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.
So, on my way back from Gallifrey One, the top Doctor Who convention in the world, having had as usual a whale of a time. Though I will start with two less happy things. First, my back has been playing up for the last few weeks, so I was very careful not to overdo it, and napped during the day a bit more than usual (to compensate for sleeping worse). In 2009 and again in 2013, I had back problems which were serious enough to keep me off work for ten days each time, so I know the danger signs and am religiously doing my stretches.
The second less than happy thing was the announcement that the 2028 Gallifrey One will be the last. Mostly the same team have been running it since 1991, and they prefer to conclude the series rather than hand over the reins. Understandable, but there was a palpable air of sadness and shock in the hall as the announcement was made. Apparently there are moves to assemble a replacement structure, and with four years to go, there is time. Meanwhile we are all grateful for the immense amount of work put in by the team over the decades.
A lot of other things went well. For the first time since 2012, I got a room at the conference hotel, and that makes a big difference to lugging things around. Though the escalators between the lobby and the ballroom floors were out, so we got used to the labyrinthine alternative routes.
Outside the hotel, I had breakfast most days at Denny’s about half a mile away, and that was tremendously good value, setting me up well so that I didn’t need as much of the hotel’s somewhat inflated bar food. Other places I ate:
The Getty Museum Cafe, for lunch on Thursday, which was fine
Jino’s Pars, for dinner on Saturday with Jon Arnold, about a mile from the Marriott, yummy Persian food
Blu Jam Cafe, in Downtown LA on Monday morning, a substantial brunch which was too substantial for me to finish
Wolfgang Puck in Terminal 7 at LAX for a late lunch as we left, where they charged me $33 for a small sad overcooked chunk of salmon which took over half an hour to arrive. When I complained they refunded half the price.
Also apparently there were two earthquakes in Malibu late Friday and early Saturday, but I must admit I failed to notice.
One other thing that went well, not especially related to the convention: I got an eSIM for my phone, and that meant that i had cheap data for he entire trip. Based on the recommendation of my former colleague Robert, I went with Airalo, who also offer coverage in China where I will go next month. I’m sure there are others available, but I was very satisfied with what I had.
So: H and I travelled on Wednesday this time, to have got over the jetlag by the time the convention started on Friday morning, and I had a very pleasant Wednesday evening in the bar with Nicola Bryant, Andrew Smith (writer of Full Circle), Big Finish writer Lisa McMullin and others.
Formal shot with Nicola Bryant – many more photos but all in my shipped baggage as I write from HeathrowAndrew Smith signs the novelisation of Full Circle, published 42 yeas ago when he was 20.
I took fewer cosplay photos than in previous years, but as usual the effort put in was impressive.
Amy and VincentTime LordA SilentDoctors & coK-9 variationsDodoThe unseen villain of Rogue. Fluent in many languages and scolds you for not doing your homework, before eating you.
The great set-pieces of the convention are the presentations by the stars, and I got to most of them, back permitting. Sylvester McCoy, in an amazingly high energy performance from a man who has recently turned 80, wandered around the audience in his session, and H got this great photo of me asking him about Vision On, to which he gave a good five-minute answer.
H got to do a script reading with Colin Baker:
Wendy Padbury and her daughter Charlie Hayes were an effective double-act, Charlie threatening to ask her mother to tell us everything she knows about astrophysics.
Louise Jameson was also charming, but complained facetiously when her Leela clothing got a round of applause: “Upstaged by a costume!”
The headline star this year was not either of the Doctors present (Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy) but Steven Moffat, who did a solo Q&A, commented on a showing of Boom!, crashed Jenna Coleman’s Q&A, did a small group analysis of The Girl in the Fireplace and signed my copy of the novelisation of The Day of the Doctor.
As well as seeing lots of old friends I made new friends as well. Here Ruadhri from London, who was doing a series of mini-interviews with participants for later publication, has the tables turned on him by Jack from Boston.
Altogether I had a really good time and hope that I can make it to the last three, in 2026, 2027 and 2028.
On the Thursday before it all started, I decided to go to the Getty Center, a half-hour’s drive north – I had planned to do that last year, but it is closed on Mondays so I went to LACMA instead that time. I am therefore now equipped for many weeks of my #Thursdayart posts, which you may have seen on my social media channels. The Getty Villa is still closed after last month’s fires, but its sister institution is fine; head literally in the clouds on a very rainy day.
After the Rijksmuseum, which we had visited only a few days before, the Getty is rather exposed as what it is, the perpetuation of a rich man’ whims rather than the nation-building project over in Amsterdam. But there is plenty of good stuff; the five I picked for social media posts were:
Van Gogh’s Irises, very much the star of the show
I was fascinated by the human detail in The Bird Catchers, painted by by François Boucher in 1748.
I envied the relaxation of Princess Leonilla of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, painted by Franz Xavier Winterhalter in 1843:
And finally here’s a bust of Felix Mendlesohn, from 1848 (just after his death) by Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel.
But plenty more where all of that came from.
Yesterday, for my last morning, I braved the public transport system (cheaper now that I am over 55!) and ventured downtown to The Last Bookstore. I didn’t actually buy anything, but I always find bookshops good for recharging.
It too has unusual artworks. Going up the stairs you will meet Nuestra Señora La Reína de la Librería Última de Los Ángeles:
And at the top you will see “Diagnosis” by Jena Priebe and David Lovejoy.
Got back to the hotel in time to chat with my old friend D, who then dropped me to the airport. And 14 hours of travel and 3 hours of sleep later, here I am in Heathrow. See you soon.
This was a two-part Twelfth Doctor story from Series 9 in 2015, set in the early 22nd century in a base under a Scottish reservoir, and also in 1980, in the abandoned village that was there before the reservoir was built. I don’t appear to have written it up at the time – I was a bit sparing when the last name on the screen was my first cousin, which may have been too cautious of me.
The TARDIS, with the Twelfth Doctor and Clara on board, arrives in the year 2119, in an underwater base under siege from ghosts, which appear linked with a mysterious alien vessel at the bottom of the lake. The crew of the base start getting picked off one by one. The Doctor goes back to 1980 to try and sort things out, but apparently returns as a ghost. The trouble is being caused by a semi-dead alien called the Fisher King, but I confess I did not really follow that part. Eventually all is resolved with the use of time paradoxes – the Doctor has a breaking-the-fourth-wall conversation with the viewer about who really wrote Beethoven’s music. There are some very good shots of Capaldi in particular.
Notably, Cass, the woman who takes command of the crew for most of the story (after the original commander is an early victim) is deaf, played by deaf actor Sophie Leigh Stone, and communicates with everyone else by signing through an interpreter.
I also noted with interest that two characters played by actors of Asian heritage, Zarqa Ismail and Arsher Ali, are given the thoroughly Anglo names Tim Lunn and Mason Bennett. (I don’t think we ever find out Cass’s first name.)
The writer was Toby Whitehouse, who also wrote School Reunion, one of my favorite New Who episodes; Greeks Bearing Gifts, one of my favourite Torchwood episodes; the series Being Human; and the New Who episode The God Complex, which I didn’t rate as highly and have written up here along with its Black Archive.
Rewatching Under the Lake / Before the Flood, I would rank it as average or slightly below. Over on X/Twitter, it did better, at 120th of 309 Who stories in @heraldofcreatio’s poll. Anne could not remember having seen it first time round. I find the plot decently sfnal and the base well realised, but the energy somehow not quite there, and the means and motivation of the alien menace obscure. Full marks of course for the portrayal of Cass’s disability, which we’ll get back to.
Ryan C. Parrey and Kevin S. Decker have done a solid though relatively short Black Archive on the story. The first chapter is an introduction which briefly touches on bases under siege, evil capitalism, and the reversed sequence of the narrative.
The second and longest chapter, “The Bootstrap Paradox”, goes in detail into the exploration of time paradoxes in this story and in other Doctor Who stories, and the extent to which they also carry the freight of moral dilemmas.
The third chapter, “‘Only Room for One Me’”, looks at Clara’s arc overall in the wider Doctor Who narrative. Its second paragraph is:
“This two-part story contributes important elements to Clara’s arc during her time with the 12th Doctor, an arc that begins before Danny’s death and that sees Clara act on her fascination with the Doctor’s power and responsibility. Making a conscious decision to leave certain inhibitions behind after Danny dies, she experiments here and elsewhere in series nine with, in effect, becoming the Doctor.
Incidentally I am writing this at Gallifrey One, where Jenna Coleman as usual is charming the participants.
The very brief fourth chapter, “Ghosts in the Machine”, looks at the ghosts in the story as compared to other Who stories, and unpacks how they are not really ghosts.
The fifth chapter, “New Waste Lands”, which is also short, looks at the alien Fisher King and successfully explained to me what is actually going on in the story, better than the script did.
The sixth and best chapter, “The Case of Cass”, looks at the varying ways that disabled people are portrayed in the media, especially in Doctor Who, coming to the conclusion that Cass is uniquely well depicted in this story. Hard to disagree with that, and it’s well argued.
The seventh and concluding chapter takes us back to ethics and invokes Jean-Paul Sartre.
I rate this about average of the Black Archives, but with significant bonus points for the discussion of disability. You can get it here.
The key maintains a direct link with the TARDIS at all times. Even if the TARDIS is isolated by a temporal disturbance the key should be able to summon it back (see Case Study, page 32). Conversely, the TARDIS can be concealed, a second out of sync with your current time zone, using the key as an anchor.
This is one of those really lovely BBC spinoff books, looking in detail at the TARDIS, presented as an operator’s manual and pulling together all the TARDIS lore from the first 55 years of Doctor Who (it features Jodie Whittaker but not any of her stories). None of this is new, but it’s put together very imaginatively and entertainingly. I had forgotten that many of the early stories include a TARDIS malfunction of some kind, and the authors heroically retcon everything together, even the Eye of Harmony from the TV movie. A lovely effort. You can get it here.
Most people called it the Jewelled City, because they had no imagination of their own and just picked up on what some down-market visnews journalist correctly thought would make a catchy slogan. The planet had originally been colonised as a source of jethryk, but the mining boom had long since died out, and it reverted to being just another human world. Nowadays there were no more jewels around than there were in any other colonial capital.
I never had the pleasure of meeting David McIntee, but we were Facebook friends for years, and like many others I was shocked and saddened when he died last December, two weeks before his 56th birthday. He wrote twelve Doctor Who novels between 1993 and 2004, one of which (Autumn Mist) is among the very few Doctor Who stories set in Belgium. My favourite is The Face of the Enemy, set while the Doctor and Jo Grant are off in Peladon, so that UNIT has to bring in the Master and some bloke called Chesterton and his wife to help out.
Mission: Impractical is the last of the Sixth Doctor novels that I read a decade ago, failed to write up at the time and have now reread again. It’s a comedy heist story, not usually one of my favourite sub-genres, but done very well here. The cast of characters includes Sabalon Glitz and his sidekick Dibber, who appeared in a couple of TV stories, and Frobisher, originally a DWM comic strip companion, who is a shape shifting alien Whifferdill and prefers to take the shape of a penguin. There are also Ogrons and an ancient artifact which is the McGuffin. McIntee had a good ear for dialogue and robustly characterizes both the continuity characters and the bad guys who turn up in this story, and the settings are vivid. So I am ending this mini-project on a high note.
The purchase link says it’s out of print and that Amazon doesn’t know of any second-hand copies. But who knows, you may be lucky?
I find that I also never wrote up some of the early Bernice Summerfield books, so I will do them next, possibly alongside the early Big Finish audio adaptations.
Three stories here. The title story by Andy Diggle and Craig Hamilton brings Lady Christina de Souza back for a space heist with the Doctor, Amy and Rory, and raised a smile or two. The second, “Space Oddity” by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Horacio Domingues, is an excellent tale of the Vashta Nerada and an early undocumented Soviet space mission. The third, “Time Fraud” by Richard Dinnick and Josh Adams, has bird-like aliens and fake Time Lords. You can get it here.
Next in this series is Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle, Eddie Robson and Andy Kuhn
Big Finish had a First Doctor sale last month, and I took advantage of it to get hold of some of the audios I would have liked to have caught at the time. This is the first of three quartets of First Doctor Companion Chronicles, each featuring an original series actor and a guest performer, in this case released in October 2015 (so I am some way behind).
The Sleeping Blood, by Martin Day, has Carole Ann Ford as Susan travelling with her grandfather before they arrive on Earth, and looking for medical treatment when the Doctor is struck down by a mysterious infection. She ends up at a medical facility where the local security team are fighting off a mysterious terrorist (both the terrorist and the head of security are played by Darren Strange). It’s a smart Doctor-lite script, exploring truth and trust and the use of violence, and giving Ford a bit more space to perform than she really got on screen.
The Unwinding World, by Ian Potter, has Vicki telling the story of how she, together with the Doctor, Ian and Barbara, are stuck doing grunt work on a boring but repressive planet. This is framed as a conversation between Maureen O’Sullivan and Alix Dunmore, who plays the all-powerful computer and a couple of other female parts. I started off wondering exactly what was going on, but then realised that a nicely constructed plot – expressed basically as a dialogue – was coming to a clever and satisfactory conclusion.
The Founding Fathers is one of two stories in this set by Simon Guerrier, sequels to The War to End All Wars, with a framing narrative where Steven Taylor, having retired as king of the planet of the Elders/Savages, is engaged in long conversations with the copy of the Doctor’s brain made by Jano long ago. The main plot element is a flashback to a Doctor-and-Steven trip to Paris in 1762, where they encounter Benjamin Franklin and give him pointers on the future governance of the American colonies and also electricity. But there’s a subsidiary plot set on Steven’s planet, where his granddaughter Sida (played by Alice Haig, now Alice Tate, who does all the female characters) is listening and learning.
Finally, in Simon Guerrier’s The Locked Room, we get not only the First Doctor returning in the flesh, but also the Vardans, of all monsters, to trouble Steven and Sida on their home world, which is of course itself in the middle of a huge political crisis involving them both in different ways. The soundscape of all of these is vey good, but I felt this was particularly impressive, where two actors in adjacent sound booths summon up an entire planet under threat. Peter Purves’ version of Hartnell is uncanny as ever.
So, basically my mini-project of catching up with Big Finish’s First Doctor stories is off to a good start. You can get this set here.
Current Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott Five Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula K. Le Guin War Childhood: From Sarajevo to Syria, Memories of Life and Hope, by Jasminko Halilović
Last books finished A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell The Professor in Erin, by L. McManus [Charlotte Elizabeth McManus] (did not finish) Drowned Country, by Emily Tesh Inside the Stargazers’ Palace, by Violet Moller Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Kevin Decker and Ryan Parrey
Next books The Secret Places of the Heart, by H.G. Wells DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee “Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang
Then she heard applause. The applause of centuries.
This is the fourth book in the Lychford series, where once again the village is under attack from hostile magical forces and the three women who have become the central characters of the series have to try and stop it. It’s lyrically done, with the old world’s natural crumbling being given extra momentum by the external threat; characters float in and out of different stages of awareness – there’s a sympathetic portrayal of dementia – and it all comes across beautifully. Quite a short book but it packs a lot into its 162 pages. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham.
A Portuguese slogan had been painted on the side of the plane: “We carry not only passengers but solidarity”. Indeed, about half the passengers were from aid organisations. People were flooding into Mozambique and we pompously called ourselves ‘solidarity workers’.
This is the autobiography of Hans Rosling, the Swedish scientist whose Factfulness was my book of the year for 2018. I must admit that I had given no thought at all to how one might become a guru of data visualisation, so it was fascinating to read of his career in public health in Sweden and the developing world.
The moral core of the book are the third and fourth chapters, recounting his experience of working as a District Medical Officer in northern Mozambique, in a situation where to describe resources as scarce and medical facilities as overstretched is something of an understatement. I must say that the end of the third chapter made me cry on the train, which I don’t often do.
Apart from that, it’s a good account of a professional doctor shuttling around the world and accommodating himself to different cultures, and to the rapid changes in societies (including Sweden) brought about by economic growth and technical innovation. There is a very entertaining encounter with Fidel Castro in Cuba. And then thanks to his son’s software skills, he found that he was famous, and his medical career turned into something quite different. He doesn’t go on about his success of middle age; he knew we would be much more interested in how he got there.
I had high expectations of this and they were more than fulfilled. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next on that pile is the English translation of The Burgundians, by Bart van Loo.
The Hadza or Hadzabe people (meaning ‘people’) have inhabited the area around LakeEyasi in Tanzania, south of the Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater, for tens of thousands of years. Archeological findings show that this area has been inhabited by hunter-gatherers, such as the Hadza, for at least 50,000 years, while the Bantu people came to this region much later, about 2,000 years ago. There is a (not widely accepted) theory that the entire human race consists of three ‘branches’: the Hadza people, the Jul’hoan people of Namibia, and all other people. This idea is based on the fact that the Hadza and Jul’hoan use clicks in their speech, as well as having the most divergent known mitochondrial DNA of any human population, indicating that they are descended from those that first separated from the rest of the human ‘tree’.
Along similar lines to the same author’s Atlas of Unusual Borders, this brings together trivia about language isolates from all over the globe. It’s much the same story over and over again, for 230 pages, but the message is clear: language diversity is part of human experience, and that can include ancient languages which are just about hanging on in their native places, but also new-ish creoles which have been created to help communication.
There were a lot more cases that I had not heard of here than in the same author’s Unusual Borders book. Most of these would be well enough known in their own countries (most Poles know about Kashubian, for instance). But almost every country seems to have some linguistic quirk hidden in a corner. (For instance, the Germanic section ends with French Flemish.)
I did wish Nikolić had gone a little more into unusual grammar or phonology. The front cover of my copy of the book references the ǃXóõ language of Namibia, which has the most phonemes of any known tongue – 87 consonants, half of which are clicks, 20 vowels, and two tones by one count. There must be a few more like that. Information is of course difficult to come by.
Some of the languages are illustrated with a paragraph from The Little Prince, which does help a little with getting a sense of the structure. Again, I’d have liked to see a bit more here, for instance emphasising the words for “sunrise” would give you a better feeling for how the language works.
However, I don’t know of any other book quite like this and I’m glad to have it. You can get it here.
An early Valentine’s weekend up north (sorry, Dutch-based chums, this was a just-us romantic weekend and we didn’t see anyone else) to visit a few museums.
Accommodation: IBIS Leiden Centre, cheap and cheerful.
Friday lunch: Tapa Thai, Stationsweg 3, Leiden; decent value, rice a bit dry. Friday dinner: Surakarta, Noordeinde 51-53, Leiden; very satisfactory Indonesian, helpful explanations of unfamiliar food. Saturday lunch: The Rijksmuseum Cafe; friendly service and filling victuals Saturday dinner: Verboden Toegang, Kaiserstraat 7, Leiden; hearty stuff, good service, better value than I would get in PLux. Sunday lunch: Pieterskerk Cafe, quiet and healthy.
The National Museum of Antiquities: the Bronze Age
This was what sparked the idea for our trip, a big exhibition about the Bronze Age in Europe, bringing together some prize exhibits from other museums, and basically selling the message that the Europe of 3000 years ago had intense internal cultural links and also communications deep into Asia.
The hit of the exhibition is is the Nebra Sky Disc, from 1600-1800 BC, the oldest known visual representation of the universe from anywhere in the world. Found by illegal treasure hunters in East Germany in 1999, sold by them as soon as they dug it up, recovered by Swiss police in a raid in Basel in 2002, now permanently on display in Halle (but on loan to Leiden). Some of you may have seen it in the British Museum last year.
It’s a truly striking artefact. You know exactly what it is meant to be. The makers have communicated their interest in the night sky to you directly, 3,600 years on.
There are a couple of other personal artefacts that spoke to me. The Mold gold cape, for instance, from about the same time as the Sky Disc but found at the far end of the trade routes, in Wales, on loan from the British Museum:
Or the Schifferstadt Sun hat, one of four such hats found in France and Germany, perhaps for celebrants to wear at ceremonies welcoming / summoning the return of the Sun?
Just a week ago, on 2 February, worshippers paraded around our local chapel bearing candles to celebrate the arrival of spring. I bet that ceremony has been going on longer than Christianity in our part of the world.
Another stunning display has six ceremonial (magic?) swords, made in the same East Anglia workshop, found separately in England, France and the Netherlands, brought together here for the first time.
They are not practical for combat, but instead were all found ritually placed into damp ground and abandoned; one of them (the second from the right) was carefully and perhaps ritually warped before the deposition. A sacrifice of weapons, specially commissioned from Norfolk, to show unity with the land? Though I cannot be the only visitor who thought of Monty Python:
We tend to think of Bronze Age archaeology as concerned with beautiful material artfacts, like the gold and weapons above and the torcs and bracelets below. And they are lovely.
But a couple of other exhibits really got me.
It’s a stone from a grave in Anderlingen, Germany, with three figures on it. One has outstretched hands, one has an axe, one has a robe. Are they fighting? Dancing? Worshipping? All three? Something else?
But what got to me most was the reconstruction of women’s clothing from grave goods.
On the right, we are told, is the oldest dress in the Netherlands, from 800 BC near Eindhoven. Enough survives to be sure that there was a check pattern coloured by cochineal and wode; this high status woman was buried in her favourite clothes..
But on the left we have the Egtveld Girl, found in Denmark with her clothes in good preservation. She wore a belt with a big gold disc, and a short corded skirt. She was only a teenager, but had moved around a lot in her short life. Her skirt is surely made for dancing; to move from the sublime to the ridiculous, here are my own colleagues performing “Hips don’t lie” by Shakira:
Anyway, it’s a tremendous exhibition, and you have five more weeks to go to it.
The National Museum of Antiquities: the rest
To be honest, we didn’t see a lot of the permanent collection, but this piece really jumped out at me, at the end of a small gallery of cameos:
It is the Gemma Constantiniana, created by the Senate of Rome as a trophy for the Emperor Constantine in 315 after he vanquished his rival emperor Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. Drawn by (male) centaurs, trampling Maxentius, Constantine and his fmily ride to glory and accept a triumphal wreath from an angelic figure.
What happened to it in the next 1,300 years is obscure, but it came into the hands of the Dutch East India Company in 1628, possibly via the collection of Pieter Paul Rubens. They decided to sell it to the Mongol Emperor Jahangir, who was a big collector, and packed into the cargo of the East India Company’s biggest ship, the Batavia. However, the Batavia was wrecked off the coast of Australia, and the surviving passengers held hostage by mutineers until reinforcements arrived a year later.
The Gemma Constantiniana was successfully salvaged, but Jahangir had died (he had actually died before the Batavia left) and his heir Shah Jahan (builder of the Taj Mahal) was less interested in that kind of thing, so it returned to the Netherlands and is now on permanent display in Leiden.
Two other great cameos survive, one of Augustus in Vienna and one of Tiberius in Paris. They have less exciting histories.
The Rijksmuseum
We had missed out on the Rijksmuseum on our 2023 trip to Amsterdam due to poor planning on my part. But it’s less than an hour by train and we grabbed the opportunity yesterday.
Wow. The Rijksmuseum is very big. We stayed in it for almost five hours (including a lunch break) but it still wasn’t enough. Despite knowing the Netherlands well, I think it may have been my first visit. I hope it will not be my last.
Starting with the Night Watch – carefully protected from the public, which is probably just as well as it allows you to take it all in. But I guess I hadn’t realised that it is in a genre of squad portraits. Here is another by Bartholomeus van der Helst, the Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster, from 1648:
On the cuirasse of the large chap on the right, you can see the reflections of three of his neighbours.
Also up in that gallery there is a little Vermeer alcove with seven of his household scenes. There’s something very attractive and eye-catching about his use of light. The Milkmaid is (by a small margin) my favourite.
Much much food for future #ThursdayArt posts here (I do this occasionally on most of my social media channels). Three other things at the Rijksmuseum that made me stop in my tracks:
This isn’t Great Art, but it’s the transom of the English navy’s flagship, the Royal Charles, captured by the Dutch in 1667, in full sight of the impotent English leadership. When he heard the news, Samuel Pepys lamented, “I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone…” and warned his family that he himself, as a senior naval administrator, might be the target of political violence. It was the worst ever defeat for the English navy in home waters. The Dutch used the captured flagship as a party boat for a while, but scrapped it a few years later, saving the stern for public display.
Both Anne and I stopped and went ‘gosh’ when we saw this 1815 portrait of Emma Jane Hodges, daughter of the Anglo-Dutch painter Charles Howard Hodges. She was born in 1791 (so is 24 here) and lived to 1868; she did not marry, and left her collection of her father’s paintings to the Rijksmseum. Something about the use of light and the expression on her face really grabbed us.
And the third thing that grabbed me goes without saying. Most of the Van Goghs in Amsterdam are (unsurprisingly) in the Van Gogh Museum, but the 1888 Wheatfield really calls out to you across a crowded room.
Other things that caught our eye in the Rijksmuseum:
Lots of model ships!
In the navy – Yes, you can sail the seven seas In the navy – Yes, you can put your mind at ease In the navy – Come on now, people, make a stand In the navy, in the navy
Two different but similar treatments of St Ursula with her virgins.
One of several magnificent doll’s houses (the Dutch royals are really into them).
Also a brilliant exhibition of American photography, and much else that I ran out of energy before recording.
I should say two more things. First, the 18th-century art is really not a patch on the 17th-century Golden Age stuff. It picks up again during and after the Napoleonic wars, but it’s as if the artistic impulses were exhausted after Remrandt, Vermeer and all those folks.
Second, there was a very interesting section about art and Dutch colonialism in Asia and the Americas (apart from the Caribbean and Suriname, I had forgotten that they occupied a large chunk of Brazil for 24 years). The commentary is frank about the nature of colonial exploitation and the human damage done by the enterprise.
Wereldmuseum Leiden
We had been to what used to be the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden back in 2021, but returned to it for a temporary exhibition on gold. Lots of gold to see here, including these reliquaries:
And Thom Puckey’s sculpture, The Wife of the Alchemist, dedicated to the legend of Perenelle Flamel.
Also one can never get enough of the Buddha Room.
The Observatory and Hortus Botanicus
Not the best of weather for the Leiden botanical gardens, but the observatory had a nice little art exhibition about time and science and plants.
Here at the entrance is a fantastic rotating assembly of lenses with spotlights shining through them, by Jos Agasi.
And this is very simply the decay of a shoe over the ages, by Oscar Santillán.
The Pieterskerk
The deconsecrated Pieterskerk was the last of our tourism stops; it has a nice corner dedicated to the Pilgrim Fathers who worshipped there.
And then home. It’s a bit more than two hours to drive for us; for those of you coming from further away, there’s a direct train connection to Schiphol airport, and plenty to see (and eat and drink). Recommended!
See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Canada, as explained further below. This is a case where the winner is way ahead of the field, and also where the winner is really not in the least surprising.
L.M. Montgomery does pretty well here. I was looking back to see if we have had any other countries so far with seven out of eight books by women writers, and to my surprise the answer is yes, there have been four of the previous 38: South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran. Which might not be the four you would have guessed.
The top two books tagged “Canada” by LT and GR users by score were The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, neither of which is set in Canada at all as far as I remember. The setting of Room, by Emma Donoghue, is not specified geographically as far as I can tell, and I thought quite carefully about whether to qualify it or not; but it’s based on events in Austria, and although the film was made in Canada, it is explicitly set in Ohio. On the other hand, my memory of Station Eleven is that most of it is set on what is now the Canadian side of the lakes, so I let it through.
Two more Margaret Atwood novels, Oryx and Crake and The Testaments, are set or mostly set in what is currently the United States, but who knows where we may be in a few weeks’ time? That still leaves her The Blind Assassin, which is explicitly set in Ontario. Alias Grace missed the cut by a hair’s breadth.
Next up: Poland, then Morocco, Angola and Ukraine. But I’m going to skip next week as I’ll be at Gallifrey One.
Key sections of the lengthy technical document focussed on a comparison between setting up a Stormont-run RHI scheme, or a grant-based scheme, called a challenge fund. The challenge fund would competitively allocate the available funding from the Treasury each year, allowing the market to provide the most cost-effective means of using the money. Once the funding ran out each year, it would shut, making it impossible to overspend. The alternative, an RHI scheme, would by contrast provide ongoing payments over 20 years to each boiler owner, with the payments linked to how much heat they produced. Having examined the numbers, it was clear to CEPA that the challenge fund provided vastly superior value for money.
This is a tremendous expose of the colossal scandal that brought down the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive government in early 2017, taking another three years before it was restored (and then it was gone again in two years, being restored only a year ago). The guts of the story are that a subsidy for using renewable heat sources for commercial purposes was perversely structured so that the state effectively paid users to burn biomass; “cash for ash” as it was dubbed.
McBride was at the forefront of breaking this story through the News Letter, and the BBC was also particularly strong on the case (to the point that when I bumped into Arlene Foster in 2019, with a BBC journalist by my side, she chatted pleasantly with me while totally cutting my companion). It still doesn’t get to the bottom of the question – did anyone consciously legislate for this bottomless subsidy to arise? – but there is one obvious key beneficiary.
Once it became clear that far from subsidising the vast cash giveaway, the UK government was going to claw it back from the Northern Ireland budget, the shit hit the fan and politicians and ministers began manoeuvring not just to avoid blame but also to extract the maximum amount of money from the system before it was closed. As a BBC journalist put it:
‘Those ongoing costs are likely to be at least £400 million. That could have paid for the new Omagh Hospital, the dualling of the A26 at Frosses [between Ballymena and Ballymoney], the York Street Interchange and the Belfast Rapid Transit System. With £15m left over.’
McBride despairs over the incompetence of the Civil Service in allowing the system to have arisen in the first place, and the incompetence of ministerial oversight. Jonathan Bell, the DUP minister who actually exposed the scandal in the first place, is himself exposed as bad-tempered and over-indulging in alcohol, under-briefed and displacing responsibility. Arlene Foster, on whose watch the scheme was set up and who then became First Minister, seems to have been curiously indifferent to the potential problems.
If Arlene Foster had followed the example of Peter Robinson, and stepped aside for a few weeks for a preliminary investigation to clear her of personal misconduct, devolution would have continued and the DUP would likely still be the largest party in Northern Ireland. As it was, she let ego override strategy, not for the first or last time. Sinn Fein also come in for criticism for their management of the financial side, and for the fact that ministerial decisions are still apparently being signed off by non-elected individuals.
I won’t embarrass them, but I am glad that the two people who I know best out of the whole disappointing story, a senior DUP special advisor and a senior civil servant (now retired), come out rather well; my DUP friend was only peripherally involved by all accounts, and my civil servant friend was one of the first to realise how badly things had gone wrong and, crucially, to accept responsibility.
I felt at the time that it was actually quite healthy for a Stormont government to fall over an actual issue of governance, rather than something related to the Norn Iron Problem – the only precedent is the deposition of John Miller Andrews in 1943. McBride however shows that the Norn Iron Problem includes the problem of a very small pool of political and administrative talent in a territory with such a small population, and this was one of the factors in the RHI scandal.
This is something that I have observed in my dealings with other small states. The issue isn’t whether the polity is economically viable, it’s whether there are enough smart people around to run it properly. I think the critical mass is probably around 2 million, the size of Slovenia, unless you have positive immigration boosting the numbers (eg Luxembourg). Northern Ireland, at 1.7 million, isn’t quite there yet.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019; you can get it here. Next on that pile is A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell.
End of this very enjoyable series of graphic novels, which tells the story of the reawakening of King Arthur as an evil undead monster and the efforts of our plucky heroes (grandma, grandson, grandson’s girlfriend) to contain the situation. Loads more archetypes from English cultural history get thrown in here, notably King Lear and T.S. Eliot, and the ending is suitably dramatic and more or less final. It’s nice to see a project like this reach a satisfying ending. You can get it here.
As to the others… Bảo Duy was endearing but reckless, and Lành was extremely difficult to deal with or protect, which added to the annoyance.
A lovely dark story about four women from different Vietnamese spacefaring clans, who get thrown together to ward off an unspeakable horror which threatens them all, with undercurrents of deadly inter-clan politics and internal romance. The protagonist is subtly coded as autistic as well. The novella is often the ideal length for a story like this, allowing the writer to put in enough world-building and characterisation and yet not get lost in too long a plot. You can get it here.
Current A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell Inside the Stargazers’ Palace, by Violet Moller Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee
Last books finished The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells Ithaca, by Claire North Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin De bondgenoten 1, by Brecht Evens Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Richard Dinnick et al Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh
Next books Doctor Who: TARDIS Type Forty Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott
“Sandor’s Tycho Memorial!” Pepe jogged my ribs. “There’s the old monument at the American capital! I know it from Dian’s videos.”
This won the the 2001 Best Novelette Award in both the Hugos and the Nebulas, the author having been born in 1908, making him certainly the oldest person to win either award in, I suspect, any category (Retro Hugos aside). These were the only final ballot places for fiction that Williamson ever got in his long career (his autobiography won a Hugo for Best Nonfiction Book sixteen years earlier, in 1985).
I wrote at the time of the Hugo final ballot that although I preferred Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” and Greg Egan’s “Oracle”:
None of the others were real turkeys though. “The Ultimate Earth” didn’t have a very satisfactory ending but that seems to be standard for stories about nanotechnology.
“The Ultimate Earth” came eighth in the Locus poll, which normally hews closer to the Hugo and Nebula rankings, and only fourth in Analog‘s own readers poll of novellas of 2000. (The Locus poll was won by “Radiant Green Star” by Lucius Shepard, and the Analog poll by “A Roll of the Dice”, by Catherine Asaro, both of which were also Hugo and Nebula finalists.) Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” surely has shown more staying power; likewise Greg Egan’s “Oracle”.
Looking back now, it’s clear that the Hugo and Nebula voters of the day were honoring Williamson’s career rather than the qualities of this particular story, which is rather old-fashioned despite the use of nanotechnology.
After disaster strikes Earth, a group of clone children who have been raised on the Moon steal a spaceship to go back to the home planet. They find it is not what they expected (this is where the nanobots come in) and head off into the stars. Not very new ideas, and not really done in a new way. But you can get it here.
The Hugo for Best Novel went to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; the Nebula to Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose, neither of which are brilliant choices. There is better luck in some other categories – Dave Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness” is a jewel of a short story Hugo winner, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won both Hugo and Nebula
Next in this series of joint Hugo/Nebula winners will be “Hell Is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang. After that, I will skip American Gods and Coraline and go straight on to Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold.
But now I have to say, just to clear my conscience, that sometimes I was in charge of the installations-strong technologies made for the insides of boys’ heads. Every batch was mass-assembled somewhere in [redacted], and when Èkó had marked them, had storied them in full, we inserted the chips pre-loaded with information on how boys would and should be. I watched the new skulls move through the conveyor belt in a cyclical choreography—perfect carbon copies. Some of us messengers were responsible for coding these cultures in the lab; others of us were in charge of delivering them, of fixing them in boys’ heads as soon as we were sure they’d at least live long enough to become men.
Interesting to come to this soon after Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, which is also sf (well, fantasy really) set in Nigeria. There are big differences, though; the protagonist(s) of Freshwater move back and forth across the Atlantic, whereas the vagabonds of Vagabonds! are swimming around the murky middle and lower reaches of society in Lagos.
I made a mistake in reading it, in that I did not realise that it was more a collection of linked short stories than a novel, and got frustrated that later chapters introduced new characters without giving closure to earlier plot lines. That’s partly on me (though to an extent also on the publisher for describing it as a novel on the dust jacket). But I think the writer can sometimes demand too much of the reader in discerning the book’s structure.
It’s a very intense description of life at the margins, especially the queer margins, in a developing city economy. The deities Èkó and Tatafo guide us through the narrative (which is why the Clarke jury felt that it fell on the fantasy side of the line), but they don’t intervene much, allowing humans to make their own mistakes. The book is fuelled by an energising rage against injustice. It’s passionate and well-described; but as mentioned, I felt the last couple of steps to make it fully coherent were missing. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on that pile is DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee.
Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue paper.
Another in my dwindling pile of minor Wellsiana, this 1917 novel concerns the Reverend Edward Scrope, Bishop of Princhester, whose faith is challenged by its irrelevance to the people of his industrialised diocese and by the horrors of war. Scrope deals with this difficulty by falling under the influence of an attractive and rich parishioner, and taking mind-altering drugs. He resigns from the Church completely, goes through further spiritual wrestling and finds his own accommodation at the end, though one feels that his wife is unenthused by the new state of affairs, never mind their five daughters.
One of the few unexpected things I learned about the English way of life when I went to study at Cambridge aged 19 is that there are a lot of people, if a minority, who take the Church of England seriously, something that was not apparent from the popular culture that I had absorbed growing up in Belfast. Wells isn’t quite sure how funny he should be here. He finds the Church itself ridiculous, but wants to make us sympathise with the bishop’s spiritual torment (which is expressed at length). The story ends up falling between two stools, and has been justifiably forgotten over the last 108 years. But you can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is another H.G. Wells novel, Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump.
Brezovica Žumberačka has only a few houses, with thirty or so inhabitants, occupying an area of less than two hectares, but with the ‘neighbouring’ Slovenian village, Brezovica pri Metliki, it forms one place. Interestingly, it seems that the Croatian and Slovenian authorities are not entirely sure exactly where the border line is. It is even possible that there are currently a few more miniature enclaves and exclaves. Although this situation is less of an issue now that Slovenia and Croatia have entered into the European Union, a bizarre possibility is the fact that one house, together with the land around it, does not belong to either country. This would make it the so-called terra nullius, namely, no man’s land. This has created an opportunity for the proclamation of an independent country, which was exploited in a virtual way. A website for the newly formed Kingdom of Enclava emerged on the Internet, though it had nothing to do with the inhabitants of the house itself. After the Slovenian government officially declared it to be their territory, the Enclava moved to one of the disputed islands in the River Danube, on the border between Serbia and Croatia.
This is a very attractive book listing 47 cases of unusual borders around the world. As a map geek myself of many years’ standing, I was aware of most of these (and sorry that a couple of my favorites were missed, the Iliemi Triangle, the Drummully salient, and the now resolved case of the Chiṭmahals), but they are all sensitively explained and well illustrated. There is lots of potential for trivia here: where, for instance, is there a direct land frontier between the Netherlands and France? (In the Caribbean.) It would also be interesting to know what daily life is like in a situation like Baarle. Anyway, it’s a lovely production, and you can get it here.
See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Yemen, as explained further below.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced
Nujood Ali
23,627
1,231
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Paul Torday
16,461
1,631
The Panther
Nelson DeMille
23,158
1,125
The Monk of Mokha
Dave Eggers
20,958
754
Sold
Zana Muhsen
7,759
464
Henna House
Nomi Eve
4,266
215
Motoring with Mohammed
Eric Hansen
1,611
343
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky
Jennifer Steil
1,432
153
Yemen has not been well served in the literature available in the West. Two of the above are about child slavery and sexual abuse (I Am Nujood and Sold) and the rest are all by foreigners (Jennifer Steil’s memoir of teaching journalism sounds particularly dire).
I excluded a lot of books which cover Yemen along with other places. Three of these were fiction: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (mainly set in Ethiopia), The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, which is set all over the Indian Ocean (but with Oman rather than Yemen as the heroine’s home base), and Black Mamba Boy, by Nadifa Mohamed, which starts in Yemen but is mostly set in East Africa.
The rest were non-fiction; War on Terror punditry (The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright; Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill), regional travelogues (Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger; Baghdad Without a Map, by Tony Horwitz), and general reporting (Our Women on the Ground, ed. Zahra Hankir). I am also sad to have to disqualify Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767, by Thorkild Hansen, which looks fascinating, but only 90 pages out of 370 are actually set in Yemen.
One case of huge divergence between Goodreads and LibraryThing: The Handsome Jew, by Yemeni writer Ali al-Muqri, has 2,955 raters on GR, but only 8 owners on LibraryThing, which clearly has failed to penetrate the Yemeni market. The more traditional travel books score comparatively better on LT.
Next up: Canada. This will not be at all surprising.
Marge from maintenance helped him hoof down fresh tubing and all his welding gear.
From the 2020 Hugo Voter Packet, a grim but very short story humanising the ecological devastation that we are wreaking on whales. You can get it here.
The BSFA long lists are out again. Some of them are longer than others. As usual, I’ve run them through the Goodreads and LibraryThing catalogues to see which of the longlisted works have scored on the two biggest book reviewing websites.
Not very surprisingly, this doesn’t work for the 23 longlisted works for Best Artwork, nor for the 26 longlisted works for Best Short Non-Fiction, none of which have been logged as separate publications by GR or LT users. For the other categories, the highest and median numbers for each system are as follows:
Category
GR highest
GR median
LT highest
LT median
Best Novel
102,956
398
1,432
35
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
88,111
428.5
878
30
Best Shorter Fiction
5,260
7
186
1
Best Collection
5,253
11
158
4
Best Non-Fiction (Long)
129
2
31
1
Best Short Fiction
164
0
10
0
Best Original Audio Fiction
53
0
3
0
Unlike last year, thee of the eight long-listees for Best Original Audio Fiction do feature on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. All three are Big Finish audios.
Title
Author
GR
LT
Doctor Who: The Quin Dilemma
Chapman, Valentine, Rayner
53
3
Torchwood: The Hollow Choir
Marshall, Devlin
27
2
Torchwood: Bad Connection
Aaron Lamont
23
2
The Best Short Fiction longlist features no less than 80 stories, of which I was able to find three which have been published separately and thus feature in the online catalogues.
Title
Author
GR
LT
Spill
Cory Doctorow
164
10
Evan: A Remainder
Jordan Kurella
78
2
Unquiet on the Eastern Front
Wole Talabi
15
2
Ten of the seventeen long-listed works in the Best Non-Fiction (Long) category are on either Goodreads of LibraryThing or both. Two of the other seven are podcasts, which wouldn’t usually score anyway. The ten which do feature are:
Title
Author
GR
LT
Everything Must Go
Dorian Lynskey
129
31
Speculative Whiteness
Jordan S. Carroll
23
4
Track Changes
Abigail Nussbaum
8
5
Spec Fic for Newbies Volume 2
Angus, Nolan
5
3
The Book Blinders
John Clute
3
3
Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction
Eugen Bacon (ed)
2
3
Urban Fantasy
Stefan Ekman
2
1
Utopia on the Tabletop
Jo Lindsay Walton
0
2
The Boom and The Boom
Guanghzhao Lyu
1
0
Three, Two, One, Let’s Jam!
Satoru Stevenson
1
0
I was able to find 48 of the 51 long-listees for Best Collection on one system or the other.
Title
Author
GR
LT
Your Utopia
Bora Chung
3140
158
She’s Always Hungry
Eliza Clarke
5253
62
Mystery Lights
Lena Valencia
532
40
New Adventures in Space Opera
Jonathan Strahan (ed)
196
31
Convergence Problems
Wole Talabi
209
28
The Inhumans and Other Stories
Bodhisattva Chattopadh(ed)
48
22
I Want That Twink Obliterated
Chris McCartney
41
13
North Continent Ribbon
Ursula Whitcher
33
9
A Jura for Julia
Ken Macleod
11
14
Pick Your Potion
Ephiny Gale
50
3
Deep Dream
Indrapramit Das (ed)
14
7
To the Stars and Back
Ian Whates (ed)
14
7
Calvaria Fell
Sparks & Warren
12
7
Limelight and Other Stories
Lyndsey Croal
38
2
Elephants in Bloom
Cecile Cristofari
7
10
Back Through the Flaming Door
Liz Williams
8
8
Discontinue if Death Ensues
Gyzander & Taborska (eds)
17
3
The Butterfly Disjunct
Stewart C. Baker
41
1
Nova Scotia Volume 2
Williamson & Wilson (eds)
6
6
Heartwood
Dan Coxon (ed)
3
11
Laughs in Space
Donna Scott (ed)
7
4
The Utopia of Us
Teika Marja Smits (ed)
5
5
Drive or be Driven
Aliya Whiteley
3
8
The Mad Butterfly’s Ball
Grassman & Kelso (eds)
7
3
Our Savage Heart
Justina Robson
2
10
Bestiary of Blood
Jamal Hodge (ed)
14
1
Different Kinds of Defiance
Renan Bernardo
14
1
Egypt + 100
Ahmed Naji (ed)
14
1
All Tomorrow’s Futures
Benjamin Greenaway (ed)
4
3
Schrodinger’s Wife (And Other Possibilities)
Pippa Goldschmidt
5
2
Little Sisters & Other Stories
Vonda N. McIntyre
3
3
Gallus
Faulds, Milton & Williamson (eds)
4
2
A Stitch Between Worlds
Frazier Armitage
7
1
Cursed Shards
Leanbh Pearson (ed)
3
2
Human Resources
Fiona Moore
1
4
Three Curses & Other Dark Tales
Leanbh Pearson
1
1
The Neurodiverseiverse
Francis & Olmsted (eds)
18
0
A Night so Dark and Full of Stars
Nikky Lee
12
0
Fight Like a Girl 2
Clarke & Hall (eds)
8
0
Offshoots: Humanity Twigged
Juliana Rew
8
0
The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2023)
Ekpeki & Eziaghighala (eds)
7
0
A Place Between Waking and Forgetting
Eugen Bacon
5
0
Extrasensory Overload
Chun Hyon Lee (ed)
3
0
Sunflowers in the Snow
Dawn Bonnano
3
0
Different Times and Other Places
Juliet Mckenna
1
0
Out of the Window Into the Dark
Marian Womack
1
0
Triangulation: Hospitium
Brandon Ketchum (ed)
0
1
Weathering Youth
Dawn Vogel
1
0
In the Best Shorter Fiction category, 23 of the 41 long-listed works feature on LibraryThing and 25 on Goodreads; almost all of the rest are periodical or website publications.
Title
Author
GR
LT
The Butcher of the Forest
Premee Mohammed
5,260
186
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
Anne de Marken
4,733
122
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles
Malka Older
2,090
159
The Practice, The Horizon and the Chain
Sofia Samatar
1,455
102
Lost Ark Dreaming
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
982
58
Saturation Point
Adrian Tchakovksy
1,459
34
Navigational Entanglements
Aliette de Bodard
480
64
Countess
Suzan Palumbo
341
35
Unexploded Remnants
Elaine Gallagher
201
30
The Dragonfly Gambit
A.D. Sui
135
12
A Cursed Hunt
Rebecca Grey
96
4
12 Hours
L. Marie Wood
42
4
Charlie Says
Neil Williamson
28
3
Elephants in Bloom
Cecile Cristofari
7
10
Songs for the Shadows
Cheryl S. Ntumy
13
4
Ghost Apparent
Jelena Dunato
51
1
The Year of Return
Akotowaa Ivana Ofori
41
1
No Sympathy
Eoin Dooley
32
1
The Last to Drown
Lorraine Wilson
29
1
Star Pattern Traveller
Joyce Ch’ng
6
4
Luna
Allen Stroud
10
2
Waypoint Seven
Xan van Rooyen
6
1
The Runemaster’s Daughter
Lawrence Schoen
2
1
Jezero
Allen Stroud
7
0
Chimera
Chinaza Eziaghigala
1
0
All fourteen of the long-listed works in the Best Fiction for Younger Readers category score on both systems.
Title
Author
GR
LT
Somewhere Beyond the Sea
T J Klune
88,811
878
Immortal Dark
Tigest Girma
11,881
462
Snowglobe
Soyoung Park
4,177
163
Blood at the Root
LaDarrion Williams
2,767
112
Songlight
Moira Buffini
1,344
67
Until We Shatter
Kate Dylan
946
85
The Dividing Sky
Jill Tew
491
28
Redsight
Meredith Mooring
366
32
Doctor Who: Caged
Una McCormack
161
13
Benny Ramirez and the Nearly Departed
Jose Pablo Iriarte
113
11
Braided
Leah Cypess
53
4
Wayfinders
Bryan Chick
59
3
Rebel Dawn
Ann Sei Lin
40
2
The Rarkyn’s Fall
Nikky Lee
16
1
And finally, with apologies for the length of this post, all 61 of the works long-listed for Best Novel are on Goodreads and/or LibraryThing. (59 on GR and 60 on LT.) On the version of the long-list I was working from, one novel was actually listed twice, but I’ve only listed it once here (and there’s another which also features in the Best Shorter Fiction list).
Title
Author
GR
LT
The Ministry of Time
Kaliane Bradley
102,956
1,432
Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands
Heather Fawcett
64,569
1,022
A Sorceress Comes To Call
T. Kingfisher
25,913
716
An Education in Malice
S. T. Gibson
16,561
400
The Teller of Small Fortunes
Julie Leong
11,357
521
The Book of Love
Kelly Link
7,027
378
Someone You can Build a Nest In
John Wiswell
8,063
278
Alien Clay
Adrian Tchaikovsky
6,253
218
Absolution
Jeff Vandermeer
4,517
279
Fathomfolk
Eliza Chan
3,341
365
Private Rites
Julia Armfield
5,658
155
Floating Hotel
Grace Curtis
2,790
177
The Mars House
Natasha Pulley
2,666
167
House of Open Wounds
Adrian Tchaikovsky
2,347
163
Machine Vendetta
Alastair Reynolds
2,978
128
Womb City
Tlotlo Tsamaase
2,193
132
The Principle of Moments
Esme Jikiemi-Pearson
1,209
200
The Great When
Alan Moore
1,196
195
The Briar Book of the Dead
A G Slatter
2,163
105
The Bezzle
Cory Doctorow
1,789
125
Rakesfall
Vajra Chandrasekera
622
91
Deep Black
Miles Cameron
1,283
41
Asunder
Kerstin Hall
795
57
The Wings Upon Her Back
Samantha Mills
615
73
Lady Eve’s Last Con
Rebecca Fraimow
594
69
Navigational Entanglements
Aliette de Bodard
480
64
Calypso
Oliver K. Langmead
422
47
The Legacy of Arniston House
T. L. Huchu
526
36
On Vicious Worlds
Bethany Jacobs
588
24
The Last Shield
Cameron Johnstone
398
31
Redsight
Meredith Mooring
366
33
Beyond the Light Horizon
Ken Mcleod
415
27
The Siege of Burning Grass
Premee Mohammed
281
37
Lake of Darkness
Adam Roberts
235
32
The Collapsing Wave
Doug Johnstone
361
17
Three Eight One
Aliya Whiteley
201
30
The Nightward
R. S. A. Garcia
161
36
Archangels of Funk
Andrea Hairston
147
35
Morphotrophic
Greg Egan
203
11
The Book of Gold
Ruth Frances Long
101
21
Archipelago
H. R. Hawkins
201
7
Ninth Life
Stark Holborn
103
11
The Tapestry of Time
Kate Heartfield
106
10
Extremophile
Ian Green
94
11
The Green Man’s War
Juliet Mckenna
108
8
Grim Root
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
121
7
Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory
Yaroslav Barsukov
91
8
We Are All Ghosts in the Forest
Lorraine Wilson
92
6
The Heart of Winter
Shona Kinsella
85
6
Conquist
Dirk Strasser
40
5
Inversions
M.V. Melcer
36
3
Vigilance
Allen Stroud
16
6
Dark Shepherd
Fred Gambino
13
6
Rabbit in the Moon
Fiona Moore
5
5
Her Gilded Voice
K.C. Aegis
24
1
Three Men in Orbit
Sandra Bond
4
6
Watermyth
Anita Harris Satkunan
8
2
The Headland
Abi Curtis
10
1
The Factory
Ihor Mysiak
0
4
Dakini Atoll
Nikhil Singh
0
2
That Perfect World
BXMN
1
0
As I said last year, I don’t really know how useful a long-list of 51, 61 or indeed 80 can be. I appreciate that awards can call attention to otherwise overlooked work, but a) I’m not convinced that an award decided by popular vote, as the BSFA and Hugo Awards are, is the best vehicle for doing that and b) this is best done with a short list, not a long list where the most interesting stuff risks getting lost in the crowd.
Non-fiction 8 The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith Fifty Years On: The Troubles and the Struggle for Change in Northern Ireland, by Malachi O’Doherty The Atlas of Unusual Borders: Discover intriguing boundaries, territories and geographical curiosities, by Zoran Nikolić Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride The Atlas of Unusual Languages: An exploration of language, people and geography, by Zoran Nikolić How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir, by Hans Rosling
Non-genre 5 A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells
SF 10 Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow Orbital, by Samantha Harvey I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman The Song, by Erinn L. Kemper Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde The Ultimate Earth, by Jack Williamson Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon The Lights Go Out in Lychford, by Paul Cornell Ithaca, by Claire North
Doctor Who 4 Doctor Who annual 2025, by Paul Lang Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell (audiobook) Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones (audiobook)
Comics 2 The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
7,200 pages 10/29 by non-male writers (McNicoll, Datlow, Harvey, Harpmann, Kemper, Osunde, de Bodard, Solomon, North, Bonvillain) 4/29 by non-white writers (Vuong, Osunde, de Bodard, Solomon) 2/29 rereads (The Ultimate Earth, Killing Ground) 247 books currently tagged unread, down 14 from last month, down 58 from January 2024.
Reading now Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read, almost finished!) De bondgenoten, by Brecht Evens Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
Coming soon (perhaps) The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee Doctor Who: TARDIS Type Forty Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Kevin Decker and Ryan Parrey A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells Braver, Greener, Fairer: Memos to the EU Leadership 2019-2024, ed. Maria Demertzis The Secret Places of the Heart, by H. G. Wells Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by Dr John Barton The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple “Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al
She had been in Madden’s Bar in Belfast and had turned to a man she thought was me and said hello.
I was lucky enough to be in Northern Ireland on the day that this book was launched, attended, bought it and got it signed. I know the author if not very well; I guess we have been on each other’s radar for a long time.
It’s about the fifty years in Northern Ireland, more specifically Belfast, from 1969 to 2019, of which the first thirty were consumed with the Troubles and the next twenty with the new post-peace process society as it develops. It’s a big book – almost 400 pages – and covers not only the politics of violence, and the constitutional question, but also the more fundamental shifts to what was a very conservative society in the 1960s: women’s rights, gay rights, language rights.
It’s a very personal tale, explaining better than I’ve seen from anywhere else how very much the outbreak of violence in the late 1960s was a bolt from the blue, unanticipated by anyone including the perpetrators, and how the prelapsarian geography of Belfast got reshaped by sectarian brutality. As well as recounting his own memories, O’Doherty interviews a lot of current players with different views than his own, including on the diehard Loyalist side, and gives them space to articulate their perspective.
I was inwardly amused that the people in the book who I do know personally are concentrated in the feminism / gay rights chapters rather than the more political chapters. Though on reflection perhaps this does point to a gap in the perspectives presented; I miss any mention of integrated education, mixed marriages, or the growth of the vote for non-aligned political parties. Less exciting perhaps, but not unimportant.
I see some reviewers complaining that if you don’t already know much about Northern Ireland, the wealth of information and number of personalities make it difficult to follow. I’m not in the at-risk category of not knowing enough about Northern Ireland, and I very much enjoyed it, and even learned a few things from it. You can get it here.
This was (shamefully) the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread pile. Next up there is Braver, Greener, Fairer: Memos to the EU Leadership 2019-2024, ed. Maria Demertzis.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read, almost finished!) Ithaca, by Claire North De bondgenoten, by Brecht Evens The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
Last books finished Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride The Atlas of Unusual Languages: An exploration of language, people and geography, by Zoran Nikolić How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir, by Hans Rosling The Lights Go Out in Lychford, by Paul Cornell
Next books The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis
The 2009 Hugos were the only year of the seven from 2006 to 2012 where a Doctor Who episode failed to win, comprehensively thrashed by Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, though with Turn Left coming third. (Sorry that the final ballot stats on the right are cramped, but you can click to embiggen.)
When I first write about this TV story in 2009, I said:
Unlike a lot of people I wasn’t overwhelmed by Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. On re-watching, I enjoyed it more, but still feel it is weaker than Moffat’s previous New Who stories. Perhaps I am being unfair, and I guess that expecting another Blink is not reasonable. I must admit that as sf, its concept works very well – the intersecting levels of reality, the time-traveller who meets a lover from his own future; and as drama it is pretty effective, with Alex Kingston and Catherine Tate particularly strong, and the utterly horrible creepiness of the ghosting data chips (“Who turned out the lights?”, etc).
My two problems with it are both to do with River Song’s story. To get the easier one out of the way, her ending is not a particularly happy one; she is still dead, and gets to spend an ersatz afterlife in the computer’s memory with her crew rather than with the man she loves. (If you work or have ever worked in a team with other people, just consider for a moment whether you would prefer to spend eternity with them or with your lover.) The script didn’t quite do justice to the tragedy of River’s story for me.
My other problem is that while the story works as sf and (apart from the above niggle) as drama I’m not so sure it works as Doctor Who. Back in 2006 I enjoyed The Girl in the Fireplace, but rated it below School Reunion, because one of my sources of enjoyment in Who is its dealing with its own mythology, and another is the relationship that we as viewers build up with the regular characters, and TGitF did not deliver much on the second and nothing on the first of these. Now, where at least TGitF had a decent start and closure to the Doctor’s love story, with Renette’s death ending their relationship, SitL/FotD cheats us because we are asked to care very deeply about the Doctor/River dynamic, without getting the payoff of it becoming a regular plot theme. (No televised return to explore River’s past relationship with the Doctor seems likely now, and anyway it would hardly get satisfactory treatment in the time we have left.) So while this episode may well get strong support from Hugo voters who are not regular Who watchers, I was and am surprised by the favour it has found among fans.
It’s rare that I come back to a review and admit that I was completely wrong, but as it turned out, I was completely wrong. River Song went on to be a fixture of the Eleventh Doctor’s era, her origins were a major plot line for Series 6, and she has made the occasional appearance since then (plus a well-received set of Big Finish spinoff audio plays). Looked at now, the story is a clever pitch-rolling for the future arc of the show. An important data point is that it was written precisely at the moment that Stephen Moffat was deciding whether or not to be the new show-runner.
And I mentioned it in my first paragraph, but did not give enough credit to the story’s success as drama. The ghosting data chips are truly horrible and awful and compelling, and Donna’s alternative history rather moving (capped with Lee’s inability to get her attention at the last moment). Midnight is still my favourite episode of a good season, but Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead succeeds better than I allowed at the time.
Dale Smith’s Black Archive on the story ranges far and wide across Stephen Moffat’s œuvre, not only in Doctor Who but in Press Gang, Coupling, etc, to explore where the themes of the story come from. The first chapter, “An Irrational Fear of the Dark”, considers Moffat’s vision for Doctor Who as fairy tale, not at all in a negative way.
The second chapter, “Please Tell Me You Know Who I Am”, looks at the origin and subsequent life of River Song, and at Moffat’s attitude to time-travel and continuity.
The third chapter, “Nothing More Than Virtual Reality”, looks at the philosophical and biological basis of identity, and death. Its second paragraph is:
The idea that real life is a simulation is one with a long history, from 1 Corinthians 13:123, via Descartes’ evil demon4, to the more SF idea of the brain in a vat, fed false images of the world it is living in5, like Morbius if Solon had been of a more philosophical bent. It’s an extension of any number of conspiracy theories that provide comfort by putting somebody secretly in charge of the apparently arbitrary randomness and cruelty of real life, only better because it is unprovable: whoever runs the simulation has complete control over our ability to perceive that we are simulations, and so anything that might seem to disprove the idea can simply be re-assimilated as proof of the opposite. It is the perfect teapot in space6, an idea maintained by faith alone and with so little impact on day-to-day life as to be completely useless. But in Silence / Forest, it is uncomplicatedly positive: a chance to cheat death and live for as long as there is a Lux family willing to ensure the real-world hardware doesn’t go down. 3 ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly’, The Bible, King James translation. 4 Descartes, René, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’. 5 Putnam, Hilary, ‘Reason, Truth and History’. 6 Russell, Bertrand, ‘Is There a God? [1952]’, In Slater, John G. (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11, pp 542-548.
The fourth chapter, “It Can’t Be the Books, Can It?” looks at books and archives, with a diversion into classification systems, and the power of the written word.
The fifth, final, and longest chapter, “Brilliant and Unloved”, looks at how Stephen Moffat writes women, how he writes men’s relationships with women, and how this all adds up to the writing of River Song.
This is an unusual Black Archive in that it ranges far beyond the story in question to look at the work of the story’s writer. But Stephen Moffat is one of the two most significant writers of New Who (I’ll not choose here between him and RTD as to who is #1 and who is #2), and so it’s definitely worth the excursion into the bigger picture. It does mean that the book isn’t as much about the actual story in question as most of the Black Archives are, but there is no harm in variety. You can get it here.
A woman, not yet thirty, clutches her daughter on the shoulder of a dirt road in a beautiful country where two men, M-16s in their hands, step up to her. She is at a checkpoint, a gate made of concertina and weaponized permission. Behind her, the fields have begun to catch. A braid of smoke through a page-blank sky. One man has black hair, the other a yellow mustache like a scar of sunlight. Stench of gasoline coming off their fatigues. The rifles sway as they walk up to her, their metal bolts winking in afternoon sun.
I came across this when compiling my list of the best known books set in Vietnam; it wasn’t clear to me from online commentary if it satisfied my criterion of more than 50% of it being set in the country. Now that I’ve read it, I can tell you that it doesn’t; the majority of the book is set in Hartford, Connecticut, with a fair bit of back-story in Vietnam and a bit in New York at the end.
It’s quite a tough read. The protagonist is growing up queer and Asian in a very white and straight town. His mother endured unspeakable traumas in Vietnam and passes these on to him to a certain extent. The language is lyrical and convincing but the content rather gruelling. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that pile is Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott, the best-known book published in 1875.
There’s a whole run of original Doctor Who audiobooks which I have only recently discovered. (List on Tardis.wikia, as there doesn’t seem to be an official listing page.) I had listened to several of them without realising it, but now that I have a full list I can go through them systematically.
I am starting, of course, at the end, with two recently produced stories of the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby. On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell and read by Susan Twist, takes the two of them to the County Durham coastline in 1958 where they get tangled up with a ghost story and deal with intruders from another dimension. It’s nicely done, though Susan Twist makes the Doctor more Scottish than Ncuti Gatwa actually sounds. You can get it here.
Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones, read by Genesis Lynea, did not satisfy me as much. The TARDIS lands in contemporary Washington State, where we encounter a park ranger and Bigfoot hunter. Inevitably the Sasquatch turn out to be aliens on their own mission, dealing with rather yukky parasitic telepathic worms. I think the story is basically fine, but Genesis Lynea (who played Sutekh’s Harbinger in The Legend of Ruby Sunday) took some time to get into her stride in the reading, starting off rather flat and oddly paced; it’s quite a different skill from stage acting. So it’s less warmly recommended, I’m afraid. You can get it here.
This week’s winner is not at all surprising. The Kite Runner‘s 3.3 million Goodreads raters beats any book I have looked at so far in this sequence, apart from Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (Italy), and the top books set in the UK and USA. On LibraryThing, its 54,000 owners beat all books other than Romeo and Juliet (also Italy), and again, the top books set in the UK and USA. It really is quite a phenomenon.
As noted, I excluded two books: Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea, which qualified previously under Pakistan, and Laurence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which covers many places besides Afghanistan.
I’m relieved that there are only two US military stories on the list, and one of those (by Jon Krakauer) is distinctly dissident. But one feels that, were it not for Khaled Hossaini, the literature available to Goodreads and LibraryThing users would almost exclusively portray Afghanistan as a place where white people go and do things which may or may not involve dead locals. Flashman was not much further down the list.
Next is Yemen, which I am surprised to learn has a bigger population than Canada or Poland.