Hi. I’m Nicholas Whyte, a public affairs consultant in Brussels, political commentator in Northern Ireland, and science fiction fan. This is my blog on WordPress, which 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.
Since late 2003, I’ve been recording (almost) every book that I have read. At 200-300 books a year, that’s over 4000 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 a purchase link for Amazon UK. (Yes, I know; but I get no other financial reward for writing all of this.)
Second paragraph of third chapter (with illustration):
“Squeak, Squeak, where are you?” murmured the girl, nervously biting on her lower lip. She slowly pivoted in midair and stared at the distant earth, a hazy blue globe dangling in an ebony sky. Her brother might never walk on that friendly dirt again. The slender young flight doctor shuddered, de-spite the controlled warmth of her space suit. There was no friendly soil on the moon—nothing but sterile, gray-brown dust, monotonous craters, and saw-toothed mountains the color of rust.
I had picked this up somewhere along with one of my sets of Doctor Who e-books. I didn’t have the Major Matt Mason toy when I was a kid, so missed out on all the fandom around the Mattel astronauts; here we have Major Matt coming to the rescue of a fellow astronaut, whose sister is also on the team as the medic. It turns out that giant space rabbits are Behind It All. You’re welcome. The art is rather nice though. You can get it (for free) here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is the Roger Zelazny collection, Nine Black Doves.
The main function of most birdsong is long-distance communication, either to mark territory or to be sociable. As such it is largely intraspecific; blackbirds sing to impress blackbirds, not buntings. In contrast, social vocalisation, such as coordinating group activity, largely occurs at short range during active flight or foraging, or when settling down for the night or preparing to take flight as a flock.
Following on from Does Anything Eat Wasps? and Why Can’t Elephants Jump?, here are 101 more questions asked by New Scientist readers with answers also supplied by New Scientist readers. There is a whole chapter on why one might want one’s martini to be shaken, not stirred, with accounts from readers of direct experimentation on the options. Otherwise lots of wholesome science stuff. (And no, we won’t ever speak Dolphin; they don’t really have language to the same level that we do.) You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelf. Next was going to be A Brief History of the Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff, but I realised it was actually a condensation of his two books that I have already read, so in fact next will be Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton.
The second paragraph of the third section of “Beggars in Spain” is:
She had studied the theory of cold fusion at school, and her global studies teacher had traced the changes in the world resulting from Yagai’s patented, low-cost applications of what had, until him, been unworkable theory: the rising prosperity of the Third World; the death throes of the old communistic systems; the decline of the oil states; the renewed economic power of the United States. Her study group had written a news script, filmed with the school’s professional-quality equipment, about how a 1985 American family lived with expensive energy costs and a belief in tax-supported help, while a 2019 family lived with cheap energy and a belief in the contract as the basis of civilization. Parts of her own research puzzled Leisha.
Back when I was first attempting to work through the joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, more than twenty years ago, I had the silly idea of doing them in alphabetical order by title, which meant that this was the second I got to after “Bears Discover Fire” (at that point, American Gods, Among Others, Ancillary Justice and All Systems Red all lay in the future). In 2001 I wrote the following (links have been updated):
I think this was the first work by Kress that I ever read, just around the time that my own daughter was born in 1997. The story begins with the planned conception of a genetically modified child, Leisha Camden, and her “normal” twin sister, Alice, and follows them until their early twenties, so as a new father myself I was gripped from the start. All parents know that their child is the most marvellous creature in the world, of course, and part of the monstrosity of Roger Camden is that he barely acknowledges the existence of the ordinary Alice and concentrates his affection on the augmented Leisha. The dysfunctional family of Camden, his wife who gradually disintegrates, the geneticist who Camden subsequently marries, and the girls themselves, is all too credible and painfully (if sparsely) portrayed; likewise Leisha’s discovery of a new community with the other children born with the same modification that she has. However it is not the main point of the story.
Leisha has been genetically modified so that she does not need to sleep. Along with this most obvious change come other benefits: the Sleepless (for she is among the first of many such children) are more intelligent, more capable, and more content than the Sleepers (as we normal humans become known). As the Sleepless progress to maturity they have to deal with the prejudices that many display against them. The story of prejudice against children who are not just different but who are feared to be superior is an old SF trope, going back at least to 1911 and J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder. Kress’ triumph here is that she displays a certain compassion for both the ordinary humans who are terrified by the emergence of the Sleepless, and indeed for the isolationists among the Sleepless who want to build a new society for themselves, leaving cut off the rest of humanity. Howwever we are in no doubt that her sympathies lie with those including Leisha Camden who want to maintain a single human society including both Sleepers and Sleepless.
Dealing with prejudice is a hall-mark of Kress’ best work; it is the main theme of her Nebula-winning “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and prominent also in her other Nebula-winning novella, “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”. Her understanding is that many, perhaps even most, will be prejudiced against those who seem insufficiently “human”, but those of us who do not feel that way must stand up and be counted against such bigotry, even if it seems that the odds are stacked against us. It’s a powerful and profound argument. But that too is not the main point of this particular story.
The main theme of the story concerns the responsibilities of those who have favourable positions in society towards those who are less fortunate. The intellectual underpinning of the argument here is a fictional philosopher/scientist called Kenzo Yagai, who has not only invented cheap energy but propounds a moral code based on these principles: “That spiritual dignity comes from supporting one’s life through one’s own efforts, and from trading the results of those efforts in mutual cooperation throughout the society. That the symbol of this is the contract. And that we need each other for the fullest, most beneficial trade.” In a crucial passage where Leisha debates this issue with Tony, an embittered fellow Sleepless, later martyred, he introduces the metaphor of the story’s title:
“What if you walk down a street in Spain and a hundred beggars each want a dollar and you say no and they have nothing to trade you but they’re so rotten with anger about what you have that they knock you down and grab it and then beat you out of sheer envy and despair?” Leisha didn’t answer. “Are you going to say that’s not a human scenario, Leisha? That it never happens?” “It happens,” Leisha said evenly. “But not all that often.” “Bullshit. Read more history. Read more newspapers. But the point is: what do you owe the beggars then? What does a good Yagaiist who believes in mutually beneficial contracts do with people who have nothing to trade and can only take?” “You’re not–“ “What, Leisha? In the most objective terms you can manage, what do we owe the grasping and nonproductive needy?” “What I said originally. Kindness. Compassion.” “Even if they don’t trade it back? Why?” “Because…” She stopped. “Why? Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing them anything? Be as honest as I know you are.” Leisha put her head between her knees. The question gaped beneath her, but she didn’t try to evade it. “I don’t know. I just know we do.”
Kress’ source for Yagaiism is quite explicitly the philosophy of Ayn Rand, as expressed in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged (famously mocked as Telemachus Sneezed by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson in the Illuminatus! trilogy). In one interview, Kress says of Rand: “although there’s something very appealing about her emphasis on individual responsibility, that you should not evade reality, you should not evade responsibility, you should not assume that it’s up to the next person to provide you with your life, with what it is that you need, whether that’s emotional, or physical… [it] lacks all compassion, and even more fundamental, it lacks recognition of the fact that we are a social species and that our society does not exist of a group of people only striving for their own ends, which is what she shows, but groups of people co-operating for mutual ends, and this means that you don’t always get what you want and your work does not always benefit you directly.”
She goes on to draw another contrast in the other direction, between the society she depicts in her own fiction and the society of Anarres in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but I guess this must have more relevance to the expanded, novel version of Beggars in Spain which I have not read. There is an interesting discussion of both Rand and Kress on the everything2.com discussion site. [And it’s still there, almost a quarter of a century later!] The central message of “Beggars in Spain” is that our humanity as individuals is bound up in our obligations to the rest of humanity, and if we forget that, we become less human.
It would be easy to write a didactic and boring story about how we all ought to be nice to each other, even including the two subsidiary themes identified above. “Beggars in Spain” is not that story. We have vivid characterisations of Leisha and her sister Alice, their stepmother the geneticist, and several of the other Sleepless (perhaps the father is a little too monstrous here). Also Kress has a very strong sense of place, with the Camdens’ mansion by Lake Michigan, Leisha’s student environment in Harvard, and the middle America through which she and Alice eventually flee having rescued a Sleepless child from abuse, all depicted convincingly. And there are a couple of beautiful vignettes; a scene where Leisha confronts a pregnant Alice, slightly (deliberately?) reminiscent of the end of Lolita; an earlier scene where the Sleepless kids try a drug that will make them sleep for the first time, with their sense of anticipation – and then disappointment when they all wake up hung over – wickedly portrayed. This story is strongly recommended.
I stand by pretty much all of that from 22 years ago. Two new points jumped out at me. First, the Sleepless kids’ communication, presented as a deeply clever and privileged way of staying in touch across computer networks, is basically a WhatsApp group or a private Telegram channel; the fact that everyone would have access to that sort of networked communication in the future was unthinkable in 2001.
Second, the scene with Alice barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen in the Appalachians resonates backward with Lolita, but also forward with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (review coming soon). Having said that, I do wonder how the daughter of a Chicago millionaire managed to get into a (not very) romantic relationship with an older man from the sticks?
Anyway, I’m glad to say that it has retained its power, a classic case of sf being not just “What if…?” but “My God! What if…?” You can get it here as a standalone novella.
That year Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold won the Hugo for Best Novel, and Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick won the Nebula. For Novelette, the Hugo went to “Gold” by Isaac Asimov, who had just died, and the Nebula to “Guide Dog” by Mike Conner; and for Short Story, the Hugo went to “A Walk in the Sun” by Geoffrey Landis, and the Nebula to “Ma Qui” by Alan Brennert. I remember reading the two shorter Hugo winners but not the Nebula winners. The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Ray Bradbury Award both went to Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Next up in this sequence is a Connie Willis double: the short story “Even the Queen” and the novel Doomsday Book.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I had two nights away from Belgium that month, a Clarke meeting in London and a work meeting in The Hague. I also enjoyed a massive St Patrick’s Day whammy of Irish Embassy Reception on the evening of the 16th, Northern Ireland representation breakfast on the 17th and the Irish College in Leuven, where it all started, on the evening of the 17th. A couple of days later I attended the screening of a film about Lyra McKee.
Here are two journalists, both with the same first name, at the Irish embassy reception.
With the Clarke deadline closing in, I read 37 books that month, though again I did not finish those that seemed insufficiently science fictional (or insufficiently good) to have a chance of winning.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 22) Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright Management Lessons fromGame of Thrones: Organization Theory and Strategy in Westeros, by Fiona Moore Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins Wordsworth’s French Daughter, by George McLean Harper Kerblam!, by Naomi Jacobs and Thomas L. Rodebaugh William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, by Émile Legouis The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, by James Mortimer The Kosova Liberation Army, by James Pettifer The Face of Britain, by Simon Schama
Non-genre 1 (YTD 4) Ratlines, by Stuart Neville
SF 23 (YTD 64) The Key to Fury, by Kristin Cast (did not finish) Lost In Time, by A.G. Riddle (did not finish) The Visitors, by Owen W Knight (did not finish) Thrust, by Lidia Yuknavitch Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel Neom, by Lavie Tidhar The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd (did not finish) Luca, by Or Luca Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, by Aliette de Bodard Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Pod by Laline Paull The Best of Ian McDonald Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, eds. Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins The Anomaly, by Hervé le Tellier Glitterati, by Oliver K. Langmead The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan Off-Target, by Eve Smith Children of Memory, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman Last Exit, by Max Gladstone (did not finish) Speaking Bones, by Ken Liu (did not finish) Ricky’s Hand, by David Quantick The Moonday Letters, by Emmi Itäranta
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 10) Warring States, by Mags Halliday The HAVOC Files: The Laughing Gnome, ed ???
Comics 2 (YTD 7) Revolutions of Terror, by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande and Arianna Florean The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
10,100 pages (YTD 26,200) 17/37 (YTD 46/110) by non-male writers (Albright, Moore, Jacobs, Cast, Yuknavitch, St. John Mandel, Shepherd, Luca, de Bodard, Paull, Thomas/Morigan, Egan, Smith, Itäranta, Halliday, Casagrande/Florean, Bechdel) 7/37 (YTD 21/110) by a non-white writer (Cast, Shepherd, Luca, de Bodard, Paull, Thomas/Wiggins, Liu)
Some really good books this month. From the Clarke submissions, Venomous Lumpsucker (get it here), The Anomaly (get it here), Off Target (get it here) and Children of Memory (get it here) were all excellent. Several good biographies too: Rob Wilkins on Terry Pratchett (get it here), Madeleine Albright on herself (get it here), Alison Bechdel on herself in graphic format (get it here). See also Simon Schama on British portraits (get it here) and the Best of Ian McDonald‘s short fiction (get it here). I don’t need to cover the less good ones, I think.
‘I like to sit with my back to the engine,’ he explained.
I had read this as a teenager, which I went through my Flann O’Brien phase, and approached re-reading it with some trepidation; would the Suck Fairy have visited this collection of excruciating puns based around a totally fictional friendship between John Keats (1795-1821) and George Chapman (1559-1634)?
I’m afraid so. I am sure that over the table in a bar, Flann O’Brien would have told these with gusto, his face barely twitching as he reached the end and his friends collapsed with hilarity. But culture has moved on since his time, especially in Ireland, and a lot of the stories are laboured journeys to an uninspiring punchline. Here is one of the less aged ones:
One winter’s evening Keats looked up to find Chapman regarding him closely. He naturally enquired the reason for this scrutiny.
‘I was thinking about those warts on your face,’ Chapman said. ‘
What about them?’ the poet said testily. ‘
Oh, nothing,’ Chapman said. ‘It just occurred to me that you might like to have them removed.’
‘They are there for years,’ Keats said, ‘and I don’t see any particular reason for getting worried about them now.’
‘But they are rather a blemish,’ Chapman persisted. ‘I wouldn’t mind one – but four fairly close together, that’s rather—’
‘Four?’ Keats cried. ‘There were only three there this morning!’
‘There are four there now,’ Chapman said.
‘That’s a new one on me,’ Keats said.
You see what I mean?
The book also includes the script of Eamon Morrissey’s one-man show based on O’Brien’s work, “The Brother”, where the punchline is that although many claim to have died for Ireland, the barman was born for Ireland (in that his mother distracted a hostile British soldier at just the right moment to save the narrator). It’s a cringeworthy set-up, but it also sparks the interesting thought that there has been very little writing about gender-based violence during the Irish conflicts of the early 1920s. Can there really have been none at all?
This was the non-genre book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (I don’t think the stories are very sfnal, even if Keats and Chapman lived two centuries apart in real life, and most of the stories are set long after Keats’ time, never mind Chapman’s). Next on that pile is a rather different matter, Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson.
Current Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat
Last books finished Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson Ocean’s Echo, by Everina Maxwell The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd Extraction Point, by MG Harris The Night of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith
Next books The Day of the Doctor, by Alasdair Stuart Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor
The 81st World Science Fiction Convention opens in Chengdu a month from tomorrow, and I’ve been looking for books about the city to set the scene. A couple that I saw on Amazon looked cheap and interesting and I bought them without too much investigation. Both are memoirs by Americans about their time teaching in Chengdu. Both are, frankly, terrible.
Dispatches from Chengdu, by Abdiel LeRoy, is a consolidation of his emailed newsletters home to friends and family from 2005. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
In China, foreign visitors are relentlessly assaulted with bizarre arrangements of English words—symptomatic of a country growing faster than its competence. Among my favorites was a sign above a men’s room saying, ‘Toilet of Man’. More recently, I came across this promotional copy from a bed manufacturer: “Whenever the time that night come, grow to have the Yalisi mattress sweet concomitant, let you fallen asleep safely in the quite night [sic].”
I am afraid this is symptomatic. The author wanders through Chengdu (and in later books, other parts of China) getting fired from teaching jobs because he is basically an asshole with no self-awareness, and zero empathy for the culture in which he has chosen to embed himself. Its only merit is that it is quite short.
Charmed in Chengdu, by Michael O’Neal, dates from a few years later, 2012-13. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Michael, what will you do tomorrow? We’d like to take you into town!”
This is actually even worse; the books starts by mocking the stewardesses on his flight to China from Seattle for the crime of being over 50, and continues in the nastiest possible tone of snide at the country and the people he meets and teaches. I couldn’t finish it.
Sometimes when people show you who they are, you should believe them, and these two authors show rather more of who they are than I wanted to see. I’m not going to do my usual trick of supplying links to buy these books, because I don’t encourage anyone to buy them.
I do have three other books set in Chengdu on my shelf, all by Chinese writers, which I think will make a difference. Two are the first two books in a promised crime trilogy, Death Notice and Fate by Zhou Haohui; the other is Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, by Murong Xuecun. I’m not sure if I will get to writing them up here before Chengdu Worldcon, but I’m totally sure that they will be a lot better than either of these offensive piles of rubbish.
I’ve often observed of past ballots in this category (now the Astounding Award, previously the John W. Campbell Award) that we voters are given apples and oranges to choose between; this year tennis balls have been added to the mix, as one of the finalists has submitted no work in English at all to the Hugo voter packet, and another has submitted one translated piece and one longer piece that is not translated.
Of course it is crucially important that the Hugos become more open to non-English-speaking cultures and submissions, and it’s also important to note that there is nothing in the constitution about the Hugo voter packet; as I have observed before, it is a privilege and not a right. The keen voter (like me) will run a non-English-language work through one or more of the many free online translators and will attempt to form a fair impression. Future Hugo administrators could think about ways of lowering the barriers to entry and reading here – perhaps the administering WorldCon could support professional translations, though that has costs in time as well as money.
(And if you are about to tell me how cool it would be to get fans to crowdsource translations of Hugo packet stories and other important WSFS documents for free, I have just three things to say to you: No. No. And no.)
Anyway, I’ve done my best to form a fair opinion of the two Chinese-language finalists here, and am casting my vote as follows:
6) 刘麦加 / Liu Maijia. Has submitted a short story with English translation ,《左⼿边》/ “LEFT”, and a short novel without English translation, 麦克斯先生很好》/ “Maxwell”.
I read “LEFT” with interest. The second paragraph of its second section is:
“From the day I found out about her existence, it has been exhausting…” I naturally knew what I looked like now. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a full night’s sleep. I survived each day on coffee, and it had been almost a month since I took off my robe. Professor Jiang moved slightly away from me, which I suspected he had caught a whiff of my two-week-old unwashed scent.
Translation supplied in packet
It’s a story about moving away from western concepts of science using the Chinese language as a basis for understanding, a notion which I also remember T.H. White using in The Master long long ago. Breaking the monopoly of English is of course an important question in the wider scheme of things. I didn’t feel it was all that well executed, though; the emotional punch is missing, the wise old professor has a cute-not-cute obsession with Western hard liquor, and although the scenes set in Boston are given a little local colour, I don’t think we find out where exactly in China the scenes set there are meant to be.
I started “Maxwell” as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
从城市外三百公里开始，一直向南延伸到海岸线，是斯格林的世界。
Beginning three hundred kilometers outside of the city and stretching south to the coastline is the world of Skrin.
DeepL translation
We’re given a summary, which says:
After experiencing a precipitous deterioration of the Earth’s environment and the era of advanced technology, humanity won the AI-war. At the same time, the technocracy went into a cul-de-sac. Overnight, all cyborg humans became “Robotic Skeletons “devoid of citizenship rights. The war with AI nearly destroyed all power facilities. Earth’s resources continued to diminish. Citizens were forced to settle in four 3D cities, awaiting a miraculous invention from the Cloud that would reshape human civilization with unlimited energy. In 2115, a new round of federal presidential elections was underway. The support rate for the obscure mayoral candidate, Yino Feng, was far from optimistic. Citizen Seven, in order to witness the desired conclusion of their favorite anime, ventured on the edge of federal law. Meanwhile, outside of the city, a young Skeletons boy finally had the opportunity to join the survival battle for the power generator……
It doesn’t sound much like my kind of thing, and after running the first couple of chapters through translation, it still didn’t feel much like my kind of thing.
5) Everina Maxwell. Was on the ballot last year and submitted her first novel, Winter’s Orbit, for the packet then; I reviewed it here. This year she has submitted a second novel, Ocean’s Echo. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
He was an army officer, stocky, with a bald head and an evidently lofty rank—Tennal couldn’t read rank tabs, but he felt a stab of apprehension from the miles of gold braid encrusting his uniform. But the officer’s nominal rank didn’t matter. The moment he stepped in the room, a vivid glare of light flooded Tennal’s head, drowning out even the pounding of the engines. Tennal couldn’t see. He couldn’t think.
It’s another queer space opera romance, where the super politically connected Bad Boy is thrown together with the Good Boy trying to overcome his controversial family heritage, in a world where mind-control skills are just sufficiently developed for the plot, and you can see where it’s going from the third chapter. I liked it more than the previous book though. You can get it here.
4) Travis Baldree. As already mentioned separately and under Best Novel, the author is a well-known gaming figure and he has submitted Legends and Lattes, his Best Novel contender, also as his contribution to the Astounding folder of the packet, which makes perfect sense. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
The hob hauled in his box of tools and placed it inside the big doorway.
It is about an Orc warrior who decides that she will set up a coffee shop in a fantasy city. There are hilarious capers as she encounters jealous enemies, magical interference with the brewing process (both positive and negative) and love. I honestly don’t think it’s very deep but it’s good fun. You can get it here.
3) Naseem Jamnia. Has submitted a short novel, The Bruising of Qilwa, the second paragraph of whose third section (“Year Three”) is:
“I thought she didn’t even like Kofi.” Afsoneh wore a rose-patterned scarf around her hair, which she’d decided to cut short into a bob and not regrow.
This is a story in an alternate history Persia, dealing with the consequences of Arab invasions which worked out differently than in our timeline, with magical medicine and a very liberal take on gender. It’s pretty heavily loaded with colonial and other tropes, but I think it does manage to carry that burden with a very believable protagonist. The Persian contribution to the Islamic Golden Age is a topic that has long fascinated me, and this is a worthy fictional treatment of it. You can get it here.
(I also salute all of these authors for submitting submit shorter work rather than 750-page novels to the packet in this category. The longest submission this year is Maxwell’s, at less than 500 pages.)
2) Xin Weimu. Has supplied three stories in Chinese with no translation. I ran them all through the online translators and was rather impressed, starting with the shortest of them, 哈农练指法 / “Hanon’s exercises” – a pianist who has found a tech enhancement to drastically improve his performance but at a terrible cost. It’s Faust, of course, but from a fresh angle. The second paragraph of the third section is:
Every day Shao Bin got something wrong. A senior girl preparing for the Ligeti Grand Prix cried out, when he interrupted her for the fifth time: “But you’re talking too fast, I can’t take it in!” The editor of the Music Appreciation column was dumbfounded when he received Shao Bin’s new article and replied politely, “Of course it’s impeccable, but our agreed deadline is not for another two months, and I know you’re usually busy, so you don’t have to write so urgently.” He changed his clothes and went out for a run, slightly suppressing his nauseous motion sickness; but he unwittingly ran for 30 kilometers, and then tripped flat on the ground, gasping for breath and surrounded by inquiring passers-by, before slowly calming down his breathing.
my translation
The second story, 明天就出发 / “Leaving Tomorrow”, concerns time-travellers from two centuries after the bulk of humanity decided to leave Earth, uneasily interacting with the Holocaust. This is tricky ground, but I thought that Xin navigated it well, and there is quite a lot between the lines if you look for it. The second paragraph of the third section is:
The Time Academy divides the people of this planet into two halves. Half of them can recite the three major laws governing time travel backwards, and when it comes to the “Grandfather Paradox” or the “Hitler Paradox”, they can quote from the classics, and when it comes to business trips or vacations, they can pick and choose whatever they want. The other half, like their ancestors before the invention of time travel, move slowly from day to day. Some of them seem to have forgotten about the existence of time travel, while others have become the most faithful recipients of time-travel-themed news, academic writings, and literary works.
DeepL translation
The third story, 血肉之锤 / “Hammer of Flesh”, is a really inventive story of Chinese workers in 1880s America whose experiments with robotics fail to preserve them from racism. One of the non-robot characters is also non-binary. There’s a lot here and I hope someone gives it a professional translation soon. The second paragraph of the third section is:
There was an endless stream of customers in the hardware store. From buying scissors and hammer heads, lubricating clocks, to replacing mixer gears and modifying steam vehicle tires, Fu Jiu readily agreed to any request. His superb skills were all written on his rough hands – he was born in a family of craftsmen in Taishan, Guangdong. He went to the village scholar’s home to study, and built houses for them as tuition fees. He was known as “the one who can make everything” until he moved abroad at the age on eighteen. It is rare for anyone from Jinshan to start a family in a foreign country, but he got married soon and well. When the Pacific Railway was recruiting skilled workers, he left his pregnant wife for a while and went to the section where Chinese laborers gathered.
My translation
I am not blaming anyone, because I am very well aware of the limited resources of time, money and goodwill available to the Hugo team in any year, but it is really unfortunate that no translation was provided for Xin’s work – I think voters who do not take the effort to deploy the available online tools will miss a treat.
1) Isabel J. Kim. Has supplied a booklet of ten short stories published in 2021 and 2022. They are all really good. Most of them are about death. Most of them are about multiple or shared identities. Several of them combine the themes of death and multiple or shared identities. Several of them reflect the author’s Korean background. The second paragraph of the third story, “You, Me, Her, You, Her, I”, is:
“It’s what you would have wanted, right, Val?” her father had said, looking at the arm you are currently controlling.
Some of these stories made me uncomfortable, but all of them made me think. I expect that Travis Baldree, who has a lot of name recognition, will win this category, but if voters actually read the packet, I think they will incline towards Kim, whose work is really way ahead of the others.
A Black Archive on the recently concluded 13th Doctor era, like Kerblam! looking at one of the more unsatisfactory Chibnall/Whittaker stories. After it was first broadcast, I wrote:
A very obvious riff on The Green Death, my favourite Third Doctor story, which also had some great return-to-Sheffield characterisation moments, and really impressive special effects, but completely muffed the ending. (What happens to the bad guy? Is it really more compassionate to lock the spiders up until they die?)
Rewatching it this time, all the same points occurred to me; the other thing is that the production was very obviously saving money by not having many extras – I mean, what American billionaire would go anywhere without at least half a dozen aides?
Some Black Archive books on similarly problematic stories try gamely to make us see the best in them. Sam Maleski here is frank about Arachnids‘ shortcomings as well as its thematic beats, and doesn’t go on too long about either, turning in a decent analysis of an inferior script.
The first (and longest) chapter, “Doctor Who and the Spiders from Sheffield”, starts by admitting that the story begins and ends on very different notes, but then goes into an in-depth analysis of giant spiders (and other creepy-crawlies) in science fiction film and in Doctor Who in particular. He omits Adrian Tchaikovsky, but he’s not really looking at print.
The second chapter (almost as long), “Yorkshire Gothis”, looks at the ways in which the story is Gothic – a theme in several of the Black Archives I have read recently – and at the importance fo the setting in Yorkshire, and of the shadow of Donald Trump.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Muddled Politics”, is:
But while the aesthetics of the episode are deeply and incandescently political, it seems rather unclear as to what course the characters, and by extension the viewers, should pursue as a response. It’s an episode marred by contradictions: these sometimes enrich its text, and other times simply prove frustrating. In order to demonstrate this, this chapter focuses on three focal points that the episode uses to signal its political nature: science, minority identities and the influence of political music.
It looks at how the story opens up, and then basically squanders, engagement with the politics of science, race and gender, and music. These points are particularly well made.
The fourth and final chapter, “Absence, or Clearing the Cobwebs”, argues that even though the story fails to answer a lot of the interesting questions it raises (including also what “family” means, for the Doctor and for us), that should not stop us from thinking further about them.
Sam Maleski took on a tricky assignment here, and I think did a good job as far as that can be done. You can get it here.
Hunger snaked him through the maze. He clambered over the tailgate and dropped to the ground. A fire snapped somewhere invisibly, bronzing the side of a neighboring truck, packed likewise with a teetering mass of household goods. Down the flickering alleyway between them—Tom could have stretched out his arms and lay his hands flat against either vehicle—he glimpsed a temporary encampment: two or three wagons and half again as many beat-up trucks and cars, parked nose in among a scattered grove of towering cottonwood and oak. In the rough circle between, a handful of children chased each other in some game impervious to adult logic, their clamor flitting in the dark. Their fathers here and there hunkered in circles, lean and grim, peering out from under their hats as they drew sticks through the dust or smoked hand-rolled cigarettes.chased each other in some game impervious to adult logic, their clamor flitting in the dark. Their fathers here and there hunkered in circles, lean and grim, peering out from under their hats as they drew sticks through the dust or smoked hand-rolled cigarettes.
I am not sure why I got this back in 2017, but I am sure that it’s a shame I left it so long until reading it; a very short novella about a quest for angels during the Dustbowl, a sort of John Steinbeck meets Ray Bradbury, as one reviewer put it. I don’t think I have read much else by this writer but perhaps I need to correct that. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
The highlight of February this year was my visit to Gallifrey One in Los Angeles again:
And visited by my sister and her daughter, we re-enacted the gestures of the statues in the forest.
I read 28 books that month, though a number were Clarke nominees where I read only 50 pages either because I didn’t think they were very good or because I didn’t think they were science fiction, or both.
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 13) The Number Mysteries: A Mathematical Odyssey Through Everyday Life, by Marcus Du Sautoy Timelash, by Phil Pascoe Listen, by Dewi Small Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle
Non-genre 1 (YTD 3) Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
SF 19 (YTD 41) To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings (did not finish) How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu Roadside Picnic, by Arkadii and Boris Strugatsky The Furrows, by Namwali Serpell The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Wild Cards: Deuces Down, ed. John J. Miller Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde (did not finish) Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse (did not finish) Until the Last of Me, by Sylvain Neuvel(did not finish) Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo (did not finish) The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews (did not finish) Peculiar Lives, by Philip Purser Hallard Eyes of the Void, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Metronome, by Tom Watson Leech, by Hiron Ennes (did not finish) Harpan’s Worlds: Worlds Apart, by Terry Jackman (did not finish) Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C Clarke Oval, by Elvia Wilk
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 8) Doctor Who: The Eaters of Light, by Rona Munro Lucy Wilson & the Bledoe Cadets, by Tim Gambrell Doctor Who: Timelash, by Glen McCoy
Comics 1 (YTD 5) Agent Provocateur, by Gary Russell et al
The best of these were two of the Clarke submissions, Metronome, by Tom Watson (which we eventually shortlisted; get it here) and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (a Hugo finalist; get it here). I’ll draw a veil over the worst of them.
Perhaps a fire, but where no one gets hurt? Just flames and fire engines. We can all stand around watching, with flasks, and Ron can shout advice to the firefighters. Or an affair, that would be fun. Preferably mine, but I’m not greedy, so long as there’s a bit of scandal, like a big age difference, or someone suddenly needing a replacement hip. Perhaps a gay affair? We haven’t had one of those at Coopers Chase yet, and I think everyone would enjoy it. Maybe someone’s grandson could go to prison? Or a flood that doesn’t affect us? You know the sort of thing I mean.
I know Richard Osman of course as a TV quiz show personality; this is the second in a series of murder mysteries solved by a group of retirees in a coastal town in the south of England. The mystery is unrealistically complex, but the character interactions are great fun, and although the tone in general is comedic, there’s also a serious and realistic emotional freight. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-genre novel, and my top unread book acquired last year. Next on those piles respectively are Winter, by Ali Smith, and A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford.
A variety of brain areas implicated in ASD were considered in Chapters 1 and 2, but no focus in the brain emerged as commonly causing ASD. There is no autism producing lesion. The lesion approach to communication disorders had already been challenged by Geschwind2 who resurrected the connectionist approaches of the nineteenth century. He argued that symptoms occurred not because of an area of brain damage, but because brain areas were disconnected. A connectionist, or network, approach to ASD is now widely accepted, as is the brain’s interaction with the environment. This new network model, and the evidence for it, is considered in the second part of this chapter. 2 Geschwind, 1970
This is a hefty volume on autism spectrum disorders, meant for a more expert and knowledgeable audience than me, but which I’m glad we have as a convenient reference point.
(Incidentally, I was stunned and appalled a couple of years ago when I received an email from a person who had put as part of their signature that they knew the cause of autism: “aged sperm”. My daughters were born when I was 30 and 35; my sperm was not all that aged, I think. This person was just casually putting out offensive misinformation in their email signature, to friends and strangers alike! Mind-blowingly inappropriate!)
The book is pretty comprehensive, looking at the rather slim information we have on physical neurological changes in autistic people – this research is very much a work in progress – and in much more detail at the developmental phenomena and educational and health support that are needed; biased of course towards the US system, but with due note being taken of experiences from elsewhere.
The one topic I would have liked to se a bit more on is autistic regression. Our oldest was developing normally until about 2 years old, then lost much of her ability including her speech. One can speculate that in such a case, the brain is somehow overwhelmed – and permanently damaged – by the need to process all the stimuli that a developing child becomes aware of. But it is mere speculation.
On the other hand, I felt very comfortable with the description of the vast amount of research activity that is going on. As consumers, if I can put it that way, we see only the outputs and the occasional tests that we are invited to participate in ourselves. It’s helpful to know that there is a big academic infrastructure behind it all.
One interesting point that I will have to ponder: do we talk to ourselves mentally when we think? And what does this mean for the cognitive abilities of people who don’t have language?
This was the very last book acquired in 2016 that I got around to reading, and I actually finished it last month, nine months after I finished the last book that I acquired in 2015, so I am speeding up.
The unread pile from 2017 is a lot smaller than the 2016 unread pile was last November, so I’ll hope to be expanding the above list again before too long.
That opens up the 2017 books:
Shortest unread book acquired in 2017: A Rumor of Angels, by Dale Bailey
Non-genre longest on the unread shelf: The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother, by Flann O’Brien
Non-fiction longest on the unread shelf: Will We Ever Speak Dolphin?, ed. Mick O’Hare
SF longest on the unread shelf: Major Matt Mason: Moon Mission, by George S. Elrick
Top unread book acquired in 2017: Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier
Current The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd Extraction Point, by MG Harris Ocean’s Echo, by Everina Maxwell Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson
Last books finished Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent A Doctor in the House?, by Jody Houser et al The Bruising of Qilwa, by Naseem Jamnia
Next books The Night of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith A Brief History of The Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway
Of the fiction categories, this has the most Chinese-language finalists; they are all recognisably sfnal, in the same genre, if perhaps a little old-fashioned compared to the English-language finalists. Each of these has one cool idea, which drives the story, and they are all decent pieces of work. My personal ranking is as follows:
6) 白色悬崖，鲁般 / “The White Cliff”, by Lu Ban
岩里说完，原本一直保持笔直的上半身渐渐放松了下来，重新躺回长椅的靠背上。
After Yanli finished speaking, he gradually relaxed his upper body from its upright position and lay back on the backrest of the bench.
(my translation)
Perhaps here I felt the cultural gap at its greatest. The topic of the story is death with dignity, of producing a simulated virtual environment for those who are about to go; in Belgium, where we’ve had legal euthanasia since 2002, we think about these things in a different way and the story’s big idea doesn’t quite land right; it didn’t also have the emotional punch that I anticipated for this topic.
(And on a technicality, the English translation provided is rather poor, but you can see what is meant without too much effort.)
The synthetic sat at the table and ate three bowls in a row, his pale back shrugging with each bite. After dinner, he curled up in a chair, hugging his knees, saying nothing.
(translated by Blake Stone-Banks)
Another story about death, but here there’s a whole industry of bringing people back, partially alive, for a second go. Nothing terribly wrong with it, but Silverberg’s “Born with the Dead” did it better back in 1974.
It was midafternoon. Noah was in his bedroom with the blinds drawn like an appropriately pissy teenager, hunched over his concentrator rig. A concentrator is one of those “baby’s first levitation” kits, a series of glass rods with minor magical charge that can float briefly in the air. Noah repurposed the kit to draw water from the air itself. After a week of tedious experiments, he had a cup one quarter full of water. Or was that three-quarters empty?
A story of kids using bulletin boards and magic. I felt it rather uneasily merged two different kinds of world-building, and did not quite work for me.
Second paragraph of third section (in Chinese, the supplied English translation has different line breaks):
通讯恢复了。
Communication was restored.
(translation supplied by author.)
A Chinese space mission comes to the rescue of the Americans and Russians in the International Space Station, and you kinda know what’s going to happen as soon as it becomes clear that one of the Americans is a cute woman; and yet the narrative pace, even in translation, is tremendous and I found myself getting really invested in it as we got to the climax. Perhaps the most old-fashioned of the stories in this category, but rather well done.
2) 火星上的祝融，王侃瑜 / “Zhurong on Mars”, Regina Kanyu Wang
Zhurong realized that, although life consumed resources, increased entropy, and caused the environment to become more chaotic, they also made Mars more interesting. To a certain degree, Zhurong was doing the same thing. E used the resources left behind by humans and greatly increased the entropy of Olympus Mons. Did that mean e was a form of life?
(translation by S. Qiouyi Lu. The original Chinese text uses a literary gender-neutral third-person pronoun 伊yī for Zhurong, translated here using the neopronoun e. Zhurong is the god of fire in Chinese mythology.)
This is also a story which uses an old trope – the AIs who are left behind after humanity has quit the scene, familiar from Zelazny’s “For a Breath I Tarry” and Aldiss’s “But Who Can Replace a Man?”, but this time set on Mars, with call-outs to Chinese mythology. It’s rather deep for such a short piece, and I enjoyed it a lot.
Grace doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, and certainly isn’t laughing. She waits for Sal at the coffee shop, and every sip of spark makes her stomach roil with nerves.
I thought this was tremendous – a story about a near-future USA where abortion rights have been gruesomely restricted, a scenario which unfortunately seems less and less unrealistic, interleaved with well-researched historical reflections. An angry and timely piece that has my vote.
His hard work paid off, and Zhou Ning saw the ghost several times after that. The reason for its appearance remained murky. It randomly appeared near the basement, indicating that the previous speculation was not unreasonable. Zhou Ning groped for the truth alone, and with difficulty. He had already established its outline, but he couldn’t go any further. He gradually became anxious. So one night, after what seemed to be a long game of hide and seek with it, Zhou Ning finally exploded into action. Seeing that it was about to disappear into the wall once again, Zhou Ning attempted to cut ahead of it and stop it. This was a conditioned desperate reflex, and naturally, it had no effect, and the ghost quickly disappeared.
(My translation)
Great that we have a Chinese-language story in the top six in this category, but this is a fairly standard haunted museum tale, with some nice local Beijing colour which however doesn’t elevate it past fifth place for me. (No translation was provided, but it’s easy enough to run the text through the online resources.)
4) “A Dream of Electric Mothers”, by Wole Talabi
Third paragraph (there are no sections):
“Are you okay?” I ask my colleague, the honorable minister of information and culture, who is fiddling with his bronze-framed spectacles nervously as we exit the white-walled womb of the secure ministerial conference room. He was one of only two dissenting votes in the cabinet and the only cabinet member I have ever engaged with more than a professional politeness since I was appointed by the Alaafin three months ago. This is the first consultation I will be a part of, but the records show that he voted against the previous four as well. I have come to like him, but I find his apparent resistance to the consultation curious, especially since he is the one that will be responsible for the report and official broadcast once we are done.
Interesting speculation of combining ancient wisdom with information technology in an alternative history West Africa.
He always fights as though his only hope is to win on points. That doesn’t matter so much. One time, someone lands a lucky punch and breaks his hand on Tom of Finland Guy’s body. The guy’s face is flushed. He winces and howls in pain. Everyone backs away from him then runs away. The punch itself doesn’t even register on Tom of Finland Guy. He just stares at his midsection.
This has by far the best title of anything nominated in any category for this year’s Hugos. It’s a fun and passionate story about having a crush on the guy in the gym, who turns out to have divine superpowers.
Her mother bursts into the room the second she arrives, a tiny tornado with a gray buzz cut. “Are you okay? Did anyone get violent?”
It’s odd how little sf we get that addresses the future of labour relations. This is a nicely observed vignette of a dystopian future city on the edge of nowhere, where the maintenance workers are in conflict with the management.
Only, at the same time “Sylvie” was driving Ron Harrison into a panic, someone named Sylvie was sending very similar messages to a hedge fund manager in Connecticut, a museum curator in British Columbia, and a political consultant in Florida, along with thirteen other men identified so far. Millions of messages over dozens of services, spanning across a full decade.
I thought this was very good, a reflection on the current state of AI, told in the authentic voice of an investigative journalist, getting in a few digs of social commentary as well, with hyperlinks to genuine media articles. It gets my vote.
I do generally like the novella category, which often unleashes some corking good fiction at digestible length. As usual, this year has some great stuff, and I found it difficult to rank them. But rank them I must.
6) A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I knock my head ungently against the wall and order myself to get it together. Luckily, or unluckily, I’ve been in enough perilous situations by now that I don’t waste too much time panicking or regretting my life choices or shouting SHITSHITSHIT in all caps. I’ve developed a simple system.
Characters are fairy-tale archetypes exploring the possibility of different destinies. It’s a neat idea, but was a bit fresher last year, and I found the violence a bit squicky. You can get it here.
5) Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Eleanor herself smiled warmly at Cora as she walked around the bulk of her desk and settled in her leather-backed chair, gesturing for Cora to sit in one of the more modest chairs on the other side of the desk. Cora settled without a word of complaint, her still-damp nightgown sticking to her skin, while her hair sent rivulets of water down her back. The upholstery might get wet, but Eleanor wouldn’t care about that. Caring about things getting wet wasn’t very nonsensical, and Eleanor’s devotion to the Nonsense still waiting for her on the other side of her own door was one of the school’s few true constants.
Next in the sequence of the Wayward Children stories, where it turns out that there is another, much nastier school for the children who have slipped between worlds. I enjoyed but wondered a bit about the longevity of the schools within the premise, and felt it was getting a bit too entangled with its own mythology. You can get it here.
4) Into the Riverlands, by Nghi Vo
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“The Hollow Hand,” Khanh said, his voice remarkably calm, and Lao Bingyi scowled.
A very nicely done story drawing from the wuxia tradition, a travel narrative with lots of sub-narratives. There’s a particularly good discussion of heroic women who are not also beautiful. I could practically smell the landscape. You can get it here.
3) Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Second paragraph of third section:
Stunned silence from them. And then… a medley of reactions; quite the range, now you think back on it. Because some still have that core in them, hammered there by church and village life before they did whatever each one did to make them outlaw. Some are shocked that you could even lift a hand against the Masters, let alone shed so much of that vast reservoir of blood that it might kill one. Taboos like that, beat into you from earliest childhood, they don’t get shaken free so easily. Garett, the oldest of them, is pale and shaking his head, and Nell Wilso sucks at her toothless gums. But some of the others, their eyes are lit up. They’re the ones whose crimes were against the property, not of humans but of ogres. They lost that reverence, and maybe they’ve dreamed of doing just what you did every night since. And right then you’re in no position to appreciate it, lost in a welter of guilt and panic, but it’s the first time people look at you like that. Not fond, not exasperated. You’re not the prodigal son or the lovable rogue right then. You’re the hero who slays the monster.
As previously reported, dystopian agricultural future where an elite minority of big people (the ‘ogres’ of the title) holds the majority of humanity in brutal slavery, and our protagonist discovers the awful truth and begins the overthrow of the system. You can get it here.
2) Even Though I Knew the End, by C.L. Polk
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I knocked the right rhythm — not shave and a haircut but close. I stood still as the peephole opened and a light flashed in my eyes. The wall opened, and Sylvia let me onto the landing before a long flight of stairs leading down into the earth.
Really inventive story of lesbian love in magic-infested noir Chicago, and the price of your soul. Vivid plotting and description. You can get it here.
1) What Moves the Dead, by T. Kingfisher
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Did Denton insult you?” he asked, once we were out of earshot of the parlor. I could tell he was genuinely worried. “He’s a good man, but you know they don’t have sworn soldiers in America. I’ll have a word with him if he did.”
I thought this was tremendous – a rewriting of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” with a lot more background and indeed plot. I’m not familiar with the original story, but nonetheless this grabbed my attention and gets my vote. You can get it here.
Nona didn’t want to be just good-looking and dumb; she wanted to be useful. She was dimly aware that she was not what anyone had wanted. This was why she had gone out and got herself a job, even though it wasn’t a paying one.
I completely bounced off the previous two books in this series, both of which were Hugo finalists. But to my surprise, I started off really enjoying this one, as the title character tries to put together her lost memories in a dangerous and violent society not too far from our own. But it lost me again at the end; once she returns to the world of Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, it became boring and confusing, and also there’s a parallel narrative thread which wasn’t integrated into the plot at all, as far as I could see. You can get it here.
5) The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The offices for KPS the name of the organization on the card Tom gave me were on Thirty-seventh, in the same building as the Costa Rican consulate, on the fifth floor. The office apparently shared a waiting room with a small medical practice. I had been in the waiting room for less than a minute when Avella came to get me to take me to her personal office. There was no one else in the KPS office. I guess they, like most everyone else, were working from home.
Very readable and engaging story which I read to the end, a parallel universe with Godzillas; but as usual with Scalzi, all of the characters sound exactly the same (and indeed exactly like Scalzi himself in real life) and the social commentary is paper thin. You can get it here.
4) Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The hob hauled in his box of tools and placed it inside the big doorway.
By a well-known gaming figure, this is about an Orc warrior who decides that she will set up a coffee shop in a fantasy city. There are hilarious capers as she encounters jealous enemies, magical interference with the brewing process (both positive and negative) and love. I honestly don’t think it’s very deep but it’s good fun. You can get it here.
3) The Spare Man, Mary Robinette Kowal
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Her grandmother had taught her that, when Tesla’s rage turned a room incandescent red, the best thing to do was to stay very, very still. The time her elementary school science teacher had marked her correct answer anout the most recent supernova as wrong “because it wasn’t in the textbook” had impressed in Tesla’s mind how effective that stillness could be. It was also the first time she used any version of “I want to speak to the manager” when she asked to go to the principal’s office in a voice that was, in hindsight, too cold and flat for a ten-year-old.
This was very interesting – a detective novel set on an Earth to Mars space cruise. Intricate plotting, lots of good stuff about gender diversity and invisible disabilities, and a very cute dog. And cocktail recipes. I was not quite sure about the ending, though. You can get it here.
2) Nettle and Bone, T. Kingfisher
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I saw you,” said the voice. She squinted against the light and saw the speaker. A man. Perfectly ordinary looking, in the gray-brown garb that everyone wore, here on the edge of the desert. There was nothing that stood out about him, except that he was shouting at her.
As usual with Ursula Vernon, a cracking good read: it’s about a discarded princess who goes on an epic fantasy quest with a gang of unlikely henchbeings. Lots of funny lines and social commentary. Very enjoyable. You can get it here.
1) The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Melquiades claimed the mere thought such a thing might be possible was sacrilege: holiness could not reside in a flower or a drop of rain. Offerings to spirits were the devil’s work.
I thought this was really interesting, a reframing of H.G. Wells in the context of the historical Maya resistance to Mexican rule in the Yucatan. There was a twist three quarters of the way through that I should have seen coming, but didn’t. Not especially excited about any of these, but this one gets my vote. You can get it here.
I remember watching and hugely enjoying The Stones of Blood when it was first broadcast in 1978. I’ve come back to it several times and it retains its charm. When I came back to it in 2008, I wrote:
The Stones of Blood was one that I remembered fondly from first time round, and I liked it again on re-watching three decades later. Perhaps, now that puberty is behind me rather than yet to come, I appreciate Mary Tamm’s costumes as Romana all the more. But of course I also have a fascination with megaliths, and this is the only broadcast story that really uses them (though see also the SJA story The Thirteenth Stone). And of the three stories featuring an ancient cult in England within a few years of 1980, this is the only one that really pulls it off well (the other two being Image of the Fendahl and K9 and Company).
When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
We are back on firmer ground [after The Pirate Planet] with The Stones of Blood. This just shows the difference that a decent plot (as opposed to a decent script, which Adams was capable of doing) and good casting and direction can make, though unfortunately we are now slipping into Romana as screamy girl rather than smart aleck, which is a shame, especially as the story has two excellent female leads in Beatrix Lehmann and Susan Engel. (I must also add that the viewing experience on DVD is greatly enhanced by the extras, which include a documentary with Mary Tamm exploring the Rollright Stones where it was filmed.)
It’s a story of two halves, Satanic cults (as previously seen in Image of the Fendahl and The Masque of Mandragora) and then the abandoned prison spaceship with the ruthlessly homicidal justice machines. The story wobbles a bit at times – Beatrix Lehmann, who died a few months after filming, is notably shaky on some of her lines – but stays just the right side of the quality divide. The location filming around the stones is particularly memorable, (including particularly K9 on one of his few field outings) and well blended in with the studio scenes. I am really looking forward to the new novelisation by David Fisher, the author of the original script; the original Terrance Dicks novelisation is workmanlike but not terribly memorable, but Fisher’s two previous novelisations of his own stories – The Creature from the Pit and The Leisure Hive – are particularly good, among the best Fourth Doctor books and certainly better than the TV originals.
Rewatching it again, I liked it a bit more if anything; it clearly too Beatrix Lehmann a couple of scenes to get comfortable with the situation but once she gets in the swing, she is great. And the monstrous Ogri are depicted as pretty horrifying even though we see very little of what they actually do to people (apart from the unfortunate lady camper). I also liked the clues that the segment is around somewhere nearby, which I picked up on more than on previous watches.
Unusually, though not uniquely, there are two different Target novelisations of the story, the first being a rather workmanlike effort by Terrance Dicks. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Romana straightened up, releasing her end of the tape. A sudden loud cawing sound made her jump. A big black bird was perched on the stone above her head. Romana jumped back. ‘What’s that?’
A longer novelisation by the story’s original author, David Fisher, was released on audio a few years back and is now available in book form. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
The figures pushed back their hoods, revealing themselves to be Mr de Vries, a plump man sporting a wisp of a beard on his chin, and Martha Vickers, a middle-aged lady with the face of a discontented bulldog. She was a resident of the nearby village of Bodcombe Parva, and a member of the local Women’s Institute. Her fellow members would have been astonished to see her there, because she was known to be non-religious and only sang ‘Jerusalem’ under protest. In fact, ever since meeting Mr de Vries a couple of years ago, she had been a pillar of his Druid circle, gradually initiated into the inner mysteries of the BIDS. She used to hunt in her younger days, and unlike some of the other group members was not disturbed by the sight of blood. Hence her presence at all the sacrifices.
Earlier this year the BBC released a new novelisation of an Old Who story – David Fisher, who wrote the original TV story The Stones of Blood, has now converted it not to a print novel but to audiobook format, read with great gusto by Susan Engel (who played the villain of the piece on screen) with John Leeson doing K9’s lines. I had been looking forward to this with hopeful enthusiasm, as Fisher’s novelisations of his other two stories are among the best of the Target range.
I am very glad to say that I was not disappointed. The audio is about twice as long as the original series (four hour-long CDs), and Fisher has bulked out the material with lots more character background and atmosphere than was possible on screen – the full story of the campers gruesomely slain by the Ogri, for example, and various brazen but humorous infodumps. There are lots of decent sound effects as well. Very highly recommended.
I also went back and reread Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation of the story for comparison. It must be a lot shorter than Fisher’s new text. I notedof it three years ago that it is “a standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment, somewhat flattening a rather good story” and I found no reason to change my views. I did think Dicks handled the climax of the story with some finesse, but the rest it pretty thin.
The print version is topped and tailed by some lovely personal reminiscences about Fisher by his son Nick Fisher and by the BBC Audio commissioning editor Michael Stevens. It remains a good read.
As my regular reader knows, I myself am pretty interested in megalithic sites and in their mythology. Katrin Thier, the author of this monograph, apparently shares my interest and has given us a good chunky read with no less than seven chapters, not counting introduction and afterword. There’s plenty to say about this story and where it fits in British popular culture.
An introduction sets out Thier’s stall, reviewing the previous careers of writer, director and guest cast and describing the ‘folk horror’ and Gothic modes, and making a link to Irish independence,
Chapter 1, “The Stones”, starts with the bold proposition that “the main guest stars in The Stones of Blood are the King’s Men at Little Rollright in Oxfordshire, playing the Nine Travellers.” Thier reviews the cult of medievalism, especially around the Rollright Stones themselves, and looks at the origin of the Ogri.
Chapter 2, “The Druids”, reviews what is really known about the Druids and the Gorsedds.
Chapter 3, “Megalithic Afterlives”, looks at the scientific investigation of megalithic monuments and how it has been reflected in popular culture (including The Goodies episode “Wacky Wales”, which features Jon Pertwee as a homicidal cultist). Its second paragraph is:
When the Doctor explains to Romana that the circle is a ‘megalithic temple-cum-observatory’, he expresses an interpretation widespread in the 1970s, suggesting that the prehistoric builders of these monuments were not simple undeveloped countryfolk, but were in fact highly sophisticated, maintaining a class of scientists to rival those of the ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. The evidence for this was seen in the way many of these monuments seemed to be laid out to allow astronomical calculations. The study of this idea now called archaeo-astronomy (although ‘astro-archaeology’ is also sometimes found, reflecting the different emphasis assumed by different scholars). The idea arose partly out of the well-established observations that some of the major monuments interact with points on the sun’s annual circuit, especially the solstices, and a simple explanation for this is that the monument points to the event it is used to celebrate.
Chapter 4, “The Women”, explores the fact that the two main guest stars are women and that Romana rather than the Doctor carries a lot of the plot. This ties into Graves and Mallory, of course. A nice note – although on screen, Beatrix Lehmann is older than Susan Engel who in turn is older than Mary Tamm, Professor Rumford is the youngest of the three characters, a mere 70ish, whereas Romana is in the first half of her second century and Cessair of Diplos is thousands of years old. (Cessair is a genuine if obscure Celtic figure, but should of course be pronounced with a hard ‘c’.)
Chapter 5, “‘To Wit, a Celtic Goddess'”, looks more deeply at the goddesses – the Morrigan, Nemetona, the Cailleach, Ceridwen and the origin of the Great Seal.
Chapter 6, “Mere Mortals”, looks at the origins of Vivien Fay / Cessair’s other identities. I love this coincidence: the site of the Nine Travellers was supposedly owned at one time by the Little Sisters of St Gudula. St Gudula of course is the patron saint of Brussels, but is also the name of a key character in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, who in the BBC’s 1966 TV adaptation was played by… Beatrix Lehmann!
Chapter 7, “Leaving Earth”, looks at hyperspace, slightly jarring with the themes of the previous six chapters (as indeed the hyperspace parts of the story jar with the rest).
An afterword, “Reithian Gothic?”, points out that the story is really quite informative about megalithic sites and lore, and would have sent the curious viewer off to find out more. It certainly fed my own interest, both on first watching at eleven and since.
This is a good analysis of a good story, even if it’s light on the production details which I usually enjoy hearing about. You can get it here.
Anders Johannsen, captain of the first human starship, tossed and turned in bed trying to find the sleep he so desperately needed, after days of insomnia and stress. Losing the battle as the shouts of his bridge crew reverberated through his mind.
Third in a self-published series. Badly written and incomprehensible. You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Only one trip outside Belgium at the start of this year, to London where unexpectedly I saw Noises Off. Within Belgium, F and I had a great excursion to the Cubes of Herne:
Non-fiction 9 God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, by Rupert Shortt Diary of a Witchcraft Shop 2, by Trevor Jones and Liz Williams Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol Horror of Fang Rock, by Matthew Guerrieri Battlefield, by Philip Purser-Hallard The Karmic Curve, by Mary I. Williams Juggle and Hide, by Sharon van Ivan Representing Europeans, by Richard Rose Complexity: A Very Short Introduction, by John H. Holland
Non-genre 2 The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin (did not finish)
Plays 1 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness
Poetry 2 Metamorphoses, by Ovid tr. Stephanie McCarter Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes
SF 22 The Circus Infinite, by Khan Wong Fugue for a Darkening Island, by Christopher Priest All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva “The Mountains of Mourning” by Lois McMaster Bujold Full Immersion, by Gemma Amor The Stars Undying, by Emery Robin (did not finish) The Chosen Twelve, by James Breakwell Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez (did not finish) Mercury Rising, by R.W.W. Greene (did not finish) The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo At The Edge Of The World, by Lord Dunsany The Immortality Thief, by Taran Hunt Wormhole, by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown Death Draws Five, by John J. Miller Appliance, by J.O. Morgan The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi The Transfer Problem, by Adam Saint (did not finish) Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugrešić Upgrade, by Blake Crouch The Perfect Assassin, by K.A. Doore Stray Pilot, by Douglas Thompson (did not finish) The World Set Free: A Fantasia of the Future, by H.G. Wells
Doctor Who 5 Doctor Who: Galaxy Four, by William Emms Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii, by James Moran Rise of the Dominator, by Robert Mammone Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: Battlefield, by Marc Platt
Comics 4 Alternating Current, by Jody Houser et al. Sin Eaters, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko Neptune – Épisode 1 by Leo Neptune – Épisode 2 by Leo
9,900 pages 17/45 by non-male writers (Williams, Cheney/Lofgren/Murphy/Luria, “Williams”, van Ivan, Zevin, McCarter, Sachdeva, Bujold, Amor, Robin, Enriquez, Vo, Hunt, Ugrešić, Doore, Houser et al, Melo) 5/45 by a non-white writer (Thompson/Aguilar/Murphy, Zevin, Wong, Sachdeva, Vo)
Second paragraph of third essay (Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from “The Lord of the Rings”: A Textual Excursion into the “History of the “The Lord of the Rings””):
We know about these rejects and false starts because Tolkien was a pack rat. He neither burned his rejects nor threw them in the trash; he saved them. Just about all of the drafts and manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings are preserved at the Archives of Marquette University, and a detailed narrative account of the slow crafting and polishing of the tale was stitched together by Christopher Tolkien in the four volumes of “The History of The Lord of the Rings,” a subseries of the 12–volume History of Middle-earth. The volumes are The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated; the Appendices are treated separately in The Peoples of Middle-earth, and will not be discussed in this paper.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever met David Bratman in the flesh, but he was one of those who kept the faith with Livejournal until quite late in the day, and indeed posted a lengthy and well-argued rebuttal to my foolish assertion that Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring is Any Good At All.
I was tipped off to this book of essays by File 770, and grabbed it immediately. I’m a sucker for any serious Tolkieniana, and what I particularly liked about the essays collected here is their chronological scope, from a time before The Silmarillion had been publish to nearly the present day. The shape of the scholarly field has changed a lot in the meantime a there are several telling anecdotes about the early days. If I had to pick two of the Tolkien pieces that really struck me, I think they would be the Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from The Lord of the Rings, and the exegesis of Smith of Wootton Major.
The other essays include four pieces about the Inklings (two on C.S. Lewis, one on Charles Williams and one on their links with the Pacific), and several on other fantasy topics, including a fascinating piece on Lord Dunsany as a playwright, and a standup encomium of Roger Zelazny. There is also a critique of the Peter Jackson films written presciently before they had actually been released.
Clara was twenty-eight years old and, for the past few years, she’d been mixed up with a suspicious gentleman in a blue box who hopped periodically into her life and caused varying degrees of chaos.
I did not write up the two-part story The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion at the time of broadcast, though I did note that it was my favourite two-part story of Series 9 (though my favourite Capaldi story remains Heaven Sent, also from Series 9). I enjoyed it – there’s some necessary preachiness about the Other, and immigration and terrorism, some very good skullduggery by villains who can look just like you, and some excellent horror in everyday life. The scene of the plane being brought down by a hand-held missile is a bit too close to the bone for me; several friends of friends died when the Russians destroyed MH-17 in a similar way.
The novelisation is a good competent screen-to-page job, adding a bit more background about the Zygon Bonnie (who used to have a boyfriend called Clyde, who looked like Danny Pink). There are a couple of footnotes citing other DW novelisations, including one quoting a books called The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, for which you will search bookshops in vain. At my reading pace it’s quicker to read the novelisation than rewatch the story, and it’s well enough done. You can get it here.
I was about to get out of the car, but my payment and location would be traceable. I told it to drive on and it took me a couple of miles south. I got out, doubling.
Started it three times and failed to finish the first chapter. Eventually got to page 50 and put it down. You can get it here.
But in the evening, on the way to church, the Frobishers and their guest crossed the market-square as his string of boys marched along the west side. And the guest was arrayed in a gay new dress, as if it was already Easter, and her face set in its dark hair came with a strange effect of mingled freshness and familiarity. She looked at him calmly! He felt very awkward, and was for cutting his new acquaintance. Then hesitated, and raised his hat with a jerk as if to Mrs. Frobisher. Neither lady acknowledged his salute, which may possibly have been a little unexpected. Then young Siddons dropped his hymn-book; stooped to pick it up, and Lewisham almost fell over him… He entered church in a mood of black despair.
Another unexpectedly enjoyable Wells novel, a young man who finds that he has to make a choice between two women having already married one of them (not a situation that Wells himself was unfamiliar with), at the same time as dealing with embourgeoisement and the tension between ideals and reality. Quite short, totally credible, would probably make a terrible film. You can get it here.
This was top of my list of H.G. Wells novels; next on that pile is The New Machiavelli.
Paved alleyway, close on all sides, the Old Quarter. The men at the bia hơi she’d just left watched her go, sullen, red-eyed. The heat beating down, worse than usual, night but still unbearable, air thick. Tempers on edge, the aftermath of a Chinese crackdown the week before. A prism grenade thrown into a high-end restaurant popular with Chinese military; two dead officers, two dead waiters, a dozen injured. Not the most notable of attacks, except one of the dead officers was a general. So there were raids and arrests and bodies turning up, young men and young women, tortured and aired out and worse. Everyone an informant, everyone Việt Minh, no one able to talk or trust.
Current The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd “Doctor Who: Doom’s Day” Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent
Last books finished Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir DALEKS, ed. Marcus Hearn Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier War of the Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al
Next books Extraction Point, by MG Harris Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway
You kindly asked me to contribute my thoughts on social media in the Brussels bubble following the decline of X/Twitter. I’m afraid I’ve missed your deadline – first week back after the hols – but you’re welcome to quote from the below anyway. I can’t speak for the Brussels bubble, I can only speak for myself.
X/Twitter is still going, but feels very much on life support. There have been some improvements since last October – most notably that the length limit for Tweets (as I still call them) has been drastically increased. I notice also that engagement seems to be creeping up again after cratering a few months back. But I get the sense that the ownership cares very little about providing a good user experience, and it feels like it’s just a step away from becoming MySpace. As Hemingway put it, the end comes in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
I was a fairly early adopter of Mastodon, but I am increasingly frustrated with it. The lack of a search function – which is entirely deliberate – removes a lot of the point of social media for me; I want to find out what other people are saying about the political crisis in Grand Fenwick, and if people are talking about it on Mastodon, I won’t see it if they are not in my feed – or even if they are, and I happen to miss the twenty minutes when their toot about it is top of my screen. I am hanging on, because there are rumours that this will be fixed, but I feel it’s not being designed for people like me.
Bluesky is much more promising, though I have been there for only a couple of weeks. It’s easier to Find Good Stuff, and the tone of discourse is noticeably more civilised than on Twitter. However so far, it’s much more useful and interesting for my cultural interests (particularly science fiction) than for following politics. Perhaps this is a critical mass issue, and if in particular Bluesky can market themselves in non-English-speaking countries, we may see an uptick in political relevance for my local interests.
LinkedIn, that venerable beast, seems to me to be the winner for now of the decline in Twitter, at least as far as my professional interests are concerned. I personally find it rather an annoying platform – you have no idea of how the algorithm decides what you want to see, you get little information about how successful your own posts have been. But on the other hand, an increasing number of stakeholders are posting important content there – not just their own thoughts, but reblogging others. And, again, the tone of discourse is markedly more civilised and professional than on Twitter. Discussions on LinkedIn are very different in feel from Twitter threads, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Facebook and Instagram continue as ever, mainly as places where I read personal news and views from friends and look at their holiday photos respectively. Facebook has much less relevance for my work life than ten years ago, and Instagram never had much at all. Let’s see what happens when and if Threads ever comes to the EU.
And finally, we of a more venerable generation are getting completely left behind by the young ‘uns using TikTok. I know that there are concerns about its use of data, but there’s already a clear and growing demographic who are there and nowhere else. I myself featured briefly in a TikTok last month; probably not for the last time.
It’s all a work in progress, and I think my prediction is that LinkedIn will continue to grow at Twitter’s expense, and that none of Threads, Bluesky or Mastodon can become what Twitter once was (and neither can Twitter). But who knows?
Edited to add: I was not in fact too late for H’s deadline, and his piece quoting me and others is here and here:
“Squeak, Squeak, where are you?” murmured the girl, nervously biting on her lower lip. She slowly pivoted in midair and stared at the distant earth, a hazy blue globe dangling in an ebony sky. Her brother might never walk on that friendly dirt again. The slender young flight doctor shuddered, de-spite the controlled warmth of her space suit. There was no friendly soil on the moon—nothing but sterile, gray-brown dust, monotonous craters, and saw-toothed mountains the color of rust.
