Since late 2003, I’ve been recording (almost) every book that I have read. At 200-300 books a year, that’s over 5,000 books that I have written up here. These are the most recent; I also record the books I have read each week and each month. These days each review includes the second paragraph of the third chapter of each book, just for fun; and also usually a purchase link for Amazon UK. (Yes, I know; but I get no other financial reward for writing all of this.)
I have a couple of other blogging projects. Every 1 January, I post about science fiction stories set in the year to come, but written more than twenty years before. So far I have done this for 2020 (little did we know…), 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.
I am also posting weekly analysis of the most well-known book set in every country, by the imperfect measure of ownership on the three main bookshelf sites, LibraryThing, Goodreads and Storygraph. You can find those posts here.
This WordPress blog replaced my Livejournal in March 2022. I was able to copy across all of my old Livejournal posts; unfortunately the internal links in old posts will still in general point back to Livejournal, and though I was able to import images, I wasn’t able to import videos, so it’s a little imperfect.
Comments welcome.
Top posts on this blog (most views in the last seven days):
El Salvador is on the Pacific coast of Central America, with Guatemala to the northwest, Honduras to the northeast and the ocean to the south. Like all the other Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, it became independent from Spain in 1821 and independent from its neighbours in 1841. Its subsequent history was one of military coups and authoritarian governments, with heavy US interference towards the end of the 1931-79 military regime.
A bitter and brutal civil war between left-wing guerilla groups and the US-backed government ran from 1979 to 1992. Most notoriously, a government-backed death squad assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass at a hospital chapel in 1980. 75,000 people (of a population then of roughly 5 million) are reckoned to have died in the conflict. The war ended with the Chapultepec Peace Accords which established a peaceful settlement that has lasted to this day.
The current government is led by President Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019 and re-elected in 2024. He has controversially cracked down on organised crime, reportedly at the expense of civil liberties, and adopted Bitcoin as legal currency. Having said that, El Salvador has the lowest income inequality of any Central American country. Its main exports are textiles, sugar and coffee.
The one personal contact I had with El Salvador was my colleague from NDI days, Gerardo Le Chevallier, who had been a negotiator for the government side in the process that led to the Chapultepec Accords. We had a couple of very collegial evenings at internal work events in 1997 and 1998. He later joined the United Nations, and was killed in the Haiti earthquake of 2010, when the entire leadership of the UN mission there was wiped out.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if, as far as I can tell, less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of El Salvador.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Salvador
Joan Didion
3,961
791
704
What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
Carolyn Forché
3,516
297
623
The Country Between Us
Carolyn Forché
2,823
477
303
Archive of Unknown Universes
Ruben Reyes Jr.
2,546
83
702
The Massacre at El Mozote
Mark Danner
1,687
352
241
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: Stories
Ruben Reyes Jr.
1,251
91
638
One Day of Life
Manlio Argueta
1,025
421
153
Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador
Horacio Castellanos Moya
1,871
169
135
This week’s winner, Salvador by Joan Didion, is well ahead on LibraryThing and wins on Goodreads and StoryGraph too, the latter by a hair’s breadth. It was published in 1987 and adapts three essays by Didion from the New York Review of Books, her first substantial publication on foreign policy (she was already well known as a commentator on US culture).
Carolyn Forché is also American, but has written a lot about El Salvador. What You Have Heard Is True is non-fiction. The Country Between Us is poetry, and I believe the majority of it is inspired by Forché’s experiences in El Salvador.
Ruben Reyes Jr is another American writer, though his parents are from El Salvador. Archive of Unknown Universes is about two Salvadoran students at Harvard using a time machine to explore different alternate histories of the civil war. There is a Rio Grande in Heaven is a short story collection, and the majority of them appear to be set in El Salvador.
The Massacre at El Mozote is about a particularly awful incident in 1981 during the civil war, when government forces killed 811 non-combatant villagers, and also about the Reagan administration’s successful suppression of coverage of the story in the US media.
Manlio Argueta is the top writer on this week’s list who actually lives in El Salvador. One Day of Life is about one woman’s experience of state violence immediately before the war.
Horacio Castellanos Moya is also Salvadoran (though born in Honduras and having spent much of his life in exile). Revulsion is a 119 page book written as a single paragraph, about an exiled writer returning to San Salvador in the 1990s and hating the place.
Including the StoryGraph numbers meant that we gained the two books by Ruben Reyes Jr. and lost two by Sandra Benitez, The Weight of All Things and Bitter Grounds.
Benitez grew up in El Salvador but her parents were from Puerto Rico and she identified as American, as far as I know. The top woman Salvadoran writer who I found was Claudia Hernández, best known for her novel Slash and Burn (originally Roza, Tumba, Quema).
I did not have any tough disqualification choices (or rather, I hesitated with both The Country Between Us and There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, but ruled them in rather than out). Two novels that scored very well on all the systems, but are mainly set outside El Salvador, are Solito by Javier Zamora and The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende.
The Soccer War, by Ryszard Kapuściński, is a collection of articles including the title piece, which is about the 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras sparked by a soccer match, but it is just one of a number of geographically varied essays in the book.
Apart from Gerardo, mentioned above, I have no personal connection with El Salvador, and there are no books on my own shelves about the country.
Coming next: Denmark, Singapore, Lebanon and Liberia.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
I was hugely honoured to be present at the Presidential residence in Podgorica on 13 July 2006, 20 years ago this month, the last leg of a trip that had started in Skopje and continued through Prishtina with an exciting journey through the mountains to Montenegro itself. There were perhaps 300 guests. The mood was festive, everyone shaking hands and embracing. The moment eventually came when the guards played a fanfare, and then a young man began to sing the new/old nation’s anthem, joined in the second verse by a young woman, without any other accompaniment, their voices trembling with emotion. For the first time in nine decades, Montenegro was celebrating its traditional independence day as an independent state. They didn’t drop a beat, or miss a note. It was one of the most electrifying things I have ever witnessed. I don’t have photographs, but I was given a souvenir first day cover.
The month started with a family trip to Antwerp to see the Sultan’s Elephant, an extraordinary live action steampunk show. I got a few film shots of the elephant and the little girl in action:
F celebrated his 7th birthday later in the month, and actually had a party, though my contribution was to take B on a long drive to keep her out of the way.
At the end of the month we drove as usual to Northern Ireland (Anne failing to be persuaded of the merits of Fury from the Deep), but made the tough decision to leave B in Belgium under the supervision of my mother-in-law. It actually went all right, but it was a bit sad.
I managed to read 24 books in July 2006, thanks perhaps to several long land-based trips.
The one I enjoyed most was The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson’s classic horror tale, which you can get here. There were a lot of other good ones, and I guess my favourite reread was Fahrenheit 451, which you can get here. I thoroughly bounced off Galactic Patrol, but you can get it here.
I am pleased with the outcome of the 2026 WSFS business meeting so far. I have marked up my previous post by including the results of the votes; basically everything that came to the meeting that I really wanted to get approved was passed, and the things I thought were really stupid were rejected. Octothorpe’s latest has a reflection on the first sessions, including a firm staffing recommendation to the Brisbane 2028 WorldCon bid, with which I concur.
Later today the Business Meeting will convene again to discuss what actions to take regarding the fiasco of the 2023 Hugos. These proceedings are confidential, though it is public that the Trial Committee has proposed four resolutions to the meeting. The resolutions themselves, and the reports of the Trial Committee which proposed them, and the Investigation Committee which reported last year, have not been made public, and the reports probably won’t be. (I was a member of the Investigation Committee, though not of the Trial Committee, and I also participated in the January 2024 Worldcon Intellectual Property meeting which formally censured several people for what happened at Chengdu.)
I have seen some criticism of the way in which this has been handled. However, there was not really a choice to be made. Until WSFS decides otherwise, its procedures are governed by Robert’s Rules of Order. I would like to change them to something better but we have not yet seen a proposal of what that would be. For all its many flaws, Robert’s Rules do have provision for how to conduct disciplinary procedures.
We should also bear in mind that this is not a criminal trial, but something more akin to a HR process taken by an employer, or a convention responding to a Code of Conduct violation. WSFS actually has a duty of care to those who are accused of damaging our reputation, as well as to the rest of us whose reputation has been damaged. If you think that sort of discussion should be conducted in full view of the public, I wish you luck next time you escalate a dispute with your boss and have the argument in front of your entire workplace.
That all said, the damage done to the reputation of WorldCon and the Hugos by the Chengdu fiasco was very real. The arbitrary disqualification of a large number of otherwise qualified finalists, combined with the obviously cooked voting statistics and a disrespectful and combative public posture from one of those involved, were a grave scandal. It was covered by, among many others, the New York Times, the Guardian (twice), Foreign Policy, NBC News, The Hill, Salon and Esquire. The disqualification of R.F. Kuang’s Babel even turned up as a question on the British quiz show University Challenge in December 2025.
It is not an exaggeration to describe the Chengdu Hugo affair as the worst reputational crisis to hit WorldCon in its 87 years of history, and part of dealing with that is accountability for those responsible, to set the standards of behaviour that we expect of people in senior roles in Worldcons, particularly Hugo administrators, and hold them to account. As someone who loves Worldcon and the Hugos, I am personally bitterly disappointed by the behaviour of some people who I used to respect, and I am still angry about it.
As I said above, four resolutions have been proposed by the Trial Committee for consideration at today’s meeting. The Business Meeting can accept these resolutions, reject them or water them down; it cannot increase their force. Personally I am likely to support in full the four resolutions that have been proposed, though I will listen to reasoned amendments. If anything, I wish the measures proposed had been even stronger. But we are where we are.
At least, there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.
Discworld’s take on the cinema industry, with awful forces trying to install film-making into the Discworld. I remembered this one less favourably than some; the satire is thickly laid on and very specific to cinema culture, which I’m not as interested in as some people. But I am pretty sure that I read it before my 2017-2023 project of watching every single Oscar-winning film in order, and now that I have done that, I found myself much more able to relax into enjoying it for what it is, a bit of fun and perhaps a return to the roots of Discworld, where the first two books were more pastiche than plot. Not sure that the wizards really work though. You can get Moving Pictures here.
This is the last in the series of Eighth Doctor Adventures that I didn’t get around to writing up when I first read them in 2014-15. Most of them were in the Sabbath arc which didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but the previous volume, Halflife, and this one both seem a bit more coherent and interesting, as perhaps the impending end of the series of books was concentrating the creativity of the authors (and editors).
The Tomorrow Windows is a picaresque novel which includes an exploding Ken Livingstone, windows which give you visions of potential futures, and lots of Douglas Adams-esque planets with humorously depicted aliens. I felt it worked well; I have complained about previous books in the sequence that the character of new-ish companion Trix is underdeveloped, but here she gets a fair bit of first-person narrative and I felt I knew her much better. None of this series is Great Literature, but this one at least is satisfactory. You can get The Tomorrow Windows here.
That finished the unblogged EDA’s, but I find I still have some Who books on the shelves acquired years ago that I have not yet written up, so I’m going to go through them in more or less continuity order. First up will be Paul McAuley’s Eye of the Tyger.
Current Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian The Time of Angels, by Jenny Colgan Making Peace in Northern Ireland, by Charles B. Strozier Sleeping Murder, by Agatha Christie
Last books finished Théo Van Rysselberghe, ed. Paul Holberton The Eye of the Tyger, by Paul McAuley Autumn, by Ali Smith Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker (did not finish)
Next books Doctor Who: The Invasion, by Ian Marter Last Exit, by Max Gladstone TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith
(Published in the US as Thirteen at Dinner.) Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Well, mon ami,” he said. “What do you think of that?”
One of Christie’s classic mysteries, published and set in London in 1933. Clearly aimed at the American market, as the first victim’s wife is an American actress who has married English aristocracy.
A very well put together mystery, with the murderer turning out to be able to mastermind an impressive, but just about believable, set of deceptions. Poirot is especially well portrayed, though one feels sorry for Hastings who is patronised by him in every chapter.
It is however marred by casual, unpleasant and explicit anti-semitism.
My electronic edition spells ‘Edgware’ correctly in the main text and title page, but with an extra ‘e’ in page headers and chapter titles.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
The big family event of June 2006 was my great-aunt’s 90th birthday. Here she is with her four children (the four on the left, with her sister-in-law) and her eight nieces and nephews, including my mother. I’m glad to say that she had another 17 years ahead of her.
Two of the pictures from my own camera show the guest of honour and the youngest guest, young F, and me with my siblings.
The other family birthday that month was B’s ninth. The big present was a crocodile-shaped water sprinkler, which all three children hugely enjoyed.
Here is a rare video (well, compilation of several short videos) of the three kids together, B just 9, F about to turn 7 and U at 3½:
Apart from that, I see I went to the Tun on 1 June so must have been in London, was in Thessalonica for a meeting with the SEERC later in the month, attended a Wilton Park conference, and seem to have ended the month with a visit to Paris. At work we published a report on the Preševo Valley of Southern Serbia. My Greek intern K was replaced by Macedonian E. (He now works for the European Commission.) And I wrote what turned out to be the last of my mega-meta-reviews of that year’s Hugo finalists. (It wasn’t possible the following year, for reasons which will become clear, and by 2008 other channels had taken over.) This was also the month that I started really getting into the Big Finish Doctor Who audios.
4,700 pages (YTD 23,300) 3/16 by women (YTD 11/73) none by PoC (YTD 3/73)
The two really good ones here are Zoran Živković’s collection of short stories, which you can get here, and Emma Crewe’s anthropological stody of the House of Lords, which you can get here. I found The Triumph of the West pretty pointless, but you can get it here.
Another of the BBC’s Doctor Who audiobooks, read by Fraser Hines, with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria landing on a strange planet where memories and sensual perceptions are up for barter. It takes Victoria in particular to some surprising places, and the central concept is well developed; also Hines is a very good reader of the three main characters. You can get The Elysian Blade here.
The last time I saw that winter count, a girl and her little brother were holding it above them to try to keep the freezing rain off, and, because I was an enemy to them, the girl was holding her hand tight around a long knife, not because that could have worked against me, but because she was Pikuni, and Pikuni fight even when the fight’s over. That’s why your Great Father still hasn’t been able to stamp us all out like he wants, no matter how many soldiers he sends.
This won the Nebula earlier this year, and no doubt will show up on the Hugo long-list. I think that may make Jones the first Native American writer to win a Nebula. It’s a well assembled novel of a Native American vampire in Montana, as told to a Lutheran pastor in 1912, then unearthed by the pastor’s granddaughter a century later. The descriptions are visceral and convincing. I am still not wild about the horror elements and it is a little too gory for my own delicate tastes. But you can get The Buffalo Hunter Hunter here.
Three stories of the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors separately, laying the way for the Thirteenth Doctor series of comics from Titan. To be honest I didn’t find any of them particularly memorable, though the art is pleasing. You can get The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor here.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
A month when I visited Berlin and London for work, and I have a note that I was in Bath too, but am really not sure why. (Anne’s birthday fell in the middle of my Berlin trip, so we must have celebrated at the weekend.) I also got a really weird phone call from someone who felt it really important to tell me that “je suis” is “Jesus” with “I” in the middle. At work, I took some time off Crisis Group to do a chunky bit of consulting for my future employers Independent Diplomat. I also applied for a job with the European Commission, but it was one of those cases where they were really formalising someone’s existing job and the advertisement was not serious.
As the fine weather came in, U and F dressed up, and B climbed a tree.
The big geopolitical news was Montenegro voting for independence, and its subsequent peaceful separation from Serbia. I still feel rather proud that I helped make the argument for Montenegro as an independent state to EU policymakers long before it became fashionable.
This was also the month that I had my infamous exchange with John Scalzi over his novel Old Man’s War (see here, here, here and here). We are friends now (picture from the 2019 Hugo ceremony).
3,300 pages (YTD 18,600) 1/15 by a woman (YTD 8/57) 1/15 by PoC (YTD 3/57)
Lots of good books here, but the two I enjoyed most were both non-fiction, Moondust, about the Apollo astronoauts, which you can get here, and Echoes from the Dead Zone, a Cypriot anthropologist’s take on his island’s problems, which you can get here. On the other hand, two of these books were so awful that, unusually, I could not finish them, Ivanhoe being slightly the worse of the two. You can get it here, if you want.
The Republic of Congo, often referred to as Congo-Brazzaville to avoid confusion with its much larger neighbor the Democratic Republic of Congo (aka Congo-Kinshasa), is on the western coast of Africa, straddling the equator. Its northern neighbors are Cameroon and the Central African Republic; the Democratic Republic of Congo borders it to the east and south, along with the Cabinda enclave of Angola also to the south; to the west are the Atlantic Ocean and Gabon.
Its history since independence from France in 1960 has been a dismaying sequence of single-party Communist-leaning regimes punctuated by military coups, with two full-blown civil wars in 1993-94 and 1997-99. At the end of the second civil war, President Dennis Sassou, who claimed to have won the 1997 elections, was installed in power with help from the Angolan army, and has stayed there ever since.
In 2016 I actually got to know the then main opposition leader, Guy Brice Parfait Kolélas; he stood in the 2021 presidential election, and came second but got less than 9% of the total vote. It did not matter to him, because tragically he died of COVID on the day of the election, while on a plane flying to France for medical treatment.
These days the Republic of Congo’s economy depends on oil exports. There are untapped mineral resources which will no doubt become more important as the developed world searches for critical raw materials. 70% of the population lives in one of the two big cities in the south, Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville, or along the railway line connecting them; the north and centre are very sparsely inhabited. The official languages are French, Kituba and Lingala, these last two being local languages of the Bantu family.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of the Republic of Congo.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Black Moses
Alain Mabanckou
2,324
246
446
Broken Glass
Alain Mabanckou
2,085
279
339
No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo
Redmond O’Hanlon
1,825
749
92
African Psycho
Alain Mabanckou
1,211
186
325
Memoirs of a Porcupine
Alain Mabanckou
1,243
205
188
Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty
Alain Mabanckou
710
93
80
Johnny Mad Dog
Emmanuel Dongala
454
112
63
The Death of Comrade President
Alain Mabanckou
618
60
74
There was a fair amount of confusion with the Democratic Republic of Congo this week, but I think I successfully sifted for the books set on the northwestern side of the river.
One writer dominates here, Alain Mabanckou, born in Pointe-Noire in 1966, and now teaching literature at UCLA. Most of his books are explicitly set in the Republic of Congo.
This week’s overall winner, also on Goodreads and StoryGraph, is Black Moses (original title Petit Piment, “Little Pepper”) which is an Oliver Twist-like story of a lad making good in Pointe-Noire in the 1980s and 1990s.
Broken Glass is about the lives and travels of the patrons of a Congolese pub; I am taking a chance that more of it is set in-country than not.
African Psycho is about a man who calls on the spirit of a dead murderer to plan his own crime.
Memoirs of a Porcupine is told by a porcupine which has a mystical spiritual link with a human.
Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty is a more frankly autobiographical novel drawing on Mabanckou’s own childhood.
The Death of Comrade President (original title Les cigognes sont immortelles, “Storks are Immortal”) is about a boy growing up in Pointe-Noire who has to protect his family when the president of the country, to whom they are related, is assassinated.
Two other writers feature this week. Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo, originally published just as Congo Journey, is this week’s LibraryThing winner (by quite some way). It is about a journey through the jungle to find a mysterious dinosaur-like creature. I checked, and it’s quite clear that it’s set on the Brazzaville side of the river.
Johnny Mad Dog is by Congo’s other well known writer, Emmanuel Dongala, and is about a child soldier in an African civil war of the 1990s. English Wikipedia thinks it is set in Rwanda or Liberia, and the film adaptation is definitely set in Liberia, but French Wikipedia and the other sources I have consulted in French are fairly sure that the original book is set in the Republic of Congo.
Including the StoryGraph numbers didn’t change the top eight, but did move Redmond O’Hanlon down from the top spot to third place.
As noted above, I scratched my head about a couple of the books included on the list; the one I excluded at the last moment was Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd, where although the framing narrative is set near Brazzaville, the core of the novel is set on a chimpanzee reserve in an unnamed country which is probably Angola and definitely speaks Portuguese rather than French. Otherwise it would have easily topped this week’s table.
It’s an all-male list this week. The top women writers from the Republic of Congo who I found on Goodreads and LibraryThing are Mambou Aimée Gnali (best known work set in Congo: L’or des femmes) and Adèle Caby-Livannah (best known work set in Congo: Les contes de la Pleine Lune: Congo), but with rather low numbers in each case. I did not find any books by women writers from the Republic of Congo on StoryGraph.
I have no books on my own shelves relating to the Republic of Congo.
Across the Atlantic next for El Salvador; then back to Europe for Denmark; then over to the far side of Asia for Singapore; then back west for Lebanon.
The results for the WSFS Mark protection Committee election are out!
Given that the Business Meeting yesterday voted to conduct future elections (from 2027, if it is ratified next year) as single multi-member counts, rather than repeated single-seat counts as at present, I was asked to produce my analysis of how that would have worked with this year’s vote.
(Disclosure: I voted for Warren Buff, so my vote started with him and was not transferred in any of the counts, either in real life or in my simulation.)
We know the number of first preferences counted in each round, and we can work out the transfers from Alana Vincent and Andrew January as follows:
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3
Alana Vincent
27
-27
0
0
Andrew January
25
+23
48
-48
0
Warren Buff
12
+3
15
+18
33
Joni Dashoff
11
11
+8
19
Todd Dashoff
3
3
+5
8
Judy Bemis
3
3
3
Arturo Serrano
2
2
+6
8
Gary Blog
1
1
+4
5
Linda Ross-Mansfield
1
1
1
Roseanna Pendlebury
0
0
+7
7
not transferred
+1
1
1
With 85 votes in total and three places to elect, the quota is 85/(3+1)+.001 = 21.251 Both Alana Vincent and Andrew January exceed the quota on the first count, and are elected, Alana Vincent first with a surplus of 5.749 and Andrew January second with a surplus of 3.749.
Where do Alana’s votes go? 1 is not transferred 3 go to Warren Buff 23 go to Andrew January, and are then transferred along with the rest of his votes in the real-life Round 3. For purposes of the thought experiment, I’m going to assume that Andrew’s original votes, and the ones he inherited from Alana, behaved similarly to each other, and split ties in Andrew’s favour. So, let’s assume that the number of voites transferred from Alana to the next candidate after Andrew was as follows:
Warren Buff
12
Joni Dashoff
4
Todd Dashoff
2
Judy Bemis
0
Arturo Serrano
3
Gary Blog
2
Linda Ross-Mansfield
0
Roseanna Pendlebury
3
not transferred
1
The surplus value of these votes is Alana’s surplus (5.749) divided by the number of transferable votes (26) and rounded down: 0.221 So the second count looks like this:
Count 1
Count 2
Alana Vincent
27
-5.749
21.251
Andrew January
25
–
25
Warren Buff
12
+2.652
14.652
Joni Dashoff
11
+0.884
11.884
Todd Dashoff
3
+0.442
3.442
Judy Bemis
3
3
Arturo Serrano
2
+0.663
2.663
Gary Blog
1
+0.442
1.442
Linda Ross-Mansfield
1
1
Roseanna Pendebury
0
+0.663
0.663
not transferred
+0.003
0.003
(The extra .003 in the Non-Transferable row is an accounting artefact to take account of rounding.)
Next we transfer Andrew January’s first preference votes. Again I’m assuming that they split much the same way as the votes he got from Alana Vincent, as follows:
Warren Buff
9
Joni Dashoff
4
Todd Dashoff
3
Judy Bemis
0
Arturo Serrano
3
Gary Blog
2
Linda Ross-Mansfield
0
Roseanna Pendlebury
4
not transferred
0
The surplus value of these votes is Andrew’s surplus (3.749) divided by the number of transferable votes (25) and rounded down: 0.149 So the third count looks like this:
Count 1
Count 2
Count 3
Alana Vincent
27
21.251
21.251
Andrew January
25
25
-3.749
21.251
Warren Buff
12
14.652
+1.341
15.993
Joni Dashoff
11
11.884
+0.596
12.480
Todd Dashoff
3
3.442
+0.447
3.889
Judy Bemis
3
3
3
Arturo Serrano
2
2.663
+0.447
3.110
Gary Blog
1
1.442
+0.298
1.740
Roseanna Pendlebury
0
0.663
+0.596
1.259
Linda Ross-Mansfield
1
1
1
not transferred
0.003
+0.024
0.027
Linda Ross-Mansfield has the fewest votes at this stage. We know from the real-life election that her vote transferred to Warren Buff, so the fourth count looks like this:
Count 1
Count 2
Count 3
Count 4
Alana Vincent
27
21.251
21.251
21.251
Andrew January
25
25
21.251
21.251
Warren Buff
12
14.652
15.993
+1
16.993
Joni Dashoff
11
11.884
12.480
12.480
Todd Dashoff
3
3.442
3.889
3.889
Arturo Serrano
2
2.663
3.110
3.110
Judy Bemis
3
3
3
3
Gary Blog
1
1.442
1.740
1.740
Roseanna Pendlebury
0
0.663
1.259
1.259
Linda Ross-Mansfield
1
1
1
-1
not transferred
0.003
0.027
0.027
Roseanna Pendlebury now has the fewest votes – the 7 that she got from Alana Vincent and Andrew January. We know that in real life, 1 of these was not transferred, 3 went to Warren Buff and 1 each to Joni Dashoff, Todd Dashoff and Artur Serrano. We don’t know which votes came from Alana and which from Andrew, but let’s imagine that the 3 from Alana went to Warren and the other 4 split evenly. So the fifth round looks like this.
Count 1
Count 2
Count 3
Count 4
Count 5
Alana Vincent
27
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
Andrew January
25
25
21.251
21.251
21.251
Warren Buff
12
14.652
15.993
16.993
+0.663
17.656
Joni Dashoff
11
11.884
12.480
12.480
+0.149
12.629
Todd Dashoff
3
3.442
3.889
3.889
+0.149
4.038
Arturo Serrano
2
2.663
3.110
3.110
+0.149
3.259
Judy Bemis
3
3
3
3
3
Gary Blog
1
1.442
1.740
1.740
1.740
Roseanna Pendlebury
0
0.663
1.259
1.259
-1.259
Linda Ross-Mansfield
1
1
1
not transferred
0.003
0.027
0.027
+0.149
0.176
Gary Blog now has the fewest votes – his own first preference, and 2 each from Andrew January and Alana Vincent. In real life, his first preference went to Warren Buff and the other 4 evenly between Warren Buff, Joni Dashoff, Todd Dashoff and Arturo Serrano. I’m going to imagine that the 2 votes that started with Alana went to Warren and Joni, and the 2 votes that started with Andrew went to Todd and Arturo. So the sixth round looks like this:
Count 1
Count 2
Count 3
Count 4
Count 5
Count 6
Alana Vincent
27
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
Andrew January
25
25
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
Warren Buff
12
14.652
15.993
16.993
17.656
+1.221
18.877
Joni Dashoff
11
11.884
12.480
12.480
12.629
+0.221
12.850
Todd Dashoff
3
3.442
3.889
3.889
4.038
+0.149
4.187
Arturo Serrano
2
2.663
3.110
3.110
3.259
+0.149
3.408
Judy Bemis
3
3
3
3
3
3
Gary Blog
1
1.442
1.740
1.740
1.740
-1.740
Roseanna Pendlebury
0
0.663
1.259
1.259
Linda Ross-Mansfield
1
1
1
not transferred
0.003
0.027
0.027
0.176
0.176
Judy Bemis now has the fewest votes – her 3 first preferences. We know that 2 of these went to Joni Dashoff and 1 to Warren Buff. So the seventh round looks like this:
Count 1
Count 2
Count 3
Count 4
Count 5
Count 6
Count 7
Alana Vincent
27
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
Andrew January
25
25
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
Warren Buff
12
14.652
15.993
16.993
17.656
18.877
+1
19.877
Joni Dashoff
11
11.884
12.480
12.480
12.629
12.850
+2
14.850
Todd Dashoff
3
3.442
3.889
3.889
4.038
4.187
4.187
Arturo Serrano
2
2.663
3.110
3.110
3.259
3.408
3.408
Judy Bemis
3
3
3
3
3
3
-3
Gary Blog
1
1.442
1.740
1.740
1.740
R Pendlebury
0
0.663
1.259
1.259
L Ross-Mansfield
1
1
1
not transferred
0.003
0.027
0.027
0.176
0.176
0.176
Arturo Serrano now has the fewest votes – his 2 first preferences, 3 votes from Alana and 5 votes from Andrew. We know that one of his first preferences transferred to Warren, but the other went to Alana in the first instance, and we have no good information about the rest. For the sake of illustration let’s split the 2 first preference votes evenly between Warren and Joni, the 3 votes from Alana between all three remaining candidates, and the 5 votes from Andrew 2 to Warren, 2 to Joni and 1 to Todd. So the eighth round looks like this:
C1
C2
C3
C4
C5
C6
C7
C8
Alana Vincent
27
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
Andrew January
25
25
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
21.251
Warren Buff
12
14.652
15.993
16.993
17.656
18.877
19.877
+1.519
21.396
Joni Dashoff
11
11.884
12.480
12.480
12.629
12.850
14.850
+1.519
16.369
Todd Dashoff
3
3.442
3.889
3.889
4.038
4.187
4.187
+0.370
4.557
Arturo Serrano
2
2.663
3.110
3.110
3.259
3.408
3.408
-3.408
Judy Bemis
3
3
3
3
3
3
Gary Blog
1
1.442
1.740
1.740
1.740
R Pendlebury
0
0.663
1.259
1.259
L Ross-Mansfield
1
1
1
not transferred
0.003
0.027
0.027
0.176
0.176
0.176
0.176
Warren Buff now exceeds the quota and is elected third, after Alana Vincent and Andrew January.
There are various improvements that could be made to the presentation of the above, but I think this captures the likely flow of voting, without too many heroic assumptions.
If the value of transferred votes were slightly different, Warren would not have been elected on the eighth round and Todd Dashoff’s votes would have been transferred. It would however have required every single one of them to go to Joni Dashoff for her to get the last seat, and from the numbers we have, it seems likely that some would have gone to Warren Buff, and he would have been elected.
The above process was completed in 8 rounds of counting, rather than the 14 that it took in real life. There were 76 transfers of votes here, compared to 84 in real life. The result was actually the same as in real life; but that was because the opposition to the three elected candidates was less than a quarter of the total vote.
Hopefully we can ratify this change for next year.
Voting in this year’s Hugos closes on 8 August! Go do it!
1) My top vote in this category goes to Sophie Burnham, author of the one novel I had not previously read, Sargassa. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
The long stretch of summer was just beginning, and already burdened by an oppressive heat that stuck heavy on his skin and clothes. His stepmother Naevia had taken to winding herself in cool strips of linen soaked in water and aloe before hiding in the tiled bathhouse with his little sister Selah, who was six at the time and still too little to be very interesting. And though she’d expressly forbidden him from going out into the sun, Naevia wasn’t his mima, and Arran had slipped away to join the other boys from his elementary in the shallows that ran along the lush private shores of Luxana’s Arborem district.
I thought this was excellent. We start off in an alternate timeline where an extension of the Roman Empire survives in North America, and we have young people involved with deadly palace politics and incipient revolution. I was really enjoying that, and then the writer puts an extra twist on the situation just after the three-quarter mark which made me enjoy it even more. The sequel was also in the Hugo packet, and I’ll read it in due course, but the first was enough for me to determine my vote for Burnham. You can get Sargassa here.
2) Antonia Hodgson, represented by her novel The Raven Scholar, which I already wrote up. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Today, Bersun was plainly dressed. An iron band for a crown, stamped with an ∞ – sacred symbol of the Eternal Path. His black tunic was slashed with five scarlet claw marks, a reversal of his bodyguards’ uniform. He wore chain mail beneath his tunic, and a longsword at his belt. Orrun was at peace, the rebellion a long-faded scar. But Bersun was a warrior to the bone. Even now, after more than two decades on the throne, he looked more natural dressed as one.
Hodgson is apparently already well known as a writer of eighteenth-century crime novels; this is her first fantasy, set in a world (or at least a country) where eight totemic elemental animals (including the titular Raven) dominate human culture, and the new king is determined in a series of Hunger Games-style trials. It’s an intricate and well constructed plot, as leading characters turn out to be completely different to who we thought they were, and indeed the game plan of the bad guys turns out to be completely different to what it looked like. I found the brutal violence a bit ick though. You can get The Raven Scholar here.
3) Kamilah Cole, represented by her novel So Let Them Burn, which I read last year. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Dinner had been served. Usually, her parents would wait for the whole family to be home before even setting the table, but not when she was here. When Aveline Renard Castell, the gods-blessed ruler of San Irie, arrived in Deadegg to visit the Vincent family, they brought out the good plates and their best manners. Which was annoying, because she was, well, the absolute worst.
Story of magically gifted teenage girl military leaders, which interestingly is a sequel to an unpublished adventure but works regardless. Lots of high politics and dragons. You can get it here.
4) Jared Pechaček, represented by his novel The West Passage, which I read last year. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Pell had always liked the refectory, with the quiet, half- conscious liking one feels for something one has known since childhood. A clerestory of tiny square windows ran along the eastern wall, letting in morning sunlight and evening breezes. Vast old tapestries covered the stone walls. Their rich colors had dimmed, many were moth- eaten, and some had fallen, but the stories and strange figures they held made her feel as if she were a creature of legend herself. Bats roosted in the south rafters, pigeons flew in and out, and ivy curled in at the windows, but even in its state of decay the refectory held some clear beauty quite separate from the ancient chaos of the rest of the palace.
A nicely worked out secondary world with some odd dynastic quirks. You can get it here.
Generation starship with all kinds of issues between bottled brains and AIs. Some cute stuff but felt it wasn’t fully under control.
6) Molly O’Neill, represented by an extract from her novel Greenteeth. Second paragraph of third chapter:
I was stiff from my sleep and wanted to get up. I coughed loudly and rustled the reeds and branches of my nest more than I usually do. I didn’t want to startle her but Temperance stayed still, her chin resting on her knees. Her face was perfectly blank and pale, devoid of any expression, even when I scuttled past her to dangle my feet in the water. I looked back at her and tried to smile without showing any of my teeth. This was difficult to manage and a few of the first row popped out. I gave up and stopped smiling.
Clunky prose, doesn’t get the intersection between modern characterization and ancient lore, too much “look what a cute idea”!
That’s it for my Hugo votes this year, at least the ones I am making public. Happy voting, all!
Non-genre 4 (YTD 27) Lord Edgware Dies, by Agatha Christie Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh Xenophon’s Ephesian history: or the love-adventures of Abrocomas and Anthia, in five books, translated from the Greek by Mr. Rooke Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata
Doctor Who 6 (YTD 49) Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton The Elysian Blade, by David Bishop The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris The Scent of Blood, by Andrew Lane The Winged Coven, by Paul Magrs The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones
Comics 3 (YTD 20) Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor, by James Peaty et al The Many Lives of Doctor Who, by Richard Dinnick et al Time out of Mind, by Jody Houser et al
~7,200 pages (YTD 48,700), counting the audiobooks as 100. 9/31 (YTD 79/204) by non-male writers (Copeland, Cherry, Dent, Christie, Collins, O’Neill, Lord, Burnham, Houser) 3/31 (YTD 20/204) by writers of colour (Kawabata, Ekpeki, Lord) 4 out of 31 reread (Brideshead Revisited, Moving Pictures, Doctor Who and the Zarbi, The Tomorrow Windows) 203 books currently tagged unread, down 14 from last month, down 4 from June 2025.
Reading now Théo Van Rysselberghe, ed. Paul Holberton Autumn, by Ali Smith Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian
Coming soon (perhaps)
Eye of the Tyger, by Paul McAuley The Time of Angels, by Jenny Colgan Doctor Who: The Invasion, by Ian Marter The Invasion, by Stephen Hatcher
Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker Last Exit, by Max Gladstone Blake’s Seven: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century, ed. Laura Horn
TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor Dead Lions, by Mick Herron The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton Léopoldville 60, by Baudouin Deville Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi Jingo, Terry Pratchett Death and the King’s Horseman, by Wole Soyinka Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset Septology, by Jon Fosse
(a bit late, but it’s still Thursday in the Americas)
Current Théo Van Rysselberghe, ed. Paul Holberton Autumn, by Ali Smith Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian
Last books finished Blood Libel: Anti-Americanism and Genocide in the Kosovo War, by Bardhyl Mahmuti (did not finish) The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones The Many Lives of Doctor Who, by Richard Dinnick et al Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh The Making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, by David Goodall Xenophon’s Ephesian history: or the love-adventures of Abrocomas and Anthia, in five books, translated from the Greek by Mr. Rooke Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata Time out of Mind, by Jody Houser et al Bridging Worlds, ed. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
Next books Eye of the Tyger, by Paul McAuley Brian Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith
Second paragraph of third section (which is the third of three introductions, this one by the editor Glyn Morgan):
The book that you hold in your hands was created as a companion project to the ‘Science Fiction’ exhibition that opened at the Science Museum in London in October 2022. This book is an extension of the themes and topics covered there, but stands alone as a collection of essays and images across five different topics, each exploring different aspects of the global genre of science fiction and its relationship with scientific enquiry, history and culture.
I got this book at the ‘Science Fiction’ exhibition in the Science Museum in London in December 2022. I didn’t bother writing up the exhibition itself at the time – to be honest, I did not find it very exciting at all, but could not work up the energy to be mean about it.
However, this lavishly illustrated book of short essays and interviews is a good souvenir. The interviews are with Stanley Chen / Chen Qiufan, Charlie Jane Anders, Vandana Singh, Tade Thompson and Kim Stanley Robinson. The five individual sections are on machines / robots, space travel, communication and translation, aliens and millennial despair. The essay that I enjoyed most was Rachel Cordasco’s on science fiction in translation, which is not to say that any of the others were bad. The illustrations are relevant and well chosen. I think I got more enjoyment from the content of the book than from the content of the exhibition, and probably spent more time reading it than I did in the Science Museum that day three and a half years ago. Worth looking out for. You can get Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination here.
This was my shortest unread book acquired in 2022, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on both of those piles was An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent, but I didn’t finish that and can’t be bothered to write it up; likewise the very last book I acquired in 2022 other than Doctor Who comics, Blood Libel: Anti-Americanism and Genocide in the Kosovo War by Bardhyl Mahmuti.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
No Crisis Group papers in April 2006, but I did publish a piece in Interationale Politik in the wake of the failed Dutch and French referenda on the EU’s Constitutional Treaty, advocating the sort of citizen’s assembly, with an element of random selection, that has subsequently been used to great effect in Ireland and which President Macron is now advocating for France and for Europe; I was ahead of my time. You can read it here.
My only trip was to Stockholm, starting on my 39th birthday; as well as attending a conference, I went to the Vasa Museum and the Nobel Prize Museum, both very interesting. We celebrated my birthday at the weekend when I got back, which also was the weekend that the lovely School Reunion episode of Doctor Who was broadcast.
More grimly, one of our neighbours was murdered by her husband, who later took his own life in prison. She had been a stalwart of the annual dorpsfeest, and a bench in the grassy space behind the parochial hall is dedicated to her memory (lovely photo by Ernst Gülcher).
4,900 pages (YTD 15,300) 2/13 by women (YTD 7/42) 1/13 by PoC (YTD 2/42)
The best of these are the two biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. They were almost exact contemporaries – they were born two years apart and died two years apart, she soon before her 49th birthday (of natural causes) and he a few months after his (shot dead by the vice-president of the United States).
Neither is mentioned in the other biography, and they would not have ever met (neither ever crossed the Atlantic), but they would have known about each other. John and Abigail Adams certainly knew them both. Abigail was not a fan of either. On 30 September 1785, she wrote of Georgiana,
Amongst the most celebrated of their beauties stands the Duchess of Devonshire, who is masculine in her appearance… [not intended as a positive statement]
and on 28 January 1797, she wrote of Hamilton,
Beware of that spare Cassius, has always occured to me when I have seen that cock sparrow. O I have read his Heart in his wicked Eyes many a time. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.
Angelica Schuyler Church (who gets a lot of the good lines in Hamilton the musical) and her husband (a radical English MP) must also surely have known them both on rather better terms – John Church was an ally first of Earl Grey (he of the tea, who was also Georgiana’s lover) and then of Charles
James Fox (who she also strongly supported).
One of Hamilton’s great-granddaughters was a Georgina, but that’s more likely a homage to Washington than Devonshire. (Incidentally it was she who got the famous Emma Lazarus poem, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses..” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.) You can get Alexander Hamiton here and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire here.
None of the other books this month was all that bad but I guess The Moon Pool failed to convince me; you can get it here.
The department secretary/courier glanced back at the envelope he had tossed onto my desk. ‘How would I know?’
I’ve only read one of Karen Lord’s books before, but was inspired to get this after meeting her at Eastercon (we were part of a big group that went out for dinner one evening, and ended up sharing a massive baked camembert between the two of us).
I really enjoyed this. It’s a very humane story of a nearly-human race whose world has been destroyed, and of the government agent whose job it is to settle refugees from the genocide onto a new planet. We end up touring the new planet which itself turns out to be pretty diverse, with different social structures and beliefs in different regions, while the two protagonists sort out their own relationship while observing the other personal dynamics in their team. The book was published in 2013, so just before the refugee crisis really hit, but was very timely for all that. Lord pulls off the trick of vivid alien planetary settings and vivid yet comprehensible almost-human characterisation.
The book came fifth in the 2014 Locus Awards but rather surprisingly didn’t get any other nominations. It was my top unread science fiction book, before the Hugo packet landed; top of that list now is The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. You can get The Best of All Possible Worlds here.
When I first started to watch The Web Planet in 2007, the DVD was unfortunately still in my laptop when it was stolen by a sneak thief at the Gare du Nord in Brussels. I got another copy eventually and wrote:
I got the DVD of The Web Planet, a First Doctor story from 1965 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, back in January; and then, after I had read Wood and Miles‘ excoriating description of it, the disc was in my laptop when it got stolen. But I caught up with this one over the weekend as well.
Oh dear.
It’s very brave to try and produce an entire six-part story with no humanoid characters other than the regular cast, and the production teeters on the edge of greatness but, ultimately, falls off and hurtles to its doom. I mean, the Zarbi, with their unearthly whistling, are actually pretty good, so good that you can nearly forget that they are blokes in giant ant costumes. And the disembodied Animus is pretty sinister. But the Venom Grubs are, frankly, pathetic. And the Menoptra, with their bizarre dance movements, and their pitiful Optera relatives, are just ludicrous. I can’t quite believe that this is the only story from the original Season Two (apart from the glorious Dalek Invasion of Earth) available on DVD. Almost any other would make more sense and be a better advertisement for Who as a whole. (I have reservations about The Chase, though it does at least have Daleks and a variety of settings, and I’ve only seen the first episode of The Space Museum so can’t speak to the whole of it, though I must say it really grabbed me.)
Maureen O’Brien is good as Vicki though, perhaps the best I remember her in any of her stories. The others are fine too, especially (as ever) Hartnell.
Coming back to it two years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
When I first watchedThe Web Planet two years ago I really didn’t rate it. In my current rewatch, it is the first story where I have revised my opinion significantly upwards. Unlike the other non-Dalek sfnal stories so far it looks weird rather than crap. I think I appreciate it much more now that I have got my watching brain acclimatised to the mid 1960s, as it were; and perhaps it is easier to take it an episode at a time rather than sitting down to watch all six. The Menoptra and Zarbi (and the Animus) are much more convincing aliens than the Voord or the Sensorites, the sets are excellent and the vaseline on the camera lenses adds to the air of alienness. It is no wonder that this was one of the very first novelisations, or that the first Doctor Who annual had not one but two stories set on Vortis. (The Optera and Venom Grubs are still a bit less convincing, but I was able to rise above that somehow.) We also see a lot more of the inside of the Tardis than ever before. Lots of good character moments for all four regulars, with Barbara saving the day.
Coming back to it, I attempted to binge the whole story in an evening, and I think this was a mistake; I found myself confused and actually a little bored. Yes, the makers of the show achieved miracles on a shoestring, but it’s difficult for today’s viewer to grasp. People who saw it the first time around were generally more impressed, most notably Peter Capaldi:
…those old shows were only made to be watched once, on a flickering monochrome telly that smelled of valves and furniture polish. In that context, they succeeded immeasurably. They were triumphs of imagination. It may surprise you now, but something like The Web Planet lived powerfully and expansively in my head for decades… until the DVDs came along and spoiled the party. But I’m glad to say that the Menoptra eventually flitted back into my dreams, where they belong.
The novel, Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton, the Australian writer of the original story, was the second Doctor Who novel ever published (after Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure with the Daleks). The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Chesterton, get back! Back!”
I (obviously) read it as a child, and was fascinated. Coming back to it in 2008, I wrote:
Doctor Who and the Zarbi was based on the story now generally called The Web Planet, which crashes and burns spectacularly awfully on screen because today’s viewers cannot take the production values seriously. The book is a bit better, because the printed page and the reader’s imagination, rather than the unforgiving camera, supplies the details of the various non-human races in conflict on the planet Vortis. In principle it makes a good sf story, perhaps the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era.
The book does suffer from a couple of weaknesses. Most bizarrely, and uniquely, the central character is referred to as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor” throughout, and the Tardis loses the definite article, as if Tardis was just the name of the vessel. Also, in places the book feels uncomfortably like what it is, a TV script cast in different format, and one feels that Strutton is just writing what appeared to the viewer on the screen. Having said that, though, the book is still better than the original TV story.
To call it “the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era” is a strong statement, and to be honest I think three of the four Hartnell Dalek stories are better contenders. But as a story, it’s at the upper end and the novelisation pulls that out. You can get Doctor Who and the Zarbi here.
The illustrations in the book are really striking.
They are credited to one John Wood, which is also the name of the BBC designer who worked on the TV story. Fannish lore, however, insists that these are two different people, and further that the illustrator John Wood is a mistake for John Woods, one of the illustrators who also worked on the three 1960s Dalek books (The Dalek Book, The Dalek World and The Dalek Outer Space Book). Unfortunately the three or four different artists who worked on the Dalek books are not credited individually, so it is difficult to compare.
I am not convinced by fannish lore. I think Occam’s Razor shaves closer to the possibility that the same artist designed the TV show and illustrated the book. Also, the Vicki in the illustrations is a brunette, whereas Maureen O’Brien at that age was blonde. Surely this indicates that the illustrations could have been based on the original production design, which might have dated from before Maureen O’Brien’s start on the show? The Web Planet was only her third story, and its first episode was her seventh. Also, if John Wood’s name was spelled incorrectly when the book was first published, surely he would have had a chance to correct it before a different publisher brought it out again ten years later?
Anyway. Brigid Cherry, a retired media studies academic who like Peter Capaldi is old enough to have seen the story when it was first broadcast in 1965, has written a redemptive Black Archive monograph on it. I must say that while my favourite Black Archives are those that tell me all the reasons why my favourite stories are so fantastic, I do also like the ones like this where the writer challenges my less positive views and finds reasons that I had not considered to appreciate a story. There are only three chapters, but they are long and it is a chunky read.
A substantial introduction, with the title “So the Legends Say: Receptions of The Web Planet“, looks at views of The Web Planet, contrasting the rather harsh take of modern fans such as me with the much more positive memories of those who saw it at the time, including the author herself, Stephen James Walker and contributors to an online forum. She doesn’t quote Peter Capaldi here, but his comments are fully aligned with her argument.
I’m going to lazily use the author’s summaries of her own chapters. “Chapter one [whose title is “Every Corner of Vortis: Televisuality”] explores the aesthetics of the story in relation to how television was made at the time, and the ways in which the mise-en-scène, art design, camerawork and other stylistic elements were determined by these production processes. In terms of The Web Planet being considered an ambitious, if not over-ambitious, experiment, this chapter also frames early Doctor Who, and this story specifically, as an example of the experimental television being produced at the time.”
“Chapter two [whose title is: “Flying Above thought: Performance”] extends this approach by further considering the performativity of the story, considering it in relation to art or media forms such as puppetry, mime, and avant-garde theatre. These two chapters are necessarily historiography (writing about the past) not in order to definitively answer the question of whether The Web Planet is great children’s TV or a failed experiment – it might be both, of course. Rather, it is an analysis intended to re-examine it from the perspective of TV production history and the history of the wider arts and popular culture of the time. Such historiography… can be both an account of industrial circumstances (in this instance, aspects of production and performance at the BBC in the 1960s) and a social history where the text reflects the national (or global) zeitgeist.”
The second paragraph of the third and final chapter (whose title is: “The Light is Good: Themes”) is:
There are several technological forms contrasted in The Web Planet: the organic technology of the Carsinome; the inorganic crystalline technology used by the Menoptra (the prime example of which is the communication device that Vrestin uses to contact the invasion force in ‘The Zarbi’); the metallic gold collars (again inorganic) used by the Zarbi to ‘morphotise’ victims; and the mysterious energy that powers the TARDIS itself and is shown to repel the Animus and Zarbi (potentially both organic and inorganic since the Doctor’s ship often seems ‘alive’). These various forms of technology are indicative of technological, and thus cultural, development in each of the character groupings in the narrative.
The author’s summary is: “chapter 3 turns to the textual meanings that underpin the story, revealing the ideological meanings and discourses in relation to the 1960s zeitgeist. This also draws on yet another element of historiography discussed by Hilmes, that is consideration of the conditions under which the popular culture text is consumed or experienced.”
The short conclusion, “The Silence of Time: Reappraising The Web Planet”, sums up what has been said, and ends:
Bear in mind that when the Doctor stops Ian from plunging his hand into the acid pool in the opening episode, the lesson to be learnt is to be more cautious before rushing in and take more time to better understand what we are seeing. It is past time to re-appraise The Web Planetin contexts other than an established fan canon born of naiveté or ignorance of television history. It is, then, time to come back to Vortis. As this book has argued, The Web Planet’s innovative approaches demand it is given its deserved status in the canon of British experimental television.
As I hope is clear by now, I found this an entertaining and thought-provoking read, and maybe the next time I pop the DVD in the player I’ll approach the story in a more redemptive frame of mind. You can get the Black Archive here.
Andrew Hilton is more than ninety years old and hasn’t stood at his full height in ten. He was a tower of a man in his prime, two metres tall and built like a boxer. Nearly nobody he ever met was able to look him straight in the eye, at least not and tell him ‘No.’ Illness has gradually eaten away at that over the years. He feels as if he lives at the bottom of a deep bath, with everybody he ever meets looking down at him from slippery, unscalable walls, none of them able to reach down to help him. He’s spent his final months crumpled up in bed like a dying spider, changing to a corpse’s colour ahead of time. It might have been bearable if he’d lost his mind, but he remembers what he used to be: a leader, a powerhouse. He used to be able to alter the course of terrible events for the better, to get justice. He used to protect people.
One of the hotly tipped books this year, a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, this is a great story combining the vibes of A Scanner Darkly and H.P. Lovecraft, and perhaps a nod to the Silents of Matt Smith era Doctor Who, and Charlie Stross’s Laundry. The Antimemetics Division deals with entities which are invading us, taking our memories, our consciousness, our loves and emotions. and leaving nothing. People who have worked at the Division for years turn up and think it is their first day. The protagonist loses all knowledge of her husband. The sense of alienation and loss of trust in reality is tremendously conveyed. You do slightly wonder how the Antimemetics Division itself could withstand the tests of time, given the powerful nature of the opposition. But I enjoyed the ride a lot. You can get There is No Antimemetics Division here.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
March 2006 was a pretty memorable month for me. I had one of the most fun science fiction convention experiences I can remember at P-Con in Dublin, where I moderated four panels, one of which was interrupted by the BBC calling me for a statement on the death of Slobodan Milošević. My brains were eaten by Fluff.
I went on from Dublin (having spoken at a panel with Garret Fitzgerald) to Cyprus, where I presented the first Crisis Group report on the situation there at a packed event in the Ledra Palace Hotel on the Green Line. This was more significant than I had perhaps realised; it was the first time since the referendums of April 2004 that someone had come to the island to tell the Greek Cypriots that they had voted for continued partition. Tempers were still high (actually they still are, many years later) and one Greek Cypriot newspaper accused me of behaving “με αναίδεια χίλιων πιθήκων”, “with the impudence of a thousand monkeys”. But I feel it was one of the more important bits of work we did in my time at Crisis Group, and perhaps more important, I made friends on that trip who I am still in touch with. (The chap in the picture below is not one of them.)
I also presented the report in Athens and Istanbul, my first ever visit to Turkey. The reception was a bit more laid back in both cases.
Anne and I attempted to have a romantic weekend break to Maastricht. It rained. Weirdly enough I went back to that part of the world later in the month for a conference about Kosovo in a chateau very near by (in Château St-Gerlach). And we did a nice little report on the EU and the South Caucasus. Outside Crisis Group, I published a short note on how to proceed with EU integration, proposing the citizens’ dialogues later adopted by President Macron (who may have come up with the idea separately).
Meanwhile back at home, F made a scale model of the solar system in our back yard. Here are the Sun (portrayed by a space hopper), a barely visible Mercury, and more clearly visible Venus, Earth and Mars.
4,200 pages (YTD 10,400) None by women (YTD 5/29) None by PoC (YTD 1/29)
This was a really good month for books as well, despite a certain lack of diversity. The top book of 2006 for me was Lost Lives, the gruelling account of people who died in the Troubles. You can get it (for a price!) here. Others that I particularly enjoyed were The Discontinuity Guide, which you can get here; Easter 1916, which you can get here; and Thud!, which you can get here.
Serbia is at the heart of the Balkans; south of Hungary, north of North Macedonia, east of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, northeast of Montenegro and Kosovo, west of Romania and Bulgaria. It became autonomous from the Ottoman Empire in 1804 and gradually expanded in territory and upgraded in status to the point that it became the spark for the First World War in 1914.
The war was pretty disastrous for Serbia – around 20-25% of its entire population is thought to have died during the 1914-18 period. But after the war it became the centre of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, incorporating large chunks of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the neighbouring state of Montenegro. Renamed Yugoslavia, this state was broken up during the second world war, but reassembled under the leadership of Marshal Tito, and lasted another 45 years after that.
There is no space to go into detail here about the break-up of Yugoslavia, which involved another three and a half wars (Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and the ten days of conflict in Slovenia) and also two peaceful separations (Macedonia and Montenegro). By the end, Serbia was back down to almost its 1914 borders with the addition of the Vojvodina north of Belgrade. Slobodan Milošević, who had become the Serbian leader in the late stages of Communism, remained in power until 2001. Since 2014 it has been under the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party.
I have been to Serbia many times, starting in 1998, and have many friends in and from there. My former assistant R from my Bosnia days now lives in Belgrade and has an Instagram travel blog called “Price iz kofera“, “Stories from a Suitcase”. Going back a lot further, my grandfather was given a Serbian military decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, for his part in the unsuccessful defence of the front line in Macedonia in 1915. I always enjoy going back. (Here’s Sirmium.)
Serbian is a Slavic language, mutually intelligible with Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, not quite as close to Slovenian in one direction and Macedonian and Bulgarian in the other. I am slightly above casual tourist level.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Serbia.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Fatherland – A Family History
Nina Bunjevac
1,700
135
352
The Library
Zoran Živković
3,042
139
158
The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander
Milorad Pavić
1,461
197
112
With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia
Åsne Seierstad
1,029
282
92
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia: A Memoir
Sofija Stefanovic
1,177
46
247
At The Lucky Hand
Goran Petrović
2,482
40
130
Götz and Meyer
David Albahari
614
214
91
The Use of Man
Aleksandar Tišma
886
180
49
This was unusually difficult to tally. Many books are tagged “serbia” on LibraryThing and Goodreads even if they are mostly set in Bosnia (or sometimes Kosovo). On the other hand, Serbian writers like Danilo Kiš, Zoran Živković and Milorad Pavić love setting their writing in an anonymous Eastern European location, which sometimes might be Serbia and sometimes might not. Indeed, when I did this analysis in 2015 I awarded the top spot to The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Olbreht, but having read it since then, I don’t think it is sufficiently explicit that the setting is Serbia for it to qualify. I have done my best with the list above.
This week’s winner, Fatherland, by Nina Bunjevac, also the StoryGraph winner, is a graphic novel about a girl whose mother moves the family back home to Serbia from Canada, to get away from the Serbian nationalist father who eventually accidentally blows himself up in Toronto. I have not been able to check in detail but it sounds similar to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, though maybe not such a classic.
I’m glad to see that this week’s Goodreads winner, The Library, is by the great Serbian magical realist writer Zoran Živković, who I actually met two decades ago. I’m aware that this requires some special pleading, in that the locations of the stories are not specified, but I thin most of the stories can be taken as set in the writer’s home of Belgrade – though admittedly the fourth story of the six is set in Hell and the fifth in a city where there are bookstalls under the Great Bridge, which I don’t think is the case in Belgrade.
The Inner Side of the Wind is a time travel romance set in Belgrade between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
With Their Backs to the Wind, this week’s LibraryThing winner, is reportage about life under Milošević.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is also non-fiction, about a girl growing up between Serbia and Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. It sounds like more of it is set in Serbia than Australia so I have allowed it on the list.
At The Lucky Hand is more magical realism set in Belgrade.
Götz and Meyer is about a Serbian teacher today obsessed with two SS men committing genocide in and around Belgrade in the second world war.
The Use of Man is about four people from Novi Sad, the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina, and their experiences in the second world war.
I excluded Srdja Popović’s Blueprint for Revolution which draws on the real-life lessons of the author’s involvement with the anti-Milošević Otpor movement, because when I checked I found that he had also drawn on a lot of other countries’ experiences of civil resistance.
I also excluded Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš, because on a page count it became clear to me that more than half of it is set in Hungary rather than Serbia.
Both Nina Bunjevac and Sofija Stefanovic found their muses by emigrating. The top Serbian woman writer by my metrics who is still in the country is Mirjana Novaković, best known for her Fear and His Servant.
Using the StoryGraph numbers gained us Miss Ex-Yugoslavia at the expense of Hourglass, by Danilo Kiš, who unfortunately ends up unrepresented here as a result.
Serbia is well represented on my own bookshelves, particularly in books which cover the whole former Yugoslavia or the wider Balkans such as Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, The Balkans by Mark Mazower, The Fall of Yugoslavia by Misha Glenny and Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little.
F and I went to see Nolan’s The Odyssey yesterday, it being his 27th birthday. The Kinepolis complex in Brussels is one of only three IMAX 70 mm projectors sowing it in continental Europe (the other two are Montpelier and Copenhagen). However it is already booked up for weeks in advance, so we went instead to the IMAX cinema in Hasselt, an hour’s drive northeast of us. I must say having the huge screen was great, and although I had heard that the volume of the soundtrack is very loud, I think that in Hasselt at least it had been adjusted downwards for viewer comfort.
So, what did I think? It’s not long since I read Emily Wilson’s translation of the original, so it was reasonably fresh in my mind, and meant that there were certain set-pieces I was waiting for with interest, to see how they could be done – the Cyclops, Circe, the final showdown on Ithaca, this last also recently done by Claire North. I see some Homeric purists online complaining that this or that plot line or story element was left out. In general I don’t have much sympathy with that; the Homeric texts as we have them are presumably a synthesis from different sources, and I think every story-teller gets to tell it as they want (and some have varied a lot more than Nolan). Which is not to say that the choices made are above criticism, of course.
So I am not too worried about the softening of the protagonist’s character, or that Helen and Clytemnestra are played by the same Black actor (Lupita Nyong’o), or that Telemachus at one point calls Odysseus ‘Dad’, or the lengthy inclusion of the Trojan Horse, or even about the unbeatable robot soldiers. As the Economist reviewer says, ‘We are not arguing about “The Odyssey” when we argue about “The Odyssey”. We are arguing about ourselves.’
Having said that, there were a couple of bits that really didn’t work for me in dramatic terms. The Sirens just had vague shapes on a misty shore, with Matt Damon gurning while tied to the mast – curiously underplayed compared to the rest of the film. And Charlize Theron’s Calypso as the very professional but not very affectionate therapist for Odysseus’ PTSD, rather than the sexy beach nymph of Homer, makes the story rather Californian, as I saw someone somewhere put it.
But in general I liked it. I actually found the plot easier to follow than the original, though my sense is that it stuck fairly closely to Homer’s narrative order. Matt Damon is fine as Nolan’s version of Odysseus, and Tom Holland is fine as Telemachus. I thought Zendaya a bit underused as Athena, but Anne Hathaway is superb as Penelope, the most interesting character in the story. I loved the Cyclops and Circe, though in both cases Nolan tells a slightly different story to Homer. The prolonged fight sequences at the end sees Robert Pattinson’s sleazy Antinous eventually get his comeuppance, and is well enough shot that you barely have time to wonder how Ulysses and Telemachus can possibly defeat 120 suitors. Indeed the whole three hours passed rather quickly.
I imagine that this and Project Hail Mary will be duking it out for next year’s Hugo, and probably for other awards too. I think I’ll give The Odyssey the higher vote.
We had the day off for Belgian National Day on Tuesday, and I went to Gent, to visit the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) and the City Museum of Contemporary Art (SMAK), which face each other to the south of the city centre (where the Gentse Feesten were also on, but I didn’t check that out).
The Museum of Fine Arts probably isn’t in the top five art museums in Belgium (there are at least two better ones in each of Bruges, Brussels and Antwerp, never mind elsewhere), and it isn’t particularly large, but even a lesser Belgian art museum is on the level of a national gallery in many other countries. I had an enjoyable few hours looking around the collection. Here are my top ten art works, in chronological order.
Saint Jerome in Prayer, by Hieronymous Bosch (late 15th century). The saint has a very small pet lion, and the rocks and plants around him are typically twisted. Hieronymus depicts Hieronymus.
Gerry decided to test at 23andMe, too. She was curious about her own results, and besides, if she matched Alice, that would eliminate some possibilities that Alice needed to consider—that Alice had been adopted or that Jim Collins wasn’t, biologically speaking, Alice’s father. These were contenders for an explanation, even if Gerry told Alice she was insane when Alice suggested their mother could have had an affair.
My attentive reader will have noticed that I have become very fascinated by the addition of DNA analysis to the suite of tools available to the genealogy researcher. I have been fortunate; all of my own direct ancestors appear to be genetically who we thought they were, at least back to the early nineteenth century; and while I have identified a couple of absentee parents for other people, only one of them was still alive (and his daughter decided not to try contacting him).
Libby Copeland takes us to stories of people who found much closer and less pleasant surprises in their DNA, and asks what this means for the American concept of families? And it is a much more American than European thing; I find more relatives on the DNA sites connected to my American grandmother than to my three Irish grandparents combined. There are lines around consent and confidentiality that modern technology is redrawing. The privacy of a brief relationship decades ago is up-ended by the genetic information encoded in the body of the child of that relationship, who has a right to know where they come from too.
If you haven’t yet gone down the rabbit hole of DNA testing, but are considering it, this is an essential read to think through what you might find out. If you have, you’ll find yourself alternating between nods of recognition and jaw-dropping astonishment. I am lost in admiration of CeCe Moore, who has turned the combination of DNA analysis and genealogical research into a new branch of science. My own dabbling has been fascinating but without any huge shocks. Not everyone is so lucky.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
As previously noted, I started the month in Skopje, and then returned to Prishtina in Kosovo for more work meetings, extended by a day when fog prevented my flight home from taking off. This was all leading up to publishing another Kosovo report mid-month. I also got quoted in the Guardian by the lovely and much missed Ian Traynor. My other trip of the month was to Vienna, a rather mad affair which included intense chats with the late great Albert Rohan and the late great Martti Ahtisaari.
My negotiations with my future employer were meantime continuing, but I received an unexpected approach from a head-hunter looking for someone to run a new thinktank on longevity issues. I don’t know a lot about the subject, but I kept up the conversation for several weeks until we mutually decided that it just wasn’t my thing. (Much later, I tracked down the person who did get the job; let’s just say that I dodged a bullet.)
At home, we had a lovely ceremony organised by the municipality in which young F attended the ceremonial planting of his special tree. Our village donates or plants a tree for every child turning seven each year; we did not make anything of it for the girls, who would not really appreciate it, but F was certainly interested and engaged.
We went back to the scene in 2013 to see if we could find the same tree, and I’m pretty sure we did.
Another seven years on, we went back again in the early pandemic. – you can see I think that it is the same tree, and the same person who stood by it aged six and thirteen, now twenty.
4,200 pages (YTD 6,200) 4/12 (YTD 5/18) by women (Jenkins, Kemble, Alcott, Benson) 1/12 (YTD 1/18) by PoC (Delany)
The best and worst of these were all non-fiction. The best is Fanny Kemble’s account of slavery from the point of view of someone who married a slave-owner. You can read it for free here. Almost as good is Richard Caplan’s definitive account of the diplomatic response to the break-up of Yugoslavia, which kills a few myths and which you can get here. The worst by far is Rebecca Jenkins’ biography of Fanny Kemble. If you want, you can get it here.
Current The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Last books finished The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris Lord Edgware Dies, by Agatha Christie Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett For and Against a United Ireland, by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride The Scent of Blood, by Andrew Lane The Winged Coven, by Paul Magrs Understanding the War in Kosovo, eds Florian Bieber and Židas Daskaloski An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent (did not finish) Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, by Bob Shaw
Next books
The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones Blood Libel: Anti-Americanism and Genocide in the Kosovo War , by Bardhyl Mahmuti Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata
I will never see Lenore Dove again. Never hear her laugh coming from high above me in the branches. Never feel the warmth of her in my arms as we lay on a bed of pine needles, my lips pressed into the hollow of her neck. Never pull a stray goose feather from her hair, or listen to her play her tune box, or press my finger into the crease that forms between her eyebrows when she’s puzzling out a thought. Never see her face brighten at a bag of gumdrops or a full moon or the sound of me whispering, “I love you like all-fire.”
I have been wondering about this book since grinding through the statistics for the YA finalists in the BSFA, Nebula/Andre Norton and now the Hugo/Lodestar, given that it is so far ahead of the field in terms of ownership on all of the platforms. Apparently it was the best-selling book in the USA last year. I wasn’t a massive fan of the Hunger Games trilogy though I could see how it developed a cult following. It took me a while to remember how this story, which is about the past Hunger Games victory of Haymitch Abernathy of District 12, fits into the narrative 24 years before the original novel is set.
Reader, I hugely enjoyed it. Even though we know from the very beginning that everyone else is going to die horribly, the story pushes on with tremendous energy and momentum, and a strong empathy for the children who are being slaughtered by each other in the ritual killing. I guess it’s notable that the technology of Panem doesn’t change much in the 24 years between the two stories, but then again, it’s a repressive place where innovation serves only the interests of state surveillance. I found it an easy, exciting read and I was actually able to remember the plot afterwards. You can get Sunrise on the Reaping here.
With that, it’s time to decide my votes for this year’s Lodestar Award. I think I will go as follows:
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Among Ghosts, by Rachel Hartman
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, by C.B. Lee
Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen
They Bloom at Night, by Trang Thanh Tran
Oathbound, by Tracy Deonn
I will write up one more category here, the Astounding Award, before the voting deadline.
