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A review by chalicotherex
Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson
5.0
A polar garbageman documents the arrival of PR/human resources culture to Antarctica's McMurdo station, supplemented with e-mails he's liberated from the Antarctic recycling program. Was going to be an HBO series, but presumably the death of James Gandolfini and the suicide of the author put an end to that.
The combination of Raytheon's toxic corporate culture with low sunlight, extreme isolation and the continent's lack of a governmental authority to appeal to is rather harrowing. Imagine the Stanford prison experiment being given it's own continent to run wild on. Though Johnson and his friends are sometimes able to take their own petty satisfactions.
Interesting in how it compares to Kim Stanley Robinson's [b: Antarctica|41126|Antarctica|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403187728s/41126.jpg|3011567]. Robinson's is a science fiction book based loosely on his time there in '97, but he seems to nail the prevailing culture and its complaints with the supply contractor (in the book it's ASL, a fictional version of ASA which was replaced by Raytheon by the time Johnson arrived). Robinson's solution of having the contract awarded to a co-op is probably one that Johnson would've liked to see, but Big Dead Place shows just how unlikely that is to ever happen. Incidentally, there are a lot of similarities between Johnston and KSR's X, the proletarian protagonist of Antarctica.
Big Dead Place knows its history. He includes a lot of wild stories about early Antarctic exploration that the general enthusiast would be ignorant of, sometimes with a focus on the occult. He's good at drawing comparisons between the plight of early explorers who were often terrorized by their leaders more than the climate and the often dismal working conditions of modern McMurdo.
The combination of Raytheon's toxic corporate culture with low sunlight, extreme isolation and the continent's lack of a governmental authority to appeal to is rather harrowing. Imagine the Stanford prison experiment being given it's own continent to run wild on. Though Johnson and his friends are sometimes able to take their own petty satisfactions.
Interesting in how it compares to Kim Stanley Robinson's [b: Antarctica|41126|Antarctica|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403187728s/41126.jpg|3011567]. Robinson's is a science fiction book based loosely on his time there in '97, but he seems to nail the prevailing culture and its complaints with the supply contractor (in the book it's ASL, a fictional version of ASA which was replaced by Raytheon by the time Johnson arrived). Robinson's solution of having the contract awarded to a co-op is probably one that Johnson would've liked to see, but Big Dead Place shows just how unlikely that is to ever happen. Incidentally, there are a lot of similarities between Johnston and KSR's X, the proletarian protagonist of Antarctica.
Big Dead Place knows its history. He includes a lot of wild stories about early Antarctic exploration that the general enthusiast would be ignorant of, sometimes with a focus on the occult. He's good at drawing comparisons between the plight of early explorers who were often terrorized by their leaders more than the climate and the often dismal working conditions of modern McMurdo.