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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, but you can also find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads. You are welcome to follow me on all of those, but I usually won’t add you back unless we know each other personally. If you want to contact me I prefer email to nicholas dot whyte at gmail dot com, or at my work address if it’s something to do with my job.

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.)

During the pandemic I developed an interest in family history and have been recording my research here.

This WordPress blog replaced my Livejournal in March 2022. I was able to copy across all of my old Livejournal posts; unfortunately the internal links in old posts will still in general point back to Livejournal, and though I was able to import images, I wasn’t able to import videos, so it’s a little imperfect.

Comments welcome.

Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw

Second paragraph of third section:

“Detective Wright, you are cleared to continue your operation. Re-establish contact and proceed as planned,” Palmer said.

A short bleak dystopian satire set in a world where literature is under state control, and the apparatus of government security forces is used to stop people from encountering dangerous ideas, striking through their families. Hits quite hard. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Raven Heart, by “Murphy Lawless”.

8 July books

Non-fiction
The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, translated and with an Introduction by Benedicta Ward (2007)
The Desert Fathers: Translations from the Latin with an Introduction by Helen Waddell (2007)
The Faerie Queene: a selection of critical essays, edited by Peter Bayley (2011)
The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullough (2021)

Non-genre
The Mermaids Singing, by Lisa Carey (2012)
The Commissioner, by Stanley Johnson (2016)

SF
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong (2015)
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (2020)
The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (2022)

Doctor Who
Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood, by Keith Temple (2024)

The Best
The Johnstown Flood – magisterial account by the great David McCullough in his younger days of a man-made disaster that wiped out a town in Pennsylvania in 1889; one of the victims was the uncle of my as-yet-unborn grandmother. A book of both its times, ie 1889 and 1968. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions:
The Desert Fathers, Waddell translation – the thoughts of the saints who isolated themselves in the desert are by definition a bit dry, but Helen Waddell invests them with humour and sympathy. (Review; get it here)
The Master and Margarita – one of the great Russian fantasy novels of that creative period soon after the Revolution. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
Even though it was made into a film starring John Hurt, the original novel, The Commissioner, by Stanley Johnson (father of Boris) is not that well known (only 11 owners on LibraryThing, 10 ratings on Goodreads). A tale of Brussels skullduggery in more innocent times. (Review; get it here)

The ones to avoid
I’m leaving this category clear again; none of the above is awful. I didn’t gel with Three Kingdoms, but that’s on me at least as much as the writer and translator. There are enough ghosts and sorcery for it to qualify as sf above. (Review; get it here)

Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton (and Christopher H. Bidmead); and some reflections on Escher

I was again glued to the TV in January 1982 as Peter Davison took on the role of the Fifth Doctor in Castrovalva, and I really enjoyed the look and feel of the story, even if the plot was a little confusing. I was fourteen. When I came back to it in 2007, I wrote:

This was the first Peter Davison story and is one of the better ones, but a bit atypical in that the Doctor spends much of the time trying to reconstruct his own personality. Lots of lovely nods to earlier Doctors, most of which were rather lost on me in 1981. The companions are still rather feeling their way, with Nyssa being the clever one who explains everything, coming across as rather cold despite her warm and fuzzy fairy costume, while Tegan gets to be the one who everything has to be explained to. Adric seems to have rather enjoyed being tied up by the Master… The plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but the depictions of two magical places – Castrovalva itself and the Tardis interior – are both rather wonderful, and the music and general sense of goodwill makes it still good viewing.

Continue reading

7 July books

Non-fiction
The Economist Style Guide (2006)
Young Elizabeth, by Alison Plowden (2012)
Danger to Elizabeth, by Alison Plowden (2012)
Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth I, by Alison Plowden (2012)
Elizabeth Regina, by Alison Plowden (2012)
The Bible: The Biography, by Karen Armstrong (2012)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Ann Jacobs (2012)
The Russian Phoenix, by Francis House (2012)
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3: Jon Pertwee, by Philip Sandifer (2013)
Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich (2021)

Non-genre
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (2013)
Dark Horse, by Fletcher Knebel (2016)
Gigi, and The Cat, by Colette (2019)

SF
The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen, translated and edited by Jeffrey Frank and Diana Crone Frank (2007)
Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl (2013)
True History, by Lucian of Samosata (2015)
Dreaming in Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan (2020)
The Extremes, by Christopher Priest (2020)
Aurora: Beyond Equality, eds Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Anderson (2023)
The Splendid City by Karen Heuler (2023)

Doctor Who
Doctor Who Annual 1986 (2011)
Risk Assessment, by James Goss (2012)

Comics
Rose de Paris, by Gilles Schlesser and Eric Puech (2018)
Junker: een Pruisische blues, by Simon Spruyt (2022)

The Best
Today’s pick is a political novel from the early 1970s which I bet you have never heard of: Dark Horse, by Fletcher Knebel. Due to the Republican candidate’s death shortly before the 1976 election, an obscure politician from New Jersey – “a corridor of swampy weather and toadstool habitations that called itself a state” – is elevated to political superstar status, and tries to use it for good. There are no TV debates. There is a sub-plot with a sex tape of which there is only one copy. It’s just great. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable Mentions
I’m in a forgiving mood today, so you can have four:
The Name of the Rose – the fascinating medieval novel by Umberto Eco. (Review; long footnote; get it here.)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – gruelling first-person account of the real effects of the “peculiar institution”. (Review; get it here.)
Boys in Zinc – the human impact of the post-Soviet wars on ordinary Russian soldiers and their ordinary families. Helped win the writer a Nobel prize. (Review; get it here.)
Risk Assessment – one of James Goss’s many excellent contributions to the Whoniverse, this time concerning Torchwood. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
Aurora: Beyond Equality – a useful representation of both how far sf had come in 1976 and how much farther there still was to go. (Review; get it here.)

The ones to avoid
I’m leaving this category blank today; I like some of the above more than others, but none is actually awful.

The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster

Second paragraph of third chapter:

<Stop that,> she told the land firmly, pushing its attention away from Wyn. <You’re fond of him, remember? I know his secrecy is trying, sometimes, but this reaction is quite out of proportion to the offense. He’s our friend.> Friend wasn’t quite the right label anymore, but she hadn’t found a new one yet that didn’t sound either silly or premature.

Another from the 2020 Hugo packet, a second installment of a series set in a secondary world which simply failed to draw me in. The fact that I was reading Jeannette Ng’s (much better) Under the Pendulum Sun at the same time didn’t do it any favours. I stopped around page 100. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is The Revenant Express, by George Mann, which I’m approaching with some trepidation as I haven’t always found his writing to my taste.

The best known books set in each country: Mali

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Mali.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
SaharaClive Cussler60,0054,040
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious ManuscriptsJoshua Hammer 12,0951,721
Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali(anonymous)2,889748
Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years With a Midwife in MaliKris Holloway 4,958399
SeguMaryse Condé 1,973641
The Black PagesNnedi Okorafor 4,21590
I Lost My Tooth In AfricaPenda Diakité 517629
The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save its TreasuresCharlie English 1,010252

After a couple of countries which were harder work, I was glad that Mali turned out to be fairly straightforward – the city of Timbuktu gives it a certain brand recognition. I wasn’t completely sure about this week’s winner at first, a typically convoluted Cussler tale which climaxes with an absurd revelation about the fate of Abraham Lincoln, but a speedy page count revealed that it does indeed appear to be more than 50% set in Mali, so it qualifies. Glad to see the traditional Malian epic Sundiata doing well also.

I did disqualify ten books. With a particularly heavy heart, I ruled out Scales of Gold by Dorothy Dunnett, because although more than half of it is set in West Africa, I think less than half is set in what’s now Mali. Tremendous book though.

Similarly, I was not quite sure about Masquerade, by O.O. Sangoyomi, but I think that more than half of it is set in the fictional city of Ṣàngótẹ̀ and I’m pretty sure that’s meant to be in what’s now Nigeria. The Bitter Side of Sweet, by Tara Sullivan, is set in Côte d’Ivoire. The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill, is set in Canada. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, by Haben Girma, is set in the USA and the protagonist is Eritrean by origin, so I don’t know why people connect it with Mali. The Green Road, by Anne Enright, is mostly set in Ireland.

The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński, Leo Africanus, by Amin Maalouf, Sahara, by Michael Palin and China’s Second Continent, by Howard W. French, all cover numerous countries, with much less than half of each book set in Mali.

Coming next: Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Malawi.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine
Oceania: Australia

6 July books

Non-fiction
The Making of Doctor Who, by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks (2007)
Self-Portrait, by Anneke Wills (2015)
Naked, by Anneke Wills (2015)

Non-genre
Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson (2013)

Script
Le Mariage de Figaro, by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (2018)

SF
The Prisoner, by Thomas M. Disch (2006)
The Mind of Mr Soames, by Charles Eric Maine (2007)
Farthing, by Jo Walton (2008)
Frankenstein Unbound, by Brian Aldiss (2016)
De piraten van de Zilveren Kattenklauw, by “Geronimo Stilton” (2017)
“Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson (2023)
“The Hemingway Hoax”, by Joe Haldeman (2023)
Titan Blue, by M.B. Fox (2023)

Doctor Who
Hunter’s Moon, by Paul Finch (2013)
Something Borrowed, by Richelle Mead (2013)

Comics
Afspraak in Nieuwpoort, by Ivan Petrus Adriaenssens (2013)
De dag waarop de bus zonder haar vertrok, by Béka, Marko, and Maëla Cosson (2020)
De dag waarop ze haar vlucht nam, by Béka, Marko, and Maëla Cosson (2020)

The Best
Farthing, by Jo Walton, is a great what-if-Hitler-won alternate history; an alternate 1948, where Britain made peace with Germany in 1941 after Rudolf Hess’s mission. It is a crime novel that turns into a political parable. I couldn’t put it down. (Review; get it here)

Honourable mentions
Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, another of her very humane tales of middle America. (Review; get it here)
The Making of Doctor Who (first edition), by Malcolm Hole and Terrance Dicks, was the book whose second edition pushed a much younger me into fandom. (Review; get it here, at a price)

The one you haven’t heard of
Self-portrait, a charming and (I think) honest autobiography by Who actress Anneke Wills, bringing to life the Swinging Sixties. (Review; get it here)

The ones to avoid
Titan Blue was one of the least impressive books I looked at for the Clarke Award, real Nutty Nuggets stuff where the first female character to speak does so on page 48, and again on page 60. (Review; get it here)
Also to mention Doctor Who novel Hunter’s Moon (review; get it here), and mid-20th century British SF novel The Mind of Mr Soames (review; get it here) which were both rather poor.

Fear Death By Water, by Emily Cook

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Thankfully, her bedroom was on the third floor of Longstone Lighthouse. Flooding had been an unfortunately frequent occurrence in her downstairs bedroom at their old lighthouse on Brownsman Island. The windows often failed to withstand storms, meaning large waves would cascade through the broken frames and shattered glass. On one occasion, when she was a young girl, Grace came close to drowning as the room filled with seawater and forced the door shut. The memory of it still sent shivers down her spine with every subsequent storm that passed.

The first original Fifteenth Doctor novel, by Emily Cook, who organised the memorable Twitter watchalongs during lockdown in 2020. Set between the two Fifteenth Doctor seasons, it’s a straightforward aliens-intervene-in-celebrity-history story, the celebrity being lighthouse heroine Grace Darling (apparently a relative of Cook’s; Cook writes herself into the book as well) and the aliens turning out to have some complexity. Gorgeous characterisation of Ncuti’s Doctor, not massively original plot. You can get it here.

5 July books

Non-fiction
The Medieval Cookbook
, by Maggie Black (2007)
Why I am not a Christian, and other essays on religion and related subjects, by Bertrand Russell (2008)
Hope-In-The-Mist, by Michael Swanwick (2010)
The Bloody Sunday Report, Volume II (2010)
Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (2021)
Face the Raven, by Sarah Groenewegen (2022)
Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610: Politics, Migration and Trade, by Mary Ann Lyons (2023)

Non-genre
Mating, by Norman Rush (2015)
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer ((2015)

Speculative fiction
Collected Short Stories, by E.M. Forster (2008)
Dune, by Frank Herbert (2017)
Moominvalley in November, by Tove Jansson (2018)
If Found Return to Hell, by Em X. Liu (2024)
The Death I Gave Him, by Em X. Liu (2024)

Doctor Who, etc
Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, by Tony Attwood (2009)
Loving the Alien, by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry (2017)
Doctor Who Annual 2020 (2020)

The Best
There are a lot of good books today, but the standout winner is Carrying the Fire, the memoir of astronaut Michael Collins, which was my book of the year for 2021. (Get it here.)

Honorable mentions
Dune, of course. (Get it here.)
Forster’s Collected Short Stories – you may be surprised that I list it under “Speculative fiction”, but ten of the twelve stories have fantasy elements. (Get it here.)
Loving the Alien concludes a nice set of Doctor Who novels by Tucker and Perry. (Get them here, here, here, here and here.)
Why I am not a Christian, and other essays is rather humane, and I agree with it more now than I did then. (Get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of
Even though it was a Hugo finalist for Best Related Work that year, Hope-In-The-Mist, Michael Swanwick’s biography of Hope Mirrlees and explanation of her fantastic story Lud-in-the-Mist, doesn’t seem to have scored on the book ownership sites. It’s great though. (Get it here.)

The ones to avoid
The 2020 Doctor Who Annual is disappointingly lazy stuff. (Get it here.)
Also unimpressed by Mating and The Seven Per Cent Solution. (Get them here and here.)

Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton

Second paragraph of third chapter (‘The name of the country I have forgotten’ – remembering and dismembering in Sir Henry Sidney’s Irish Memoir (1583), by Willy Maley) – this is a long one!

In recent years, with the advent of the new historicism, local and topographical readings of early modern Ireland have been supplanted by more theoretically sophisticated work on mapping.⁵ This refinement of the relationship between literary culture and geographical understanding has been accompanied br a questioning of the extent to which accurate depiction of place was an essential prerequisite for conquest and colonization.⁶ Maps have gaps, just like texts, and their silences may be as eloquent as their inclusions.⁷ Perhaps the most famous mapping moment, the most remarkable unfolding of a chart in Renaissance literature outside of King Lear, is Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), when Eudoxus interrupts Irenius to say:

I see now all your men bestowed, but what places would you set their garrison that they might rise out most conveniently to service? and though perhaps I am ignorant of the places, yet I will take the mappe of Ireland before me, and lay it before me, and make mine eyes (in the meane time) my schoole-masters, to guide my understanding to judge of your plot.⁸

⁵ R.B. Gottfried’s ‘Irish geography in Spenser’s View‘, English Literary History, 6 (1939), 114-37, is an example of the earlier tradition. The recent criticism includes Bruce Avery, ‘Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A view of the present state of Ireland, English Literary History, 57:2 (1990), 263-79; David Baker’s ‘Off the map: charting uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland’ in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield & Willy Maley (eds), Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge, 1993), 76-92; Bernhard Klein’s ‘English cartographers and the mapping of Ireland in the early modern period’, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 2:2 (1995), 115-39; Julia Lupton’s ‘Mapping mutability: or, Spenser’s Irish plot’ in Bradshaw et al. (eds), Representing Ireland, 93-115; and Joanne Woolway Grenfell, ‘Significant spaces in Edmund Spenser’s View of the present state of Ireland,’ Early Modern Literary Studies, 4:2, Special Issue 3 (September 1998), 6:1-21 URL:http://purl.oclc.org/ emis/04-2/woolsign.htm.
⁶ Peter Barber is among those who have questioned the obsession with cartographic evidence in reading the culture of the early modern period See ‘Was Elizabeth interested in maps – and did it matter?”, TRHS, 14 (2004), 185-98
⁷ J.B. Harley has argued along these lines in ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe’, Imago Mundi, 40 (1988), 57-76. I am grateful to Thomas Herron for this reference. While I have some sympathy for Harley’s position, and find his use of Foucault persuasive, I am also partial to Foucault’s distinction between the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and an ‘incitement to discourse’. See ‘We “other” Elizabethans’, the introduction to Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: colonialism, culture and identity (Basingstoke, 1997), 1-10. I come closer to Harley in my ‘Forms of discrimination in Spenser’s A view of the state of Ireland (1596; 1633): from dialogue to silence’ in Willy Maley, Nation, state and empire in English Renaissance literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke, 2003), pp 63-91. Cartography in a colonial context carries many dangers. Sir John Davies, writing to the privy council on 28 August 1609, reported the fate of a mapmaker in Ulster, where ‘the enhabitants tooke of his head, by cause they wouid not have their cuntrey discovered’. Cited in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield & Willy Maley (eds), Representing Ireland; literature and the origins of conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge, 1993), 13.
⁸ Andrew Hadfield & Willy Maley (eds), Edmund Spenser, A view of the state of Ireland (1633): from the first printed edition (Oxford & Malden, 1997), p. 96. All subsequent references are to this edition by page number in the text.

I’m still hoping to get around to my project on Irish history in the Tudor period at some point, and I will really not complain if that aspiration sometimes leads me to read brilliant books such as this.

There are sixteen substantial essays here, with an introduction by co-editor Herron, and none of them is a dud, which is really unusual for any book with separately commissioned pieces by that many authors. All of them address the proposition that there are many interesting things to say about Ireland and the Renaissance, two words that are not often used in the same sentence.

Eight of the chapters are about learning and literature (including one about the Counter-Reformation). Topics covered include the teacher Peter White (who I suspect may have been a distant relative of my family), Sir Henry Sidney of course, and the contemporary literary treatment of the glamorous Thomas Stukley.

Six chapters then look at artefacts, mostly architecture – the front cover features Sir Walter Ralegh’s place in County Cork, which still survives as a private residence! – with a bit of art as well, including Bartlett’s maps of the Nine Years War. The standout chapter for me was on the bridge at Athlone constructed by Sir Henry Sidney and demolished in 1844, or rather on the sculptures and inscriptions that adorned it.

Two final chapters examine the personal accounts of two aristocratic women who unsuccessfully defended their castles in 1641, and the celebrations in Dublin of the restoration of Charles II twenty years later. (Your regular reminder that the first recorded Indian immigrant to Ireland was burned out of his home by Irish nationalists.)

One last comment – this is a particularly heavy book, with lovely plates and illustrations, well produced from Four Courts Press. It will last for the ages. A grim comparison with the previous book I finished, Not So Quiet… by Helen Zenna Smith.

You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex.

4 July books

Non-fiction
Virgins, Weeders and Queens, by Twigs Way (2018)
A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, by Lynelle George (2021)
The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, by Philip Bates (2023)

Scripts
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne (2017)

Poetry
Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley (2021)

Speculative fiction
Deep Dive, by Ron Walters (2023)

Doctor Who, etc
The Price of Paradise, by Colin Brake (2009)
The Shakespeare Notebooks, by Goss, Morris, Richards, Richards & Sweet (2014)
Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale (2024)

Comics
Pussey!, by Daniel Clowes (2007)

Not as many as usual today. I will trim the Honorable Mentions, but I’ll also say that all three of the Doctor Who books are rather good (you can get them here, here and here)

The Best
Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, won the Hugo for Best Related Work that year; I didn’t vote for it, but it’s a great new take on an old story. (Get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of
My old friend Twigs Way is a historian of gardening, and while I am not a gardener myself, Virgins, Weeders and Queens is a great historical miscellany. (Get it here, republished as A History of Women in the Garden.)

The one to avoid
Deep Dive was one of the Clarke submissions that year which failed to gel with me. (Get it here.)

Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone

Second paragraph of third chapter:

This arrangement, however, was strictly for the hoi polloi. If one were rich enough, one could use the docking facilities at the hub of the Mons Venturi wheel for private shuttle craft. Benny hauled herself through the airlock of one such of these, reflecting that all of this seemed to be a needlessly expensive method of transferring her back to the point from which she’d started, albeit several thousands of kilometres above it.

Next in the sequence of Bernice Summerfield novels, this was an interesting paired reading with Freya Marske’s A Restless Truth because it’s also an sfnal murder/crime mystery on a ship; a spaceship this time, with Bernice Summerfield pitted against the assembled wiles of the galaxy’s best / worst detectives to try and solve the identity of the mysterious thief known as the Cat’s Paw. (Who was prefigured in the previous three novels, though I didn’t notice.)

It’s generally funny and witty, and a good parody of the mystery genre with also some decent characterisation of Benny. As one reviewer puts it, Stone is “operating in a league entirely his own, even if nobody – himself included, one suspects – is quite certain exactly what sport he’s actually supposed to be playing.” Could have done without the digs at autism though, which really bring the book down a couple of points for me.

You can get it here.

3 July books

Non-fiction
No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media, by Peter Steven (2022)

Non-genre
Dead Souls, by Ian Rankin (2010)
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison (2011)
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje (2021)

Speculative fiction
The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett (2004)
The Book of the New Sun (four books), by Gene Wolfe (2005)
The Hidden War, by Michael Armstrong (2016)
The Area X trilogy (three books), by Jeff VanderMeer (2017)
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, by James Finn Garner (2018)
Mickey⁷ by Edward Ashton (2023)
Linghun, by Ai Jiang (2024)

Comics
De Apenkermis, by Willy Vandersteen (2014)
Amoris van Amoras, by “Willy Vandersteen” [Paul Geerts] (2014)
Het Aruba-dossier, by “Willy Vandersteen” [Paul Geerts] (2014)

A slight change of format today.

The Best
Dead Souls is one of the better of the generally excellent Inspector Rebus novels. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions
Linghun, by Ai Jiang (review; get it here)
Mickey⁷ by Edward Ashton, now filmed as Mickey 17 (review; get it here)
The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett (my review on Infinity Plus; get it here)

Books that I rather bounced off though most other people thought they were great
The Book of the New Sun (four books), by Gene Wolfe (review; get it here and here)
The Area X trilogy (then three books, now four), by Jeff VanderMeer (review; get it here)
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje (review of film and book; get it here)

The ones to avoid
No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media, by Peter Steven – out of date and ranty. (Review; get it here)
The Hidden War, by Michael Armstrong – I didn’t last fifty pages. (Review; get it here)

Wednesday reading (late)

Forgot about this last night!

Current
Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al
Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima
The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future, by Mustafa Suleyman

Last books finished
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna
Spent, by Alison Bechdel
The Gallant Edith Bratt: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Inspiration, by Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays
The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright
The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex
F**k Work, Let’s Play: Do What You Love and Get Paid for It, by John Williams

Next books
Down, by Lawrence Miles
The Revenant Express, by George Mann
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson

Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The stench that comes out as we open the doors each morning nearly knocks us down. Pools of stale vomit from the poor wretches we have carried the night before, corners the sitters have turned into temporary lavatories for all purposes, blood and mud and vermin and the stale stench of stinking trench feet and gangrenous wounds. Poor souls, they cannot help it. No one blames them. Half the time they are unconscious of what they are doing, wracked with pain and jolted about on the rough roads, for, try as we may—and the cases all agree that women drivers are ten times more thoughtful than the men drivers—we cannot altogether evade the snow-covered stones and potholes.

Powerful novel about the experiences of a woman ambulance driver on the front during the First World War, by Evadne Price, Australian-born writer and playwright, who in the last part of her career was a writer of astrology columns for magazines (more fiction, I guess). She had not actually been a V.A.D. driver herself, but drew heavily from a friend’s diary. It was commissioned as a satirical riposte to All Quiet on the Western Front, but ended up as something very different.

The key thing about the book is the visceral description of misery, trauma and death on the battlefield – and I am struggling to remember reading any other portrayal of trench warfare that is quite so explicit about the daily horror of it all. Most accounts dwell on the awfulness of death, without giving much attention to the awfulness of life in that situation.

But tied in with this is a constant reflection on class and gender. The narrator is an upper class woman, and class divisions do not completely dissolve on the battlefield. There is a memorably psychopathic supervisor. The relatives at home have no understanding of what is being done in their name.

And there is plenty of sex as well, though much less explicit than the body horror of the trenches. The narrator has a couple of flings. Her fiancé is grievously injured and cannot have children. There is a particularly memorable passage where the narrator lies to her rich aunt to get money for her sister’s abortion.

My edition has a 50-page afterword by Jane Marcus, who puts the book in context with other writing about the war by both women and men, and mentions a few other figures that I have bumped into in my explorations, notably Mary Borden, who later ran the WW2 hospital founded by my grandmother’s aunt and F.T. Jesse, who my grandmother met in 1926. And the whole story is interesting context for my great-great-aunt’s efforts. But even without that personal element, it is gripping. You can get it here.

My edition has a striking cover, a portrait of a V.A.D. driver by Gilbert Rogers. Unfortunately it does not seem a very robust publication, and after a few days of carrying it around in my bag, the pages and binding began to warp. I see that Virago have also done an edition, which may be longer lasting (but won’t have the Jane Marcus afterword).

2 July books

Non-fiction
Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, with six short stories never before collected, by A. J. Langguth (2004)
Vicious Circles and Infinity: An Anthology of Paradoxes, by Patrick Hughes and George Brecht (2007)
Manufacture and Uses of Alloy Steels, by Henry D. Hibbard (2011)
Legacy: A story of racism and the Northern Ireland Troubles, by Jayne Olorunda (2014)
Europe in the Sixteenth Century, by H.G. Koenigsberger and George L. Mosse (2017)
The Eleventh Hour, by Jon Arnold (2022)

Speculative fiction
Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman (2006)
I Am Not A Serial Killer, by Dan Wells (2011)
Roger Zelazny’s The Dawn of Amber: Book 1, by John Gregory Betancourt (2021)

Doctor Who, etc
Doctor Who Files 1: The Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner with a story by Stephen Cole (2009)
Doctor Who Files 2: Rose, by Jacqueline Rayner (2009)
Doctor Who Files 3: The Slitheen, by Jacqueline Rayner (2009)
Doctor Who Files 4: The Sycorax, by Jacqueline Rayner with a story by Stephen Cole (2009)

The Best
Jayne Olorunda’s autobiography of growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, before and after her Nigerian father was killed by an IRA bomb, is essential reading. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions
A.J. Langguth’s biography of Saki has a lot of fascinating material. (Review; get it here)
Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage takes the veteran author in some surprising directions. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
Jon Arnold’s Black Archive on The Eleventh Hour teases out a lot more about the Eleventh Doctor’s first story. (Review; get it here)

The one you can skip
I only read H.D. Hibbard’s pamphlet on alloy steel because he was my great-grandfather. It was already six years out of date when it was published in 1919. (Review; get it here)

The Dalek Invasion of Winter

Another in my sequence of First Doctor audios which I got back in January, this one dating from September 2018. This is really rather good. It’s a look at a society which has done a deal with the Daleks – or rather whose rulers have done a deal, at the expense of the ordinary citizens. The narrative of the Doctor and friends (here Vicki and Stephen) leading a rebellion against oppression is an old one (indeed at one point Vicki notes that she’s done this before), but the contrasting performances of Robert Daws as the evil collaborator Majorian, and Sara Powell (ex-War of the Sontarans), Shvorne Marks and Matthew Jacobs Morgan as the exploited populace is just tremendous; plus of course Nick Briggs as the Daleks, and Peter Purves and Maureen O’Brien doing both their own characters and Hartnell’s Doctor when necessary. I generally enjoy Big Finish audios (and I whine like anything when I don’t) but this is a particular high point.

The author is David K. Barnes, who also wrote the brilliant First Doctor / Second Doctor mashup Daughter of the Gods and one of the creepier Ninth Doctor audios. That’s three hits out of three for me, and I’ll look out for his work in future. Directed by the excellent Lisa Bowerman who rarely misses the mark.

You can get it here.

The next in this sequence is An Ideal World, with the same classic actors, but I’m going to divert to a short story before I get there.

1 July books

Just as an experiment, I’m collating all the reviews I have blogged on this particular date over the years, on my usual end-of-month, end-of-year system: grouped by category, and then with recommendations and disrecommendations. I’ve written a week of these in advance, and we’ll see how it goes from there.

Non-fiction
Nomadland, by Jessica Bruder (2023)

Non-genre
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (2009)
The History of Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding (2012)
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann (2014)

Speculative Fiction
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov (2006)
Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov
(2006)
Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
(2006)
Something Rotten, by Jasper Fforde (2007)
Children of the Atom, by Wilmar H. Shiras (2008)
The Humans, by Matt Haig (2017)
The Happier Dead, by Ivo Stourton (2022)
Queen of the States, by Josephine Saxton (2022)

Doctor Who, etc
Torchwood: The Sin Eaters, by Brian Minchin (2009)
The Brilliant Book 2011 (2011)
The Fall of Yquatine, by Nick Walters (2012)
Code of the Krillitane, by Justin Richards (2012)
Joyride, by Guy Adams (2017)
The Stone House, by A.K. Benedict (2017)
What She Does next Will Astound You, by James Goss (2017)
Ruby Red, by Georgia Cook (2024)

Comics
Keys to the Kingdom (Locke & Key Vol 4), by Joe Hill (2012)

The Best
Nothing else on the list will quite manage to top John Steinbeck’s gruelling Of Mice and Men. (Review; get it here)

Honorable Mentions
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder, is the disturbing anthropological study on which the Oscar-winning film was based. (Review of book and film; get it here)
Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, for all its flaws, is a bedrock of sf. (Review; get it here)
The Brilliant Book 2011 is a Doctor Who annual-type book which features the one and only Doctor Who story by Brian Aldiss, who was also probably the oldest person ever to write anything for Who. (Review; get it here, at a price)

The one you haven’t heard of
What She Does Next Will Astound You, by James Goss, is the best of the spinoff novels from the all-too-short-lived Class. (Review of all three Class books; get it here)

The one to avoid
I was unimpressed by The Humans, by Matt Haig. (Review; get it here)

June 2025 books

Non-fiction 7 (YTD 38)
Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton
Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton
1913: The Year Before the Storm, by Florian Illies
The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb (did not finish)
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past, by Christopher Hadley
The Gallant Edith Bratt: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Inspiration, by Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays

Non-genre 2 (YTD 21)
Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith
The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright

SF 7 (YTD 64)
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske
The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster (did not finish)
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw
“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link
Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng
The Impossible Contract, by K.A. Doore
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 16)
Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone
Fear Death By Water, by Emily Cook
Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead

Comics 2 (YTD 18)
Panter, by Brecht Evens
Spent, by Alison Bechdel

5,500 pages (YTD 40,800)

12/21 (YTD 64/149) by non-male writers (Bunting, Smith, Enright, Marske, Lancaster, Harding-Shaw, Link, Ng, Doore, McKenna, Cook, Bechdel)
1/21 (YTD 22/149) by non-white writers (Ng)
5/21 rereads (The Burgundians, The Gallant Edith Bratt, “The Faery Handbag”, Ship of Fools, Doctor Who: Castrovalva)
224 books currently tagged unread, down 7 from last month, down 83 from June 2024.

Reading now
Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima
The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future, by Mustafa Suleyman
The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex
F**k Work, Let’s Play: Do What You Love and Get Paid for It, by John Williams

Coming soon (perhaps)
Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al
Down, by Lawrence Miles
Spectral Scream, by Hannah Fergesen
Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by by John Higgs
The Revenant Express, by George Mann
Raven Heart, by Murphy Lawless
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson
The Master, by Louise Cooper
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis

The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by Clea Koff
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch

Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley
The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
Final Cut, by Charles Burns

“Two Hearts”, by Peter S. Beagle
Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire
A Tall Man In A Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson
The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: the whole thing

I have compiled all of my posts about this year’s WSFS Business Meeting into a single Google Document (embedded below, direct link here). I hope it will be useful. For the moment I am leaving comments on; we’ll see how that works.

Needless to say, it represents only my own views, and where I am one of the co-sponsors of one of the agenda items, I speak only for myself here.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

The best known books set in each country: Syria

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Syria.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
As Long as the Lemon Trees GrowZoulfa Katouh91,116890
Sea PrayerKhaled Hosseini 59,241818
L’Arabe du futur 2Riad Sattouf11,251430
Come, Tell Me How You LiveAgatha Christie Mallowan4,918965
Death Is Hard WorkKhaled Khalifa4,548291

Only five this time. As with Niger a few weeks ago, I had to disqualify a lot of books (sixteen in this case) which are (at least in part) about Syria, but not actually set there, most of which dealt with the experience of Syria refugees trying to make their way to and in other countries during the recent war. My rule is that if I have had to disqualify a large number of books before I reach the fifth that is actually set in the country, I leave it there. Normally I would list the top eight books.

I’m glad to see a novel by a Syrian woman actually topping the chart this week, though it does way better on Goodreads. You may be surprised to see Agatha Christie making an appearance; this is a non-fiction account of her experiences observing her husband’s archaeological digging, and it is the top book set in Syria on LibraryThing, though much further behind on Goodreads.

I ruled out the first volume of the graphic novel series L’Arabe du future, which is set in several different countries. However the second volume does seem to be mainly set in Syria, so it’s on the list. Both are on my list of BDs to buy.

The top book on Goodreads with ‘Syria’ tags was Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, and the top on LibraryThing was The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker, both of which are about the experience of Syrian immigrants in the USA; one non-fiction, the other fantasy. There were a few other non-fiction books looking at the region as a whole. I won’t list them all.

Coming next: Mali, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka and (edge case, but it’s listed as a separate country in most lists) Taiwan.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine
Oceania: Australia

2025 Best Poem Hugo; and WSFS Business Meeting Best Poem proposal

2025 Hugos: Goodreads / Librarything stats | Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Graphic Story or Comic | Related Work | Fancast | Poem | Lodestar | Astounding

So, the last literary category in this year’s Hugos that I’m going to write up is the special category award for Best Poem, a one-off for 2025. I found it pretty easy to rank them.

1) Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead. Second paragraph of third chapter:

I spend a while exploring the tall halls,
Searching the archways for an ideal place.
It should be comfortable and intimate;
I always prefer to be warm at church.

This is a tremendous piece of work, 224 pages in length, a narrative about a generation starship and competing visions of the future, making delightful innovations of form and content. I really hope it wins. You can get Calypso here.

The others are all much shorter.

2) Your Visiting Dragon, by Devan Barlow. Third stanza:

Be prepared for your visiting dragon to steal
your scarves, your spoons, your salt shakers
or anything else that captures their fancy
They will, nearly always,
leave them behind at season’s end

Most of these finalists are telling narrative stories; I liked the way that this one is more of a situation, not particularly trying to have a plot. Poetry can be more than stories in verse. (OK, my top vote is going to a story in verse.)

3) We Drink Lava, by Ai Jiang. Third stanza:

It was clear why humans could not drink
lava like we, so unaccepting of their pasts,
so much fear for their futures, where we find
enjoyment experiencing both in the present.
Because to us, that is all that matters.

An interesting portrayal of human emotions and passions as seen and interpreted by lava-drinking gods.

4) A War of Words, by Marie Brennan. Third stanza:

Today it was the water—
the big water that divides us—
we’re losing more and more,
more battles, more words,
all gone across the water I can’t name anymore
because it belongs to them now,
the—
what are they—
I had a word for them this morning, I know it—

A story about words being stolen, or perhaps rather raided, which works effectively as a poem.

5) Ever Noir, by Mari Ness. Third section (arguably):

Sometimes they spill a golden coin or two,
or seven tarnished silver coins. Or a shirt
woven from nettles. Can turn you from a bird,
they say. Or maybe the other way around. A
golden ring that never fits. Boots with
iron soles. A shard from a shattered slipper.

I was not so sure about this, a merger of three different literary discourses – fairy tales, noir and poetry. It’s ambitious and it didn’t quite work for me.

6) there are no taxis for the dead, by Angela Liu. Third stanza:

At home, you don’t knock, just
ping the paper lanterns, one after the other
            like fireflies seeking patterns in summer heat. You sink

I’m sorry, I really didn’t understand what this was about. Some of the individual pieces, sure, but they did not make a whole picture for me.

Speculative Poetry Award

A team of activists have put a lot of work into putting the case for a permanent Best Poem Hugo. The main difference with this year’s special award is that they propose a minimum of one line rather than three. The brief version of their proposal is in item F12 (pages 40 and 41) of the Business Meeting agenda; they have published longer argumentation at the PoetryHugo.com website.

I admire their commitment, but I am probably voting against, because I feel that there are already too many Hugo categories, and I would like to see the Business Meeting trimming some of the excess before adding yet again to the burdens of Hugo administrators.

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al

Second frame of third issue:

“Your kindness touches my heart. Such thoughtfulness is rare these days. What, may I ask, brings such a beautiful couple out on the road? Not running away together, are you?”

Having finished the Titan Eleventh Doctor comics, I’m starting the Twelfth Doctor albums, beginning with this compilation of two two-issue stories, both of which I rather liked.

Terrorformer has the newly regenerated Doctor and Clara visiting a planet which should have been an ice world but seems to have become rather hot; it turns out that there’s an intelligent star behind it all (this made me look up the temperature at the core of the Sun). Clara gets some decent character moments too.

The Swords of Okti is set in both past and future India, and puts Clara aside for most of it to give the Doctor two temporary Indian companions – who I think are the first South Asians to have that role in any medium? The story was originally published as The Swords of Kali, but re-titled after a Hindu group in Nevada protested at the appropriation of the goddess. In any case, it’s a fairly standard aliens-pose-as-gods narrative but with the extra cultural wrinkles.

You can get it here. Next in this sequence: Fractures, also by Robbie Morrison et al.

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: four more constitutional amendments

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I have only five (5) items left to write about from this year’s WSFS Business Meeting agenda. One of them is a proposal for a new Hugo category, which I will deal with tomorrow. The other four are fiddly proposals which I’ll deal with here.

F16 (on page 46 of the agenda) simply prevents committees from lapsing on the event that a Business meeting is not quorate. It seems to me a rather unlikely scenario, but I suppose it may as well be covered. Will vote in favour if necessary.

F17 (pages 47-48) changes the deadlines around when a newly seated WorldCon can allow bid voters to convert their voting rights into attending memberships at a discount. This is basically about preventing a 2021 mistake that didn’t in the end actually happen, and the wording proposed, on my reading, would actually prevent a seated WorldCon from allowing voters to convert to memberships at the convention where the voting took place. This seems to me a good example of a change that isn’t really needed, fixing a contingency that has never happened, isn’t well thought out and is not a good use of Business Meeting time.

F18 (pages 48-49) is more complicated playing with deadlines, poorly explained. The proposers complain that if a committee fails to report, the relevant business is delayed for another year; but several of them have circumvented precisely this scenario this year, by proposing resolution F20. I would prefer to see tighter management of the relevant committees, and I don’t see this one as being a good use of Business Meeting time.

F19 (pages 49-50) addresses the question of reopening certain deadlines (for Site Selection bids and for the submission of Business Meeting items) by requiring that year’s WorldCon to announce the deadline dates at the previous year’s WorldCon, mindful of the contingency that the dates of the convention may change (as they did in 2021 and 2023). This would have prevented the Winnipeg bid in 2021. While I can see that this is a potential problem, I am not convinced that this is the solution. Voting against.

Just Best Poem to go… I may assemble all of these into a single document.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson

Second paragraph of third chapter (“The High Priesthood and the Israelite Samaritan Priests”, by Benyamin Tsedaka):

So, for 112 generations the high priesthood was inherited from father to son in the Phinhas family, heads of the Israelite Samaritan People till 1624 CE. Sometimes the high priesthood was inherited by a brother or uncle in the family if there was not a direct successor to the previous High Priest. Sometimes the High Priest appointed his son as his successor and shared with him the duties during his own time of priesthood.

This was a book of essays on random historical topics that I picked up at Eastercon. Unfortunately the first three that I tried were all too boring to read to the end, so I put it down and won’t pick it up again. If you want to, you can get it here.

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: Site Selection

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

There are several items of business relating to the conduct of Site Selection votes for future Worldcons on this year’s WSFS Business Meeting agenda. I have already dealt with four of them, E5 which would put extra people into the site selection counting process, D7 (page 23) which tidies up the wording of Sub-section 4.4.2, F1 (page 31) which further tidies up Sub-section 4.4.2, and F10 which requires bidding committees to agree on software solutions.

There are another four proposed constitutional amendments on this topic. The first of these is F14 (page 44), and it is co-signed by me and a bunch of other people who have been involved with Site Selection ballot design. Very simply, it abolishes the requirement for site selection voters to provide their postal addresses or other Personally Identifying Information when voting. This extra information gathering is unnecessary, possibly illegal in some jurisdictions, and in others may expose voters’ privacy. Please vote for it.

The next is F15 (pages 45-46), which proposes that only votes cast remotely at least 15 days in advance, or in person at the selecting convention, should be counted for site selection purposes. It would be a huge change to the process of site selection voting. This is ostensibly to prevent a recurrence of the events of the 2021 vote, which however the proposers say that they do not want to relitigate.

I think it’s not unreasonable to remind ourselves of what actually happened in 2021. The Chinese translation of the Site Selection ballot produced by DisCon III was not clearly worded in terms of what information was required for the ‘address’ field, and it was also not clear at the time that the Constitution required voters to actually fill it in for the votes to be valid. There was a flood of last-minute emailed ballots from China, for Chengdu. The Site Selection administrators reported that 1591 of the ballots received from China lacked a street address, but otherwise valid. This number was more than enough to make the difference between the Chengdu bid and its only competitor.

The losing side in the 2021 vote then took an emergency resolution to the Business Meeting (see the minutes of the meeting, pages 31-34) which requested that the Business Meeting rule that votes where the address and other fields were not filled in correctly should not be counted for Chengdu. In my view, this was a very bad abuse of process. The Business Meeting simply does not have jurisdiction over the conduct of Site Selection votes, let alone a vote that is still taking place. Under Subsection 1.6 of the Constitution, that’s clearly a matter reserved for the seated Worldcon. The resolution should have been ruled out of order by the Chair as ultra vires.

In any case, as a matter of equity, if the Chinese version of the form was not clear, that was not the fault of the voters, who should not have been penalised for filling in the ballot form officially supplied by the convention.

However, the last-minute resolution was accepted under the Chair’s discretion; the Chair, having ruled that the resolution was in order, then stepped down from the chair and spoke in favor of it from the floor of the meeting. That seems highly irregular to me. No effort was made to inform the representatives of the Chengdu bid that the Business Meeting was about to try and invalidate most of their votes, on foot of a proposal from their main opposition. That also seems highly irregular to me.

The resolution was passed by 47 votes to 30, but I am glad to say that the WorldCon chair ignored it, rightly ruling that the bid that had got the most votes, ie Chengdu, should be declared the winner. This affair was not a high point of the Business Meeting’s conduct. Weasel words that the vote was purely advisory do not help; if the proposers had not intended it to have any effect, they would hardly have proposed it.

Several of those involved with this affair, including the then Chair of the Business Meeting and the 2021 Site Selection administrator, are proposers of F15. They now tell us that a number of ballots for the winning Chengdu bid “consisted of sequential blocks of ballots with what appeared to be consecutively assigned email addresses, that is, the “username” part of the email address before the “@”, or a subfield thereof, appeared to count up through sequential digits/letters.” It is implied that this information was made public at the time of the 2021 vote, but I have checked the record (minutes of the meeting, pages 63-65) and it was not; this is new information.

It is also implied that these alleged defects applied to all of the controversial votes. This is not the case; I scrutinized them myself as part of the process of integrating the 2022 Hugo nominating electors, and while some of the votes probably did fit this description, many certainly did not. (I did not analyze the data systematically at the time, and no longer have access to it.) The only defect alleged at the time was that the disputed votes lacked a street address.

I know as well as anyone that there have been attempts to cheat on Hugo voting in the past. I can see that the Site Selection process basically allows anyone with enough money to throw at the vote to win. The argument of F15 is that by shifting the deadline back two weeks, administrators will have the chance to toss out clearly fraudulent votes. But personally, I don’t think that someone who is determined to buy themselves a Worldcon is going to be deterred by an earlier deadline.

I think that F15 is fighting the wrong battle (and also, frankly, that the wrong people are proposing it). It would be better to start with an agreed concept of ballot fraud, which we do not have, and take the conversation about necessary steps forward from there. That may well involve adjustments to deadlines and procedures. The whole Site Selection process is anyway based on the needs of an earlier age and probably needs bigger reforms. But essentially this amendment is an effort to keep WorldCons as they have historically been, and to prevent new voices from getting into the system, and that is a recipe for stagnation and death.

In case it was not already clear, I will support any moves to kick this to a committee, and will vote against it if it comes to the plenary.

Finally for now, F20 (pages 50-53) revives a resolution that was kicked to a committee last year, which would restrict Worldcon locations to venues which are positively rated by various internationally published indices of good behaviour. The Committee appointed to examine this issue in 2024 failed to meet or produce a formal report, but its chair has summarized the ideas expressed by members in correspondence on pages 71 and 72 of the agenda. This is a very thoughtful piece of work, and I recommend reading it. In particular, the non-report asks:

Is it true that the Hugo Awards cannot be administered fairly in a country that exceeds an objective threshold of authoritarianism? Could the 2023 Hugo Awards have been properly administered by a different person?

Sites currently undergoing armed conflict still rank as acceptable according to the previously proposed indices. So does the US, which at least some members of the Worldcon community would not deem an acceptable bidding location at this time. Metrics are not real time, and any mechanism is subject to situational change between bid qualification and the time of the vote or convention.

These are good questions and good points. I’m very dubious anyway about hardwiring anything in the WSFS Constitution to external bodies, particularly at a moment when some of the best known human rights organisations are under attack and may not survive (though I really hope that they do). I would also very much regret formally restricting WorldCon to developed and mature democracies, which would be the effect of this change. I’ll be voting against.

Both of these last two resolutions are basically intended to ensure that WorldCon never goes to China again. I am not at all sure that China wants WorldCon again, given the reputational backfire from last time. If you want WorldCon to be restricted to a narrow group of countries, that’s your privilege; but don’t expect me to respect you for having that opinion.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

Second paragraph of third chapter:

A few groups of richly dressed people still lingered standing, like clusters of jewels hung from a woman’s throat, but most were seated. The steward who’d opened the door for Maud cleared his throat meaningfully.

Sequel to A Marvellous Light; I acquired them both as part of the 2022 Hugo packet and have the third still to go. It’s a sorcerous murder story set on an Edwardian transatlantic liner, with a lot of lesbian sex. Tremendous fun. Second of the series, and I had forgotten what happened in the first volume but enjoyed this anyway. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. (And we don’t really know what Homer’s gender identity was either.)

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: Retiring NASFiC

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I’m devoting an entire post to F13 (pages 41-43 of the agenda), the question of abolishing the NASFiC, the annual convention held under WSFS auspices when WorldCon is outside North America. I hope it is clear that I am something of a WSFS minimalist, in that I think WSFS should not be regulating more than strictly necessary. I also think it looks very weird that North America alone should get special geographical treatment in the form of an extra validated convention in compensation if WorldCon is elsewhere.

I saw a proposal a few years ago for WSFS to set up approved conventions for each continent, though I don’t think this was ever formally put to a Business Meeting; and another proposal for an Asian Science Fiction Convention under WSFS auspices was approved in Chengdu but then failed ratification in Glasgow. I am all in favour of everywhere having their own regional convention, as Europe has done for years; I just don’t see why WSFS needs to be involved, or what value WSFS accreditation would add.

Having said that, I am glad that this proposal is going forward at a US WorldCon, in Seattle, and would be ratified next year in the US again, in Los Angeles. I think the optics of non-North American WorldCons voting to take away the NASFiC are not good.

Voting in favour.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Wednesday reading

Current
The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright
Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna 
The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex

Last books finished
Panter, by Brecht Evens
The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore
The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past, by Christopher Hadley

Next books
Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al
The Revenant Express, by George Mann
The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman

The First Doctor Chronicles vol 2

A mixed bag of Companion Chronicle style stories here, though with a strong finish. Released in 2017.

It may just have been the mood I was in when listening to it (generally out of sorts and distracted) but John Pritchard’s “Fields of Terror” failed to click for me. As drama, it is purely Maureen O’Brien wandering the Vendée in the company of a French revolutionary officer played by Robert Hands. I didn’t get into it and the plot didn’t seem to resolve.

The other three are a different matter. “Across the Darkened City” by David Bartlett is a two-hander between Peter Purves as Steven and Nick Briggs as a renegade Dalek. It’s an Enemy Mine situation, with several wrinkles and an unpleasant but shapeless alien menace. It brought me back into the sequence.

And then the third story, “The Bonfires of the Vanities”, with Anneke Wills as Polly and Elliot Chapman as Ben, made me sit up sharply. The TARDIS lands in Lewes on Bonfire Night some time in the 1950s, but it seems that there are dark human forces afoot in the town and dark alien forces out to disrupt the Doctor’s timeline. This was the best of the four for me. I let out a gasp of surprise in the commentary when I discovered that it is by my good friend Una McCormack.

Finally, the same cast are in “The Plague of Dreams”, by Guy Adams, a pre-regeneration story for the First Doctor which invokes Shakespeare in unexpected ways and also brings in a new and unexpected renegade Time Lord, tying in loosely but effectively with the previous story. I felt the second half of this box set generally worked very nicely as a unit.

You can get it here.