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.)
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.
Last books finished Britain’s Other D-Day: The Politics of Decimalisation, by Andy Cook Pavilion of Women, by Pearl S. Buck The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore Serbian Folk Tales, ed. Jake Jackson
Next books Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek (if I can find it) A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske
Tyler Banks was Thorne & Dirk’s head of Client Excisions, meaning he made problems disappear. Cut them entirely out of existence when necessary. However, he didn’t like getting his hands dirty with the seriously dangerous jobs. That’s what Julie was for— but she was the last thing on his mind as he stepped into the room.
Urban fantasy with our magically empowered heroine dealing with demonic intrusions and her own disastrous love life. I did not get very far because the horror scenes were gruesomely anatomical, and there is only so much of that that I can read. You can get The Dead Take the A Train here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2024. Next on that pile is A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske, of which I have higher hopes.
“Who plays bridge?” asked Mr. Shaitana. “Mrs. Lorrimer, I know. And Doctor Roberts. Do you play, Miss Meredith?”
A mid-period Christie, in which the murder is carried out during a bridge game, in the presence of Hercule Poirot and three of Christie’s other regular characters. Since we know none of them can have done it (spoiler: indeed, none of them is the murderer), suspicion turns to the four bridge players, who are characterised in detail to help us pick and choose the potential baddie. The plot is a little improbable, as each of the suspects has their own history of causing death; did they do it again? And solving the mystery involves several more deaths. But it’s classic Christie, and it’s no harm for Poirot to be forced to share the stage with some of her other characters (including Colonel Race, previously seen in The Man in the Brown Suit). You can get Cards on the Table here.
She pointedly ignored the ungracious hail, sitting out in the slanted morning sun with her folding desk, working on her triple-entry accounting. The first entry to calculate, the second to check the calculations and the third, on a separate piece of paper, to include all the errant entries that she wouldn’t be reporting to anyone but still felt the obscure need to keep track of.
This is the second in the Tyrant Philosophers series which started with City of Last Chances. Our protagonist, a survivor from the previous book, is conscripted into a military field hospital where with the help of his personal god, he is able to heal the wounded – provided that they then refrain from violence, a riff also from Forever Peace. There’s a complex cast of characters and a varied political and geographical landscape of war; there’s plenty of plot to keep you interested, but it’s still a very long book! I hugely admire Tchaikovsky’s industry and talent, but I would love it if he could write at shorter length too…
Second clue from third puzzle (“The War Machines”):
Dodo believes that the attack will come at sunset, while Ben thinks it will be six hours later, give or take.
I didn’t finish reading this yet, but I think it will be a nice distraction in idle hours (such as they are): a set of 61 logic puzzles, of the type that I loved when I was eleven or twelve, each based around a classic or modern Doctor Who story. I did the first two and found that they had pleasing subtleties. Here’s the grid from “The War Machines” to give you an idea of what it’s about:
See here for methodology, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Tajikistan.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Neanderthal
John Darnton
3,104
1,141
198
Hurramabad
Andrei Volos
88
39
11
A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East
Richard C. Foltz
39
17
8
The Disobedient Wife
Annika Milisic-Stanley
101
5
10
Huit monologues de femmes [8 монологов женщины] [Eight Women’s Monologues]
Barzou Abdourazzoqov
39
8
12
Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan
Artemy M. Kalinovsky
30
11
6
The City Where Dreams Come True
Gulsifat Shakhidi
42
3
11
The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic
Paul Bergne
30
15
3
Poor Tajikistan! Most of the books that I found with that tag on LT and GR are about Central Asia in general, and Tajikistan is always the last of the five republics that people write about – more difficult to get to, very different language to the other four, devastated in the war of the 1990s which the rest of the world has forgotten.
The top book here (by a long way), Neanderthal by John Darnton, is actually a novel about discovering two lost tribes of Neanderthals in the mountains of Tajikistan. The Neanderthals have psychic powers, and one tribe is peaceful while the other is aggressive. It sounds like rubbish to be honest.
Hurramabad, this week’s runner-up, is about the Russian minority in Tajikistan after independence. Its author, Andrei Volos is an ethnic Russian from Tajikistan. The Disobedient Wife is about an expat western woman in Dushanbe and her maid.
The City Where Dreams Come True is about the civil war of the 1990s and its impact; Gulsifat Shakhidi is the top Tajik woman writer on my list. It made the list thanks to a better Storygraph rating, bumping Uncertain Light by South African writer Marion Molteno off the end.
I put a slight question mark against Huit monologues de femmes [Eight Women’s Monologues], which has not been translated into English (and I also could not find much by searching on its original title, 8 монологов женщины). One summary that I have seen says that it is set on the border with Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. However Barzu Abdurazzoqov is a Tajik writer (mainly for the theatre) so I’m assuming that the monologues are set on the Tajik side of the Uzbek and Afghan borders with his country.
A History of the Tajiks, Laboratory of Social Development and The Birth of Tajikistan are all self-explanatory. (I say that, and then someone will write to me to say that at least one of them is really a great work of post-Soviet magical realism.)
I disqualified, though again with question marks, two books about great Tajik cultural figures, because both seemed to me to be more set in Uzbekistan than Tajikistan. These were the autobiographical The Sands of Oxus, by Sadriddin Ayni, who spent much of his youth in Bokhara, and Возвращение в Панджруд [Return to Panjrud], by Andrei Volos, which is about the poet Rudaki; although his eponymous home, Rudak, is in Tajikistan, his career peaked under the Samanids who were based further west.
This was unusually enlightening and humbling – it turned out that I know much less about Tajikistan than I thought.
Next up is Papua New Guinea; then we’re into a run of European states, with Sweden, Czechia and Azerbaijan.
My regular reader knows that I am fascinated by the seventeenth century stucco artist Jan Christiaan Hansche, a dozen of whose fantastic three-dimensional ceilings survive. I first encountered his work in the summer of 2021, and since then have tracked down almost all of what is left of it. Some of his best sculpture is preserved at Park Abbey near Leuven. This is their own (very short) promotional video.
A major exhibition opened last weekend at the Park Abbey, and of course I went to have a look for myself. There are displays about how he actually built the ceilings, with his apprentices, and talking heads explaining his difficulties with the guilds in Brussels. There are original invoices with his actual ink signature, an interesting contrast with the signature he puts in his ceilings.
“Jan Christiaen Han… / Kalcksnijder”
Here’s my own humble attempt to convey the scale of the refectory, with its magnificent Last Supper.
To my delight, I found out about several Hansche works I had not known about. In the Abbey itself, the vestibule at the end of the museum gallery – a room I have stood in half a dozen or a dozen times before, without noticing the ceiling – has a fine Assumption.
And on display in the cloister is a panel from the demolished Canfyn House in Gent – not one of the five main decorative panels, just an cherub and surrounding imagery, but one I simply had not known about before.
Other displays told me about a couple of other now lost Hansche works. The old St Catherine’s Church in Brussels had Hansche ceilings in the aisle and transepts, demolished in 1893.
The exhibition also notes a lost ceiling in the Hôtel d’Ursel in Brussels, but I guess this may be known from documentary evidence only; the building was remodelled in the mid-18th century and then demolished entirely in 1960 – but I suspect that the Hansche ceiling was lost two hundred years earlier; we have photographic evidence of the ceilings lost in Germany in the twentieth century.
The exhibition also mentions a Hansche ceiling at the Château de Saint-Fontaine in Clavier not far from the impressive stuccos at Modave. This supposedly shows the family tree of Olivier-Renard de Saint-Fontaine, cavalry captain and high bailiff, and his wife. The exhibition implies that this ceiling survives, but the tourist guides to Saint-Fontaine tell me that the whole castle was rebuilt in 1820 after a fire, and again I don’t see any photographs. The castle is in private hands, but maybe I’ll see if I can contact the owners to clarify it.
It’s all very attractively laid out, with a children-friendly approach as well – do your own art, that kind of thing. And it’s open until 31 May. If you are in reach, do go and have a look.
I’m going to make an effort to be more assiduous in tracking my non-book entertainment here. We very much enjoyed two TV series made last year which we watched this year, one SF on Apple TV, one historical on Netflix.
Plur1bus is a tremendously well implemented vision of a future where some alien force has has merged humanity into a single group consciousness, and our protagonist, romantasy novelist Carol (played very effectively by Rhea Seehorn, who I had not seen before) is one of a very small number of people worldwide who are immune.
Carol hates people in general – her lover is killed off in the first episode – and she hates her own writing, describing her new book as “like a bad episode of Star Trek“. But she eventually becomes motivated to try and find a way back for humanity, and by the end of the first series is talking to another of the survivors about how to do that. (Great Guardian interview with Rhea Seehorn.)
What the Plurbs cannot replicate is true rivalry. Its absence no doubt spares their economy from waste, redundancy and foolishness. But it also limits the scope for progress. However much wisdom they collectively possess, the Joined will also need to learn from trial and error. Although they can presumably run polite, collegial experiments to test alternative economic strategies, none of them can pursue a strategy with the kind of blinkered, eccentric conviction that characterises many of capitalism’s most successful entrepreneurs. The economy often makes progress through rare, successful attempts to defy collective wisdom. And to defy collective wisdom, it helps to be immune to it.
Most of it is set in Albuquerque, with excursions elsewhere, and a filming dynamic that totally reinforces Carol’s isolation among the rest of her species. The merged humanity is incapable of cruelty, or of lying, but also incapable of creativity; so the food starts running out (apart from the Soylent Green solution), and Carol’s novels become the only new art produced in the world. (There is a grimly funny moment when Carol asks the collective brain what her spouse really thought of her writing, and gets an honest answer.) Some of the details are better not examined closely, but in general it’s a thought-provoking as well as an entertaining story.
Here’s the trailer.
I expect to see the series as a whole, or perhaps just the first episode, “We is Us”, on the Hugo ballot.
I don’t expect to see Death by Lightning on the Hugo ballot. It is a solid four-part Netflix series about the campaign, presidency and death of James Garfield, who served from March to September 1881; more especially it’s about his assassin, the deranged Charles Guiteau, played by Matthew Macfadyen with effective creepiness and passion combined.
Garfield is played by Michael Shannon, a completely different character from the evil colonel in The Shape of Water (he was also one of the sons in Knives Out). The other notable performances are Bradley Whitford, a welcome return from The West Wing, as James G. Blaine, Garfield’s Secretary of State; Betty Gilpin as Garfield’s wife Lucretia; and Shea Whigham as corrupt New York senator Roscoe Conkling, who enables Garfield’s rise and then wishes he hadn’t.
A special shout for Nick Offerman, in a great performance as Chester Arthur, who starts as Conkling’s sidekick, becomes Vice-President due to Garfield’s political necessity and thanks to Guiteau ends up in the top spot himself. He gets the best character arc of anyone, moving from boozy sub-boss to penitent reformer. In real life, Arthur had never fought an election before 1880, and may have been born in Canada which would have rendered him ineligible if it had ever been confirmed (the original Birther controversy). His father was from Cullybackey in County Antrim.
Macfadyen is mesmerising as Guiteau, but the ensemble is necessary to support the role. The script is terrific, somewhat updated to modern discourse (by which I mean that the characters all say “fuck” a lot) but also with knowing reference to the interaction between popular culture and politics today. Also Hungary puts on a very good act as nineteenth century America
Betsy Gilpin as Lucretia Garfield gets the last word, in a (totally fictional) visit to Guiteau shortly before his execution:
America may mourn him today, but as the years pass by, they’ll forget. And I can feel him waning away even now. In no time, he’ll just be another face on the wall. Lost to history.
But then again… So will you.
Here’s a trailer.
Those were both 2025 productions. In between watching them, we sat down to the 2003 remake of The Lion in Winter, starring Patrick Stewart (aged 63) and Glenn Close (aged 56). Of course, a director should feel full creative power to make the film they want to make, but I was a bit thrown by the change in dynamic compared to the original 1968 version with Peter O’Toole (aged 36) and Katherine Hepburn (aged 61). In 1183, when the story is explicitly set, Henry II was 50 and Eleanor of Aquitaine 59, so Peter O’Toole was 14 years younger and Patrick Stewart 13 years older than their historical counterpart. O’Toole always acted older than he really was (playing the older version of David Tennant in Casanova, he was only 72 but does a good mid-eighties), but Stewart always acts his exact age.
It is also difficult to surpass the supporting cast of the 1968 film, which included Antony Hopkins, in his first major film role, as Richard the Lionheart; Timothy Dalton, in his first ever film role, as Philip of France; and Nigel Terry as future King John. (And Jane Merrow as Alais and John Castle as Geoffrey are good mid-ranking actors too, Castle is particularly good in this.)
Given the relative balance of talent, the 2003 film is dominated by Glenn Close, who has good chemistry with Patrick Stewart but is also magnetic on her own.
Of course he has a knife! I have a knife. We all have knives. It’s 1183 and we’re all barbarians!
Of the others, I felt Rafe Spall played John a bit too much for laughs, and it was difficult to see why either of his parents might want him to inherit. On the other hand, Julia Vysotskaya was a very believable Alais. (Her character is the lover of King Henry, almost thirty years older than her; in real life, she was and is married to the film’s director, Andrei Konchalovsky, who is thirty-six years older than her; perhaps this helped.)
It looks good; the music is good; but it’s not as good as the original. Here are the traiers; judge for yourself.
The temperature was rising and the dawn wind was blowing firmly, but it was still at least thirty below. Strymon canal was a steel-blue, hard sheet of ice and would not melt today in this latitude. Resting on it beside the dock was the mail scooter from Syrtis Minor, its boat body supported by razor-edged runners. The driver was still loading it with cargo dragged from the warehouse on the dock.
Published in 1949, this was a book that I greatly enjoyed as a young reader, one of Heinlein’s successful juvenile series. The protagonist is a lad in the human colony on Mars, attending a military boarding school where he discovers a fiendish plot by the Earth-based rulers to destroy the colonists. Aided by his Martian pet, and by the mysterious giant Martians themselves, he gets home via the canals and other Martian tech, raises the alarm and helps his family and the rest of the colony defeat the evil administrators, who are apparently eaten by the Martians.
It’s a very male book; the protagonist and his buddy, and their fathers and a wise old doctor, carry most of the narrative, with some dialogue from mothers and a bratty sister. It’s a very pro-gun book; the colonists’ equivalent of Second Amendment rights are taken as obvious common sense (and of course crucial in the uprising). The colonists’ mission is explicitly colonial; no questions are asked about the fate of the Martians once humans spread out over the planet.
And yet there’s still a very attractive sensawunda about it, a feeling of estrangement from Earth and awe at the ancient mysteries and dangers of a new world, and arid landscapes not quite like the American West. Some of the magic remains for me, though perhaps not quite enough for me to recommend it to readers of the same age as I was when I first read it. You can get Red Planet here.
This was my top unread sf book (though of course I had read it long ago). Next on that pile is Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham.
Current The Pavilion of Women, by Pearl S. Buck The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore
Last books finished The Doors of Midnight, by R.R. Virdi (did not finish) Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch The Big Wave, by Pearl S. Buck Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill The Recollections: Fragments from a Life in Writing, by Christopher Priest
Next books De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske
Dusk fell when I still had about four miles more to go. needed to borrow some matches so I called in at an antiques shop in Dragonsdale, a giant metropolis of seventeen houses, three shops, two pubs and a twelfth-century church. That’s modern hereabouts. Liz Sandwell was just closing up. She came out to watch me do the twin oil-lamps on the Ruby. Well, you can’t have everything. Liz is basically oil paintings and Georgian incidental household furnishings. She has a lovely set of pole-screens and swing dressing-mirrors.
Having been rereading the Agatha Christie novels, I realised that I still had an unread Lovejoy novel from years ago on my shelves. And actually I realise now that I had read it even more years ago, but it’s short and digestible.
This is the Lovejoy of Gash’s original conception, fanatically obsessed with antiques and fatally attractive to women, who he treats badly. In fact he hits one of his girlfriends on page 2 (though in fairness she hits him first). If you pick this up expecting the gentle humour of Ian Le Frenais’ writing and Ian McShane’s acting, well, you’ll be surprised.
At the same time, I think the writer is fully aware of Lovejoy’s flaws and shows us what a monster he is, through his own lack of self-perception. And the actual plot of the book is a murder mystery, where Lovejoy is motivated by righteous rage when a friend is killed and the police write it off as an accident. I found the actual mystery resolution a bit opaque, but there is a fantastically well written climactic scene in Colchester Castle, where Lovejoy and his charming newly hired apprentice Lydia take on the villain, Lydia making her first of many appearances here.
There’s also a fair bit of lore about the Holy Grail – this book was published in 1979, three years before The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, but after at least two of the three BBC documentaries that it drew on (from 1972, 1974 and 1979). Not to go into details, but it had me checking Wikipedia for the career of Hester Bateman, one woman for whom Lovejoy has the highest respect.
I haul my bag up the hill. I haven’t brought much. All I need are shorts and t-shirts, flip flops, sneakers. Swim shorts. Harper arrives next week. Nat’s coming to the cottage tonight. I wrote to him weeks ago via the Castine post office, the way he told me to, and let him know I was coming. I don’t have his address. When I passed through Castine earlier I found his reply waiting, just as he promised I would, written in careful, childlike cursive: OK. I’ll bring dinner.
I got this as part of Kelly Lonesome’s submission for the 2024 Hugo packet, in the Best Editor Long Form category. I’m not sure if having that category for the Hugos really makes a lot of sense, but I am very appreciative of the reading material that it generates.
At first I wasn’t even sure if this book was sfnal to be appropriate for the Hugo packet. It starts out as an intense account of a teenager’s encounter with a serial killer in a village on the coast of Maine, and then flips a little forward to his retelling the story at university. But as we see layer upon layer of narrative unpeeling, and the true nature of the events becomes clear, I realised that it definitely qualifies as fantasy horror. It’s a complex and overlapping story, but Ward keeps control of it and we always know where we are. An unexpected dark pleasure.
The first of a recent series of six graphic novels by Weber and Deville, set in Belgium in the mid-twentieth century (later years are 1958, 1960, 1961, 1965 and 1968).
The framing narrative has the central character, Kathleen, cleaning up her mother’s house in 1960, and coming across souvenirs of the war years seventeen years earlier – the same distance that separates us from 2009. We are then plunged into an intense narrative of resistance to German occupation, mostly from a schoolgirl’s point of view, with a lot of real life events and people woven into the fiction. The climax is the publication of the “Faux Soir” on 7 November 1943.
Fiction based around historical personalities and events, whether on the screen or on the page, often falls into the trap of doing it by the numbers. I felt that Bruxelles 43 avoided that; we readers of course know that the occupation will not last for much longer, and that Belgium will pick itself up again, but the characters don’t. It’s also very neat that comics themselves as a medium are woven into the story – Hergé is one of the many historical characters to make an appearance, and there’s a sensitive exploration of the role of culture in general in an occupied society.
This is a good start to the series. Next in the sequence is Sourire 58, by the same creative team. You can get Bruxelles 43 here.
And this attitude baffled Poirot. To begin with, his vanity suffered. It was his constant dictum that all the world knew Hercule Poirot. Here was someone who did not. Very good for him, I could not but feel-but not precisely helpful to the object in view!
This is the seventh Poirot novel, written and set in 1932, with Poirot and his friend, Hastings the narrator, becoming entangled with a naïve socialite who lives in a decaying seaside mansion. She appears to be the target of a series of assassination attempts, and after someone else is killed apparently in mistake for her, things get very serious. Lots of good plot here, with some red herrings and some totally fair clues, and Christie turns the tables on the reader very neatly at the end. Not especially memorable perhaps, but classic Christie.
There are a couple of less good bits. A random bloke turns up at the end, starts shooting at people, and is bundled away while Poirot explains that he had nothing to do with the actual plot. There’s casual anti-semitism about another minor character. The ending sees natural justice rather than state justice meted out. But again, this is classic Christie, warts and all.
A brief note about last weekend’s Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles, and some of the other things I did there. I was actually feeling rather under the weather for two days of the three of the convention, so didn’t take my usual cosplay photos, but I also got out and about a bit.
To begin at the beginning: I was a little hesitant to go to the USA at all, under current circumstances. One American friend urged me to simply boycott her country. But going through Dublin Airport is very smooth and straightforward, because you get preclearance for US immigration while still in Ireland. There was no queue at all for border control on the Irish side, and it meant that when we landed in Los Angeles at 6pm, it was straight to the baggage reclaim and shuttle bus, and checked into the hotel by 7pm. The price difference of flying with Aer Lingus is not much, and it is massively helpful to not be standing for hours in an immigration queue when you are already jet lagged and worrying about whether you will be immediately deported, or worse.
Also, Gallifrey One is a very safe space, woke, queer, éclairé, however you want to put it, in Los Angeles which is itself a very anti-MAGA city. Driving from the Getty Villa to the Griffith Observatory takes you through an extraordinary array of cultural diversity. It is places like LA that actually do make America great.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Cuba.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
From now on, I intend to add numbers from Storygraph to the numbers from LibraryThing and Goodreads. It didn’t change the top eight in this case, though it did bump Our Man in Havana to third rather than second.
This week’s winner is an epic but short story about a Cuban fisherman. It’s Hemingway’s second win after, oddly enough, Tanzania; he also had a book on the Italy list and two on the Spain list. Strictly speaking, most of The Old Man and the Sea is set, well, at sea, but it’s clearly meant to be in Cuban territorial waters, so I’m giving it the win. It has the highest rankings on both GR and LT of any book since Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girlback in September.
All of the above are in dialogue with the US-Cuba relationship. I was not entirely sure about the two Chanel Cleeton novels – and I did disqualify a third by her, The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, which is clearly mainly set in the USA. Though born in the USA, Cleeton identifies as Cuban-American. I also wasn’t completely sure about Dreaming in Cuban, but on balance it seems to be mostly set on the island.
I disqualified a lot of other books which are only partially set in Cuba, or not at all. Works by and about Che Guevara figured in the list. I did pagecounts of two more Hemingway books, Islands in the Stream and To Have and Have Not, but concluded that neither qualified.
Next up is Tajikistan; then Papua New Guinea, and after that a run of European countries starting with Sweden and Czechia.
As I’ve said before, I feel that the BSFA long-lists are a bit too long. But I’ve delved into several of the categories and would like to recommend a few of the nominees for the consideration of voters. The second round deadline is closing in – it is at midnight UK time next Thursday night, so you need to get moving (and this is a process where every single vote counts).
Best Art
None of the nominated art is bad, but I loved the audacity of Nick Wells’ tesselated covers for the twelve-book Fractal series of novels by Allen Stroud. It’s a lovely image anyway, but to split it across different books is very bold. Gets my vote, but I will nominate another three as well.
I liked the confidence of Stephen Embleton’s cover for The Nga’phandileh Whisperer, by Eugen Bacon. A lot of the nominated art has memorable human figures, but this one has something special for me.
Another humanoid figure, this time clearly a struggling robot, in Tithi Luadthong’s cover for Cage of Stars, by Frasier Armitage. I liked the use of colour and scale here.
Finally, what appears to be a standalone art piece, The Dust Library by Sylvain Sarrailh. I like the detail of the architecture, and the small human figures in the foreground. It carries also this narrative: “He told me he had all the books in the world. I took him for a strange poet, but I followed him for four days and three nights in the desert, curious to know the outcome of his fable. He hadn’t lied.”
Best Short Non-Fiction
Of the 28 nominees for Best Short Non-Fiction, I was able to read 26. One of the remaining two is a paywalled academic journal article, and the other was a Zoom panel discussion. The others are all available via the BSFA ballot list. A couple of them are only marginally about science fiction – the piece on the Dublin / New York Portal, for instance, tries to argue that it should be considered as an sfnal work, but unfortunately gets tangled up in its own jargon to really understand.
There are seven that I particularly want to draw your attention to, and I know which four are getting my vote. I liked, but will probably not vote for:
When People Giggle at Your Name, Or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident, by Grigory Lukin – as I said at the time, this was a pretty poor show by those responsible for the Hugo ceremony, and this piece illuminates the problem very eloquently, but I don’t generally think that this year’s awards should perpetuate last year’s controversies.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI, by Cory Doctorow – again a great piece of writing which I have recommended to curious policy-makers inside the EU bubble, but I’m not nominating it for the BSFA Award on the technical grounds that it is about technological fact rather than fiction.
Paul March Russell’s review of When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift – Again I think this is a fine piece of writing, and my reason for not voting for it (in this round anyway) is simply that I haven’t yet read the book that is the subject of the review, so I don’t feel that I am yet in a position to make a call about the nominated piece.
I will be voting for two pieces about Tolkien and two others. The two Tolkien pieces are:
“Should Galadriel have taken the Ring?”, by Nick Hubble – a short piece in which the writer points out the roots of Galadriel as Faery Queen, and the disruption that this archetypal figure brings to the Middle Earth legendarium. “I’ve finally concluded that Galadriel actually ‘passes the test’ by not allowing herself to get caught up in the false binary choice between refusing or accepting the ring. She doesn’t have to choose between being the ‘White Lady’ or the ‘Dark Queen’ because she is already both of those and all points between.”
“What Lies and Threats? History and Nationalist Myth-Making in The Lord of the Rings“, by Abby Roberts – looks at the uncomfortable nexus between Tolkien’s national myth-making project and political nationalist extremism. In general Tolkien is not a guilty party, but he does look at myth even within The Lord of the Rings. “Ultimately, in the last two decades of his life, Tolkien became increasingly critical of the mythopoeic elements in his work, which Fimi argues contributed to his failure to complete The Silmarillion. Tolkien’s self-reflection mirrors the general soul-searching that occurred among postwar myth scholars, as they reckoned with their discipline’s role in the Holocaust and World War II.”
The other two pieces that I am voting for are quite different.
“A Path Through the Landscape: My Own Route Through Science Fiction”, by Roseanna Pendlebury – in reaction to Paul Kicaid’s Colourfields, lists ten sf books that Roseanna Pendlebury found important in her own literary journey, but also four that everyone else likes and she didn’t. “I was a relatively uncritical reader as a child (as I think many children are), and this didn’t really begin to shift until my early twenties. I like to think five years of dissecting texts in other languages did something to the ol’ brain chemistry and made my thoughts turn those newly minted critical faculties back onto the things I read for pleasure in English.”
“Neither Girls Nor Friends: the Artificial Women in American Science Fiction”, by William Shaw – takes us from Helen O’Loy to Annie Bot, a very specific topic; and although I didn’t feel the journey was that far, persuaded me that it is at least interesting. “The artificial woman, in all of these stories, is caught in a contradiction; torn between her creators’ desires both for a perfected version of an exploited underclass, and for that perfection to still, ultimately, be subservient.”
I’m skipping this category because I haven’t yet listened to any of it. Big Finish fans failed to get organised this time around to get anything on the ballot.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
Two of the best Doctor Who novelisations from last year are on this list, Lux by James Goss, who I consider the best Who writer currently active, and The Robot Revolution by Una McCormack, and I’m voting for both of them. I haven’t read any of the others yet. (Links to my own reviews.)
Best Collection
I haven’t read any of the nominees, so far.
Best Short Fiction
I gritted my teeth and read about 60 of the 76 nominees here. I personally nominated Salvage by Emily Tesh (link is to my review), published as a chapbook at Novacon, but I’m not going to vote for it because I suspect that very few others will have ad the chance to read it. Instead I will vote for:
“Missing Helen”, by Tia Tashiro, a well imagined story of what happens if your ex gets off with your clone. (I voted for Tashiro for the Astounding Award last year, and I reckon she’s a talent to watch.)
The only one of these that I have read is The Well by Gareth Powell (link is to my review), another Doctor Who novelisation that I am definitely voting for.
I have listed the above, not in the order that they are on the ballot but in what seems to me to be a much more sensible order – art, non-fiction, fiction.
The strange woman watched them, still holding Mrs Skraeveling’s hat. Her antlers were a sort of hat too, Utterly realized. Now that she had got over the first shock of them she could see the wires to which they were attached shining in the woman’s russet hair. It was a peculiar sort of a hat, but then she was a peculiar sort of person altogether. She was one of the troll-people who lived at the north end of Wildsea in the rocky wooded region called the Dizzard. Reverend Dearlove said that it was rude to call them trolls, but Utterly could see why people did, for the woman with the antlers was quite ugly. All the features of her face were too big and too definite, and her thick eyebrows met above her nose. Her eyes were large and deep-set: dark brown eyes with flecks of gold in them.
I got to know Philip Reeve in person at the 2022 Eastercon, Reclamation, where we were both guests of honour. We had a couple of very pleasant dinners together, and ended up sharing a taxi to escape Heathrow. At that point the only one of his books that I had actually read was a Doctor Who short from 2013. He is of course best known for Mortal Engines, of which Minnesota governor Tim Walz is also a fan. I bought this at that Eastercon, but have shamefully only now got around to reading it.
It’s very good. Utterly Dark is a foundling girl brought up on a strange island off the Cornish coast. Her adoptive father, who was the Watcher of the island, keeping an eye out for the Hidden Isles and the creature known as the Gorm, is found drowned, and his brother is summoned from London to take over. Under the new regime, disaster of a YA Lovecraftian type comes ever closer. It’s all very nicely done, and I’ll keep an eye out for the two sequels now. (Oddly enough my reading of this overlapped with Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward, which also features young protagonists and seaside horrors.)
Current Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill
Last books finished Cards on the Table, by Agatha Christie The Dead Take the A Train, by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey (did not finish) The Doctor Who Yearbook 1995, eds Gary Russell and Peri Goodbold Elfland, by Freda Warrington The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments, by Sappho, translated and edited by Aaron Poochigan Country Christie, by Agatha Christie Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown, by Rory Carroll
Next books Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore The Doors of Midnight, by R.R. Virdi The Big Wave, by Pearl S. Buck
This is the next in my sequence of educating myself about the work of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) was born in Denmark, but her father was Norwegian and they moved back to Norway when she was two. She began writing as a teenager, and won the Nobel Prize in 1928, when she was 46, then the second youngest winner after Rudyard Kipling (since beaten by Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, and Albert Camus).
The Nobel Committee is clear that the award was for Kristin Lavransdatter: the citation was “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”. She had been nominated previously in 1922, 1925 and 1926; in 1928 her nomination came not from a writer but from Norwegian psychologist Helga Eng. In her mercifully short acceptance speech, she restricts herself to celebrating the bonds between Norway and Sweden. I find the Chairman of the Academy’s presentation speech somewhat patronising, but he’s clear that Kristin Lavransdatter is the key to Undset’s succcess.
I must say that I approached it with some trepidation. My project to read non-white-male Nobel Literature laureates has not been super successful so far; I have read two short okayish novels by Selma Lagerlöf, some incomprehensible poetry by Rabindranath Tagore and a dull book by Grazia Deledda. And Kristin Lavransdatter checks in at over 1100 pages, and I could tell that it was another tale up upstanding rural folk, like the Lagerlöf and Deledda books. However, I realised that I could just read the first part, published in 1920, for this project, and come back to the second and third parts in due course of my normal rounds of reading.
So, what did I think of The Wreath, the first part of Kristin Lavransdatter? Here is the second paragraph of the third chapter:
Ogsaa Kristin følte at det var en stor lykke de hadde faat med den lille spæde søsteren. Tænkt over at morens tunge sind gjorde det stilt paa gaarden hadde hun aldrig; hun hadde syntes det var som det skulde være, naar moren optugtet og formanet hende, men faren lekte og skjemtet med hende. Nu var moren meget mildere mot hende og gav hende mere frihet, kjælte ogsaa mere for hende, og da la Kristin litet merke til at hendes mor ogsaa hadde meget mindre tid til at stelle med hende. Hun elsket da Ulvhild, hun som de andre, og var glad naar hun fik bære eller vugge søsteren, og siden blev det endda mere moro med den lille, da hun begyndte at krype og gaa og tale og Kristin kunde leke med hende.
Kristin also felt it was a great joy that they had been given her little infant sister. She had never thought about the fact that her mother’s somber disposition had made life at home so subdued. She thought things were as they should be: her mother disciplined or admonished her, while her father teased and played with her. Now her mother was gentler toward her and gave her more freedom; she caressed her more often too, so Kristin didn’t notice that her mother also had less time to spend with her. She loved Ulvhild, as everyone did, and was pleased when she was allowed to carry her sister or rock her cradle. And later on the little one was even more fun; as she began to crawl and walk and talk, Kristin could play with her.
English translation by Tiina Nunnally.
Actually I rather liked it. It’s set in the 14th century, in a valley in central Norway. Kristin is the daughter of Lavrans (as you might have guess from the title); he is a respectable nobleman who betroths her to the neighbours’ virtuous son. Kristin however falls in love with an more mature chap who has children from a previous relationship (Undset’s own husband was also an older chap with children from a previous relationship) and eventually persuades her family to let her marry him, wearing the virginal wreath of the book’s title, though she alone knows that she is several months pregnant (as Undset was when she married).
I thought Kristin herself was very well realised, as were the men and women in her life, and the Norwegian landscape and climate, both of which are significant factors in the story, are vividly depicted. One of the interesting subplots is that Kristin’s younger sister suffers a spinal injury in an accident and remains bedridden for the rest of her short life. One of Undset’s own children had a learning disability, as did one of her stepchildren; I don’t know any more details than that, but for obvious reasons disabled characters catch my attention.
It’s quite a Catholic book. Kristin is sent off to a convent school in Oslo, and the portrayal of the nuns is pretty realistic; in general the church plays a helpful role. Undset herself converted to Catholicism in 1924, to great public scandal in Lutheran Norway. In general it’s a huge contrast with the likes of The Good Wife of Bath, which I bounced off last year. My Catholic days are behind me, but I appreciate calm description rather than polemic.
So yeah, this was the first discovery of a new and interesting writer for me in this project, and I will get to the second and third volumes in good time. Meanwhile you can get Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath here.
‘Katabasis’ means descent to the underworld, and here Alice Law, a Cambridge postgraduate student of magick, enters Hell with her classmate to try and rescue their tutor, who has died in a magical experiment gone wrong. It began rather well, as a carefully constructed fantasy afterworld leaning on Virgil and especially Dante, with a stark sparsely described landscape inhabited by the souls of the dead. Symbolic logic turns out to be key to dealing with both magick and the afterlife.
But the metaphor of Hell being a graduate studies programme is laid on very thick, and there is a section about two thirds of the way through the (very long) book where I began to feel that I couldn’t take it quite as seriously as may have been intended. Also the plot really narrows down quite quickly to the point where only one ending is possible, and it duly gets there.
So I don’t think I’ll be nominating it for the Hugos, though I’m pretty sure it will get on the ballot anyway and, depending on what else is there, it will have a decent shot at winning, as Babel should have done in 2023. You can get Katabasis here.
And so it was that when Karen Berger and Dick Giordano traveled to London in February 1987 to scout talent there were in fact two writers who successfully pitched to them on the back of Alan Moore’s endorsement. The first, of course, was Grant Morrison. The other was a journalist named Neil Gaiman who had struck up a friendship with Moore after interviewing him a few years earlier. And while Morrison would find no shortage of commercial success across their battles with Moore, neither of the great magi would come anywhere close to Gaiman, who is straightforwardly the most commercially successful writer ever to emerge from comics.
This is a 60,000 word essay, a single web page on Sandifer’s Eruditorum Press website. It hasn’t been published separately (though will apparently become part of Sandifer’s projected second volume of Last War in Albion, her history of the magical rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison); but I am treating it as a book for bookblogging purposes.
This is mainly because there is a strong case for nominating it in the Best Related Work category in this year’s Hugo Awards, for which nominations open this week. In general the Hugos should not celebrate last year’s controversies; but this is an analysis of the Sandman comics, and of Gaiman’s other work, especially in the graphic medium, over several decades, taking into account what we now know about Gaiman’s personal life and appalling behaviour. It’s not so much about the scandal (though it is about that), as about how Gaiman constructed his career and everything else.
It’s not framed as a hatchet job. Sandifer starts by sympathetically analysing Gaiman’s childhood in Scientology, and the abuse that he certainly suffered at the hands of his father, Britain’s leading Scientologist. She then goes on to look at the roots of Sandman, and at the high points of the story (of which there are many) and its occasionally troubled publications history.
But the pattern of exploitation and abuse of young fans, and later of other women, began pretty early on – Dave Sim refers to one of Gaiman’s convention flings in the notorious Cerebus #186, in 1992. And it’s not at all difficult to find reflections of Gaiman’s behaviour in his work. We may contain multitudes, but perhaps not all that many.
I was a fan of Neil Gaiman. My first entry in the original version of this blog was about meeting him at a signing in Brussels. I have more of his books in my LibraryThing catalogue than for any other author bar Justin Richards, Roger Zelazny and Terrance Dicks. I had generally friendly if slightly spiky correspondence with him over Hugo stuff over the years (his last time on the final ballot was my first time administering the awards in 2017, and he wrote in 2024 to ask “why Sandman Episode 6 was ruled ineligible for the Hugos at Chengdu?” – a question to which unfortunately I did not and do not know the answer).
I will find it very difficult to open any of Gaiman’s work ever again, and yet I wanted some sort of closure for myself. This essay provides it, acknowledging the high points of Gaiman’s work but linking it to the low points of his personal life. I’m lucky; I barely knew him apart from through his writing. Other friends are much more personally devastated. Sandifer ends the essay with one of Roz Kaveney’s heartfelt poems about the end of her friendship with Gaiman. Here’s another, published on 7 February 2025:
Heart is a traitor even when it breaks. Love friendship given cannot be returned. All that I once thought my friend was once has burned To trash shame ruin. Even his mistakes His sins his crimes are of a piece with all The things I valued. His embarrassed smile His weighted pauses. I am certain while He fucked those girls they’d see the shutters fall Behind his eyes. Some random witty thought Would take him for a moment quite elsewhere. Sometimes I want to slap him maybe swear. He was extraordinary until caught. All the good times, the brilliance flawed. Hearts crack. Yet friendship given can’t be taken back.
To a greater or lesser extent, all of us who liked the man and/or his work will have felt that betrayal, and Sandifer’s essay is an important part of moving on. I’m nominating it for this year’s Hugos, and I hope that you do too.
In 1960 Haughey’s constituency colleague, Oscar Traynor, the oldest minister in Lemass’s cabinet, was struggling with the workload in the Department of Justice. Seán Lemass decided that he would need some help to ease the burden and after some debate offered Haughey the job of parliamentary secretary to the minister, today a minister of state.⁶ Haughey said Lemass told him, ‘As Taoiseach I am offering you this appointment on behalf of the government, but as your father-in-law I am advising you not to take it,’ though Lemass would have known there was no chance that his advice, if serious, would be heeded.⁷ Haughey took the job, and immediately showed the flair, attention to detail and administrative skills that would characterise him throughout his career. He tended to identify discrete reforms that he could deliver, and which would be associated with him. Haughey engaged in a programme of law reform Lemass had requested. ⁶ ‘The Peter Berry diaries’ Magill, June 1980; Brian Farrell, Seán Lemass, Gill & Macmillan, 1991, p. 103. ⁷ Deaglán de Breadún ‘C. J. Haughey’s golden days’, Irish Times, 28 March 1984.
This book is by the son of the founder of the Progressive Democrats, Ireland’s liberal party from the 1980s to the 2000s; I knew him (the son, not the father) when we were both young political activists in the 1990s. Eoin is now a lecturer in political science, and not affiliated to any party. He was also involved with an epic trolling exchange with Ryanair a few years ago, back when Twitter was Twitter:
For those of you who don’t remember or weren’t born at the time, the rivalry between Fine Gael leader Garret Fitzgerald and Fianna Fail leader Charles J. Haughey defined Irish politics in the 1980s. My family were definitely Team Garret without apology; my parents knew him as a colleague at University College Dublin in the early 1960s, and were actually introduced to each other by Gemma Hussey, who ended up as a minister in the 1982-87 government which Garret led. There was also the rather important point of him not being a crook.
Today is the 100th anniversary of Garret’s birth. I met him a few times myself. He wrote the foreword to the book that my father had finished writing the week before his death in 1990, and gave the first of a series of annual John Whyte lectures – the title was “What Makes Politics Tick? Interests, Ideals or Emotions?” and it was a typically quirky reflection on his own time at the top. By a coincidence of timing, the day he delivered it in Belfast was the day that Margaret Thatcher resigned, and he leavened his text with some personal anecdotes (I remember one about them both being soaked to the skin while on a boat ride at the European summit in Corfu). Someone asked him how he thought Haughey, his enemy and successor, would deal with the recent election of Mary Robinson as president of Ireland. He gave his characteristic chortle. “The Taoiseach,” he declared, “is a pragmatist.” And so it proved.
A few years later, I met him at an Anglo-Irish political seminar for young activists (and older guests), and I told him about my past medieval history research. He pondered for a moment, and then asked me a rather unexpected question: “Do you know what the main means of goods transport over land was in France in the eighth century?” I shook my head in bafflement. Garret chortled, as ever. “The camel!” he declared. (I have no idea if this is true, and suspect that it may not be.)
When the much-missed Noel Whelan and I launched a hastily written book about the 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly election, Garret came to the Dublin launch, and immediately spotted that we had left one of the tables of election results blank. He sat down, got out a pencil, and filled in the missing numbers on his own copy.
The last time I met him was in 2006, when I was speaking about Eastern European conflict zones at Dublin City University; he turned up and asked me good and pertinent questions from the audience.
I had no personal links at all with Charles Haughey, but I recently read Frank Dunlop’s Yes Taoiseach, of which the best bit is the 1979-82 section covering Haughey’s first two terms in office. Like everyone else I read the newspapers, and deplored Haughey’s opportunism, though was impressed by the redemption that he achieved later in his career. I admit I was also annoyed on his behalf every time a British politician or newsreader pronounced his name “Haw-hee”.
We suspected it at the time, but it is now well documented that he was a crook. O’Malley doesn’t go into this, but the evidence is clear. The most sickening example was his outright theft of around Ir£200,000 from funds raised for his colleague and friend Brian Lenihan, who needed a liver transplant in 1989. Over the course of Haughey’s career, he was paid many millions of pounds by private business, mostly but not always Irish, and while it’s difficult to make a direct case that these payments led to specific acts of corruption, none of the money was properly accounted for – and Haughey was a qualified accountant and a qualified lawyer, so he knew exactly what he was doing.
Eoin O’Malley’s book takes the two leaders in parallel – born within five months of each other, Haughey 100 years ago last September, Fitzgerald 100 years ago this very day, studying at University College Dublin at the same time, both with family links to an older political generation (Fitzgerald’s father was a minister in the 1922-1932 government, Haughey’s father-in-law was Sean Lemass, the Taoiseach from 1959 to 1966), both also with family links to Northern Ireland (Fitzgerald’s Ulster Protestant mother, Haughey’s uncle and cousins in Swatragh).
Fitzgerald became leader of Fine Gael in 1977, and Haughey became leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach in 1979; their rivalry lasted until Fitzgerald resigned after losing the 1987 election. Just reading the facts of what happened during those crazy years is fascinating enough, even though I lived through them at the time. The most extraordinary incident was when the perpetrator of a couple of notorious murders in Haughey’s second term was arrested while staying in a flat belonging to his friend who happened to be Haughey’s Attorney-General. That was hardly Haughey’s fault, but it seemed symbolic.
But on the other hand, even we who liked Garret have to admit that he was pretty disastrous in government. He was a catastrophically bad people manager. His ‘constitutional crusade’ to make the Republic more Protestant-friendly by liberalising legislation on social issues crashed and burned. The country’s financial situation got worse and worse. The successful campaign to add a ban on abortion to the constitution saddled the country with a legal and ethical mess that took decades to sort out. (A mutual friend who saw Garret a few weeks before he died reported to me that going along with this was his biggest political regret.)
The one big success was the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which Margaret Thatcher was somehow charmed into signing. I would love to know the full story behind how this happened. I have seen one account which gives John Hume most of the credit; he is barely mentioned by O’Malley, who puts the UK cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong in the central role. In any case, it regularised the Republic’s relationship with the UK with regard to Northern Ireland, and pushed Unionists (after their initial impotent fury) to realise that a stable long-term solution was going to look more like Sunningdale than the old Stormont. Haughey (a pragmatist, as I said earlier) condemned it bitterly in opposition and operated it smoothly in government.
Haughey won the election in 1987 by running against Fine Gael’s drastic plans for economic reform, which Fitzgerald had typically failed to sell to voters, and then astonished everyone by adopting the Fine Gael programme and implementing it, leaving Fine Gael no option but to support his government. Haughey was a good coalition-builder, and succeeded in getting buy-in from both unions and business. Even more astonishingly, it actually worked, and laid the foundations for the years of economic growth that became characterised as the Celtic Tiger. O’Malley makes the point that while Haughey actually did it, it was Fitzgerald’s plan; they both deserve credit, and the difference between them was more style than policy substance.
Haughey was a crook as previously mentioned, but O’Malley makes a strong case that he was effective and impactful once he finally got to a fairly stable position of government in 1987, and that in a weird sense he owed this success to Fitzgerald.
Though I do wish that O’Malley had spent a bit more time looking at the 1971 Arms Trial (also not really addressed by Frank Dunlop). With the passage of time, almost twenty years after his death, is the balance of analysis that Haughey was actually guilty, or not? And what was the real effect on the ground in Northern Ireland, if any?
So, originally I had planned to pump out a bunch of Doctor Who reviews at the start of the month, including writing up several at Gallifrey One. But, you know what? I have been having far too much fun at Gally to do the writing I had planned. Still, catching a few minutes between panels and other social events, I’ve been able to finalise this after reading the books on the flight over. It’s about a story that I feel strangely affectionate towards.
And if you’re encountering this blog for the first time, I write mainly about books here, and often about Doctor Who. For a sample of the more usual content, these were my top blog posts based on last year’s viewership.
To the matter in hand. When I first watched The Ark in 2006, I wrote:
Fan lore generally is pretty negative about this story; perhaps this shows that I wasn’t concentrating sufficiently, but I really rather enjoyed it.
In particular, I very much enjoyed the one thing that those who dislike this story universally single out for criticism, Jackie Lane’s acting as the newly arrived companion Dodo Chaplet (who walked into the TARDIS at the end of the previous story). I thought it was great to have an assertive young companion – the first really since Barbara’s departure (apart from the brief appearance of Sara Kingdom) – and for my money she rose to the challenge. Hartnell is on top form, and even his fluffs seem much more in character with the Doctor than with the actor. Peter Purves as Stephen has some great lines and even a mild love interest.
The other feature of this story universally mocked by the critics, the Monoids, actually seemed not too bad to me, for 1966 anyway. Certainly far far better than the forest creatures at the end of The Chase. They reminded me a bit of the Ood from The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. Their transformation from silent servitors to sinister overlords is creepy but compelling. And they supply the great punchline to episode two, when the TARDIS crew discover that the statue the Ark’s human crews were building has been complete, but with a Monoid head.
I even liked the look of it. The gradual revelation that the forest has (as we are warned in the title of the first episode) a steel sky is well done. The Roman-style costumes of the human Guardians deliberately make us think of the Monoids as slaves. The surface of the planet Refusis, and its invisible inhabitants, are well done. The scenes of planets and suns in space are, at least, not too embarrassing.
The Ark is one of those stories which I did not like as much as before, watching in sequence this time. I don’t think it’s just because we can actually see it for a change (of the 21 previous episodes, only three from The Daleks’ Master Plan survive). The fundamental idea is sound and even a bit daring, but the script is very oddly paced and yet also cliched. (A security kitchen?) It is not surprising that neither the writer nor the director did another Who story, and I wonder how much morale was affected by John Wiles’ imminent departure as producer. One thing which always tells me that the director didn’t quite Get It is that the crowd scenes are lacking in dynamism – it’s interesting to see children in Who, but it’s odd to see them and their parents all standing around with their hands by their sides. Imison does better with the Monoids, in the first half at least (and I see that the lore claims they were his idea), but the script doen’t help. Both halves of the story suffer from over-long exposition and rushed climax. Poor Jackie Lane starts quite well but seems to gradually have the enthusiasm sucked out of her.
I realised to my delight that I had not yet opened, let alone watched, a DVD of The Ark bought some time ago, and spent some time over the weekend remedying the situation. As the First Doctor space opera stories go, this is one of the few successful ones without Daleks; and I’ve always appreciated it as Dodo’s first proper appearance. The DVD is solid rather than brilliant, though the story behind the insanely complex camera work is told very well, and I had not appreciated just how short the time between filming and broadcast was; though the claim that Dodo’s miniskirt seen at the end was the first ever shown on the BBC seems rather bold. The extras include a lovely reminiscence of the Riverside studio where the story was made, with Peter Purves and the director Michael Imison (who was told he was to be sacked literally as he went into the gallery to supervise filming of the final episode), and a rather silly piece on why the Monoids never took off (which at least gets Jacqueline Rayner a moment as a talking head).
And there’s also a short documentary on the influence of H.G. Wells on Doctor Who, which seems at first an odd inclusion, though the argument is in the end very convincingly made that The Ark is one of the most Wellsian stories in the Whovian canon. This features a lot of Matthew Sweet, who has written some of the more literary Big Finish audios, and also Kim Newman, Graham Sleight and a mysterious figure credited as Dr A Keen, who looks like someone I vaguely remember from the Belfast arts faculty computer facilities in the early 1990s; I wonder what he is doing now?
(I should clarify that of course I meant academic, fan and friend Tony Keen in that last remark; also, since then I have become friendly with Matthew Sweet through Gallifrey One, which is where I am writing this up.)
Watching it again, I became impressed by the scope and ambition of the story: a generation starship! An artificial forest! And also the daring out-of-sequence filming of the last episode. Today’s viewer has to make allowances for what was possible at the time, but I think it holds up well.
The second paragraph of the third sentence of Paul Erickson’s novelisation is:
‘I’m not sure, my dear boy,’ the Doctor replied. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’
Like Lucarotti [in his novelisation of The Massacre], Paul Erickson added some extra chrome into the book version of The Ark which was, I suppose, not realisable on screen, notably the numerous different habitats on the Guardian/Monoid spaceships, and a second invisible Refusian. Also the motivation for the Monoids’ peculiar decision to send the Doctor and Dodo on an exploratory mission is (just about) rationalised. I had forgotten just how bloodthirsty the climax is, as the Monoids wipe each other out in a firefight (and here Erickson gives in to Ian Marter-style temptation to make the fighting even more vicious on the page). I felt, however, that the characterisation of the first Doctor was a bit shaky, with a bit too much use of “old chap” which is not really one of his catchphrases.
Rereading it now, I was again impressed by the ambition and scope of the story – there is a sequence where the Doctor chases all over the varied climatic regions of the Ark to cure the plague, and later on, the Refusians play chess as well as tennis. You can get it here (though at a price).
Before I get to the Black Archive, I am frankly fascinated by Dodo as a companion. Long ago I wrote a piece about her, linking also to the very small amount of fan fiction then available about her.
There’s also a lovely video of Jackie Lane, played Dodo, taking a day-trip to Paris in November 2010:
Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive on the story doesn’t disappoint. It’s a good example of unpacking the ideas and context of the story and raising questions about the received wisdom of fandom.
The introduction reflects on how the story has dated, its roots in Wells and Stapledon, and what is known about the process of writing it.
The first chapter, “The Spaceship”, looks at the use of screens in the story, the conception of the ship itself, and the history of the idea of generation starships (including Ken MacLeod’s Learning the World).
The second chapter, “The Guardians”, looks at the concept of the far future, Olaf Stapledon on the future of humanity, the plague, and the connotations of the fact that the Guardians are all white.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “The Reptiles”, is:
Many of the most enduring and iconic Doctor Who monsters have been similarly reptilian. The decade following The Ark produced the Ice Warriors, the Silurians and their relatives the Sea Devils, and the Draconians, all of whom have proved their lasting appeal⁶. At the time of the story’s broadcast, a few less prominent (and not necessarily hostile) creatures had been portrayed with some reptile characteristics, like the Slyther and the Sand Beast⁷. The Monoids represent the first time in the series that a primary antagonist is identified this way. ⁶ Introduced respectively in The Ice Warriors (1967), The Silurians (1970), The Sea Devils (1972) and Frontier in Space(1973), and in the first three cases appearing in many TV stories thereafter (while the Draconians have often appeared in tie-in and spinoff media). ⁷ In The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Rescue respectively.
The chapter looks at the reptilian nature of the Monoids and their relationship to the Cyclops and to Wells, at the question of what colour they are both literally and in racial terms, and at the colonial implications of the script.
The fourth chapter, “The Landing”, looks at the depiction of Refusis and the invisible Refusians, at the story’s Biblical parallels, and at the dubious nature of the agreement between humans and Monoids brokered by the Doctor and Refusians at the end (“The Covenant of The Ark” is the last of many witty sub-heading titles).
The conclusion looks at the differences between the two halves of the story, and makes the bold proposal that fan lore may be wrong about the authorship; he sets out a good case that the second half was mainly written by the mysterious Lesley Scott.
(However, he repeats the incorrect but widely believed statement the Malorie Blackman, co-author of the 2018 story Rosa, was the first known writer of colour for Doctor Who. In fact it was probably Glen McCoy, who wrote the 1983 story Timelash.)
I think that this Black Archive is particularly accessible for readers who may not be familiar with the original story, and I hope it will encourage people to watch it. You can get Philip Purser-Hallard’s The Ark here.
I’m having a great time at Gallifrey One, and if you are here, I hope you are too.
This is pretty good fun. The Angels of the Heavenly Host come up against the Weeping Angels; the Judoon and Margaret Slitheen get involved; some nice character moments for the Doctor and Missy, and to a lesser extent Bill and Nardole. Does what it needs to do. You can get A Confusion of Angels here.
I arrived just in time to attend a royal wedding. My royal wedding, I was betrothed to the Great A.l. Generator, a giant machine that wanted to unite queen and machine to rule over everyone and stop the war. It had a copy of my certificate, which it called the Binding Contract of the Star, and it ordered the robots to come and get me ‘so metal and skin may weld within Miss Belinda Chandra’,
The Doctor Who annuals of the Chibnall/Whitaker years were notably thin. This is a bit thicker, if not quite at the glory days of the 1960s and 1970s. There’s a lot of recapitulation of the 2025 episodes, including a couple of extracts in photonovel format which I think is a first. There’s a small amount of reflection on previous Doctor Who lore, and a foreword from Varada Sethu. The most original material is a short story by Pete McTighe, “Night of the Shreek”, a prequel to Lucky Day, which is very nice. I’d say it’s worth the cover price. You can get the 2026 Doctor Who Annual here.
‘These trees don’t look all that healthy’, she observed.
A Ninth Doctor and Rose story which exports the Frankenstein narrative to 1880s Wales, throwing in some Unquiet Dead-style aliens as well. I thought it was very confidently written, and in particular captured the Series One Rose very well, with in general a good sense of the human landscape – with exceptions; Heath, an Australian with a solid writing record of his own, doesn’t seem to realise that Wales doesn’t have lochs.
This was the sixth of the eight Puffin Doctor Who Classic Crossover novels, of which I had already read the first two (both by Jac Rayner). I’ll keep an eye out for the other five, four of which are by Paul Magrs.
Anji shuddered. Whatever those buildings had once been, they were now unrecognisable, hulking ghosts being teased apart by ivy It was amazing how quiet everything was. No traffic, no birdsong, none of the hurly-burly of the city as it should be. Only the sound of their own footsteps and conversation, and the wind sighing through the trees.
Next in the sequence of Eighth Doctor novels that I read but did not review a decade ago, this has the Doctor, Fitz and Anji arriving in a parallel universe – Bristol, to be specific – where a chronological disaster has wiped out most animals and devastated humanity. There is some good action between the macro plot of trying to fix things and the micro plot of the local politics of the (doomed) inhabitants of the parallel timestream. Despite the fact that this Bristol is depopulated and desolate, there is a real sense of place and space in this book and good characterisation of the main characters, including more than one parallel version of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I liked it more than some in this sequence. You can get Reckless Engineering here.
The physicians thought it was unlikely she would live much longer.
I’m not wild in general about the sequence of Eighth Doctor books that I am currently reading, but this one hit the spot for me. The Doctor, Fitz and Anji land in Edinburgh in 2003, but in a timeline where computers were never invented and Britain is ruled by a fascist, racist regime. Inevitably they are accused of terrorism, fall in with the real terrorists, and then end up in the Tower of London trying to unravel the sleeve of history without setting off a domino effect of time destruction. There’s some graphic violence, and some very twisty plot twists at the end (and inevitably Sabbath turns up, does nothing very much and then leaves again), but I liked it more than some of these. You can get The Domino Effect here.
Next in this sequence: Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters.
Current Elfland, by Freda Warrington The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Last books finished The Grail Tree, by Jonathan Gash London, 1965, by Paul Magrs Sleeper Agents, by Paul Magrs The Penumbra Affair, by Paul Magrs Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein Whodle: a Whodunit Adventure Through Time and Space, by Tim Dedopulos, Roland Hall and Dave Knowles (did not finish) House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Doctor Who: The Ark, by Paul Erickson The Ark, by Philip Purser-Hallard
Next books Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill The Dead Take the A Train, by Richard Kadrey Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown, by Rory Carroll
