stranding the Enterprise landing party on a planet that has firmly declined an invitation to join the Federation. The storm affects the teleport, sending Kirk to “another dimensional plane” (p. 71), where he meets alternative versions of his friends, including a bearded Spock, living in a tyrannical regime. As I argue in my piece for DWM, this was surely an influence on the Doctor Who story Inferno (1970), and script editor Terrance Dicks must have taken the idea from this prose adaptation because the TV episode Mirror Mirror wasn’t broadcast in the UK until the summer of 1970, when Inferno was in the midst of being shown.

McCoy refers here to Spock as “Spocko” (p. 82) and Kirk says of Uhura “Good girl” (p. 76) — neither of them in the TV episode. I was taken by Kirk referring to one of his alternative counterparts as “Mr Pseudo-Sulu”, and describing Pseudo-Chekov’s “lubricious expression” on seeing Uhura (both p. 79) — a rare bit of Blish enjoying the kind of well-chosen words that feature in novelisations by Terrance Dicks. He tells us the Enterprise is a “fifty billion credit starship” (p. 75) and adds some psychology:

“Evidently this universe had never discovered that men pay more attention to a machine when its voice is feminine” (p. 74). 

Friday’s Child is another story about a planet with valuable mineral deposits the Federation is keen to get its mitts on for the indigenous people’s own good. Blish gives us a history of Ceres, then explains that it’s not the dwarf planet (he calls it an asteroid) of the same name in the Solar System. The people of Ceres seem primitive but are descendants of space-travelling humans from Earth, so must have regressed in just a few generations.

There’s a fair bit of male gaze here — a meal is “served by a most scantily clad Cerean girl of whom it was impossible not to be aware” (pp. 87-88). McCoy also refers to “basic humanoid stock” and “genetic drift" (p. 95), what with being an old racist. As well as English, he speaks Vulcan, Old High Martian, medical Latin, Greek, Fortran and Vegan (p. 91). 

The story here is all about a woman, Eleen, who doesn’t want to care for her new baby, due to various things that have been going on. The Enterprise crew are surprisingly judgmental and unsympathetic. “We intend to keep both you and your baby alive, whether you want it or not,” McCoy tells her (p. 94). Kirk tells her, just as sternly, that she is required to look after the child because of her traditions, which he’ll “enforce … if I have to” (p. 99). Ick.

The book concludes with Amok Time, which begins with Spock throwing soup at Nurse Chapel (in the TV episode he just declines it). His quarters are, says Blish, “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental”, while his reading screen shows an image of “the head of a very young girl, no more than a child” (p. 106) — who turns out, thankfully, to be a grown-up he’s known since childhood. As per the TV episode, his request for shore leave has been declined, but he’s not revealed the medical condition that would surely justify his workplace making reasonable adjustments. This sort of thing wouldn’t happen in the Next Generation, where the Enterprise has office managers.

Blish tells us that Spock’s normal pulse rate is 240 bpm and he has non-existent blood pressure and green blood (p. 107), information not featured in this TV episode but taken from The Naked Time. As I say in my DWM piece, I think the first UK broadcast of that episode, on 19 July 1969, inspired the lines in Spearhead from Space about the Doctor’s own pulse rate, though it may have been taken from this book. Kirk assumes that Vulcans breed “eugenically” (p. 106), and I realise that Pon-farr, as described (p. 109) is basically periods for men. 

The arena on Vulcan is described as being like Stonehenge (p. 110); I wonder if that’s the result of Blish having recently moved to the UK. As per the TV episode, we’re told T’Pau is the only person ever to turn down a seat on the Federation Council, though it’s not clear why. Spock’s childhood pal T’Pring, “no child now”, is still referred to as a “girl” (p. 111). T’Pau sets out the stakes of the duel to follow in much more on-the-nose language than broadcast:

“Are you prepared to become the property of the victor? Not merely his wife, but his chattel, with no other rights or status?” (p. 112)

McCoy refers to this as “hanky-panky”.

Then Kirk and Spock fight to the death. Oddly, Blish chooses to narrate this from Kirk’s perspective, which undercuts the tension — and the “death” of Kirk on screen. Instead, we have Kirk listening to Spock’s remorse at having killed him.

Still, killing Kirk seems to end Spock’s manic sex drive, like some kind of sexual release. I also wonder how the Vulcans will react when they learn Kirk has survived the ordeal: wouldn’t they demand a rematch? It all ends happily and a cured, unsexed-up Spock praises Nurse Chapel’s “very good plomik soup” (p. 117), providing closure. The Enterprise heads off to further adventures…

Bookish Volume II, by Matthew Sweet

Harold Terence Sneed is found in his parlour in Borough, stabbed through the ribs. The irony is that he’d just conducted a seance; one of those present at that attempt to reach the spirit world is the cause of Sneed now passing on.

Maxie Kleinmann is an elderly tailor on Jermyn Street who claims to have killed the man found dead on his shop floor, with a single punch to the throat. And when Gabriel Book takes Jack Blunt to Germany to trace the death of a man very close to them both, there are soon more murders…

I’ve not yet seen the second series of Bookish, of which this is a novelisation, but the book is a delight. I noted of the first volume that it provides some clues to when Book’s adventures are set which we don’t glean from the TV episodes. Here, the three cases all take place in the autumn of 1946, the second story — Dead Man’s Whistle — between 23 October (p. 125) and 8 November (p. 201), and the last one, Killer Nacht, on and around 6 December. Indeed, the first case, Memento Mori, takes place soon after the end of the last series (in September), as there are newspaper headlines about it.

As before, the book is bookended by a brief glimpse of the future, two years on from last time, with a letter from Book in Los Angeles to Nora dated 13 February 1964 and her reply from the following day — meaning that, away from the fog and cold of London, he missed The Edge of Destruction go out.

There are a number of Doctor Who references in the book — Sneed is named after the undertaker in Gatiss’s first Doctor Who episode, and there’s an appearance by Luigi Rossini (Lew Russell) and his circus from Terror of the Autons, and a Chinese fowling piece.

In fact, the book is chock full of references — to books, to real crimes and odd bits of history such as the sad death of Eleanor Marx (the doctor who attended her, and lived just round the corner, was the dad of Ernest Shackleton). I should dearly love footnotes, and a reading list.

I’ve seen the series described as cosy crime, and can see it being just the thing for Sunday evenings in the Call the Midwife slot. There’s a steely edge to some of this stuff, and a pathos which Mark Gatiss has always been so good at. The last episode, in particular, ends with some real tension on the heartstrings — and leaves me baying to know more.

But I note that one of the regular characters is not mentioned in correspondence from 1964. Is that a clue about what’s to come?

The Burial Tide, by Neil Sharpson

She wakes to the sound of singing, and finds herself in the dark. To begin with, she doesn't have a name or any memory - but Mara has been buried alive. Forcing her way out of the coffin and up through the wet ground, she finds three more fresh graves besides her one, and a community who aren't entirely forthcoming about what's been going on...

This is a brilliant, fast-moving and properly horrible novel, sort of John Carpenter's The Thing set on Craggy Island. Each short chapter is from the perspective of one the small group of characters and labelled with their name. In the opening pages, when Mara can't recall who she is, her chapters don't have titles; later, when some stuff happens that I won't spoil, there's a chapter title with multiple names. It' a simple but effective way of underlining the horror.

The small island community, off the Irish mainland, feels at once very specific and completely ordinary, which grounds the more outlandish elements of the story in the stolidly real. Mara quickly makes friends with two young people who are, each in their ways, not quite part of the island community. The three friends share a quirky, flirty relationship, and it's often funny. We like them, we want to be part of their gang, so any threat to them feels all the more visceral.

Like Mara, we have to puzzle out who these people really are, and why they're so guarded about the secrets they're keeping. There are some compelling mysteries to unpick - why one young man hides his horrible scars, why a woman immediately lies about the death of someone else, who it is lying in those three other graves and how they really died. Even Mara is not what she, at first, appears.

While the story is told from the perspectives of its characters, and so see things from inside their heads, it's often a very visual story, full of moments that would work well on the screen. I think there's an excellent, breezy horror movie to be made from it. In fact, it's so lucidly told in dialogue and visuals that I almost feel I've already seen it.

What's particularly brilliant is that all the different threads are neatly tied up by the end, and the book doesn't outstay its welcome. The result is compelling and deliciously horrible, but satisfying, too. We're left with an image at once satisfying and haunting, as one prominent character forgets the awful events they've been part of and so are set free. 

Doctor Who Magazine #633

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine boasts some exciting news: my novelisation Doctor Who - The Six Doctors will be published on 21 January, followed by Steve Cole's novelisation Doctor Who - The Vampire Mutation on 4 March. Both are based on newly discovered paperwork in the archives of the late Terrance Dicks, which I worked my way through last year. I say a little about that in the news story, and will have more to share in due course.

I've also written another Who Connections feature for the mag, this time using the song "As Time Goes By" as my starting point, inspired by something my friend Matthew Sweet told me. And Paul Cornell has kindly written in to add some extra facts to my previous Who Connections piece, on Star Trek.

Here is some publicity bits related to The Six Doctors and The Vampire Mutation:

When There Are Wolves Again, by EJ Swift

This novel won the Clarke Award last week, and well deservedly. It's the tale of two women, Lucy and Hester, between 2020 and 2070, from Covid lockdown through the climate emergency to a... well, that would be sad to spoil.

Lucy is six when we meet her, sent to bubble with her grandparents in their house in Herne Hill, where she falls for the teeming life in the garden. She seems to be, though I don't think it's ever quite stated, neurodivergent, and this exasperates various grown-ups around her in ways we only glean. We often have to read between the lines with Lucy to why others behave as they do.

Hester is a few years older than Lucy and, when we meet her, in Ukraine to record a documentary about the wild dogs of Chernobyl, once the pets of the people who had to flee the nuclear disaster. While there, Hester adopts - or smuggles out - a wolf/dog and, back in the UK, falls on difficult times. Then her documentary does well and she can look for other projects to document. That includes efforts to rewild the heat-ravaged country.

As with Octavia E Butler's The Parable of the Sower, it's unsettling to start a story in the past, catch up with the present and then simply keep going, as speed - it's almost like we've taken flight. Swift is very good at keeping us grounded. For all the details of buildings made of mycelium, people flying to Mars and other sci-fi innovations, things feel ordinary and real.

For all there are exciting moments, what really makes this work is the characterisation, of the two protagonists and those they encounter. Sometimes there are big dramatic moments, sometimes personalities just clash, or people are a bit over-tired. Yet Swift makes us want to spend time with these people, whether they're in a fight or just nattering in the firelight. When people and dogs, inevitably, die we really feel their loss.

Lucy and Hester have frequent near-miss encounters, and by the end are aware of one another though they haven't met. We get to know their families, their conflict, their heartbreaks, and there's the antagonist of people in denial about climate change and the urgent action needed to mitigate its effects. It's sometimes funny, sometimes thrilling and horrific, and shot through with warmth and humanity. I really liked it.

I'm not sure I was aware of it while reading, but looking back I think it's a novel exploring the idea of redemption - that we can do something to repair the damage we've done, to our world, to our communities, to each other. Friends fall out and make up again, a brother and sister come to uneasy terms about an inheritance, a violent bad guy is faced, and nature is restored.

Along the way, there's lots about our individual and collective relationship with nature, and ideas about how things might be, if not fixed, then made better. That includes gas dirigibles instead of airplanes, rewilding on an epic scale, and a huge programme in transferring private land to the common people. It's not easy, but the effort and the progress made gave me hope. How strange, how uplifting, to read a book about coming catastrophe and feel we might get through it, if we change how things are done.

Black Archive: The Daleks, by Oliver Wake

I greatly enjoyed this shrewd, wide-ranging exploration of the seven-part Doctor Who serial variously known as Serial B, The Mutants or The Daleks. First broadcast over the winter of 1963-64, it introduced us to the outer-space robot people of the planet Skaro.

Wake covers a lot of ground, detailing how the story evolved from Terry Nation’s initial wheeze through storyline, draft scripts and production, and what this process of revision by multiple people did to the resulting drama and its meanings. As he says, in this first serial the Daleks are not and never were Nazi analogues; that came later. He makes an argument that they’re something more like ants in an anthill, and provides good evidence.

A lot of what’s here is his analysis of paperwork from the time and old interviews, sources with which I’m very familiar — I wrote the Black Archive book about The Edge of Destruction, the Doctor Who serial that followed this one, and a biography of the story editor on both stories. What strikes me most is how deftly Wake has taken a great wealth of material and written something so concise and pacy. There are lots of big ideas and we rattle through them. Nation would approve.

Wake is excellent on the serial’s debt to Nation’s 1962 dramatisation of “Imposter”, the short story by Philip K Dick, and what we can glean from the RNID summary of the story — a document I’d not been aware of before — that was clearly based on early versions of scripts. He’s also good on citing his sources, so we can check his claims — though it’s a bit jarring to be caught up in some smart, insightful bit of reasoning and then hit my own name. “Oh no, him.”

I particularly liked the analysis of the direction of two key moments: the cliffhanger at the end of episode 1 where Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) is menaced by a sink plunger and then the sequence in episode 2 where we get a first proper look at the Daleks. Wake is also brilliant in his deductions about the real-world item used for the Daleks’ domed heads, using that to explore the specific aesthetic style of this first iteration of Daleks. I’ll not name the specific style here; that’s worth you paying for the book.

My only quibble, really, is where he says Nation muddled his science, eliding two distinct ideas — that radiation can mutate DNA, and that a species evolves over time through mutations in DNA — so that the neutron bomb makes the Daleks and Thals evolve into very different creatures from what they once were. He also says that real petrified jungles aren’t like the one seen here. I don’t think that’s Nation being wrong, as such. He just didn’t think Earth science applied to his story, where he could set the rules. He said as such in an interview included on the video Daleks: The Early Years (1992):

“You land their ship, the TARDIS, on a planet and from that moment on everything on that planet is your creation. If the rocks talk, fine, that’s my planet. If the creatures have 12 eyes, that’s what happens on my planet. So you have this wonderful freedom to do almost anything you want.”

Nation revelled in things being different and strange, and not as our scientists would think possible. So it was not a mistake but conscious choice. And that meant he could sometimes be ahead of the boffins: as I’ve said before, his Planet of the Daleks (1973) features an “ice volcano” in that “instead of white hot lava … erupts with molten ice” — daft fantasy until, 16 years later, scientists spotted cryovulcanism for the first time in space, and it became science fact.

Wake’s book also prompted what may be a new thought. The appendix discusses a short-lived title for the serial: Beyond the Sun. Wake argues that this suggests a setting far beyond our Solar System, but I wonder if that’s right. “Beyond” means “on the farther side of”; departing from Earth, we’d need to head towards the Sun and keep going past it — to the area of space on Earth’s own orbital path but diametrically opposite. In that sense, Skaro would be a hidden, twin planet of Earth.

We can date the moment this changed: on 23 September 1963, Doctor Who story editor David Whitaker commissioned writer Malcolm Hulke for a story called The Hidden Planet, set on planet in the Solar System previously undetected because it shares Earth’s orbit but is on the far side of the Sun. Unlike Skaro, this would have been a world almost like our own but with a number of notable differences the Doctor and his friends would explore; the setting sparked the story.

The Hidden Planet didn’t make it to the screen, but Whitaker seems to have hung on to the idea: his 1966 story The Power of the Daleks is set on a planet called Vulcan, the name used in (discredited) theories about Earth having a twin.

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

It took some time to read this long, densely written “new history of humanity”, as it is subtitled, but this is a volume to savour not to rush through. Every few pages, there’s some boggling new idea, challenging notions of early humanity and our journey to “civilisation”, and thus who we are now. I’ve very grateful to Una McCormack, who recommended it in her essay in Writing the Future (2023).

An early example of the perspective-altering stuff comes on p. 35, where the authors — Graeber an anthropologist, Wengrow an archaeologist — refer for the first time to “American intellectuals” of the 16th and 17th centuries, as opposed to their European counterparts. By this, they mean the indigenous inhabitants of North America who were in in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas. 

That term does something extraordinary, putting the debates that follow between the different, clashing cultures on more equal footing. The Europeans assumed they were bringing civilisation to the Americans; Graeber and Wengrow present a compelling argument that in fact American ideas about society and liberty flowed the other way, directly influencing such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who admitted as much) and Montesquieu. The point is that, at the time, the Americans lived lives of much greater liberty than anyone in Europe.

“To the Jesuits, of course, all this was outrageous. In fact, their attitude towards indigenous ideals of liberty is the exact opposite of the attitude most French people or Canadians tend to hold today: that, in principle, freedom is an altogether admiral ideal” (p. 43).

Even the spaces in which Europeans came to think about and argue over such ideas may have come from America. Later in the book, the authors cite an account of the Creek community as reported by the Jesuit missionary St Jean de Brébuf (1593-1649) in Jesuit Relations of New France 1645-6 (10: 219):

“Each day the adult men of a town would gather to spend much of the day arguing about politics in a spirit of rational debate, in conversations punctuated by the smoking of tobacco and drinking caffeinated beverages.” (p. 463).

It’s brilliantly boggling to think of the coffee houses of Pepys and Johnson, and the coffee shops today where I sometimes take my laptop, as threading back to the prairie. On another occasion, the authors talk about spiritual lives of some groups, where dreams were important and contained hidden truths that the rest of the community would then help to interpret and act on — centuries before European psychologists got into the business of dreams and unconscious desire.

There are plenty more “modern” notions in the historical record. Among the Nuer people of South Sudan studied in the early 20th century,

“it was not uncommon for the local ‘bull’ [leader] actually to be a woman whose parents had declared her a man for social purposes” (p. 97). 

On the following page, they speak of eccentric behaviour, cross dressing and “unconventional sexual practices” among leading figures, suggesting a society that embraced tolerance and even celebrated difference. Later, we return to the same community:

“However, most Nuer women were not ‘properly’ married. In fact, the complexities of this system were such that a large proportion found themselves officially married to ghosts, or to other women (who could be declared male for genealogical purposes) — in which case, how they went about becoming pregnant and raising their children was nobody’s business but their own.” (p. 132)

This kind of detail peppers the whole thing. I loved the word “scofflaw” (p. 424) for someone who flouts the rules. I can’t get out of my head the extraordinary idea that the mini Ice Age of the late 1500s and early 1600s was linked to the activity of European settlers in America, where 90% of the indigenous people died and 50 million hectares of cultivated land reverting to wilderness (p. 258). A footnote to this says there were 60 million in America before the Europeans arrived (p. 568). The scale and impact are stunning.

The book is largely about how archaeological and anthropological evidence of this sort, much of it unearthed in the past few decades, largely undermines the narrative of early humanity as seen in “The Dawn of Man” sequence at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): early man as timid hunter-gatherer, eking out a modest existence on the savannah for hundreds of thousands of years until suddenly, in a moment, learning to use tools to dominate and kill, creating the world we know now.

As Graeber and Wengrow point out, the bare savannah is just where the last surviving hunter-gatherers are able to live today. In ancient times, before the cities, hunter-gatherers would have lived where food was more abundant — the fertile ground, beside rivers and the sea. Admittedly, for Graeber and Wengrow, the assumed narrative is more one of hunter-gatherers suddenly becoming farmers governed by kings, but the domination goes in hand with the patriarchy. They posit three elements of the modern state as we understand it — sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition — and then provide multiple examples of different ways people have reached this, or rejected it out of hand.

For example, they make a compelling case from the surviving pictorial art and other material culture, in the absence of texts, that the so-called Minoan civilisation on Crete was not a patriarchy under a king, but a much more egalitarian society under a community of woman, perhaps priestesses (p. 435). In doing so, they discuss the way commonly used language shapes and prejudices our view, such as early archaeologists labelling part of a complex a “throne room” which immediately suggests a whole load of hierarchical structures for which there is no evidence.

From these myriad examples, they go on to argue that perhaps the “heroic societies” of warrior kings did not grow out of early farmer-settler communities but in opposition to them — among the “barbarians” at the gate or on the boundaries, who would raid the farms. Those bad guys were us all along.

When Wengrow was a guest on an episode of Free Thinking to discuss this and the late Graeber’s other books, host Matthew Sweet spoke of this book as an anarchist history — not something I’d considered as I read it, but which I can see in retrospect. Much of it is about exploring alternative social arrangements, in history and now. The authors argue that many cultures define their own identity in opposition to alternatives they have encountered, doubling down on ideas that they might not have been conscious of until then. They cite an example given by Marcel Mauss, of Abathascan people in Alaska seeing the advantages of Inuit kayaks but refusing to use them, and the Inuit likewise refusing to adopt Abathascan snowshoes.

‘“Societies,” wrote Maus, ‘live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance. [The Abathascans] reflected on what adopting, or not adopting, snowshoes might say about the kind of people they considered themselves to be.’ (pp. 174-5)

This put me in mind of works on sociology I read 30 years ago as a student, and Louis Althusser’s conceptions (IIRC) of “rapport” — where a person or culture changes their behaviour to be more like another so as to make connection — and “differance”, where a person or culture holds to, or even emphasises, the ways in which they are different. If it’s not a wholly original idea, it’s fascinating to see Graeber and Wengrow apply it to concrete examples, and in the midst of a discussion of different ways of enacting trade, such as in gift giving or — as discussed above — realising dreams.

Among the systems of social governance, I was familiar with gift economies (I once put one on Mars) but the French idea “corvée” was new: otherwise free citizens required to do obligatory labour on civic projects on a seasonal basis. We are told that the Sumerians had a similar concept, “dubsig”, the pictogram showing a person with a basket of earth on their head. The idea was that everyone — from king to the lowliest ordinary folk — were required to muck in with whatever needed doing, such as labouring on building sites (p. 299).

The authors provide evidence that indigenous people captured by Europeans or invited to visit their communities were horrified by what they saw, not least in the inequality of wealth, and that Europeans who experienced life in indigenous communities often didn’t want to leave them. The implication is that intoxicating ideas of freedom, consent, of being able to do things differently or to leave a place where we aren’t happy, spread to Europe and transformed who we are. “Civilisation” wasn’t forged when we started farming; it’s a much more modern invention and what we do now could be different — and better. 

• See also: me on Uncivilised, by Subhadras Das