Month: January 2014

Before describing the sack of the city Gibbon treats us to a portrait of the city that is about to be destroyed.

Surviving documents enabled Gibbon to paint a very full and revealing picture of just what Rome was like in the reign of Theodosius, just before the final collapse of the western empire. We have just ploughed through thirty chapters largely composed of one military disaster after another accompanied with a relentless increase in authoritarian government, religious intolerance and the rise of what was in effect a police state. So it is quite surprising to find that in Rome itself quite a lot of people were doing rather nicely, thank you.

My review of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has reached Chapter 31. If you have read the book you will recall that this is the chapter in which Rome is sacked, but the story has some involved twists and turns. It will take some hard podcasting before we get there, so let’s get started.

Here is quick recap of where the pieces are on the chess board.

This post will have to take the form of an open letter to David Withun.  Hopefully it will make sense to other people as well.

The troubles in Italy and Gaul left Britain isolated.  Its imperial forces had been withdrawn leaving low level garrisons to defend it from the depredations of the Picts and the seaborne Saxons. Being right at the bottom of the imperial todo list created a power vacuum in the province. There was a long tradition in Britain of providing usurpers to the throne, so it was sort of inevitable that a pretender to the purple should emerge.

Johnny Hallyday needs no introduction to the French speaking world, but despite a career that is now over fifty years old you can still not assume that anglophones have even heard of him.  Those that have tend to be a bit bemused.  Back in the early sixties Johnny Hallyday made the momentous decision to sing songs in the style of Elvis Presley but in French.  It was a sensation, and he has never looked back.  He rapidly became a huge star in France and has remained one ever since.  Only a few years ago a concert in Paris had half a million people trying to get tickets.  In the days when these things mattered, his records sold in the millions.  In pure numerical terms his sales make him one of the major figures of the rock world.  When you consider that his success is limited geographically to France, Belgium and parts of Switzerland and Canada it is even more remarkable.

It is normal when talking about Philip.K.Dick to start by mentioning he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on which the film Bladerunner was based. So lets not do that. Ubik is much less well known and I doubt very much will ever get made into a film. It clearly falls into the science fiction category being set in the nineties, which at the time it was written were thirty years in the future.

So with the passage of time Ubik has now become an historical artefact. It gives us an idea about what people in the sixties thought was going to happen in the future. As such it now merits the attention of historians.