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.
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
A First Doctor audio original story, read by Maureen O’Brien and featuring Steven Taylor and Vicki as companions, with Nick Briggs making a couple of interjections as the voice of the Daleks. The TARDIS team land on an isolated space station facing attack from the Daleks, and Steven is arrested as a spy, collaborator and agent. The truth is rather more complex, and involves some of the Dalek technology seen in The Chase, and the sorts of time paradox that New Who has also played with – so it’s a bit deeper than it might first appear to be. Good stuff. You can get Agent of the Daleks here.
Another of the BBC Original audio Doctor Who stories which I have been getting into, one that I particularly selected because I like Una McCormack, both as a person and as a writer, and Clare Corbett has delivered some of the best audio readings that I have heard.
I wasn’t disappointed. This is set in the middle of the recent Fifteen / Belinda series, with the two landing on a planet where two robot bases appear to be at war with each other; meanwhile the bases’ distant human commanders try to work out what is going on before it is two late. At heart it’s a classic story of computers-don’t-argue, but the Doctor and Belinda are captured very nicely by both author and reader, and it’s good to have a bit more time with this sadly short-lived pairing. You can get Counterstrike here.
The Doctor: … Susan … Ian … Barbara … Vicki … Steven …
Next of the Twelfth Doctor comics published by Titan. The title story is a tremendous tale of Vikings, Ice Warriors and Fenric himself, also featuring Bill Potts as companion for the first time in this series. A really good example of what comics can do for Who. Though those fifth and sixth Ice Warrior troopers seem very pleased to see us.
The other story in the collection is “The Great Shopping Bill”, which features aliens in a futuristic supermarket (“Übermarket”, says Nardole, who also appears here) and a lost little girl, and works out as you would expect.
This is one of the BBC’s original audio Doctor Who stories, which I only recently discovered and am gradually working through. In this one, released last year, the Seventh Doctor and Ace investigate the mysterious appearance of a plastic processing centre which turns out to be a front for the next Auton invasion. The story is very nicely set up with the viewpoint character a retiree from the local senior citizens’ home, and the concept that the Autons would want to take advantage of the microplastics is a neat update of Auton lore. Terry Molloy is a good reader, with the rather grievous exception that his Scottish accent for the Seventh Doctor is poor. Nothing extraordinary, but solid. You can get House of Plastic here.
[I] found that now I had seen so many more Brigadier stories, and indeed listened to numerous audios featuring him, I enjoyed his resurrection in Mawdryn Undead much more than first time round when he was a vague childhood memory and a figure from the Target books. There are essentially two plots here, the Mawdryn plot which is good sf stuff, teleports, spaceships, time shifts and all, and the Turlough/Black Guardian stuff which seems to me as superfluous as Turlough himself. Really, if the Black Guardian wanted to kill the Doctor off, there might be better ways to do it than hiring an unreliable alien posing as a schoolboy! Nyssa and Tegan are good here though, and I really loved the Brigadier flashback which actually incorporates a clip of Hartnell as well as the other three.
In fact, before we go any further, let’s just revisit that superb flashback, and re-experience how it made us feel moored in 19 years of tradition.
I got back to this story in my Great Rewatch in 2011, shortly after the death of Nicholas Courtney, and wrote:
Watching Mawdryn Undead is a slightly wistful experience so soon after the loss of Nicholas Courtney; but it is a real delight to see him back again, playing two slightly different Brigadiers, and again we have the flashbacks which always gratify the heart of us old school fans. The other returning character is the Black Guardian, who for some reason is unable to manifest physically, even to equip his chosen agent with anything other than a prop crystal, but again it is nice to feel a re-connection with the Tom Baker era.
I was a little startled on rewatching it to realise that the plot only starts towards the end of the second episode, but until then we have had quite a lot of decent groundwork, and the actual explanation for what is going on is one of the better sfnal ideas in the whole of Who. Presumably the Doctor is exaggerating when he says that a millisecond either way would have been critical. And perhaps he has some comprehensible but private reason, never explained, for inviting Turlough along as a companion rather than just behaving like an idiot who opens the Tardis up to all comers. (I know that there are fanfic writers who have an answer to that.) Apart from that, it’s another reasonably satisfying tale.
Watching it again now, I appreciated slightly more the performance of David Collings, unrecognisable as Mawdryn, after his previous appearances as the anguished Poul and the treacherous Vorus. He also pops up in the final episode of Blake’s Seven as Blake’s new collaborator on Gauda Prime. On the other hand, the Black Guardian’s constraints feel even more handwavium than on my previous three watches. And speaking of hands, there are a couple too many scenes where the actors’ arms hang limply by their sides, showing a lack of rehearsal or direction or both.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Peter Grimwade’s novelisation of his own story is:
Tegan didn’t trust Turlough an inch. As if anyone from Earth would just walk into a transmat capsule! Though Nyssa was quick to point out that that was exactly what she had done when she walked into the Doctor’s police box on the Barnet By-pass.
I was bracing myself for another terrible book after the awfulness of Doctor Who – Time Flight. But in fact I was pleasantly surprised; I think it is a better story in the first place, but Grimwade is able to bring in a bit more characterisation to new companion Turlough and the Brigadier, and a bit more background to the public school. Not bad at all.
Nothing much to add to that, on re-reading; it does take me back to the days when the novelisation was the only way you could reliably expect to re-experience the story. I would also say that the cover is probably the least imaginative cover of any Doctor Who book of any era, simply a photograph of the Fifth Doctor in the TARDIS. You can get it here.
Kara Dennison’s monograph on Mawdryn Undead is quite a short Black Archive, at only 93 pages, but it’s good and meaty.
It starts with a personal introduction by Dennison, reflecting on becoming a editor of the series as well as a contributor.
I hope this Archive, like the ones before and the ones to come, helps you find new ways to love this show we all adore.
The first chapter, “The Turlough Dilemma”, looks at the problematic concept of Turlough as a companion, from beginning to end, which certanily tickedsome of my oxes about the story.
The second chapter, “‘Some Shocking Experience'”, looks at the Brigadier’s experience of PTSD, referencing also the 1980-81 BBC series To Serve Them All My Days and the Twelfth Doctor story In The Forest of the Night.
The third chapter, “Regeneration Crisis”, looks at the difficulties that regeneration brings for the faithful viewer. Its second paragraph is:
In an interaction that quickly went viral, Capaldi met with the young fan (who was wearing a Dalek costume at the time) to reassure her that, while his Doctor would be different, things would be all right. ‘[Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman] say it’s okay for me to be the Doctor. I hope you think it would be okay for me to be the Doctor, too.’2 2 McCarthy, Tyler, ‘Peter Capaldi Comforts Young Doctor Who Fan With Autism’.
The fourth chapter, “‘Our Endless Voyage'”, compares the travels of Mawdryn with The Flying Dutchman (which Grimwade himself cites as inspiration, quoting it at the start of the novelisation), and also the Marie Celeste and Prometheus.
The fifth chapter, “‘Life Without End or Form'”, looks at immortality in Doctor Who, Swift, Tolkien and manga.
The sixth chapter, “‘Very Much in the Present'”, looks at time paradoxes in Doctor Who with a reflection also on Robert A. Heinlein.
The brief conclusion, “The First Question”, asks “why does this serial feel so much more ‘modern’ than others of its time?” and gives a few answers arising from the topics of the previous chapters.
As I said, it’s a short Black Archive but it’s full of quality thought-provoking analysis. You can get it here.
Non-fiction 6 This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe Renaissance- en barokarchitectuur in België, by Rutger J. Thijs The Cuddled Little Vice, by Elizabeth Sandifer Charlie vs Garret: The Rivalry That Shaped Modern Ireland, by Eoin O’Malley
Non-genre 6 The Mystery of the Blue Train, by Agatha Christie The Colony, by Audrey Magee The Secret Adversary, by Agatha Christie Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset Peril at End House, by Agatha Christie The Grail Tree, by Jonathan Gash
SF 7 Collected Folk Tales, by Alan Garner River Mumma, by Zalika Reid-Benta Deep Secret, by Diana Wynne Jones The Forgotten and the Fantastical: Modern Fables and Ancient Tales: No. 2, ed. Teika Bellamy Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep, by Philip Reeve Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward
Doctor Who 10 House of Plastic, by Mike Tucker (audiobook) Counterstrike, by Una McCormack (audiobook) Agent of the Daleks, by Steve Lyons (audiobook) The Domino Effect, by David Bishop What Still Remains, by Adam Christopher (audiobook) Frankenstein and the Patchwork Man, by Jack Heath Doctor Who Annual 2026, by Paul Lang Bessie Come Home, by Paul Magrs (audiobook) London, 1965, by Paul Magrs (audiobook) Sleeper Agents, by Paul Magrs (audiobook)
Comics 4 Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel Time Trials: The Wolves of Winter, by Richard Dinnick et al Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville Time Trials: A Confusion of Angels, by Richard Dinnick et al
~8,100 pages (counting 100 for each audiobook, and for the Sandifer essay) 13/33 by women (Sandifer, 3x Christie, Magee, Undset, Reid-Benta, Wynne Jones, Bellamy, Kuang, Ward, McCormack, Bechdel) 2/33 by writers of colour (Reid-Benta and Kuang) 4/33 reread (The Secret Adversary, The Grail Tree, Deep Secret, The Domino Effect)
186 books currently tagged unread, down 7 from last month, down 61 from January 2025.
Reading now House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Elfland, by Freda Warrington Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
Coming soon (perhaps) Doctor Who – The Ark, by Paul Erickson The Ark, by Philip Purser-Hallard Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi 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 Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch The Doors of Midnight, by R.R. Virdi The Big Wave, by Pearl S. Buck The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins Drome, by Jesse Lonergan Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Sourire 58, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham
Second paragraph of third story (“Grimm Reality”, by Ana Salome):
I live in a ninth floor flat at the Elephant and Castle. It was the coldest winter day for a decade and my boiler was broken. I had never seen my windows iced over before. Although I was cold to the bone I thought how pretty they were. Like a child I made pictures from the ice patterns. There was a long sharp nose and jagged ears; it could have been Jack Frost. And there was a tiny figure – I took a breath; it looked like a fairy, incredibly tiny and frozen to the window pane. How beautiful, how detailed and how impossibly real. As I looked more closely a wave of something like shock or panic passed through me. This wasn’t an interpretation, a Rorschach blot or Christ in a split aubergine, it was something real.
Another of the books sponsored by the La Leche League, this is an anthology of eighteen retellings of fairy stories – some of them traditional tales reworked from the female perspective, or updated to a modern context, or both; and some of them completely new stories. It was published in 2016 and I picked it up at Eastercon in 2022. None of the authors are well known – the most prominent is the editor herself, Teika Bellamy, who as Maria Smits has a couple of dozen published short stories to her credit, but ISFDB has not heard of most of the contributors.
None the less, this is all good stuff, and it was an interesting almost-paired reading with Alan Garner from a couple of weeks back. There’s a big difference to having one man process legends from all over the world, and a group of mostly women (there is one male controbutor) adapting mostly classic European tales, but at the same time there is a primal quality about all of the stories that comes through.
It begins and ends with two excellent and different takes on the same legend, “Rumplestiltskin” by Rebecca Ann Smith and “Trash into Cash” by Becky Tipper. Of the others, I will especially remember the adaptation of Snow White, “Mirror, Mirror” by Laura Kayne, which blames the mirror more than any of the human characters. But these are all good, especially considering that the writers are mostly at the very start of their writing careers.
The book is also blessed with lovely illustrations by Emma Howitt – little roundels for each story. Here is the first.
Current House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Elfland, by Freda Warrington Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters
Last books finished Peril at End House, by Agatha Christie Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville Doctor Who Annual 2026, by Paul Lang Time Trials: A Confusion of Angels, by Richard Dinnick et al Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward Bessie Come Home, by Paul Magrs
Next books Doctor Who: The Ark, by Paul Erickson Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
“Posted to take you to General Dakros, sir,” the man said hoarsely.
My sister gave this to me years ago, and then borrowed it to read herself on her second last visit and returned it on her last visit, so I thought I should return to it as well – also spurred by conversations at a couple of science fiction conventions last year with Emily Tesh, whose Diana Wynne Jones podcast won the 2025 Hugo.
I think it’s the latest published of Jones’ books that I have read, published in 1997, just a year after The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. It entangles a magical dynastic struggle in a parallel world with a science fiction convention in the central England of the 1990s. One of the two protagonists is our Earth’s senior magical guardian, searching for a new junior partner, and arranges for all the potential candidates to attend the convention so that he can vet them, while also trying to resolve the Koryfonic Empire’s problems. Hilarity ensues.
To those of us who know conventions well, there’s a real shock of recognition at the book’s description human side of it; the oddest thing is realising how much of the old organisational technology which depended on surface mail has disappeared with the electronic age. But the portrayal of a big name writer guest of honour who is a nightmare to manage at the convention – I suspect that will never go out of date.
And Jones moves the plot very deftly. We think we know what is going to happen from an early stage, but she pulls off some impressive (and entirely fair) twists at the end. We know what is happening to whom, and why, despite the number of balls being juggled. It’s not especially an adult themed book, but I think the humour will appeal more to grown-ups than to younger readers. Definitely a happy return visit for me.
Her apartment building was only two minutes away, the mintgreen balconies within sight, but she couldn’t go home. Not until she did this first. She couldn’t explain it, but she knew she was wanted in the park. It was connected somehow to Oni, to the reading. The change was starting. Right now. Someone was waiting, someone was—
From last year’s Hugo packet (supplied by Diana M. Pho as editor), this is a great intrusive fantasy novel set in the Jamaican-Canadian community in Toronto. I’m used to fantasy novels with maps at the beginning, just not used to novels where that map is a sketch of the main arteries and landmarks of a major North American city. (Those that are set in US cities tend to assume that you already know the geography.)
The protagonist has a master’s degree but is working in retail rather than academe, and then finds herself confronted by the Jamaican water goddess River Mumma, whose golden comb has been stolen and threatens horrible vengeance against humanity if our protagonist does not retrieve it. There’s a very entertaining hunt through the freezing city on behalf of a tropical deity, with cultures, temperatures and intergenerational mores all clashing. I really appreciate a book with a good sense of place and where the background culture is well thought out, and this is one of them. You can get River Mumma here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Meanwhile I acquired Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, which goes to the top of that pile.
“I think you’ve given him too much, Tommy,” said Tuppence innocently. “I fancy he wants to give some of it back.”
This was Agatha Christie’s second published book, in 1922. Tommy and Tuppence, a young man and a young woman recently relieved of war duties, start their own business called “The Young Adventurers”, and are hired by the British secret service to thwart the shadowy mastermind behind various political agitations, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, and who threatens to unleash upon the United Kingdom the ultimate horror: a Labour government.
They go through various adventures including a vastly rich young American and a wily Scottish lawyer and MP, and eventually the Secret Adversary is unmasked, his identity not being a surprise to the attentive reader (there’s a moment at the end of Chapter 12 which narrows it down considerably). The motivation of the villain is fairly clear, but his means seem to be as fiendish as might be convenient for the plot. There is a romantic subplot also, which again won’t come as a surprise to the reader, and it gets the two protagonists to where they need to be.
I thought The Secret Adversary was very silly when I first read it at the age of twelve; and I still think it is very silly now that I am fifty-eight. You can get it here.
The book did make me wonder about Agatha Christie’s knowledge of Ireland. Clara Boehmer, Agatha Christie’s mother, was born in Dublin in 1854, but to a career army officer father (born in Martinique, died in Jersey) and and English mother (born and brought up in Chichester), and her father’s regiment moved to Malta, along with the infant Clara, before she was a year old. So I don’t think we can look for Irish sensibilities from that source.
The background incident which sparks the action of the plot of The Secret Adversary takes place on the Lusitania as it is sinking off the coast of County Cork in 1915, and there is then a hurried shuffle without incident across Ireland until Holyhead is reached and some action actually happens. The Secret Adversary is funding Sinn Fein in Chapter 8, and in Chapter 17 it turns out that he also has a prominent Irish Unionist MP on the team. As with the Bolsheviks, and as with labour disputes in England, in the world of The Secret Adversary the political problems of Ireland are entirely generated by external troublemakers.
Of course when Christie was writing The Secret Adversary in 1921, with its 1920 setting, the Irish situation would have been frankly confusing to the English newspaper reader. The War of Independence was in full flow, and the government was desperately and ultimately unsuccessfully trying to spin the situation in its favour to the British and international public.
In April 1921, in fact, the Lloyd George government attempted to discredit Sinn Fein by publishing a dossier “proving” that they were tools of the Bolsheviks; this failed to convince anyone, and King George V was asking the Irish for peace two months later. But that episode obviously resonated in Christie’s mind for the incident with the Sinn Feiner in Chapter 8. I did wonder if the wily Scottish lawyer and MP character was based partly on Edward Carson, but I think Christie would have been too sympathetic to Carson to create such an unflattering literary portrait.
More broadly, over the next fifty-plus years of her writing career, the Agatha Christe wiki lists only one short story, “The Apples of the Hesperides”, as actually set in Ireland (see analysis here), and another dozen characters across her entire œuvre as having Irish connections. The garden in Hallowe’en Party is explicitly based on the Italian sunken garden on Ilnacullin island in Bantry Bay. According to Irish expert John Curran, she did a tour of Great Gardens of Ireland in the 1950s (and Miss Marple then goes on a smilar tour of Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain in the late novel Nemesis).
But it rather looks like Ireland is a mere background detail for almost all of Agatha Christie’s work. There’s no reason why it should be more than that, of course, and no evidence that it could have been either.
I’m hopping through the Agatha Christie novels in my own special way. Next will be Peril at End House. Probably.
Full title: Renaissance- en barokarchitectuur in België: Vitruvius’ erfenis en de ontwikkeling van de bouwkunst in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden van renaissance tot barok = Renaissance and Baroque architecture in Belgium: Vitruvius’ legacy and the development of architecture in the Southern Netherlands from the Renaissance to the Baroque period.
Second paragraph of third chapter, with the quote that it introduces and footnote:
We weten ondertussen dat zijn eerste uitgave van de Generale reglen viel in 1539, onmiddellijk na de terugkeer van Lombard. We zien bovendien dat de tweede uitgave van het beroemde vierde boek van Serlio pas valt in 1549, tien jaar later. Deze tien jaar omspannen dus de hele periode waarin allicht ook Bruegel nog volgens Van Mander op doortocht kan geweest zijn bij Cocke. Bruegel werd immers kort daarna, in 1551, vrijmeester. De omschrijving waarin Carel van Mander de architecturale verdiensten van Pieter Cocke vertolkt, moet ons overigens wel wat tot nadenken stemmen. Bekijken we daarom eerst even de originele passage van Van Mander op folio 218:
We now know that his first edition of the Generale reglen was published in 1539, immediately after Lombard’s return. We also see that the second edition of Serlio’s famous fourth book was not published until 1549, ten years later. These ten years therefore span the entire period during which Bruegel may also have been passing through Cocke’s workshop, according to Van Mander. After all, Bruegel became a master craftsman shortly afterwards, in 1551. Carel van Mander’s description of Pieter Cocke’s architectural merits gives us pause for thought. Let us first take a look at the original passage by Van Mander on folio 218:
‘In desen tijdt / te weten / in’t Jaer 1549. maeckte hy de Boeken van de Metselrije / Geometrije / en Perspective. En gelijck hy wel begaeft en geleert was / d’ Italiaensche Spraeck ervaren wesende / heeft de Boecke van Sebastiaen Serlij, in onse spraeck vertaelt en alsoo door zijnen ernstigen arbeydt in onse Nederlanden het licht gebracht / en op den rechten wech geholpen de verdwaelde Const van Metselrije: soo datmen de dingen / die van Pollio Vitruvio doncker beschreven zijn / lichtlijck verstaen can / oft Vitruvium nouw meer behoeft te lesen / so veel de ordenen belangt. Dus is door Pieter Koeck de rechte wijse van bouwen opghecomen / en de moderne afgegaen / dan t’is moeylijck datter weder een nieuw vuyl moderne op zijn Hoogh-duytsch in gebruyck is ghecomen / die wy qualijck los sullen worden: doch in Italien nemmeer anghenomen sal wesen. ⁴⁴
(in archaic Dutch) In this time, namely in the year 1549, he wrote the Books of Masonry, Geometry, and Perspective. And as he was well-endowed and learned, being experienced in the Italian language, he translated the books of Sebastiaen Serlij into our language and thus, through his diligent work, brought the light to our Netherlands and helped the lost art of masonry back onto the right path, so that the things described obscurely by Pollio Vitruvio can be easily understood, or Vitruvius no longer needs to be read, as far as the orders are concerned. Thus, Pieter Koeck has brought forth the correct way of building, and the modern way has been abandoned, so that it is difficult for a new, foul modern High-German way to come into use, which we will hardly be able to get rid of, but which will never again be accepted in Italy. ⁴⁴
⁴⁴ lets verderop staat dan nog: ‘want zijn Weduwe Maeyken Verhulst gaf zijn nagelaten Metselrije. Boeken uyt in ‘t Jaer 1553. – VAN MANDER 1603, fol. 218.
⁴⁴ Further on it says: ‘for his widow Maeyken Verhulst published his bequeathed masonry books in the year 1553. – VAN MANDER 1603, fol. 218.
I got this ages ago, in the hope that it would shed a bit more light for me on the artistic context of the work of Jan Christiaan Hansche, the Baroque stucco artist who I am obsessed with. I did not really get what I wanted; the second last chapter has nine lovely full-colour photographs of his ceilings, but amazingly doesn’t actually mention him by name in the main text – the chapter is mainly about the Banqueting House in Greenwich, which last time I checked isn’t even in Belgium. (The captions to the photographs do credit Hansche.)
Architectural history isn’t really my bag, and although Dutch is probably the second language that I feel most comfortable reading, that’s not saying much, so I must admit I did not read it forensically. I got enough of it to learn that the individual travels to Italy of particular artists, especially (of course) Bruegel and Rubens, had a big impact on their work, and also that the publication of architectural textbooks, by or adapted from Vitruvius, in the bookish society of early modern Belgium, allowed the new/old architectural ideas to proliferate.
But none of that really matters, because the glory of the book is the hundreds of photographs of buildings and art, which surely must be a pretty comprehensive gazetteer of the surviving architecture of the period in Belgium. If we had that sort of coffee-table, this is the sort of book I’d be putting on it. I got it for only €30, and the going rate for slightly more loved copies is €20 – really good value for what you get. So I didn’t really find what I wanted, but I am happy with what I got.
Sample page showing, left to right, St James’ Church in Liège; the St Martin’s Church in Sint Truiden; the Hazewind house in Gent; and the Wenemarsgodshuis in Gent.
You can get it from various second-hand vendors (it was published by Lannoo in 1999, so it’s out of print). The ISBN is 9789020937053.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Honduras.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Lost City of the Monkey God
Douglas Preston
62,615
2,338
The Codex
Douglas Preston
21,153
2,221
The Mosquito Coast
Paul Theroux
13,895
2,413
Miss Quinces
Kat Fajardo
3,856
291
Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure
Christopher S. Stewart
1,580
218
Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo
Elvia Alvarado
642
221
The Summer We Came to Life
Deborah Cloyed
763
86
The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough
Katie Smith Milway
246
174
This week’s winner, The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston, is a non-fiction book about archaeologists investigating the legendary lost White City, Ciudad Blanca, in the Honduran jungle. The Codex, by the same author, takes the same scenario but recasts it as a thriller.
The Mosquito Coast, this week’s LibraryThing winner, is about an American who decides to move his family to Honduras to escape the modern world, with disastrous consequences; it has been adapted for both film and television.
Most of these books are about Americans encountering Honduras. The only Honduran writer on the list is Elvia Alvarado. (One of Kat Fajardo’s parents is Honduran, but she herself was born and brought up in New York.) Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringos is non-fiction; the top novel that I found by a Honduran writer set in Honduras is Libertad, by Bessie Flores Zaldivar.
I disqualified more than twenty books. Most of them were about Hondurans in, or trying to get into, the United States. Some are by authors who have a link to Honduras but set their work elsewhere, most notably Augusto Monterroso, who was born in Tegucigalpa, but moved to Guatemala when he was 15, and did most of his best known work there and in Mexico.
This series is going to take a break for the next couple of weeks, as I will concentrate on Doctor Who posts at the beginning of February. After that, the next country is Cuba, which will be our last American jurisdiction for a while; after that come Tajikistan, Papua New Guinea, and a run of Europeans starting with Sweden.
So, the BSFA Awards Long List is out – I make it 368 nominees across 9 categories, an average of almost 41. I’ve said it before, but I do wonder to what extent a ‘Long List’ of this length is useful for readers or voters. Of course I am pleased for my friends and for the writers who I admire who are on the Long List; but how much does it really mean? Being on the Long List means that 1 (one) BSFA member nominated you; not being on the Long List means that your friends, if any, in the BSFA ignored you.
I also wonder if the BSFA needs nine award categories, and if so, if it has the right ones. (Plus the tenth, juried, Translation category.) I did think that four or five was too few, back in the old days. This is the third year since the number of categories was almost doubled; it would be interesting to see which of the new awards actually has traction with voters, but I’m not aware that the voting numbers for any stage of the process have been made public.
We do know at least how many works are on each category’s long list. There is some variation, to put it mildly.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers – 17 Best Audio Fiction – 18 Best Non Fiction (Long) – 18 Best Short Non-Fiction – 28 Best Art Work – 37 Best Collection – 41 Best Shorter Fiction – 51 Best Short Fiction – 76 Best Novel – 82
While I’m on the topic of If I Ran The BSFA Awards, I find the ordering of the categories both weird and inconsistent. This week’s long-list announcement has them roughly in alphabetical order, with “Best Non Fiction (Long)” three places away from “Best Short Non-Fiction”, and Best Fiction for Younger Readers at the end. The BSFA website, however, lists the categories roughly in the order that they were created.
Best Audio Fiction Best Artwork Best Collection Best Non-Fiction (Long) Best Novel Best Short Fiction Best Short Non Fiction Best Shorter Fiction Best Fiction for Younger Readers
Best Novel Best Short Fiction Best Shorter Fiction Best Artwork Best Short Non-Fiction Best Long Non-Fiction Best Fiction for Younger Readers Best Collection Best Original Audio Fiction
I think it would be clearer and more helpful for voters and commentators to group like with like, and to adopt something like the following canonical order for the BSFA award categories, with the announcement at the ceremony going through them in reverse:
Best Novel Best Short Fiction Best Shorter Fiction
Fiction (traditional categories)
Best Collection Best Fiction for Younger Readers Best Original Audio Fiction
Fiction (newer categories)
Best Long Non-Fiction Best Short Non-Fiction Best Artwork
Non-fiction and art
The sequencing of the Hugo categories has been developed and honed over the decades, most recently changed by swapping the order of “Best Related Work” and “Best Graphic Story or Comic” in order to group all the fiction categories together.
Anyway. This main point of this post is the analysis of each category, in terms of how well the nominated works score among users of the main book-tracking sites. This isn’t a measure of quality; it’s not a strong predictor of the outcome of the second round voting either; but it is an indication of the extent to which nominees reflect wider popular taste.
I’m bringing in something new – as well as Goodreads and LibraryThing, I’m adding the number of reviewers from Storygraph, which is perhaps a bit more fannish than the other two. In general the Storygraph numbers are four or five times less than the Goodreads numbers, and ten or twenty times more than the LibraryThing numbers. It’s all useful data. (If you find this analysis useful at all.)
I found 158 of the nominees on all three systems, and another 34 on at least one of them. There are six which are presented as separately published works, but don’t have anyone rating them on Goodreads, logging them as owned on LibraryThing or reviewing them on Storygraph. They can all now describe themselves as BSFA long-listees, because one person voted for them.
At the top end of the scale, the most logged book on all three systems is the Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins, in the Best Fiction for Young Readers category. Next, but a very long way behind, is Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, in Best Novel. Third on Goodreads and LibraryThing is The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones, also in Best Novel; third on Storygraph is The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar, in Best Shorter Fiction.
Thought-provoking novel set on an island off the west of Ireland in the summer of 1979. An English painter and a French linguist come to stay, one to capture the landscapes and peoplescapes, and the other to record the decline of the Irish language, which is helpfully translated diegetically every time it is used. The main narrative is interspersed with the real-time events of the Troubles, culminating in the Mountbatten and Narrow Water bombings, which are geographically not all that close to the setting of the story, but have a big psychological impact on the people who live there. It’s a vivid depiction of an isolated community whose engagement with the outside world is limited, but also a book that looks at what is effectively raiding of its cultural resources by artist and linguist (who naturally dislike each other). A good read.
Current Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Last books finished Frankenstein and the Patchwork Man, by Jack Heath The Cuddled Little Vice, by Elizabeth Sandifer Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang Charlie vs Garret: The Rivalry That Shaped Modern Ireland, by Eoin O’Malley Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep, by Philip Reeve
Next books Lost In Time, by A.G. Riddle Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
Vukub-Cakix, the Great Macaw, was nothing but trouble. He shone with the brilliance of gold and silver, and his teeth were emeralds, and he owned the nanze-tree of succulent fruit. He was a boaster, and his sons were no better. Their names were Zipacna the Earthmaker and Cabrakan the Earthshaker. The sons made mountains and then toppled them, and the father guzzled the harvests, so that between them they were a plague in Guatemala.
This is a collection of fifty-odd folk tales from various cultures – I did not count, but I think at least half are English or at least British, and slightly more than half were first published in another collection in 1969 (this one dates from 2011). They are all a bit enigmatic, pricking complacency about the universe. The best are short. A 47-page extract from the Ramayana was the one piece which I felt rather misfired. And it includes also some poetry by Garner himself:
Mist
The mist will always come from the fen. It bore on its breath the boating men, Saxon, Viking, iron swords, Burning thatch and crystal words. And their sons’ sons and grandsons still Built house upon house in the lee of the hill. And the latest house shows on the wall How they shuttered and barred the lord’s great hall From the mist and what the mist must hold; And what it is must never be told. For the mist will always come from the fen. And now it is killing the motorway men.
A book to sip slowly from rather than to rush through. You can get Collected Folk Tales here.
The news that J.D. Vance and his wife Usha are expecting a baby in July spurred me to research previous cases of babies born to incumbent Vice-Presidents (four boys, to three Veeps) and Presidents (three, two girls and a boy, to two POTUSes).
It has been inaccurately stated in some sources that Floride Calhoun (1792-1866) was the only previous Second Lady to have a baby during the Vice-Presidential term of her husband, in this case John C. Calhoun (1782-1850, Veep 1825-1832). She was the first but not the last.
The Calhouns’ ninth and tenth children (of ten) were born during his term, James Edward Calhoun (1826-1861) and William Lowndes Calhoun (1829-1858). Both were born in South Carolina. James became a lawyer and went to California. He died aged 36 and is not known to have had children.
William stayed in South Carolina, married twice and had three sons with his second wife (incidentally she was the widow of one of their older brothers) before dying aged 29. I think he has living descendants.
Floride Calhoun outlived all but one of her ten children, including John and William.
Frank Hamlin (1862-1922), son of Hannibal Hamlin (1809-1891, Veep 1861-1865) and his second wife Ellen Hamlin née Emery (1835-1925), was the longest lived (so far) of the Vice-Presidential babies. He was born in Maine, became a lawyer and moved to Chicago. I don’t know that he had any children.
The most recent Veep baby was Schuyler Colfax III (1870-1925), only child of Schuyler Colfax (1823-1885) and his second wife Ellen née Wade (1836-1911). He became Mayor of South Bend, Indiana at 28, and then worked for Kodak. Two of his three children died young but the third has living descendants.
The three Presidential babies were all born more recently. Grover Cleveland (1837-1908, POTUS 1885-89 & 1893-97) married Frances Folsom (1864-1947) in 1886 during his first term and they had two of their five children during his second term.
Esther Cleveland (1893-1980) was the second of her parents’ five kids. She married a British army officer and had two daughters, one of whom was the philosopher Philippa Foot, the co-inventor of the Trolley Problem. (Her photo illustrates this post)
Marion Cleveland (1895-1977) married twice and had four children. Her second husband was John Harlan Amen, the chief interrogator at the Nuremberg tribunal.
Both Cleveland sisters have living descendants – indeed four of their six children lived into this century.
Last and saddest, the fourth child of John F. Kennedy (1917-1963, POTUS 1961-63) and his wife Jacqueline née Bouvier 1929-1994) was Patrick Bouvier Kennedy (1963-63), who was born prematurely and lived for only two days.
Coincidentally Marion Cleveland and Patrick Kennedy were born quite close to each other geographically (if 68 years apart), she in Buzzards Bay at the base of Cape Cod and he in the nearby Otis Air Force Base.
Of the seven babies on my list, only two were born in Washington DC were Schuyler Colfax in 1870, and Esther Cleveland in 1893. Perhaps the Vances will add a third.
She was born Jean Murray, in 1934, to Thomas and May Murray, a Protestant couple in East Belfast. Belfast was a sooty, grey city of chimneys and steeples, flanked by a flat green mountain on one side and the Belfast Lough, an inlet of the North Channel, on the other. It had linen mills and tobacco factories, a deepwater harbour where ships were built, and row upon row of identical brick workers’ houses. The Murrays lived on Avoniel Road, not far from the Harland & Wolff shipyard, where the Titanic had been built. Jean’s father worked at Harland & Wolff. Every morning when she was a child, he would join the thousands of men plodding past her house on their way to the shipyard, and every evening he would return as the procession of men plodded home in the opposite direction. When the Second World War broke out, Belfast’s linen factor produced millions of uniforms and the shipyards churned out navy vessels. Then, one night in 1941, not long before Jean’s seventh birthday, air raid sirens wailed as a formation of Luftwaffe bombers streaked across the waterfront, scattering parachute mines and incendiary bombs, and Harland & Wolff erupted into flame.
This is a tremendous book about one particular aspect of the Northern Ireland conflict, tracking two intertwined stories through the decades: first, the history of sisters and IRA members Dolours and Marian Price, and second the mystery of Jean McConville née Murray, who was abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1972. Keefe has interviewed, and read interviews with, many of the surviving protagonists, and of course the story was made into a major Disney+ TV drama. It’s a chilling narrative of violence and death, sometimes political and sometimes just thuggery.
It is a book that has evoked sharp reactions. One person on social media responded to my note that I had read the book by fuming that it was “IRA propaganda. Complete bullshit”, though he later admitted that he had not actually read it himself. On the other hand, mainstream Republicans find both book and series sensationalist and unduly hostile to Gerry Adams. (Links are to two separate reviews by Tim O’Grady on Danny Morrison’s blog.)
By telling one particular set of stories, others are not told. Of course, everyone must write the book that they want to write; but the fact is that Northern Ireland is a lot wider than the dynamics of Republican West Belfast, and the experiences of the Prices and McConvilles, awful as they were, are representative of a part of society but not the whole. Keefe does make the occasional effort to acknowledge this, but I think a reader who knew nothing about the Troubles might get the impression that there was nothing else happening. Lost Lives would be a very good corrective.
The question is, what does one want to make of the past? At the end of the peace process, both the Prices and McConvilles felt cheated for different reasons. The McConvilles eventually did get closure with the discovery of their mother’s body, but that came about by chance rather than by any help from political factors. The Prices on the other hand felt that if the British remained in Northern Ireland, the entire armed struggle looked pointless, and they were revolted by that thought.
But the armed struggle was pointless; and it was evil. This is my analysis, not Keefe’s. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was much the same as the 1974 power-sharing structure. The most significant differences were the provisions for ex-paramilitary prisoners, and police reform. (Some would argue that the D’Hondt coalition government is also a major change, but I would say that the forced coalition was there in 1974 and the D’Hondt process is a detail of implementation.) Was that worth the lives lost and devastated over thirty years?
This of course does not excuse or minimise the role of the British and Unionists in the story. If Unionists had run Stormont better in the first place, especially if the British had leaned on them to do so, there would have been no conflict. Loyalist violence, directed by Unionist leaders, was the initiating factor in the Troubles (as shown in the early episodes of Say Nothing), and Loyalists killed more civilians than either Republicans or the British Army. Bloody Sunday was an atrocity, and the cover-up was a crime (though Bloody Friday was an atrocity too). The Price sisters were brutalised in jail, and they were not the only ones.
Books like Say Nothing are very valuable to help understand the past – especially so if the reader keeps in mind that they show only part of the whole story.
I had occasional shocks of personal connection. In 1996, I was an election candidate in North Belfast as was Gerry Kelly, one of the Price sisters’ colleagues in the 1973 London bombings. He won, I lost; I have particular memories of a hustings in the Ardoyne where the audience was basically deciding between voting for him or not voting at all, and I left in such a rush that I had to go back the next day to collect my coat. (He doesn’t get a named speaking part in the TV show.)
A couple of the minor characters in the story mentioned are on my Facebook friends list – I won’t embarrass them by naming them, but they are played in the TV series by Seamus O’Hara and Charlotte McCurry. The idea behind the Boston College archives, on which more in a moment, came from Paul Bew, who I have known since I was roughly thirteen. Northern Ireland is a small place.
The Boston College archives play a large part in how much of the story came to light. These were a set of taped interviews with paramilitaries which unexpectedly became a source of evidence for the police investigating the murder of Jean McConville. I had a lot of respect and affection for Ed Moloney, the director of the project who died last year, and I corresponded warmly and sympathetically with him in 2011 when it started seriously running into trouble. But I have to say that he does not appear to have done the necessary due diligence on the extent to which his carefully gathered records could be used in future criminal investigations, and relied unwisely on the doctrine of the protection of journalistic sources. Expert legal advice was simply never sought, and that is a big error – on Keefe’s telling, Ed Moloney’s error rather than anyone else’s.
Whatever you make of the political intentions of the author, it is a well told story. I groaned a bit when I looked at 404 pages of dense text, with 93 pages of footnotes, but it really slips by quickly – even when you know what happened in the end. And here Keefe’s choice to focus on the McConvilles and the Prices does make sense, because by focusing on the human cost of the conflict to two families, you turn historical facts and statistics into stories that can be related to by any reader.
Published in 2018, the book got a new lease of life with the 2024 drama, which I finally got around to watching at the end of last year. I think it’s very well done. In particular, Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake excel as Dolours Price in her youth and in her middle age, and Rory Kinnear is very memorable as Frank Kitson. I was surprised to see Josh Finan, who plays the young Gerry Adams here, pop up again as Dan, the philosophy teacherwhose students are convicts, in Waiting for the Out, which we have been watching more recently.
On the downside, the early episodes tastelessly play the Prices’ IRA activities for laughs, and the whole thing is more sympathetic to the Prices than perhaps they deserve. The darkness is acknowledged too, but I felt the balance could have been put in a better place.
Watching it with my son, who was born in 1999 and has never lived in Northern Ireland, was also instructive. The two standout episodes are the sixth, which centres on the brutal force-feeding of the Price sisters on hunger strike in Brixton, and the eighth (of the nine) which concludes with the McConville children, now thirty years after their mother was taken from them, clustering together in the hope that her body will be found. With the caveats above, it’s very watchable.
“Pleased to see you back again, Mr Van Aldin,” he said.”
Yeah, I’m working through the less celebrated novels of Agatha Christie (having read all the best known ones in 2013). This one dates from 1928, and features Poirot dragged into the investigation of a murder and jewel theft on Le Train Bleu, which used to run direct overnight from Calais via Paris to the French Riviera. (No point in such a route now that you can get from Paris to Nice in five hours by TGV, or a bit less by air.)
Some of this environment has become familiar to me as I work through my grandmother’s memoirs. The victim here is a rich young American woman moving between England and France (as was my grandmother), and there is another older rich woman living in the Riviera who ran a hospital during the Great War (as did my grandmother’s aunt). It’s also notable that all characters are expected to be fluent if not perfect in French.
Agatha Christie herself was reportedly dissatisfied with this book, and I can see some of the flaws that she possibly was conscious of, and some that she possibly was unaware of. There’s some gratuitous anti-semitism. She doesn’t have a good ear for names – “Van Aldin” doesn’t work for a New Yorker with Dutch ancestors; nor does “Papopolous” for a Greek, especially a Greek Jew. The actual murder plot is hilariously convoluted and Poirot’s solution to it is spun almost out of thin air.
But there’s one very well drawn character, Katherine Grey, who benefits from a recent inheritance and gets sucked into the mystery on her way to the Riviera – she reminded me a bit of Anne Beddingfeld in The Man in the Brown Suit, who heads off to Africa in similar circumstances, but a bit older and perhaps more rooted in reality. She is romantically pursued by The Wrong Chap but ends up with The Right Chap, to the frustration of the Teenage Girl – who herself is a standard Christie trope, done a bit better than usual here.
In the early 1990s, I turned my attention to what I thought at the time was a very trivial, albeit rather irritating, problem, namely why primates spend so much time grooming each other. The conventional view at the time was that grooming was simply about hygiene – removing burrs and other bits of vegetation from the fur and generally keeping the skin clean and healthy. Grooming certainly does that, but after many years watching monkeys in the wild I had been deeply impressed by the fact that they groomed far more than they ever needed to for purely hygienic purposes. It seemed obvious that grooming was intensely social and pleasurable.
Robin Dunbar is famous for the “Dunbar number”, the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, which he says research has borne out as the average size of human communities from prehistory to the present day. This book looks at the nature of friendship, including its roots in primate behaviour and its future in the online world.
Dunbar is very big on his own research, though he does mention other researchers too (with occasional asides about the fate of his PhD and doctoral students). I found the prose a bit dry, to be honest, and no space is given to any critique of his findings, or alternative explanations. Maybe there isn’t any, but I recently also read Proto by Laura Spinney which does make space for alternative theories.
I also wondered about the people and societies at the ends of the bell curve. Dunbar is very pleased that all of the studies he cites find that people to have 5-ish close friends and an extended circle of 150-ish; but what’s the variation? What can we learn from and about super-connectors, or from people who are socially isolated? The dragging towards the mean got a bit tiring.
So, yes, lots of interesting stuff here, but it raised questions as well as answers. You can get Friends here.
