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 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.
He commandeered a horse that had been left in the Lowmarket when its owner had either died or fled, then rode as fast as traffic would allow to Screaming Hall. Meanwhile, the sky closed in, stealing away any sense of the horizon, and it started to snow.
I happened to be reading this alongside The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang, and they are both fantasy novels with similar themes and about the same length. The Water Outlaws is better, but this is OK – well developed politics of a secondary world with magical elements; I had expected to be put off because it is the second in a series, but in fact it worked perfectly well as a standalone. I wasn’t quite sure that the magic system held together, and the use of French and German to stand for exotic fantasy languages was a little irritating, but if you are in a forgiving mood you’ll probably enjoy it too. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020 (in that year’s Hugo Packet). Next on that pile, from the same source, is The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster.
The Mark Protection Committee is the most public-facing of the WSFS standing committees. It was also the only body so far to officially censure Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow and Raistlin Chen for their involvement with the 2023 Hugos debacle. It has a responsibility to protect the marks of the Hugos, Worldcon, etc. In normal times this should be pleasantly technical and unexciting, but unfortunately times have not been normal of late. You will find its report on pages 56-61 of the 2025 Business Meeting agenda.
I have been a member of the Mark Protection Committee for the last three years, elected by the Business Meeting in Chicago in 2022. The election system is peculiar, but nonetheless I would like to put myself forward again this year, and I hope that people will vote for me.
The MPC has collectively got three resolutions on the Agenda this year, all of them carried over from last year as they are constitutional amendments passed by Glasgow and requiring ratification in Seattle.
The first, E3 (on page 26), requires Worldcon bids to agree to the most recent WSFS Mark Licensing Agreement (which itself is still being drafted). I obviously supported this when it was first proposed by the committee, of which I was a member, and I support it now; it will give clarity about the extent to which a Worldcon can and cannot play around with WSFS intellectual property.
The second, E4 (on page 27), brings the rules about the running of the MPC into alignment with actual practice. It also allows the MPC to remove its own members by a two-thirds vote – to our surprise when the 2023 controversy broke, we discovered that we did not have the power to do more than censure members other than going through the lengthy trial procedure in Roberts’ Rules of Order. I support this one too.
I am less sure about the third, E5 (on pages 27 and 28) on including representatives of the Business Meeting on Hugo and site selection committees, who would then report back to the Business Meeting on the propriety of the conduct of the Hugo and site selection votes. I supported it last year before the Hugo Administration Process Committee was set up, but it now seems to me that that committee is providing a more holistic view and set of solutions. On Site Selection, I am no longer convinced that this problem (if it is a problem) is the one that most urgently needs to be solved.
I do like the first paragraph of E5, which ends the fiction that a Worldcon Committee could theoretically decide to administer the Hugos themselves rather than appoint a subcommittee to do it, and at present my feeling is that I’d like to split E5 and pass the first paragraph but not the rest. However if it cannot be split, I’d vote against it as a whole.
Some of Lin Chong’s techniques would have served her very well in doing so.
I’m only vaguely familiar with the Chinese classic The Water Margin, but S.L. Huang is clearly a fan, and has updated it with the best traditions of wuxia combined with gender-flipping many of the characters and some pretty clear references to Hong Kong kung fu films. There’s some rather gory violence, but also a real affection for the story and a political sensitivity to what is really going on in the magical empire. Slightly to my surprise, I loved it. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer (from last year’s Hugo Packet). Next on that pile is The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman.
First, it is a very good thing that the Business Meeting is being held online this year. It is about time that it moved into the twenty-first century rather than pretend to be a nineteenth-century style deliberative assembly. People who know more about the rules than I do have looked at them, and deemed that it can be done this way, and I am glad. Please let’s have a good turnout at the first session of the virtual meeting on 4 July.
Second, the agenda for this year’s meeting includes a 25-page report from the Business Meeting Study Group (pages 83-107 of the agenda) which is clearly a serious piece of work, and which I won’t summarise here. It provides ample justification for passing resolution D4 (on pages 21 and 22 of the agenda) to find better alternatives for Worldcon procedures. I’ll vote in favour.
Last books finished The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster (did not finish) Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton 1913: The Year Before the Storm, by Florian Illies The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb (did not finish) “The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
Next books The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Fortified Settlement in Northern Pictland”, by Gordon Noble):
The 5th and 6th centuries in northern Britain are a key period when historical sources increase in frequency for the societies that had lived north of the Roman frontier (Chapter 2 of this volume; Evans 2008, 2014; Fraser 2009a; Woolf 2007b). The literary sources suggest that this was a transformative period with the emergence of more developed systems of rulership and social structure. Important changes can also be identified in the archaeological record in this same chronological horizon: for example, after more than 1,000 years of very limited burial evidence, the dead become a more prominent part of the archaeological record (Chapter 5 of this volume; Maldonado 2013; Mitchell and Noble 2017). As well as cemeteries, memorials to the dead and traditions of monumental carved stone monuments emerged and played notable roles in creating and maintaining new forms of personal and group affiliation (e.g. Forsyth 1997a, b; Goldberg 2012, 155-9; Henderson and Henderson 2004; Samson 1992).
A short book of essays about the Picts, more specifically the archaeological remains that exist in the land to the south of the Moray Firth as far as Aberdeenshire, the ancient realms of Fortriu and Ce. I must say it is surprising just how little is known about this culture; there’s a little bit of “No one knows who they were or what they were doing“. They seem to have left no written records of their own at all. One of the few contemporaries to write about their attitude to Christianity was very negative:
…ecclesia plorat et plangit filios et filias suas quas adhuc gladius nondum interfecit, sed prolongati et exportati in longa terrarum, ubi peccatum manifeste grauiter impudenter abundat, ibi uenundati ingenui homines, Christiani in seruitute redacti sunt, praesertim indignissimorum pessimorum apostatarumque Pictorum.
…the church mourns and weeps for its sons and daughters whom the sword has not yet slain, but who were taken away and exported to far distant lands, where grave sin openly flourishes without shame, where freeborn people have been sold off, Christians reduced to slavery: slaves particularly of the lowest and worst of the apostate Picts.
That’s St Patrick, in his Letter to Coroticus, from the fifth century; though it’s clear that the Picts ended up Christian like everyone else.
The single most fascinating artifact for me is the Rhynie Man, found at what seems to have been a major political/cult centre along with other decorated stones, a life-sized figure carved onto a megalith, now casually sitting in the headquarters of Aberdeen Council. All ancient art is interesting, but human figures are particularly compelling; was the Rhynie Man a portrait? a memorial? a deity? all three? Fourteen centuries on, he is ignoring us and ready to use his axe – on what?
Though the Gaulcross Hoard is fascinating as well, a hundred or so worked silver pieces from the end of the Roman Empire; and the Rhynie Man is but the most striking of many Pictish symbols stones. But it makes you think of the Silurian hypothesis; the Picts had a thriving material culture and presumably everything else that goes with that – yet we do not even know their name for themselves with certainty.
A proposal to abolish the Retro Hugos was passed by the 2024 Business Meeting and has landed on this year’s agenda as item E7 (page 29), requiring ratification. It was put to a consultative vote of WSFS members last month and was narrowly rejected, by 167 votes to 164.
Another proposal is on the agenda for this year’s Business Meeting as item F21 (pages 53-54), in case that E7 fails ratification, to allow Worldcons to present Retro Hugos in a multiple of ten years after a gap in the Hugo sequence. The “missing years” are 1940, 1942, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952 and (it is argued, though not convincingly) 1957. So we could polish them all off between 2027 and 2032.
I think that has helped to clarify my own thinking. The absorption of volunteer time and bandwidth, and of money, by the Retro Hugos is not a good use of resources, at a moment when the demands on Worldcon volunteers in general and Hugo administrators in particular are increasing. So if I’m in the room when it happens, I’ll vote in favour of E7, and if that is rejected, against F21 which would leave the cycle at a 25-year pace.
Although both my parents were officially ‘intellectuals’ because they went to university, neither studied what they wanted to study. My father’s story was the more confusing of the two. He was gifted in the sciences and while still in secondary school had won Olympiads in maths, physics, chemistry and biology. He wanted to continue studying maths but was told by the Party that he had to join the real working class because of his ‘biography’. My family often mentioned that word, but I never understood it. It had such wide applications that you could not make out its significance in any particular context. If you asked my parents how they met and why they married, they would answer: ‘Biography.’ If my mother was preparing a file for work, she would be reminded: ‘Don’t forget to add a few lines about your biography.’ If I made a new friend in school, my parents would ask each other: ‘Do we know anything about their biography?’
Autobiography of an Albanian academic, writing about her childhood in totalitarian Albania and the eventual transition to democracy. I have been to Albania a few times, starting in 2004, and the Hoxha regime is now marketed as somewhat kitschy; this first person account reminds us of how all-enveloping the ideologically-driven police state was. I remember some very lefty acquaintances in the 1980s singing the praises of the motivation of the Albanian volunteers building railways for the workers’ paradise; now that we know the truth, it’s all pretty revolting.
Childhood is childhood wherever you are, of course, but the cycle of school and family, indoctrination and mild subversion, was specific to Eastern Europe and particularly odd in Albania. Lea Ypi grew up knowing that her great-grandfather had had the same name as a pre-Communist Prime Minister, but was taught to insist that it was just a coincidence; only after the end of the old regime did she learn that in fact Xhafer Ypiwas her great-grandfather, and that this element of ‘biography’ had followed her father throughout his career.
Then change came at breakneck speed, and her parents became political activists, her father even serving a term as a somewhat detached MP for the Democratic Party. Her cosmopolitan grandmother, however, had always encouraged her to keep an eye on the rest of the world, and after the economic collapse of 1997, she left to study philosophy abroad.
This isn’t a travelogue around the physical geography of Albania, but it’s a great guide to the psychology of an entire country forced to survive on lies for forty years, and the aftermath, told through an intensely personal lens. Strongly recommended (and thanks to Michael Clarke for recommending it to me). You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2023 which is not by Ben Aaronovitch. Next on that pile is The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright.
One of the constitutional amendments passed last year was a proposal to clarify the Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist categories in the Hugo Awards. I believe that I actually wrote most of it, but I no longer agree with it. I have come to realise that I mistakenly accepted the logic proposed by some of the louder voices on the unmissed Hugo Awards Study Committee, arguing that we should define all genre-related activity as either Fan or Pro, and then define the awards accordingly. In fact Pro Art and Fan Art have been historically very different things, and what we should be talking about is how to change the definitions of both to reflect how the production and consumption of art has changed over the years.
This proposal was put to a consultative vote of WSFS members last month, and rejected by 160 votes to 124 – three or four times the numbers that one would historically expect to be in the room for an in-person business meeting.
It is now on the Business Meeting agenda for ratification as item E9 (page 30). It should be rejected. Unfortunately the discussion will be on 25 July, when I will be unable to attend.
There is a new proposal to clarify the art categories on the Business Meeting agenda as item F22. I find it an improvement on the status quo, but I would like to hear the views of the artist community. I don’t like the fact that it proposes renaming the ‘Best Professional Artist’ award to ‘Best Artist in the Field of Professional Illustration’, which is simply too verbose, and I regret that it has missed the opportunity to require Best Fan Artist finalists to supply the same proof of eligibility as Best Professional Artist finalists, which is the one bit of E9 that I still stand behind.
(Presumably the ratification of E9 could be split, to allow the last paragraph through and kill the rest.)
F22 is capable of amendment to improve it in the debate, but that will presumably be on the day that I cannot attend the meeting. It would be no great tragedy if E9 and F22 are rejected and we have another go in another year.
“Yes,” Cindy agreed as she eyed the milling mob. “But I almost wish they’d let me slip out of here quietly so I wouldn’t be conscious of what I was getting into.” She caught sight of blue uniforms, gold braid, and glistening brass instruments. “Golly, they’ve even got the Aerospace Force Band!”
I picked this up at Eastercon. It’s a curiosity. I have identified the author as Eloise Katherine Engle nee Hopper (1923-1993), who was born in Seattle and died in Alexandria, across the river from DC; in the introduction she identifies her husband as Captain Paul R. Engle (MC) USN. The intro concludes:
I could not have dreamed of writing a space book for girls without the help of Major James F. Sunderman and the Air Force Book program.
She also wrote several books on military history, and a couple of other novels, some of them with her second husband Lauri Paananen, who was Finnish.
Anyway, the story itself was originally published in American Girl, the magazine of the Girl Scouts of the USA, in 1961, and expanded for book publication in 1962. It has a brief but gushing preface from Dolores O’Hara, the Lieutenant Nurse for the Mercury astronauts. It’s set at an unspecified date in the near-ish future, where no women have yet flown into space (though in our own timeline, that particular barrier was broken as early as 1963) and yet there are several dozen male astronauts living on a base on the Moon.
Our protagonist, gallant Cindy McGee, is a nurse for the astronaut corps, and is sent to the Moon to deal with several astronauts injured in an accident because she weighs only 95 pounds, much to the annoyance of her female colleagues who are better pilots. She shows that she is good at nursing in space despite occasional moments of feminine panic. They celebrate Christmas on the Moon, and some of the chaps are mean to her. In the second last chapter there is a bizarre incident where aliens appear on the lunar base, look around and then erase everyone’s memories of their visit before going home. And she realises that she is in love with the astronaut who flew her to the moon and back, manly Turk Hunter [sic].
There are numerous fallacies of detail (mercilessly catalogued by Ian Sales here), but for me the striking thing about the book is its lack of ambition for Cindy and for women. Nursing is the only profession that can get you into space; being a good pilot is not enough. The hierarchy is thoroughly male and likely to stay that way. For a book published in the 1960s, the attitudes are very 1950s. (Cindy’s weight is specified as early as half way down the first page.)
The public-facing report of the WSFS Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards can be found on pages 65-68 of the 2025 Business Meeting Agenda. I was a member of the Committee and therefore I endorse the report and also the way in which it has been handled. I want to flag up a few points arising from it.
The most important point is that hundreds of votes for dozens of nominees, mostly Chinese, were discounted without explanation at an early stage of the 2023 Hugo process. The “Validation Spreadsheet”, one of the documents provided to Chris Barkley and Jason Sanford by Diane Lacey, is clearly the output of a run of the EPH algorithm (which is used to determine the finalists from the nomination votes) using a very different set of votes to those which are the basis of the officially reported statistics.
This is not news. Abigail Nussbaum spotted it almost as soon as the Sanford / Barkley report was published in February 2023 (even though Sanford and Barkley themselves largely missed it), and Chinese blogger Zionius went into the numbers in detail. But most attention in Western discourse centred on the later exclusions which had become public knowledge when the statistics were published in January, because they included some individuals who are well-known names in the West. The 22-29 nominees excluded at an earlier stage have largely been ignored.
It has been suggested that the initial exclusion of many votes was conducted by the 2023 Administrators to counter the effects of a slate. Slates, however, are not against the rules, and in any case my analysis of the works on the alleged slate and the works that were excluded by the disqualification of votes after the original EPH count of the “Validation Spreadsheet” is that there is not a huge amount of overlap between that list and the “first 29”. (I am in disagreement with Zionius on this point.)
Of the six potential finalists in 2023 whose exclusion without explanation became public in January 2024, one appears in fact to have been correctly excluded under the rules – “Color the World” by Mu Ming (Congyun Gu). It’s my personal belief that “Fongong Temple Pagoda” (尽化塔) by Hai Ya was then excluded by mistake; its English language publication date would have made it eligible, but administrators may not have been aware of that. It’s pretty clear that the other four were wrongly excluded from the ballot for other reasons.
There’s a lot more to write about this, but I think I’ll save that analysis for another occasion. Operationally, it means that the resolution passed last year to declare the “January Six” retrospectively as Hugo finalists is fundamentally flawed. One of the six, as it turns out, was correctly excluded from the 2023 ballot, though without adequate explanation. As matters stand, we’re about to declare that “Color the World” was “really” a finalist even though it should not have qualified.
But there are also another 29 nominees whose exclusion from the ballot appears to have been arbitrary and against the rules. They all deserve apologies, and they all deserve the same consideration as the “January Six”. Even if you believe that retrospectively declaring anyone to have been a Hugo finalist is desirable or possible, we just don’t have enough information to know whether all of the “first 29” would have made the ballot absent the irregular disqualification of their votes.
So the Investigation Committee has proposed in resolution D9 (page 24 of the agenda) that the following note should be attached to the official Hugo record maintained by the Formulation of Long Lists Committee: “Approximately 30 nominees were excluded from the final ballot of the 2023 Hugo Awards for reasons other than the nominating procedures prescribed in the WSFS Constitution.” It’s not clear if the number is 34 (a maximum) or 27 (a minimum), but “approximately 30” is enough to demonstrate the severity of the problem.
Speaking for myself: the proposed constitutional change E8 (page 28 of the agenda), passed in Glasgow last year and awaiting ratification in the virtual Seattle meeting this year, to allow the Business Meeting to declare unsuccessful finalists to have the status of finalists retrospectively, is a bad idea, and purports to give the Business Meeting the power to rewrite history. The 2023 Hugo process was bad and hurt many people. We have to accept that mistakes were made and that the damage can’t be undone by passing counterfactual resolutions. The ratification of E8 should be rejected.
The Investigation Committee also proposes the following resolutions:
C5 (page 19), that in future such committees should require a two-thirds vote to set up, and I agree with this (obviously since I signed off on it as a member of the Committee). It was a tough process and should not be entered into lightly.
D10 (page 24), that a new committee should be set up to write a Whistleblower’s Charter, which I agree with and I hope can be merged with D6, which would create an committee to write a code of ethics.
D11 (page 25), recommending that Worldcon Chairs should not be members of their respective Hugo administration subcommittees, which I thoroughly agree with.
D12 (also page 25), which will be discussed when we reach the relevant part of the Business Meeting.
I hope that they all pass.
I’m not promising to do one of these posts every day, but it’s not all that long until the Preliminary Business Meeting on 4 July, so there will be more soon.
On the way home from the Netherlands on Monday (closing out the longweekend), we stopped in Venray, where my second cousin once removed Gerard Valentine Ryan is buried, a few hundred metres from where he died on 17 October 1944, at the age of 21. It was literally his first hour in battle. He was leading a platoon of riflemen towards the occupied town when a machine-gun hidden in the trees opened up, killing him and another solder immediately. A third soldier was killed shortly afterwards, while checking on the dead and wounded.
This was at the tail end of the Battle of Overloon, a mopping up of the German presence remaining on the western side of the Maas / Meuse after the much more famous Operation Market Garden.TheAllies captured the towns of Overloon and Venray, but it was a costly victory and the Germans retained their positions on the western bank of the Maas until the war was almost over.
Gerard and his two fellow riflemen were initially buried where they fell, and later transferred to the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery just along the road, along with 690 others. Gerard’s ID tags had been lost, but he was identified by a cross and chain that he had been wearing. Now he rests beside his comrades.
The people of Venray have set up a lovely project where local people and families adopt graves of particular soldiers to look after them and commemorate them. We were privileged to meet Mr and Mrs Jansen, who have adopted Gerard’s grave, and had gathered the details of his death and reburial. I found it tremendously moving that this whole community is still honouring and respecting those who died liberating their town from the Nazis, eighty years ago.
I must thank Mr Hoebers and Mr Vervoort from the Committee, who had organised for us all to meet at the cemetery (the photos were taken by Mr Vervoort); and my third cousin Desmond Ryan, Gerard’s first cousin once removed, who had blazed a trail by visiting a couple of years ago and also put me in touch with the relevant local folks.
The 2025 Business Meeting agenda is out, and gosh, it’s even bigger than last year, with 48 rule changes, resolutions and constitutional amendments to consider. I hold up my own hand here; I’m a named co-signatory on five of them, and was a member of committees proposing another eight. It’s too much, and we need to collectively start thinking, “Does this amendment really matter?”
My own four proposed clarifying amendments are now items F3-F6 on the agenda (pages 32-36), with the “Clarifying Best Series” proposal edited a bit to reflect Business Meeting style, but with no change to the content. I think I’ll try and comment on the rest of the business bit by bit, as there are some parts that I care more about than others.
One of the parts that I care about most is the report of the Hugo Administration Process Committee, which you’ll find on pages 72-82; you will deduce that it’s a pretty comprehensive piece of work. I agree with most of it and endorse the conclusions, but I have to start by pointing out some mistakes of fact in the text – small details, but important to me, and obviously I did not explain them clearly enough in my public statements or when I spoke to the committee.
The biggest issue is that the Hugo Subcommittee, which is a formal body which takes decisions and executes tasks on behalf of the Hugo administrator, can be different from the Research Team which checks the eligibility of nominees. The Report confuses the two (pp 73-74). I certainly found it much more convenient to have an arms’ length research team who presented the results of their findings to the Subcommittee, who then make the actual decision. I guess that not every Administrator does it that way, but I did, every year that I was involved. I should add that Locus always do a final pass of the ballot before it is published, which is very welcome.
More subjectively, and less important, I think that the existing rules in the Constitution are actually pretty clear about procedures which the Report describes as ambiguous or having serious gaps in public knowledge. What happened in 2023 was not the result of creative interpretation of the rules; it was systematic and conscious breach of the rules (and also of existing well-established practice, but mainly of the rules) by people who should have known better.
Having said that, I largely agree with the Report’s conclusions.
Third-party administration or audit of the Hugos: This was a magic bullet invoked by a number of commentators when the 2023 scandal broke at the start of last year. But I have not seen any sensible proposal of how this could be done within the existing financial, time and legal constraints. The Report agrees.
Ethics: The Report acknowledges that the structure of WSFS makes it difficult to hardwire transparency into the process, but nonetheless recommends 1) the creation of a code of ethics (by another committee, natch) and 2) a constitutional obligation on the Hugo administrator to report on eligibility rulings, including disqualifications and categorization changes. These made it into the agenda as items D6 (page 22) and F11 (page 40) respectively, and I certainly endorse them both.
Continuation: The Committee asks for another year to address the following questions (D5, page 22):
To work with the 2026 Hugo Administrator to document their processes and best practices formally into one document.
To draft changes to the WSFS constitution that better enshrine the Administrator’s duties and relationships.
To work on developing a poll of WSFS membership regarding the relationship between the Hugo Awards and Worldcon.
I’m totally in favour of the first two points. On the third, I think that Worldcon is still learning how best to manage membership polls, and a more qualitative approach may be more appropriate in this case, but I’m certainly willing to trust the Committee for another year to think about it.
I confess that I had not heard of Liane Moriarty, but she clearly scores very well here, with Big Little Lies far ahead on Goodreads and fourth in a close race on LibraryThing. Sorry to those who were hoping to see Nevil Shute (On the Beach was 21st in my ranking and A Town Like Alice 23rd) or Peter Carey (True History of the Kelly Gang was 30th, Oscar and Lucinda 31st) on the list.
I disqualified only two books. I was puzzled to see The Book Thief (which won in Germany) topping the overall poll, but I had forgotten that Markus Zusak is actually Australian. And more than half of The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton is set in England.
Last weekend’s trip to see the hunebedden of Drenthe had a couple more stops which are worthy of note, though the Saturday and Sunday were both very wet.
Logistical details: We stayed at an AirBnB in Steendam, half an hour east of Groningen. This was not geographically very close to where we wanted to be, but the place looked charming and the price was good.
In fact, I can honestly say that in nine years of using AirBnB, this was the best experience I have had. The apartment was just as charming as it looked in the photos and very comfortable. For a modest extra charge the hosts provided a lavish breakfast, with enough leftovers to keep us going for the rest of the day. Recommended.
As with Best Fancast, I’m going to start at the top.
1) Tia Tashiro
Represented just by five short stories in the Hugo Voter Packet, but I found them all very refreshing and a bit subversive. Second paragraph of third story (“Every Hopeless Thing“):
Elodie carefully tucks the opera glasses into an inside pocket of her scavenging pack. She stands and dusts her gloves off on her thick, shielded pants. The gauge on the inside of her soft plastic helmet is reading at acceptable levels of ambient pollution, nothing that would breach her suit; it would alarm if she hit unsafe levels, and she’d hotfoot it back to Skip and let the medical system give her a once-over if it did.
2) Angela Liu
Also has five short stories in the Hugo Voter Packet, plus two poems. Again I enjoyed them all, I just enjoyed Tashiro’s work more. Second paragraph of third story (“You Will Be You Again“):
‘How do you feel?’ the doctor asks, three assistants hovering behind him like angels of death.
3) Moniquill Blackgoose
Wrote To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which won the Lodestar last year and is represented by an excerpt here. Second paragraph of third chapter:
But then Crow, who came flying to Masquapaug from the lands west of the sunset, taught the first people how to dance. Nampeshiwe’s Mother came to watch their dances. Nampeshiwe’s Mother said to the people, “Your dancing is beautiful. You must teach me your dancing. I would know how it is done.”
4) Jared Pechaček
Represented by a novel, The West Passage, which is a nicely worked out secondary world with some odd dynastic quirks. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Pell had always liked the refectory, with the quiet, half- conscious liking one feels for something one has known since childhood. A clerestory of tiny square windows ran along the eastern wall, letting in morning sunlight and evening breezes. Vast old tapestries covered the stone walls. Their rich colors had dimmed, many were moth- eaten, and some had fallen, but the stories and strange figures they held made her feel as if she were a creature of legend herself. Bats roosted in the south rafters, pigeons flew in and out, and ivy curled in at the windows, but even in its state of decay the refectory held some clear beauty quite separate from the ancient chaos of the rest of the palace.
5) Hannah Kaner
Represented in the Packet by two novels, Godkiller (submitted last year) and its sequel Sunbringer. Second paragraph of third chapter of Sunbringer:
Everything hurt. The cut on her shoulder, the burns on her right leg where her half-melted prosthesis had seared her skin. The nicks, scratches, and aches of long weeks of fitful nights and being hunted through the wild lands. Her body was keeping score of its battles.
Another secondary world, interesting enough but after reading the first hundred pages of Sunbringer I knew where I would rank it.
6) Bethany Jacobs
Represented in the packet by extracts from novels These Burning Stars and On Vicious Worlds. Second paragraphs of third chapters respectively:
Jun takes a grimacing drink of her coffee, cold and sickly sweet with condensed milk. Her appointment with the captain of The Swimming Fox is half an hour away, but she’s been nursing the same cup for two hours, and this is hardly a pleasant place to spend the afternoon. The Grum Bowl’s half-stocked shelves boast evaporated soups, snack packs, and candy bars, none of which are less than a standard year old. The floors are grimy, and the lights are eye-stabbingly fluorescent. Patrons glare at her when they see her gun, flashing their own sidearms like a dare she ignores. On one wall there’s a crude mural of Terotonteris, god of revelry and risks, his round body jutting with arms and legs, his mouth open to swallow from a pitcher while some of his hands play a game of tiles and others clasp at shiny things.
and
It’s tedious. They invited the Kindom here; their docks are open and their weapons are cold. There’s no need for histrionics.
Odd mix of fantasy and sf which didn’t quite draw me in enough to want to track down the full books.
All of these writers are good, I just happened to like some more than others; the future of the genre is safe.
Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut-tree that overhung the path, she would pick a leaf, crush it, and sniff the sweet scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer across the water. “She is a little near-sighted; you can’t imagine how sweet it makes her look,” Chris explained. (I did not say that I had seen her, for, indeed, this Margaret I had never seen.) A sudden serene gravity would show that she had seen one, and she would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly, with rather stiff movements of her long arms, to exactly the right place. When she had got the punt up on the gravel her serious brow would relax, and she would smile at one and shake hands and say something friendly, like, “Father thought you’d be over this afternoon, it being so fine; so he’s saved some duck’s eggs for tea.”
I am familiar with Rebecca West’s non-fiction, but this is the first of her novels that I have read, and it was also the first book she had published, in 1918. Shell-shocked Chris returns from the war in 1916, with amnesia wiping out the last fifteen years of his life; he is obsessed with the (now married) working class girl he had a fling with in 1901, and has totally forgotten his own wife and their recently dead young son. The story is narrated by Chris’ cousin who clearly has feelings for him herself. It’s a tightly written, intense story of mental illness and trauma, with a lot more going on under the surface, and I got a lot out of it. You can get it here.
Current The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster
Last books finished Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, eds. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton Fear Death By Water, by Emily Cook Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Next books Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
This is a book that is both weirdly out of date and weirdly timely. It is about an obscure incident of Middle Eastern history: the massacres of civilians in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces on the margins of the 1956 Suez war, 275 killed in Khan Yunus on 3 November and 111 in Rafah on 12 November. In these awful days, it’s probably healthy to cast our minds back almost seventy years to the brief months of the first Israeli occupation of Gaza, when most of its inhabitants had fresh memories of the Nakba and realistic expectations that they might be driven out of their homes again.
The other startling aspect of the book is that the research was carried out in 2002 and 2003, when the second Israeli occupation, started in 1967, was (as it turned out) on the last legs of its direct phase, and Fatah was still in political leadership among the Palestinians, though Hamas and other militants were clearly a rising faction through the Second Intifada, especially within Gaza. The death of Rachel Corrie happens just off screen.
Between the research on the book and its publication in 2009, the Israelis withdrew their military and settlers from Gaza (2004), Hamas won the Palestinian elections (2005) and seized control in Gaza (2006). I hardly need remind you of events since 2009, especially the last twenty months. But I’m writing here about Joe Sacco’s book, not about more recent history.
Sacco portrays the daily grind of life under the occupation vividly, and also the difficulty of getting eyewitness accounts of events from almost half a century before. Even for those who were there, 1956 was comparatively small beer compared with 1948 or 1967, unless you or your family happened to be directly involved with either of the massacres. Accounts differ on the details, but the broad account of brutality is the same, and the graphic medium brings home the human impact as words alone never can.
It’s an account from one side of two particular incidents, because the Israelis largely covered them up (apart from an interesting debate in the Knesset); Sacco interviews a senior Israeli securocrat to get their perspective, and he is also clear about the Fedayeen incursions into Israel in 1956, and indeed the suicide bombings and internal Palestinian violence five decades later.
It’s important that individual incidents in any conflict get the dignity of a permanent record, even if they cannot achieve closure for victims and perpetrators. (Needless to say, I think of an incident in 1972 which was more local to me.) At the time the book was published, these two massacres from fifty-three years before were the largest killings of Palestinians on Palestinian soil, a record that I suspect may no longer stand. I’m glad to say that Ha-Aretz posted a positive review of the book when it came out.
My one complaint, and it is a serious one, is that my copy of the book was wrongly bound, and instead of pages 245-276; there was an extra set of pages 117-148. Fortunately Martin Wisse was able to sort me out with the missing pieces, but it was almost a metaphor for the difficulty that Sacco faced in assembling the truth. If you are lucky, you can get a full copy here.
Truth is really important and also sometimes really difficult to get. As I was writing this, someone in my Facebook feed posted a summary of Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata (1714) by the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland / Hadrianus Relandis, claiming that Reland’s research on the ground in the early eighteenth century “proved” that there were almost no Arabs living in Palestine at that time. This meme is completely false; Reland never visited the Middle East in his life, and there is no attempt to calculate the contemporary population in his book, which is about Biblical and classical references to the place names of the region. As usual, if a propaganda claim from either side looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Footnotes from Gaza was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Final Cut, by Charles Burns.
I’m not a big podcast listener, and while I knew all of these by repute, I had heard very few episodes of any of them before. So I picked one of the episodes submitted for the Hugo Packet in each case, going for the one where I thought I knew most about the topic. My ranking was pretty clear, and for once I’m going to start with the positive.
1) Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, presented by Emily Tesh and Rebecca Fraimow. A favourite author talks about a favourite author – superb combination. I listened to all three of the submitted episodes here, on Eight Days of Luke, Wilkins’ Tooth/The Ogre Downstairs and Dogsbody. It must be decades since I read any of these, but I loved them as a young reader and loved returning vicariously to them now. Particularly interested in considering Eight Days of Luke as a gateway book to the rest of DWJ’s œuvre. Though am not totally convinced that Thor and Astrid get it on by the river. Gets my enthusiastic first preference.
2) Hugos There, presented by Seth Heasley; I listened to the episode where he and Damo Mac Choiligh talk about the early novels of Iain (M.) Banks with great knowledge and affection. A good moderator sits back and guides the discussion, and this was a good demonstration of that skill. As with all of these, I don’t know if I was just lucky or if the podcast is always like this, but I enjoyed it.
3) A Meal of Thorns, presented by Jake Casella Brookins; I listened to the episode where the guest is Dan Hartland talking about China Miéville’s The Scar. I must have read this shortly before I started bookblogging in November 2003, because it came out earlier that year, and I have vivid memories of the mosquito people. The episode is a well-structured deep dive into a long novel from more than twenty years ago, and it made me think that I should reread the book.
4) Hugo, Girl!, presented by Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson; I listened to the episode with Redfern Jon Barrett talking about The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Another favourite book of mine (one of my top five recommendations), and good discussion, but I am at the stage of life when I find too many voices with similar accents a bit confusing on my ears.
5) The Coode Street Podcast, presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe; I listened to the episode interviewing Julie Philips about her imminent (no published, I think) book on Ursula K. Le Guin. The book sounds great, but the podcast is very slow paced, to the point that I found myself frequently checking to make sure that my player had not dropped.
6) Worldbuilding for Masochists, presented by Marshall Ryan Maresca, Cass Morris and Natania Barron; I listened to the episode interviewing John Wiswell, whose recent Hugo-nominated fiction I have enjoyed, but I found the multi-presenter format confusing and diluting of the points that were being made (if they were being made). So it dropped to the end of my list.
No doubt I could have found better episodes of those that I marked down, but life is short.
I was glued to the screen for Logopolis‘s first showing in 1981, a month before my fourteenth birthday. The show I loved was being remade, with a total revamp of the TARDIS crew and last of all the leading man – just as Innes Lloyd had done in 1966. And here in 2025, we’ve just been through the same process again…
When I came back to Logopolis in 2008, I wrote at length:
I saw Logopolis (of course) back in 1981 and again when it was repeated later in the year. Its biggest problem is that the pacing doesn’t quite match the amount of Stuff that is Happening; the first episode in particular is alarmingly slow, episode two is incomprehensible in places, and it is not surprising that the ratings for the last two episodes were so low.
But the two million viewers who gave up on it between eps 2 and 3 were mistaken. Things I liked about it: the Watcher works really well, even though we never really find out the details of how he works. It generally looks fascinating – the nested Tardises, the streets of Logopolis. John Fraser as the Monitor is great. Nothing that the Master does actually makes sense, but it’s a great debut story for Ainley who does some high-class evil laughter. Nyssa may pop out of nowhere but it’s good to have her back (and out-acting Adric almost instantly). The music is super – the theme for the Watcher suggesting that he is not the Master (as Adric assumes) but something else, and that final chord sequence as it transforms into the Doctor Who theme.
The biggest problem I have with it now is that the Master’s grand plan simply doesn’t compute. How can he have known that the Doctor was headed for the Barnet by-pass? Or would then head for Logopolis? And how quickly will his message to the peoples of the universe reach them, indeed how will the radio telescope, sending messages at sluggish old light-speed, be able to affect the CVE in time? (And since Logopolis is out of commission, who will do this in future next time there is an entropy crisis?) We’ll leave out the fact that the Third Doctor survived a much longer fall in The Paradise of Death, since that story is of dubious canonicity.
The DVD is almost worth the cover price alone for the documentary on the transition between Doctors, “A New Body At Last”, featuring interviews with Davison, Baker (as hilarious as ever) and numerous other cast and crew.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
Taken on its own merits, Logopolis is a bit unsatisfactory. The first couple of episodes have way too much exposition and info-dumping, and the last two episodes are basically about establishing the Master and the new Tardis team, and getting rid of the Fourth Doctor.
But actually, watched in context, I can see why it gripped me at the time; the revival of the Master, the role of the Time Lords, and the CVE’s all link back rather satisfactorily to the earlier stories in the season, and the episode and a half actually set in Logopolis, and then the final battle between the Master and the Doctor, ending in his regeneration, are effective. And it does make sense to have the departing Doctor bid farewell to all of his companions, as the Fifth and Tenth were also able to do; this is a story about goodbyes and it’s appropriate.
And the music is particularly good.
Incidentally, when we reach the police box on Earth in the first episode, this is after a run of 23 episodes set elsewhere – the last time we saw Earth was at the very beginning of The Leisure Hive. It is the longest sequence of non-terrestrial episodes in the show’s history.
Watching again, I want to particularly salute Paddy Kingsland’s music. That sequence at the very end of the story remains spine-chilling, 44 years on.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Christopher H. Bidmead’s novelization of his own story is:
In any case, there was something much more interesting to think about. In the Doctor’s temporary absence, Adric’s curiosity had drawn him towards the police box.
Bidmead’s write-up of his own story is reassuringly dynamic and exciting, if just a little over-written in places. In particular, Logopolis itself feels more like a real place, and the minor characters more like real people; the whole thing makes slightly better sense than what we saw on screen.
Nothing to add to that; a confident novelisation which does what it needs to do. There is no explanation of the means and motivation of the Master, but there never is. You can get it here.
Jonathan Hay’s Black Archive on Logopolis pays appropriate tribute to a story that marked a turning point in the show. At 119 pages it’s fairly brief. A brief introduction gives the context for the story in terms of the production history.
The first chapter, “Resetting the Scene”, looks at the changes to the show brought in by John Nathan-Turner, the scientific basis for the story, the reintroduction of the Master and the backgrounds of the two new companions.
The second and longest chapter, “Regeneration”, looks at the way regeneration is handled for both the Doctor and the Master, especially in Season 18 but also in later Doctor Who history.
The third chapter, “Entropy” looks at the concept of entropy and the character of the Watcher. Its second paragraph is:
As the laws of physics assert, energy within a closed system can neither increase nor decrease on aggregate; it can only change between forms. Hence, as time passes, more and more energy within a closed system inevitably transforms into the form of heat energy. Heat energy is a disordered form which is essentially unable to then transform back into any other form of energy². This principle is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and applies not only on smaller scales, but also to our universe, the largest closed system we currently know of³. As time passes, the proportion of disordered (heat) energy within the universe increases. This tendency towards gradual disorder, which applies to any given physical system, is known as entropy. ² Maxwell, J Clerk, Theory of Heat, p93. ³ Maxwell, Theory of Heat, p153.
The fourth chapter, “Computers”, looks at the history of computers in reality, including the fact that the word used to mean a woman who does calculations, and the significance of Logopolis; it points out the importance of the computer-generated music. It’s not the longest chapter but I felt was intellectually the most substantial.
The fifth chapter, “The Singularity”, looks at the extent to which Logopolis anticipated Vernor Vinge.
The conclusion, “‘It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for'”, looks at the many ways in which the new Blu-ray edition of Logopolis improves on the original. It’s on my list…
Not the most ground-breaking of Black Archives, but as I said up top, a respectful and detailed analysis of an important story. You can get it here.
Last week, the Black Archives published their 77th and latest volume, on Castrovalva, and once I have read it, this reading project will have caught up to where I wanted it to get to when I started it in September 2021.
I am up North this weekend, in the Dutch province of Drenthe, feeding my interest in matters megalithic by inspecting the hunebedden, the huge 5000-year-old stone structures which are dotted around the province. In fact, Drenthe has no less than 52 of them, and there are another two in Groningen; in the whole of the rest of the Netherlands there is one (1) surviving megalithic structure, a tomb near Maastricht.
Herman Clerinx, in his book Een Palais voor de Doden, tallies twelve dolmens and menhirs in Belgium, and one in Luxembourg. (I have been to all of them.) This means that 76% of all the surviving megalithic monuments in the three Benelux countries are in Drenthe, otherwise one of the least remarkable Dutch provinces.
Even though the hunebedden are not that different from each other (which itself is interesting; compare the variations among the Belgian monoliths, and their contrast with Wéris), they are still pretty spectacular. We looked at six of them today, which is more than 10% of the total number, and unusually for this blog, I’m going to lead with my video reaction to each one, since photographs just don’t capture the majestic structure.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Niger.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Shadow Speaker
Nnedi Okorafor
2,696
448
In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger
Paul Stoller
278
76
Don’t Spill the Milk!
Stephen Davies
226
54
Harmattan
Gavin Weston
242
26
Nomads of Niger
Carol Beckwith and Marion van Offelen
3,699
408
This was a very difficult tabulation. There are a lot of books about West Africa, or just Africa in general. There’s a certain amount of confusion between Niger and Nigeria. There are books about travelling to Timbuktu (which is in Mali), or the Songhay Empire (which was also mainly in Mali), or following Mungo Park (who did the whole river Niger). I excluded 28 books before I got to the fifth one actually set in Niger, and for once I’m not going to list them all; some of them have very spurious Nigerien connections indeed.
The winner – for the second time, see also Sudan – is Nnedi Okorafor, who very clearly sets Shadow Speaker in a future Niger.
The top book set in Niger by a Nigerien author that I was able to identify is Sarraounia : Le drame de la reine magicienne, by Abdoulaye Mamani.
Next up: Australia, North Korea, Syria and indeed Mali.
Let us set the stage with a brief exploration of perhaps the most famous example of the intersection of honour imperatives and high politics in sixteenth-century Ireland: the fizzled duel of 1571 between James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald and Sir John Perrot. Fitzmaurice was the instigator and initial leader of the so-called Desmond Rebellions that raged in Munster in the 1570s and early 1580s; Perrot was the aging English knight and ex-soldier sent by the Crown to suppress them. Fitzmaurice proposed to settle matters through personal combat, a proposal to which Perrot gladly agreed, even allowing Fitzmaurice to set the conditions of combat. They arranged to meet outside of Killmallock to fight with the sword and target while clad in ‘Irish tresses’. But if Fitzmaurice’s challenge represents the high point of the politics of honour in Anglo-Irish affairs, his failure to show on the day suggests its rapid demise. He justified his absence by saying that were he to kill Perrot, the Queen would simply send a new president to crush him.¹ Whether this was sincere or not, it certainly showed a concern for the limits of honour politics: how could Fitzmaurice be sure that the Queen would abide by the extra-legal agreement made between himself and Perrot, two gentleman commanders? Following a period of self-exile on the continent, the would-be-duellist returned to Munster and with the aid of a small papal force attempted to raise a holy war against the forces of the Crown – marking the first time that a mature ideology of faith and fatherland appeared on the Anglo-Irish landscape, an ideology that would dominate that relationship, arguably, into the present.² In his abandonment of honour principles for the stronger stuff of faith and fatherland as a basis of resistance, Fitzmaurice may not have shown himself the bravest of rebels, but he certainly demonstrated political vision. ¹ For an extended discussion of the honour principles at stake, see Palmer, ‘The insolent liberty’. ² Anthony McCormack’s analysis of the Earls of Desmond’s intrigues with Francis I of France and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, however, demonstrate the longer lineage of ‘faith and fatherland’ ideology in Ireland and in Anglo-Irish relations. Nevertheless, Fitzmaurice’s landing in Munster accompanied by papal troops and carrying a banner bearing the cross marks the first appearance of this ideological position in the field. See McCormack, Earldom of Desmond, p. 68.
I met Brendan Kane back in 2009 when I attended a conference that he organised about Tudor Ireland in Connecticut; it’s still a topic I hope to write about at some future stage, and this book helped to remind me why. It’s a treatment of the concept of honour and how it affected relations between and withing Ireland and England in the century between the start of the process of declaring Henry VIII King of Ireland, and the outbreak of the Confederate Wars (with subsequent spillover into Scotland and England).
I’m instinctively (and anthropologically) attracted to historical explanations that rely on more than economic self-interest, and the concept of honour turns out to be rather a good lens for examining the history of conflict and co-operation between the various strands of Irish and their English overlords. The analysis of Irish language literature is beyond my competence to assess, but I’m glad it’s there. I found the chapters on the Nine Years’ War and on the mutual difficulties of Wentworth/Strafford and his Irish counterpart forty years later particularly interesting.
I was also completely unaware of the liminal figure of Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clanricarde (1572-1635), who was also created Earl of St Albans and married Frances, the daughter of Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (her first husband, the 2nd Earl of Essex, having come to a sticky end). One of their children married the very Irish Earl of Ormonde, and the other the very English Earl of Winchester. If I count correctly, his younger brother Ulick was my 7x great-grandfather. He was able to move between the two kingdoms and maintain his own set of identities at a troubled time, and I’d like to dig a bit more into his history.
Anyway, a good detailed book on a slightly obscure topic. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. On a related note, the next on that pile is Ireland in the Renaissance, c.1540-1660, eds. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton.
I always approach amendments to the WSFS Constitution with some trepidation. The Business Meeting does not always make things better, and it is not always sensitive to the lived experience of Hugo Administrators or con-running volunteers. But Tammy Coxen and I, as Hugo Administrators for 2017, 2019, 2020, 2024, 2025 (for a time) and 2026, hope to make things easier for our successors by clarifying the rules and bringing them fully into line with current practice, as proposed below. All new business is somewhat burdensome on the Business Meeting agenda, not to mention on the poor volunteers running it, but hopefully these four items should be uncontroversial and can be dealt with speedily.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Little Book of Fate”):
When he could get a word in, the Doctor thanked him and set off.
I wrote up the Black Archive on Warriors’ Gatetwo years ago, including the expanded and revised audio version of Stephen Gallagher’s novelisation which was released in 2019. A few months after my 2023 write-up, the BBC released a print version of the new audiobook, plus two more short stories by Stephen Gallagher set in the same continuity.
As I said before, the revised novelisation gives us a lot more background and characterisation of the slavers and the Tharils than did either the TV series or the 1982 text, and mixes up the plot quite substantially. Gallagher is probably the best known mainstream sf writer to have worked on 1980’s Doctor Who, and he clearly loves the story and can now shape it the way he wants.
The first of the two extra stories is quite a long one, “The Kairos Ring”, featuring Romana and the Tharils and aliens infesting an American Civil War battle. It was also originally released as an audiobook, as the first in a series of five of which the other four were all by Paul Magrs. I had not come across these before, and must look our for them.
The other new story is “The Little Book of Fate”, basically a vignette bringing the Eighth Doctor back into this particular continuity, but nicely done.
Sometimes the BBC tries to make money off us fans by putting old wine in new bottles, but this is very refreshing. You can get it here.
One thing that I should have mentioned in my post from yesterday – an important element of the WSFS consultative votes both last year and this year was that statements were published both for and against the proposed changes, written by people who already had skin in the game – the proposers and people who had spoken or written against each proposal.
I feel that this is a very important element of any future membership vote, and if that does become part of the process, something would need to be built into the rules about it. I wrote yesterday’s post before I had listened to Octothorpe’s discussion of the issue (starting at 40 mins in), and I was interested that one of the Octothorpe editors admits to having their opinion swayed by one of the published statements.
She didn’t lead with that. First there was some obfuscation.
Story set in a world like today’s America except that there are talking animals. A dog detective teams up with a crow to Solve Crime. Nice idea, though maybe more could have been done with it. You can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2020 (as part of Ellen Datlow’s submission to the Hugo Packet) and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on both of those piles is Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix.
So, the numbers are out from this year’s WSFS Consultative Votes. 343 Seattle Worldcon members voted in total.
In the vote to amend the constitution so as to eliminate the Retro Hugo Awards:
Yes: 164 No: 167 Total: 331
In the vote to amend the Hugo Award categories for Best Fan and Professional Artist:
Yes: 124 No: 160 Total: 284
This is less than the 1260 who participated last year, but still two or three times more participants than the peak attendance at the average Business Meeting session.
It’s not surprising that the participation was a bit lower this time. Most WSFS Constitutional amendments are not in themselves interesting and are in themselves technical. Films attract more Hugo voters than the art categories or the Retro Hugos, so turnout was inevitably higher for a proposal on the former than for proposals on the latter. These votes are consultative and were always intended as such.
Also, this year’s timing was experimental. Last year we held the vote for ten days immediately before the convention, the point at which interest in WSFS is perhaps most intense. Turnout was gratifyingly high. But we were aware that some proponents of the consultative vote favour a longer, earlier voting period. So we tried that this year, and got a lower turnout. I’m no longer on the team that made the vote happen, but I consider it to have been a successful effort, with lessons learned.
I doubt that I will be personally involved in future exercises, but my advice to organisers would be to go for a 10-day voting period, rather than a whole month, and link it to one of the Business Meeting sessions, probably the first, having the vote conclude a few days before so that the results can be announced there. I would also be very wary of making the constitutional specifications around the timing too rigid.
I think also that a different Worldcon could devote a few more resources to publicising the vote. I counted all of one social media post about it from Seattle, on the day it closed. (I did a post of my own the previous day, as did David Levine.) It was also the last of several items in a newsletter to all members on 23 May, where it was not mentioned in the opening paragraph. I feel that more publicity would have made a difference. I am sadly familiar with some of the reasons why it didn’t happen that way this time.
It comes down to this though. Is it more legitimate for important decisions to be made by the couple of dozen people for whom it is convenient to meet in a room at a given time? Or by several hundred people in an online up or down vote? I am impressed by those who are very confident that they already know the answer. In my view, it’s still a work in progress.
Current Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton
Last books finished The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson (did not finish) Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske
Next books Fear Death by Water, by Emily Cook The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo