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Posted on 10 November 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

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 usually a purchase link for Amazon UK. (Yes, I know; but I get no other financial reward for writing all of this.)

I have a couple of other blogging projects. Every 1 January, I post about science fiction stories set in the year to come, but written more than twenty years before. So far I have done this for 2020 (little did we know…), 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.

I am also posting weekly analysis of the most well-known book set in every country, by the imperfect measure of ownership on the three main bookshelf sites, LibraryThing, Goodreads and Storygraph. You can find those posts here.

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.

The Web Planet, by Bridget Cherry; Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton

Posted on 28 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first started to watch The Web Planet in 2007, the DVD was unfortunately still in my laptop when it was stolen by a sneak thief at the Gare du Nord in Brussels. I got another copy eventually and wrote:

I got the DVD of The Web Planet, a First Doctor story from 1965 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, back in January; and then, after I had read Wood and Miles‘ excoriating description of it, the disc was in my laptop when it got stolen. But I caught up with this one over the weekend as well.

Oh dear.

It’s very brave to try and produce an entire six-part story with no humanoid characters other than the regular cast, and the production teeters on the edge of greatness but, ultimately, falls off and hurtles to its doom. I mean, the Zarbi, with their unearthly whistling, are actually pretty good, so good that you can nearly forget that they are blokes in giant ant costumes. And the disembodied Animus is pretty sinister. But the Venom Grubs are, frankly, pathetic. And the Menoptra, with their bizarre dance movements, and their pitiful Optera relatives, are just ludicrous. I can’t quite believe that this is the only story from the original Season Two (apart from the glorious Dalek Invasion of Earth) available on DVD. Almost any other would make more sense and be a better advertisement for Who as a whole. (I have reservations about The Chase, though it does at least have Daleks and a variety of settings, and I’ve only seen the first episode of The Space Museum so can’t speak to the whole of it, though I must say it really grabbed me.)

Maureen O’Brien is good as Vicki though, perhaps the best I remember her in any of her stories. The others are fine too, especially (as ever) Hartnell.

Coming back to it two years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

When I first watched The Web Planet two years ago I really didn’t rate it. In my current rewatch, it is the first story where I have revised my opinion significantly upwards. Unlike the other non-Dalek sfnal stories so far it looks weird rather than crap. I think I appreciate it much more now that I have got my watching brain acclimatised to the mid 1960s, as it were; and perhaps it is easier to take it an episode at a time rather than sitting down to watch all six. The Menoptra and Zarbi (and the Animus) are much more convincing aliens than the Voord or the Sensorites, the sets are excellent and the vaseline on the camera lenses adds to the air of alienness. It is no wonder that this was one of the very first novelisations, or that the first Doctor Who annual had not one but two stories set on Vortis. (The Optera and Venom Grubs are still a bit less convincing, but I was able to rise above that somehow.) We also see a lot more of the inside of the Tardis than ever before. Lots of good character moments for all four regulars, with Barbara saving the day.

Coming back to it, I attempted to binge the whole story in an evening, and I think this was a mistake; I found myself confused and actually a little bored. Yes, the makers of the show achieved miracles on a shoestring, but it’s difficult for today’s viewer to grasp. People who saw it the first time around were generally more impressed, most notably Peter Capaldi:

…those old shows were only made to be watched once, on a flickering monochrome telly that smelled of valves and furniture polish. In that context, they succeeded immeasurably. They were triumphs of imagination. It may surprise you now, but something like The Web Planet lived powerfully and expansively in my head for decades… until the DVDs came along and spoiled the party. But I’m glad to say that the Menoptra eventually flitted back into my dreams, where they belong.

The novel, Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton, the Australian writer of the original story, was the second Doctor Who novel ever published (after Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure with the Daleks). The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

“Chesterton, get back! Back!”

I (obviously) read it as a child, and was fascinated. Coming back to it in 2008, I wrote:

Doctor Who and the Zarbi was based on the story now generally called The Web Planet, which crashes and burns spectacularly awfully on screen because today’s viewers cannot take the production values seriously. The book is a bit better, because the printed page and the reader’s imagination, rather than the unforgiving camera, supplies the details of the various non-human races in conflict on the planet Vortis. In principle it makes a good sf story, perhaps the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era.

The book does suffer from a couple of weaknesses. Most bizarrely, and uniquely, the central character is referred to as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor” throughout, and the Tardis loses the definite article, as if Tardis was just the name of the vessel. Also, in places the book feels uncomfortably like what it is, a TV script cast in different format, and one feels that Strutton is just writing what appeared to the viewer on the screen. Having said that, though, the book is still better than the original TV story.

To call it “the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era” is a strong statement, and to be honest I think three of the four Hartnell Dalek stories are better contenders. But as a story, it’s at the upper end and the novelisation pulls that out. You can get Doctor Who and the Zarbi here.

The illustrations in the book are really striking.

They are credited to one John Wood, which is also the name of the BBC designer who worked on the TV story. Fannish lore, however, insists that these are two different people, and further that the illustrator John Wood is a mistake for John Woods, one of the illustrators who also worked on the three 1960s Dalek books (The Dalek Book, The Dalek World and The Dalek Outer Space Book). Unfortunately the three or four different artists who worked on the Dalek books are not credited individually, so it is difficult to compare.

I am not convinced by fannish lore. I think Occam’s Razor shaves closer to the possibility that the same artist designed the TV show and illustrated the book. Also, the Vicki in the illustrations is a brunette, whereas Maureen O’Brien at that age was blonde. Surely this indicates that the illustrations could have been based on the original production design, which might have dated from before Maureen O’Brien’s start on the show? The Web Planet was only her third story, and its first episode was her seventh. Also, if John Wood’s name was spelled incorrectly when the book was first published, surely he would have had a chance to correct it before a different publisher brought it out again ten years later?

Anyway. Brigid Cherry, a retired media studies academic who like Peter Capaldi is old enough to have seen the story when it was first broadcast in 1965, has written a redemptive Black Archive monograph on it. I must say that while my favourite Black Archives are those that tell me all the reasons why my favourite stories are so fantastic, I do also like the ones like this where the writer challenges my less positive views and finds reasons that I had not considered to appreciate a story. There are only three chapters, but they are long and it is a chunky read.

A substantial introduction, with the title “So the Legends Say: Receptions of The Web Planet“, looks at views of The Web Planet, contrasting the rather harsh take of modern fans such as me with the much more positive memories of those who saw it at the time, including the author herself, Stephen James Walker and contributors to an online forum. She doesn’t quote Peter Capaldi here, but his comments are fully aligned with her argument.

I’m going to lazily use the author’s summaries of her own chapters. “Chapter one [whose title is “Every Corner of Vortis: Televisuality”] explores the aesthetics of the story in relation to how television was made at the time, and the ways in which the mise-en-scène, art design, camerawork and other stylistic elements were determined by these production processes. In terms of The Web Planet being considered an ambitious, if not over-ambitious, experiment, this chapter also frames early Doctor Who, and this story specifically, as an example of the experimental television being produced at the time.”

“Chapter two [whose title is: “Flying Above thought: Performance”] extends this approach by further considering the performativity of the story, considering it in relation to art or media forms such as puppetry, mime, and avant-garde theatre. These two chapters are necessarily historiography (writing about the past) not in order to definitively answer the question of whether The Web Planet is great children’s TV or a failed experiment – it might be both, of course. Rather, it is an analysis intended to re-examine it from the perspective of TV production history and the history of the wider arts and popular culture of the time. Such historiography… can be both an account of industrial circumstances (in this instance, aspects of production and performance at the BBC in the 1960s) and a social history where the text reflects the national (or global) zeitgeist.”

The second paragraph of the third and final chapter (whose title is: “The Light is Good: Themes”) is:

There are several technological forms contrasted in The Web Planet: the organic technology of the Carsinome; the inorganic crystalline technology used by the Menoptra (the prime example of which is the communication device that Vrestin uses to contact the invasion force in ‘The Zarbi’); the metallic gold collars (again inorganic) used by the Zarbi to ‘morphotise’ victims; and the mysterious energy that powers the TARDIS itself and is shown to repel the Animus and Zarbi (potentially both organic and inorganic since the Doctor’s ship often seems ‘alive’). These various forms of technology are indicative of technological, and thus cultural, development in each of the character groupings in the narrative.

The author’s summary is: “chapter 3 turns to the textual meanings that underpin the story, revealing the ideological meanings and discourses in relation to the 1960s zeitgeist. This also draws on yet another element of historiography discussed by Hilmes, that is consideration of the conditions under which the popular culture text is consumed or experienced.”

The short conclusion, “The Silence of Time: Reappraising The Web Planet”, sums up what has been said, and ends:

Bear in mind that when the Doctor stops Ian from plunging his hand into the acid pool in the opening episode, the lesson to be learnt is to be more cautious before rushing in and take more time to better understand what we are seeing. It is past time to re-appraise The Web Planet in contexts other than an established fan canon born of naiveté or ignorance of television history. It is, then, time to come back to Vortis. As this book has argued, The Web Planet’s innovative approaches demand it is given its deserved status in the canon of British experimental television.

As I hope is clear by now, I found this an entertaining and thought-provoking read, and maybe the next time I pop the DVD in the player I’ll approach the story in a more redemptive frame of mind. You can get the Black Archive here.

There is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm

Posted on 27 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Andrew Hilton is more than ninety years old and hasn’t stood at his full height in ten. He was a tower of a man in his prime, two metres tall and built like a boxer. Nearly nobody he ever met was able to look him straight in the eye, at least not and tell him ‘No.’ Illness has gradually eaten away at that over the years. He feels as if he lives at the bottom of a deep bath, with everybody he ever meets looking down at him from slippery, unscalable walls, none of them able to reach down to help him. He’s spent his final months crumpled up in bed like a dying spider, changing to a corpse’s colour ahead of time. It might have been bearable if he’d lost his mind, but he remembers what he used to be: a leader, a powerhouse. He used to be able to alter the course of terrible events for the better, to get justice. He used to protect people.

One of the hotly tipped books this year, a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, this is a great story combining the vibes of A Scanner Darkly and H.P. Lovecraft, and perhaps a nod to the Silents of Matt Smith era Doctor Who, and Charlie Stross’s Laundry. The Antimemetics Division deals with entities which are invading us, taking our memories, our consciousness, our loves and emotions. and leaving nothing. People who have worked at the Division for years turn up and think it is their first day. The protagonist loses all knowledge of her husband. The sense of alienation and loss of trust in reality is tremendously conveyed. You do slightly wonder how the Antimemetics Division itself could withstand the tests of time, given the powerful nature of the opposition. But I enjoyed the ride a lot. You can get There is No Antimemetics Division here.

March 2006 books

Posted on 27 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.

March 2006 was a pretty memorable month for me. I had one of the most fun science fiction convention experiences I can remember at P-Con in Dublin, where I moderated four panels, one of which was interrupted by the BBC calling me for a statement on the death of Slobodan Milošević. My brains were eaten by Fluff.

I went on from Dublin (having spoken at a panel with Garret Fitzgerald) to Cyprus, where I presented the first Crisis Group report on the situation there at a packed event in the Ledra Palace Hotel on the Green Line. This was more significant than I had perhaps realised; it was the first time since the referendums of April 2004 that someone had come to the island to tell the Greek Cypriots that they had voted for continued partition. Tempers were still high (actually they still are, many years later) and one Greek Cypriot newspaper accused me of behaving “με αναίδεια χίλιων πιθήκων”, “with the impudence of a thousand monkeys”. But I feel it was one of the more important bits of work we did in my time at Crisis Group, and perhaps more important, I made friends on that trip who I am still in touch with. (The chap in the picture below is not one of them.)

I also presented the report in Athens and Istanbul, my first ever visit to Turkey. The reception was a bit more laid back in both cases.

Anne and I attempted to have a romantic weekend break to Maastricht. It rained. Weirdly enough I went back to that part of the world later in the month for a conference about Kosovo in a chateau very near by (in Château St-Gerlach). And we did a nice little report on the EU and the South Caucasus. Outside Crisis Group, I published a short note on how to proceed with EU integration, proposing the citizens’ dialogues later adopted by President Macron (who may have come up with the idea separately).

Meanwhile back at home, F made a scale model of the solar system in our back yard. Here are the Sun (portrayed by a space hopper), a barely visible Mercury, and more clearly visible Venus, Earth and Mars.

I read 11 books that month.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 10)
Does Anything Eat Wasps? And 101 Other Questions, ed. Mick O’Hare
The Discontinuity Guide: The Definitive Guide to the Worlds and Times of Doctor Who, by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping
Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea
Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, by Charles Townshend

sf 7 (YTD 16)
Air (or Have not Have), by Geoff Ryman
Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod
Thud!, by Terry Pratchett
Take Back Plenty, by Colin Greenland
Different Kinds of Darkness, by David Langford
Hidden Camera, by Zoran Živković
Swords in the Mist, by Fritz Leiber

4,200 pages (YTD 10,400)
None by women (YTD 5/29)
None by PoC (YTD 1/29)

This was a really good month for books as well, despite a certain lack of diversity. The top book of 2006 for me was Lost Lives, the gruelling account of people who died in the Troubles. You can get it (for a price!) here. Others that I particularly enjoyed were The Discontinuity Guide, which you can get here; Easter 1916, which you can get here; and Thud!, which you can get here.

The best known books set in each country: Serbia

Posted on 26 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Serbia is at the heart of the Balkans; south of Hungary, north of North Macedonia, east of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, northeast of Montenegro and Kosovo, west of Romania and Bulgaria. It became autonomous from the Ottoman Empire in 1804 and gradually expanded in territory and upgraded in status to the point that it became the spark for the First World War in 1914.

The war was pretty disastrous for Serbia – around 20-25% of its entire population is thought to have died during the 1914-18 period. But after the war it became the centre of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, incorporating large chunks of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the neighbouring state of Montenegro. Renamed Yugoslavia, this state was broken up during the second world war, but reassembled under the leadership of Marshal Tito, and lasted another 45 years after that.

There is no space to go into detail here about the break-up of Yugoslavia, which involved another three and a half wars (Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and the ten days of conflict in Slovenia) and also two peaceful separations (Macedonia and Montenegro). By the end, Serbia was back down to almost its 1914 borders with the addition of the Vojvodina north of Belgrade. Slobodan Milošević, who had become the Serbian leader in the late stages of Communism, remained in power until 2001. Since 2014 it has been under the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party.

I have been to Serbia many times, starting in 1998, and have many friends in and from there. My former assistant R from my Bosnia days now lives in Belgrade and has an Instagram travel blog called “Price iz kofera“, “Stories from a Suitcase”. Going back a lot further, my grandfather was given a Serbian military decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, for his part in the unsuccessful defence of the front line in Macedonia in 1915. I always enjoy going back. (Here’s Sirmium.)

Serbian is a Slavic language, mutually intelligible with Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, not quite as close to Slovenian in one direction and Macedonian and Bulgarian in the other. I am slightly above casual tourist level.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Serbia.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Fatherland – A Family History	Nina Bunjevac	1,700	135	352
The Library	Zoran Živković	3,042	139	158
The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander	Milorad Pavić	1,461	197	112
With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia	Åsne Seierstad	1,029	282	92
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia: A Memoir	Sofija Stefanovic	1,177	46	247
At The Lucky Hand	Goran Petrović	2,482	40	130
Götz and Meyer	David Albahari	614	214	91
The Use of Man	Aleksandar Tišma	886	180	49

This was unusually difficult to tally. Many books are tagged “serbia” on LibraryThing and Goodreads even if they are mostly set in Bosnia (or sometimes Kosovo). On the other hand, Serbian writers like Danilo Kiš, Zoran Živković and Milorad Pavić love setting their writing in an anonymous Eastern European location, which sometimes might be Serbia and sometimes might not. Indeed, when I did this analysis in 2015 I awarded the top spot to The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Olbreht, but having read it since then, I don’t think it is sufficiently explicit that the setting is Serbia for it to qualify. I have done my best with the list above.

This week’s winner, Fatherland, by Nina Bunjevac, also the StoryGraph winner, is a graphic novel about a girl whose mother moves the family back home to Serbia from Canada, to get away from the Serbian nationalist father who eventually accidentally blows himself up in Toronto. I have not been able to check in detail but it sounds similar to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, though maybe not such a classic.

I’m glad to see that this week’s Goodreads winner, The Library, is by the great Serbian magical realist writer Zoran Živković, who I actually met two decades ago. I’m aware that this requires some special pleading, in that the locations of the stories are not specified, but I thin most of the stories can be taken as set in the writer’s home of Belgrade – though admittedly the fourth story of the six is set in Hell and the fifth in a city where there are bookstalls under the Great Bridge, which I don’t think is the case in Belgrade.

The Inner Side of the Wind is a time travel romance set in Belgrade between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

With Their Backs to the Wind, this week’s LibraryThing winner, is reportage about life under Milošević.

Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is also non-fiction, about a girl growing up between Serbia and Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. It sounds like more of it is set in Serbia than Australia so I have allowed it on the list.

At The Lucky Hand is more magical realism set in Belgrade.

Götz and Meyer is about a Serbian teacher today obsessed with two SS men committing genocide in and around Belgrade in the second world war.

The Use of Man is about four people from Novi Sad, the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina, and their experiences in the second world war.

I excluded Srdja Popović’s Blueprint for Revolution which draws on the real-life lessons of the author’s involvement with the anti-Milošević Otpor movement, because when I checked I found that he had also drawn on a lot of other countries’ experiences of civil resistance.

I also excluded Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš, because on a page count it became clear to me that more than half of it is set in Hungary rather than Serbia.

Both Nina Bunjevac and Sofija Stefanovic found their muses by emigrating. The top Serbian woman writer by my metrics who is still in the country is Mirjana Novaković, best known for her Fear and His Servant.

Using the StoryGraph numbers gained us Miss Ex-Yugoslavia at the expense of Hourglass, by Danilo Kiš, who unfortunately ends up unrepresented here as a result.

Serbia is well represented on my own bookshelves, particularly in books which cover the whole former Yugoslavia or the wider Balkans such as Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, The Balkans by Mark Mazower, The Fall of Yugoslavia by Misha Glenny and Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little.

Some Serbia-specific books that I own which are not listed above include The Serbs by Tim Judah; White Eagles over Serbia by Laurence Durrell; Esprit de Corps, also by Lawrence Durrell; Impossible Stories by Zoran Živković, which includes the stories originally published as The Library; The Politics of Serbia in the 1990s by Robert Thomas; Serbian Folktales, ed. J.K. Jackson; The Banovina, by Donka Stančić and Miško Lazović; and Yugoslavia’s Implosion: The Fatal Attraction of Serbian Nationalism, by Sonja Biserko.

The next four countries are in four different continents: the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), El Salvador, Denmark and Singapore.

The Odyssey – a brief note

Posted on 26 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

F and I went to see Nolan’s The Odyssey yesterday, it being his 27th birthday. The Kinepolis complex in Brussels is one of only three IMAX 70 mm projectors sowing it in continental Europe (the other two are Montpelier and Copenhagen). However it is already booked up for weeks in advance, so we went instead to the IMAX cinema in Hasselt, an hour’s drive northeast of us. I must say having the huge screen was great, and although I had heard that the volume of the soundtrack is very loud, I think that in Hasselt at least it had been adjusted downwards for viewer comfort.

So, what did I think? It’s not long since I read Emily Wilson’s translation of the original, so it was reasonably fresh in my mind, and meant that there were certain set-pieces I was waiting for with interest, to see how they could be done – the Cyclops, Circe, the final showdown on Ithaca, this last also recently done by Claire North. I see some Homeric purists online complaining that this or that plot line or story element was left out. In general I don’t have much sympathy with that; the Homeric texts as we have them are presumably a synthesis from different sources, and I think every story-teller gets to tell it as they want (and some have varied a lot more than Nolan). Which is not to say that the choices made are above criticism, of course.

So I am not too worried about the softening of the protagonist’s character, or that Helen and Clytemnestra are played by the same Black actor (Lupita Nyong’o), or that Telemachus at one point calls Odysseus ‘Dad’, or the lengthy inclusion of the Trojan Horse, or even about the unbeatable robot soldiers. As the Economist reviewer says, ‘We are not arguing about “The Odyssey” when we argue about “The Odyssey”. We are arguing about ourselves.’

Having said that, there were a couple of bits that really didn’t work for me in dramatic terms. The Sirens just had vague shapes on a misty shore, with Matt Damon gurning while tied to the mast – curiously underplayed compared to the rest of the film. And Charlize Theron’s Calypso as the very professional but not very affectionate therapist for Odysseus’ PTSD, rather than the sexy beach nymph of Homer, makes the story rather Californian, as I saw someone somewhere put it.

But in general I liked it. I actually found the plot easier to follow than the original, though my sense is that it stuck fairly closely to Homer’s narrative order. Matt Damon is fine as Nolan’s version of Odysseus, and Tom Holland is fine as Telemachus. I thought Zendaya a bit underused as Athena, but Anne Hathaway is superb as Penelope, the most interesting character in the story. I loved the Cyclops and Circe, though in both cases Nolan tells a slightly different story to Homer. The prolonged fight sequences at the end sees Robert Pattinson’s sleazy Antinous eventually get his comeuppance, and is well enough shot that you barely have time to wonder how Ulysses and Telemachus can possibly defeat 120 suitors. Indeed the whole three hours passed rather quickly.

I imagine that this and Project Hail Mary will be duking it out for next year’s Hugo, and probably for other awards too. I think I’ll give The Odyssey the higher vote.

Art in Gent

Posted on 25 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

We had the day off for Belgian National Day on Tuesday, and I went to Gent, to visit the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) and the City Museum of Contemporary Art (SMAK), which face each other to the south of the city centre (where the Gentse Feesten were also on, but I didn’t check that out).

The Museum of Fine Arts probably isn’t in the top five art museums in Belgium (there are at least two better ones in each of Bruges, Brussels and Antwerp, never mind elsewhere), and it isn’t particularly large, but even a lesser Belgian art museum is on the level of a national gallery in many other countries. I had an enjoyable few hours looking around the collection. Here are my top ten art works, in chronological order.

Saint Jerome in Prayer, by Hieronymous Bosch (late 15th century). The saint has a very small pet lion, and the rocks and plants around him are typically twisted. Hieronymus depicts Hieronymus.

Continue reading →

The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are, by Libby Copeland

Posted on 24 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Gerry decided to test at 23andMe, too. She was curious about her own results, and besides, if she matched Alice, that would eliminate some possibilities that Alice needed to consider—that Alice had been adopted or that Jim Collins wasn’t, biologically speaking, Alice’s father. These were contenders for an explanation, even if Gerry told Alice she was insane when Alice suggested their mother could have had an affair.

My attentive reader will have noticed that I have become very fascinated by the addition of DNA analysis to the suite of tools available to the genealogy researcher. I have been fortunate; all of my own direct ancestors appear to be genetically who we thought they were, at least back to the early nineteenth century; and while I have identified a couple of absentee parents for other people, only one of them was still alive (and his daughter decided not to try contacting him).

Libby Copeland takes us to stories of people who found much closer and less pleasant surprises in their DNA, and asks what this means for the American concept of families? And it is a much more American than European thing; I find more relatives on the DNA sites connected to my American grandmother than to my three Irish grandparents combined. There are lines around consent and confidentiality that modern technology is redrawing. The privacy of a brief relationship decades ago is up-ended by the genetic information encoded in the body of the child of that relationship, who has a right to know where they come from too.

If you haven’t yet gone down the rabbit hole of DNA testing, but are considering it, this is an essential read to think through what you might find out. If you have, you’ll find yourself alternating between nods of recognition and jaw-dropping astonishment. I am lost in admiration of CeCe Moore, who has turned the combination of DNA analysis and genealogical research into a new branch of science. My own dabbling has been fascinating but without any huge shocks. Not everyone is so lucky.

You can get The Lost Family here.

February 2006 books

Posted on 24 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

As previously noted, I started the month in Skopje, and then returned to Prishtina in Kosovo for more work meetings, extended by a day when fog prevented my flight home from taking off. This was all leading up to publishing another Kosovo report mid-month. I also got quoted in the Guardian by the lovely and much missed Ian Traynor. My other trip of the month was to Vienna, a rather mad affair which included intense chats with the late great Albert Rohan and the late great Martti Ahtisaari.

My negotiations with my future employer were meantime continuing, but I received an unexpected approach from a head-hunter looking for someone to run a new thinktank on longevity issues. I don’t know a lot about the subject, but I kept up the conversation for several weeks until we mutually decided that it just wasn’t my thing. (Much later, I tracked down the person who did get the job; let’s just say that I dodged a bullet.)

At home, we had a lovely ceremony organised by the municipality in which young F attended the ceremonial planting of his special tree. Our village donates or plants a tree for every child turning seven each year; we did not make anything of it for the girls, who would not really appreciate it, but F was certainly interested and engaged.

We went back to the scene in 2013 to see if we could find the same tree, and I’m pretty sure we did.

Another seven years on, we went back again in the early pandemic. – you can see I think that it is the same tree, and the same person who stood by it aged six and thirteen, now twenty.

I read 12 books that month.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 6)
EU’ve got mail! by Graham Watson
First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong, by James R. Hansen
Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia, by Richard Caplan
Fanny Kemble: The Reluctant Celebrity, by Rebecca Jenkins
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839, by Frances Anne Kemble

Non-genre 1 (YTD 2)
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

SF 6 (YTD 9)
Azem Berisha’s One and Only Flight to the Castle, by Veton Surroi
Ghosts of Albion: Accursed, by Amber Benson and Christopher Golden
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
The Einstein Intersection, by Samuel R. Delany
The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth
9Tail Fox, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

4,200 pages (YTD 6,200)
4/12 (YTD 5/18) by women (Jenkins, Kemble, Alcott, Benson)
1/12 (YTD 1/18) by PoC (Delany)

The best and worst of these were all non-fiction. The best is Fanny Kemble’s account of slavery from the point of view of someone who married a slave-owner. You can read it for free here. Almost as good is Richard Caplan’s definitive account of the diplomatic response to the break-up of Yugoslavia, which kills a few myths and which you can get here. The worst by far is Rebecca Jenkins’ biography of Fanny Kemble. If you want, you can get it here.

Thursday reading

Posted on 23 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

Last books finished
The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris
Lord Edgware Dies, by Agatha Christie
Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett
For and Against a United Ireland, by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride
The Scent of Blood, by Andrew Lane
The Winged Coven, by Paul Magrs
Understanding the War in Kosovo, eds Florian Bieber and Židas Daskaloski
An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent (did not finish)
Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, by Bob Shaw

Next books

The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones
Blood Libel: Anti-Americanism and Genocide in the Kosovo War , by Bardhyl Mahmuti
Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata

Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins

Posted on 23 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I will never see Lenore Dove again. Never hear her laugh coming from high above me in the branches. Never feel the warmth of her in my arms as we lay on a bed of pine needles, my lips pressed into the hollow of her neck. Never pull a stray goose feather from her hair, or listen to her play her tune box, or press my finger into the crease that forms between her eyebrows when she’s puzzling out a thought. Never see her face brighten at a bag of gumdrops or a full moon or the sound of me whispering, “I love you like all-fire.”

I have been wondering about this book since grinding through the statistics for the YA finalists in the BSFA, Nebula/Andre Norton and now the Hugo/Lodestar, given that it is so far ahead of the field in terms of ownership on all of the platforms. Apparently it was the best-selling book in the USA last year. I wasn’t a massive fan of the Hunger Games trilogy though I could see how it developed a cult following. It took me a while to remember how this story, which is about the past Hunger Games victory of Haymitch Abernathy of District 12, fits into the narrative 24 years before the original novel is set.

Reader, I hugely enjoyed it. Even though we know from the very beginning that everyone else is going to die horribly, the story pushes on with tremendous energy and momentum, and a strong empathy for the children who are being slaughtered by each other in the ritual killing. I guess it’s notable that the technology of Panem doesn’t change much in the 24 years between the two stories, but then again, it’s a repressive place where innovation serves only the interests of state surveillance. I found it an easy, exciting read and I was actually able to remember the plot afterwards. You can get Sunrise on the Reaping here.

With that, it’s time to decide my votes for this year’s Lodestar Award. I think I will go as follows:

Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Among Ghosts, by Rachel Hartman
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, by C.B. Lee
Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen
They Bloom at Night, by Trang Thanh Tran
Oathbound, by Tracy Deonn

I will write up one more category here, the Astounding Award, before the voting deadline.

Lessons From Kosovo: The KFOR Experience, ed Larry Wentz

Posted on 22 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (“Kosovo and Bosnia: Different Products of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration” by Jusuf Fuduli):

These include the ethnicities of the people involved, their proportion of the total population, the status of these entities as federal units in the former Yugoslavia, and the relations between the inhabitants before open conflict erupted. In terms of political definitions, the most pronounced differences between Bosnia and Kosovo are the political statuses afforded to each. While both Bosnia and Kosovo are subject to international oversight and the presence of an international peacekeeping force, the fact is that Bosnia requires an international mission to preserve its status as an independent state. This political status originates in its current form from the peace agreement known as the Dayton Accords signed in 1995 by the interested parties in the Bosnian conflict. Essentially, the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia will be required until the cement mixed at Dayton dries. Kosovo, unlike Bosnia, is not an example of a military solution being implemented to augment a political one. In Kosovo, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which provides the mandate for the international mission recognizes it as an interim solution until a final political settlement is achieved. This is the fundamental difference—Bosnia has a political solution defining its status and thereby guaranteeing the independence declared in 1992 that led to war, while Kosovo is still waiting for a settlement to answer its people’s own conflict ridden drive toward independence.

This is a massive 700-page book of essays on Kosovo from the American military point of view, pulled together by Wentz on behalf of the Pentagon’s Command and Control Research Program (reading between the lines, a Lessons Learned unit) back in 2002, which is a long time ago in Kosovo politics. It’s a real grab-bag of pieces, some from very senior writers, some from analysts who were clearly a bit shaky on the substance; Wentz himself contributes over a third of the book, in the form of a grunt’s-eye view of managing civil-military relations in an occupied but largely friendly territory, which is actually rather charming.

It could have been edited better – for instance, there are two consecutive chapters about NATO communications during the 1999 conflict, one of which persistently spells Jamie Shea’s name wrong, and the other actually by Shea himself, spelt correctly. I felt that there were possibly two different books in here, one on high strategy and one on the nuts and bolts of a medium-term military presence. But even so, there was the occasional moment when I nodded to myself and though, “Oh, so that’s why…”

In particular, it was pleasing to see the later chapters stressing the importance of relationships with civil society and international NGOs, and the various means by which these can be established, improved and maintained. The provision of maps to other international actors is a real boon, and saves lives. Information also needs to flow smoothly to where it is needed (the account of various secure comms systems and the different people allowed to use each one became almost funny in its complexity). So I hope that military planners, not only in the US, get a chance to read this book and learn from it.

You can download this book for free from the Pentagon here, though ironically the link gives a security warning and you may be more comfortable buying it here.

Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps, by Mansoureh Kamari

Posted on 21 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

(Title translates to “These lines that trace my body”.)

Third page:

…making up a symphony to whose rhythm the trees’ branches dance to.
It’s so calming…

This has been a big hit in Francophone comics land this year, and has so far been translated into Dutch and Portuguese; English must surely follow. It’s the autobiographical story of Mansoureh Kamari, who was born in Iran, moved to France in 2011 and graduated from the Gobelins school of art in 2015, and is one of the up and coming screen animators in the French film scene.

Here she tells the story of her childhood in the brutal misogynist repression of the Islamic Republic, of continual sexual harassment, of relatives who were simply executed for their behaviour, of a society where women are under constant pressure. But she frames this in reminiscences from her sideline as a nude model who has agreed to participate in a video documentary; so we have Mansoureh, naked and comfortable in her body at last, reflecting on her upbringing. The nude scenes are intimate but not heavily erotic; the point isn’t to titillate, it’s to express her freedom.

The book is more polemical than the late great Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (vol 1, vol 2), but I guess the situation for women in Iran has got much worse since Satrapi first wrote about it from exile – Kamari would still have been a child then. But it’s not just about grim oppression; it’s telling a story of personal liberation, and ends with some joy. You can get Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps here.

January 2006 books

Posted on 21 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

As previously noted, 2006 started with a full house of visitors and much fun, though B’s behaviour was becoing more and more difficult. I got very excited about the Lib Dem leadership, with Charles Kennedy’s dramatic fall and the nearly successful wonkish challenge by Chris Huhne to veterans Menȝies Campbell and Simon Hughes. At work we published a report on (North) Macedonia, but I was running out of steam… I had a one-day trip to Paris, and actually finished the month in Macedonia, having travelled there from Kosovo on frozen and slippery tracks over the hills after a landslide had knocked out the main road from Prishtina to Skopje; these pictures don’t quite convey just how scary a drive it was.

View down the twisty mountain track (the main road to Macedonia from Kosovo was closed by a landslide so we tried driving over the top of the mountains; stupid idea)

Another view down the twisty mountain track

I read only 6 books that month.

Non-fiction 1
God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time, by John North

Non-genre 1
The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle

SF 3
Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman
Steppe, by Piers Anthony
Year’s Best SF 10, ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

Comics 1
Shutterbug Follies, by Jason Little

2,000 pages
1/6 by women
None by PoC

Best: Year’s Best SF 10 which you can get here. Worst: Steppe, which you can get here.

Aliens of London, by Joseph Lidster

Posted on 20 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Adelaide, symmetrical as ever, dressed in her simple, perfect pastels, sat down in the chair opposite Janet, pushed a tin of biscuits across the table and smiled. ‘Would you like a biscuit? I’ve got these delightful, simply delightful ginger creams from a local baker. I do like to support local small businesses, don’t you? And I do so like that blouse you’re wearing. So many colours! So daring! You must tell me where you got it from.’ Adelaide adjusted her Alice band. ‘Oh, and, now before I forget, how long have you been having an affair with my husband?’

Another good novelisation of an early New Who story – I doubt that we will ever get the full sequence in novel form, but I appreciate what we have. Lidster has taken the sequence of events in the script and given us a book whose two halves correspond to the two episodes; but he has added a lot of background on the various characters, including the skeevy Oliver Charles (married to Adelaide and flinging with Janet) and also Toshiko Sato, who appears in the very first scene filmed for New Who, in the lab with the dead alien pig. Solid, enjoyable and convincing. You can get Aliens of London here.

The best known books set in each country: Bulgaria

Posted on 19 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Bulgaria is in southeastern Europe, south of Romania, north of Greece, east of Serbia and North Macedonia and west of the Black Sea.

It’s a country that I know relatively well – I first visited for a week at the age of 8 for a family holiday in the Golden Sands beach resort near Varna, and have gone back reasonably frequently since 2000. My many Bulgarian friends and colleagues include half a dozen of its former foreign ministers. (In fact I introduced one of them to his wife.)

Me speaking on Bulgarian TV in February 2020, just before the pandemic. My name is spelt “*Никълас Уайт*» in Bulgarian Cyrillic, and the caption describes me as “*инфлуенсър*”, an influencer. On a good day, perhaps.

Bulgaria became de facto independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, though the reduction by Western European diplomacy of its originally large assigned territory caused resentment for decades. In 1885 it annexed the neighbouring Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, and fought off a punitive attack from Serbia (we’ll hear more about that).

Having defeated the Ottomans in alliance with Serbia and Greece in 1912, Bulgaria then lost to Bulgaria, Greece and Romania in the next war in 1913, and after the first world war lost some more territory and settled down to a period of political instability. Bulgaria allied with Germany during the second world war, and by the end was occupied by the Soviets who installed a Communist government which lasted until 1989.

Since then, power alternated between the ex-Communist Bulgarian Socialist Party and centrist or right-wing alternatives, notably the former king Simeon, who had been forced to abdicate at the age of 9 in 1946 and returned as prime minister from 2001 to 2005, and more recently the GERB party founded by Boyko Borisov, which has been in power for the majority of the time since 2009. In this year’s elections, a new leftish political party founded by former president Rumen Radev won and took power.

The Bulgarian language is a Slavic language, related to Russian, more closely to Serbian and Croatian, and even more closely to Macedonian. If you know the basic Cyrillic alphabet, you can always spot Bulgarian by the fact that it uses the letter ъ as a vowel – the ‘u’ in ‘Bulgaria’, in fact, or the middle letter of the Bulgarian spelling of my own first name; its use as a vowel is unique to Bulgarian – in Russian, ъ does not have a sound but separates hard consonants from soft vowels; in Tajik, ъ is a consonant (the glo’’al stop); and other currently used versions of the Cyrillic alphabet just don’t have it. Also, unlike other Slavic languages (apart from Macedonian), Bulgarian doesn’t do evil things to its nouns, and translates ‘the’ as a suffix.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Bulgaria.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
What Belongs to You	Garth Greenwell	15,898	857	3,443
The Shadow Land	Elizabeth Kostova	16,240	1,128	2,392
Cleanness	Garth Greenwell	10,333	494	2,696
Arms and the Man	George Bernard Shaw	11,475	1,243	924
The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax	Dorothy Gilman	10,092	1066	984
The Physics of Sorrow	Georgi Gospodinov	13,720	415	1,070
Death and the Gardener	Georgi Gospodinov	15,325	158	751
The Balkan Escape	Steve Berry	4,864	247	417

This is the biggest shift I have yet seen from when I did this analysis for Bulgaria back in 2015. Then, the top book by far was Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw’s play set during and immediately after the 1885 war, in which the protagonist Bluntschli famously declares, “My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I’m a free citizen.” It’s still ahead, if not by much, on LibraryThing, but behind on Goodreads and way behind on StoryGraph. Basically a lot of new Bulgarian-set novels, or novels newly available in translation, have appeared in the intervening years.

Garth Greenwell is an American writer who has worked as a teacher in Bulgaria. His two novels here, What Belongs To You, which is the StoryGraph and overall winner this week, and Cleanness are about an American teacher facing the challenges of gay romance with Bulgarians while working there.

Elizabeth Kostova has a Bulgarian surname, but it is her husband’s; she was originally Elizabeth Johnson from Tennessee. I really didn’t much like her runaway hit, The Historian, but The Shadow Land, this week’s Goodreads winner, sounds like it’s much more under control and restricts its setting to Bulgaria.

The Elusive Mrs Pollifax is the third in the series of novels about an unlikely CIA agent (the first two are set in Albania and Turkey). It was the runner-up when I did this analysis in 2015.

With reluctance I had to disqualify Georgi Gospodinov’s International Booker Prize-winning science fiction novel Time Shelter, which would otherwise have been this week’s winner. I actually went to the lengths of buying it and doing a swift page count, but strictly speaking more of it is set in Switzerland than in Bulgaria. On the other hand his next two novels, The Physics of Sorrow and Death and the Gardener, are much more firmly set there. (Maybe the latter more firmly than the former.)

Finally The Balkan Escape is a YA fantasy adventure story, the first in a series (though none of the others seems to be set in Bulgaria). It came third when I counted in 2015.

Regrettably the StoryGraph numbers knocked The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor off the list. Ivan Vazov’s classic Under the Yoke was next after that (did very well on Goodreads, worse on the other two). Next would have been the top book by a Bulgarian woman writer, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova.

On my own shelves, apart from Arms and the Man, The Broken Road and Under the Yoke, I don’t have a lot of books with Bulgarian content. My grandmother’s boyfriend Alan Bott managed to reunite with the Allies there after escaping Turkish captivity at the end of the First World War. I once had, but seem to have lost, Richard Crampton’s excellent history of the country. I also commend the writing of Bulgarian thinker Ivan Krastev, who I collaborated with a couple of times, more than twenty years ago now, and whose pessimism about the political future comes from a place of love and liberalism.

Next up is Bulgaria’s neighbour Serbia; then the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), El Salvador and back to Europe for Denmark.

The Wassenaar massacre

Posted on 18 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

(content warning: violent death)

My family lived in Wassenaar in the Netherlands the year I turned 13, in 1979 and 1980. It is 10 km northeast of the Hague, about halfway to Leiden, and these days it is a dormitory town for the larger cities nearby. In international relations, it gives its name to the 1996 Wassenaar Arrangement on arms control. Earlier it was the location of the first of the South Moluccan terrorist attacks of the 1970s, when 33 Ambonese activists occupied the Indonesian ambassador’s residence and held the ambassador and staff hostage (they surrendered peacefully with no casualties).

Continue reading →

December 2005 books and 2005 reading roundup

Posted on 18 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

December 2005 was an unusual month for that time in my life in that I did not travel outside my usual commute – a planned day-trip to France was cancelled at the last moment. The overnights meme says I had spent the night in 21 different places away from home during the year; I seem to have missed Berlin from the list. I certainly visited 17 countries in the course of the year (going by today’s borders – ie counting Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo separately). We put out a report on Montenegro’s imminent independence referendum. My Armenian intern A left (she later set up her own business) and I head-hunted her Greek replacement K from the internal media team.

At home, we celebrated little U’s third birthday (she got an Etch-a-Sketch) and Anne’s brother and sister both joined us for Christmas, in time for David Tennant’s first full episode of Doctor Who. I seem to have pictures of them and the kids, but none of Anne or me. We had a full house, especially when Anne’s parents and my sister and her husband all turned up.

I read 11 books that month.

Non-fiction 3; 2005 total 42
‘with all faults’, by David Low
Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, by Ann Wroe
The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia, by Darra Goldstein

sf (non-Who) 4; 2005 total 79
Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
Sevenacide, by Robert Shuster
Triplanetary, by E.E. “Doc” Smith
Numbers Don’t Lie, by Terry Bisson

Doctor Who 3; 2005 total 5
The Well-Mannered War, by Gareth Roberts
Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt

Comics 1; 2005 total 8
Boulevard of Broken Dreams, by Kim Deitch with Simon Deitch

2,500 pages; 2005 total 46,400 – this number soared once I started commuting by train in 2007
2/11 by women; 2005 total 30/144 (21%) – a standard proportion until I started to make efforts to read more diversely
None by PoC; 2005 total 4/144 (3%) – likewise.

Best books of the month for me were The Georgian Feast, which I’m still cooking from and you can get here, and Paul Cornell’s Human Nature, which you can get here in a new edition and of course later became the only original Who novel to be later adapted to television. (Other formats adopted to television: a game book, a comic strip, a couple of short stories, more loosely a couple of Big Finish plays.) Several of these bounced off me, most thoroughly the rather dismal Sevanacide collection, which you can get here.

Looking at the 144 books I read in 2005:

SF (non-Who) 79 (55%) – the highest percentage of any year that I have tracked.
Best of 2005: Best of the Best : 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, ed. Gardner Dozois; also King of Morning, Queen of Day, by Ian McDonald, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by Diana Wynne Jones.
The one you haven’t heard of: Cultural Breaks, by Brian Aldiss
Worst of 2005: Olympos, by Dan Simmons

Non-fiction: 42 (29%)
Best of 2005: The Island at the Centre of the World: The Untold Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Founding of New York, by Russell Shorto; also The Orientalist : solving the mystery of a strange and a dangerous life, by Tom Reiss, and Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary.
The one you haven’t heard of: Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo, by John Norris
Worst of 2005: The Truth About The Armed Conflict In Slovenia, by the propaganda wing of the Yugoslav People’s Army

Non-genre 9 (lowest number of any year on record, equal lowest percentage)
Best of 2005: The Days of the Consuls, by Ivo Andrić; also Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen
Worst of 2005: The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown

Comics 8 (6%)
Best of 2005: Nu We Hier Toch Zijn, by Barbara Stok; also Bone, by Jeff Smith
Worst of 2005: Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, by Daniel Clowes

Doctor Who 5 (3%) – every subsequent year is higher
Best of 2005: Human Nature, by Paul Cornell; also The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin
Worst of 2005: Genocide, by Paul Leonard

Book of the year: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto. You can get it here.

A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Posted on 17 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The rambling sprawl mostly fell into three distinct pieces, moving from southeast to northwest along the side of the bay. At the southeast end was New Town, built by and for the many Iyalets of the Empire, for there they refined and shipped out countless priceless precursors and reagents through the canals. Northwest of that was Old Town, the original home of the Yarrow kings and their folk, though they had left that place long ago. And finally there was the High City, built in the ranges far northwest of that, where the current Yarrow king resided with all of his royal retinue, removed from the bustle of industry that now consumed the land of his ancestors.

I greatly enjoyed The Tainted Cup, the first of this fantasy thriller series, and I greatly enjoyed this as well. Our hero Din and his super abrasive boss Ana are sent to a distant fiefdom which is not yet part of the true empire, and find that deceit and treachery, not to mention magical chemistry on an industrial scale, are all around them. There are some brilliant twists, and it’s all done entirely fairly. You can get A Drop of Corruption here.

That all said, the Hugo deadline is coming up and this is my ranking of the books.

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh
Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor
A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett
The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow
The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson
Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I think it’s a good year.

Thursday reading

Posted on 16 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett
The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris
Understanding the War in Kosovo, eds Florian Bieber and Zhidas Daskaloski

Last books finished
Sargassa, by Sophie Burnham
Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor, by James Peaty et al
The Elysian Blade, by David Bishop
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones

Next books
The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones
An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

O the Chimneys, by Nelly Sachs

Posted on 16 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Nelly Sachs was the joint winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, along with the Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Born in Berlin in 1891, she had fled to Sweden in 1840, thanks to the intervention of Selma Lagerlöf just before her death. She made a living in Sweden as a translator to and from German, and started publishing poetry only in 1947.

I got hold of the collection, O, the Chimneys, published in 1967, the year after the Nobel Prize, with the German originals and English translations of varying quality – apart from her verse play, Eli, which is presented entirely in English. I have to say that I was blown away. Her poetry is an unrelenting emotional reaction to the Holocaust – the chimneys of the book’s title are the chimneys of the crematoria of genocide. She cycles between grief, despair, bewilderment, survivor’s guilt, but surprisingly little anger (though it is not completely absent). The play Eli ends with divine revenge, but we know that doesn’t happen in real life. It was an extraordinary reading experience.

Second poem of third section (title is the first line):

Einen Akkord spielen Ebbe und Flut,
Jäger und Gejagtes.
Mit vielen Händen wird Greifen und Befestigung versucht,
Blut ist der Faden.

Finger weisen Aufstellungen,
Körperteile werden eingesetzt
in sterbende Zeichnungen.

Strategie,
Geruch des Leidens –

Glieder auf dem Wege zum Staub
und die Gischt der Sehnsucht über den Wassern.

My translation:

Ebb and flow play a single chord,
hunter and hunted.
Many hands fumble to grasp and seize,
blood is the thread.

Fingers point to alignments,
body parts are positioned
in dying drawings.

Strategy,
the smell of suffering –

limbs on their way to dust
and the froth of desire on the waters.

I’m going to justify some of my choices here. The original doesn’t have the word “single” in the first line, but I think it’s necessary in translation to catch the emphasis on the object of the sentence, “Einen Akkord”. My “fumble” is a little stronger than “wird versucht”, but “try” and “attempt” sounded clumsy. I felt that “Aufstellungen” and “eingesetzt” are linked, so went for “alignments” and “positioned” rather than the more obvious translations. “Geruch” could have been “stench” or “scent”, but I felt “smell” was neutral enough. My “froth of desire” may be a bit spicier than “die Gischt der Sehnsucht” but I wanted to catch the corporeality. All that said, I am not a professional translator and my German is not what it once was.

This was an unexpectedly impressive discovery in my sequence of Nobel winners who were not white men. Next up is Yasunari Kawabata and his novel Snow Country.

Halflife, by Mark Michalowski

Posted on 15 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Imperatrix Alinti watched critically, as a bevy of butlers and servants swarmed across the Grand Hall, their arms laden with bolts of silver and gold fabric, banners and poles. She’d grown tired of arguing with her husband about the archaic way in which he’d insisted on decorating the Palace for his birthday celebrations, and had grumpily agreed to ‘maintain a sense of tradition’ about the whole affair.

After a run of Eighth Doctor books that left me rather cold, I’m very glad to say that I came across one that I liked. This actually takes the Doctor’s amnesia and does something interesting with it, including a partial mingling of personalities with Fitz which is quite entertaining; it also does something interesting at last with Trix, who I have hitherto felt was a rather undersketched character; and plonks this into the context of a decaying emperor’s last days, and the palace politics around the succession and the divvying up of resources. One of the best Eighth Doctor books I have read in a while. You can get Halflife here (for a price).

Next in this sequence – actually last in my set of unblogged Eighth Doctor Adventures – is The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris.

November 2005 books

Posted on 15 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

November 2005 was a heavy month for travel. I started in Montenegro, went from there for Vienna and then on to Kyiv, my first ever visit to Ukraine (I enjoyed visiting the Bulgakov house and the Scythian gold exhibition at the Museum of National Historical Treasures); and then at the end of the month I went to Berlin and from there to New York. We put out reports on the rigged elections in Azerbaijan, and also on EU visa policy in the Balkans. I also found time for an informational interview with my current employers; I thought it went rather well, but it was almost eight and a half years before they got back to me!

Back at home, the local riding school put on a show of small pets including rabbits. One of the rabbits, a Flemish Giant, was very big indeed.

I read 17 books that month, with all that travel.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 39)
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany
Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi with Tahl Raz
Up Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002, by David Langford

Non-genre 1 (2005 total 9)
The Days of the Consuls/Bosnian Chronicle/Travnik Chronicle, by Ivo Andrić

sf 10 (YTD 75)
Moving Mars, by Greg Bear
Olympos, by Dan Simmons
A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin
Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett
Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett
Smoke and Mirrors, by Neil Gaiman
Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Darkness That Comes Before, by R. Scott Bakker
Counting Heads, by David Marusek

Doctor Who 2 (YTD 2)
Genocide, by Paul Leonard
The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin

Comics 1 (YTD 7)
Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95, by Joe Sacco

7,200 pages (YTD 43,900)
2/17 by women (YTD 28/133)
1/17 by PoC (YTD 4/133)

Best books of the month were Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, a welcome reread, which you can get here; and Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle/Travnik Chronicle/The Days of the Consuls, which you can get here. Massively underwhelmed by Dan Simmons’ Olympos, but you can get it here if you want.

Oathbound, by Tracy Deonn

Posted on 14 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

My eyes bounce around the terrain, seeking a hiding place, while my mind debates whether I can hide at all.

I completely bounced off both the first volume and the second volume of this series, and not surprisingly bounced off the third as well. Arthurian legend in today’s North Caroline, breathless first-person-present narrative. You can get Oathbound here.

Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on 14 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

As I stood in the crumbling parking lot, the hot concrete warming the metal of my feet, I was sure of it: the Earth had great things ahead of it, even still.

I haven’t always go on with Okorafor’s writing, but I really enjoyed this: disabled Nigerian-American writer Zelu goes through tough times but also writes a science fiction novel which becomes a runaway success, despite her helicoptering family. There’s lots here about clashes of cultures, clashes of values, shifting the narrative arc from our world (in the very near future) to Zelu’s world; and love and sex and death. I felt that it all hung together very neatly. I suspect that I’m still voting for The Incandescent, but this will be high up my list. You can get Death of the Author here.

They Bloom at Night, by Trang Thanh Tran

Posted on 13 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

We’re back at the harbor on Wild Things. Tomorrow, Knife Girl will meet us here to refuel the boat. Mom and I don’t have a plan yet. We haven’t spoken much at all, our energies depleted from the wild-ass turn of events. Mom lights incense for Sông, each smoky tendril a prayer. Cleaning Bà Oanh’s glasses, I remember the smile I thought I saw. Perhaps she’d foreseen what was coming and could not stop herself from mocking us, though she’d never been unkind. It’s a bad habit of mine, finding the worst in every situation, but no one has taught me to hope.

I somehow missed this in sequence – I should have blogged it three weeks ago; I finished it between Face to Face: The Classic Years and British Generals in Blair’s Wars. Anyway, no harm done.

It’s about Nhung / Noon, a young Vietnamese-American in Louisiana, whose father and brother have died in mysterious circumstances, and who is compelled by the local thug to go find the sea monster which may be behind the ‘orrible red algae bloom on the water. Lushly written, but a bit too much body horror for my sensitive soul (and yes, I realise that is part of the point). You can get They Bloom at Night here.

13 July 2006 – Witnessing the independence of a new and old state

Posted on 13 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

It was a warm Mediterranean evening. We all gathered on the lawn of the President’s villa. There were perhaps 300 guests. The mood was festive, everyone shaking hands and embracing. The moment eventually came when the President and his wife walked down the lane to the podium, followed by the top guests: the Prime Minister and his wife, and the President of Serbia, the President of Croatia, the Serbian foreign minister, and various other dignitaries. Given that the country had just seceded from Serbia, and had been at war with Croatia not all that long ago, the presence of the heads of neighbouring states was pretty remarkable.

The referendum had been seven weeks before, on 21 May 2006, followed by a re-delcaration of independence on 3 June; but the Treaty of Berlin, recognizing Montenegro’s first round of independence, was signed on 13 July 1878, and that remained the historical independence day despite its rule from Belgrade after 1918.

The guards played a fanfare, and then a young man began to sing the new/old nation’s anthem, joined in the second verse by a young woman, without any other accompaniment, their voices trembling with emotion. For the first time in nine decades, Montenegro was celebrating its traditional independence day as an independent state. They didn’t drop a beat, or miss a note. It was one of the most electrifying things I have ever witnessed.

The President then made a speech – mercifully brief, in that he was aware that many of his guests don’t have a good grasp of the local language (whatever it may be called). He referred to July 13th as the historical date when Montenegro was recognised by the Great Powers of Europe as an independent state in 1878, but enlarged much more on the other anniversary commemorated, the beginning of the Montenegrin rebellion against fascist occupation in 1941. This was smart politics; the most bitter internal opponents of independence were those who felt particularly loyal to Tito and the Partisan legacy. Having said that, most of us in the audience probably appreciated the brevity more than the content.

There may be official photographs in some government archive on a Podgorica web server; I didn’t take any myself. I did get a lovely first day cover set of stamps, which are my only physical memories of a remarkable evening.

I was an early supporter of Montenegro’s independence in Brussels policy circles after I started working here in 1999, and was variously told that I was crazy, deluded or corrupt. Now Montenegro is at the front of the queue to join the EU, and the European Commission seriously expects that the accession treaty will be wrapped up this calendar year and full membership will take effect some time in 2028. It’s quite an achievement for a small country.

The best known books set in each country: Paraguay

Posted on 12 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Paraguay is in South America, squeezed between Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. It became independent from Spain in 1811, but was not recognized by any other countries for over 30 years. The three awful events of Paraguayan history are the War of the Triple Alliance, from 1864-1870, which they lost to Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay; the Chaco War against Bolivia in 1932-35, which they won; and the brutal and isolationist dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner from 1954 to 1989 (Europe was not the only place where revolutions happened that latter year). His right-wing Colorado Party have won every presidential election but one since 1948.

These days Paraguay is best known for the Itaipu Dam on the River Parana, shared with Brazil, the largest hydro-electric dam in the world outside China. The official languages are Guaraní and Spanish, though given Paraguay’s close relationship with Brazil, Portuguese is widely understood and is thought to be the first language of as much as 20% of the population. The main exports are electricity from the dam, bought by Brazil, agricultural products, also bought by Brazil, and Chinese goods, imported into Paraguay and smuggled into Brazil.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Paraguay.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Zama	Antonio di Benedetto	3,961	612	502
The News from Paraguay	Lily Tuck	2,497	756	267
Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay	Susan Hood	2,152	545	321
The Drunken Forest	Gerald Durrell	2,117	690	177
I, the Supreme	Augusto Roa Bastos	1,029	660	82
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay	John Gimlette	775	327	78
Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche	Ben Macintyre	834	299	78
Son of Man	Augusto Roa Bastos	764	221	35

This week’s overall winner, Zama, also the Goodreads and StoryGraph winner, is considered one of the great novels of Argentine rather than Paraguayan literature; its protagonist, Don Diego de Zama, is stuck in Paraguay at the end of the eighteenth century, trying to get back to Argentina.

This week’s LibraryThing winner, The News from Paraguay, is one of several books that I found about the glamorous figure of Eliza Lynch (1833-86), from Cork by way of Paris, who at the age of 19 became the girlfriend of Francisco Solano López, the son of the President of Paraguay. When the President died in 1862, Francisco succeeded him, and Eliza was the First Lady of the country (though they never actually married) until Francisco was overthrown and killed in 1870 at the end of the war. She returned to Paris and died there.

Ada’s Violin is about impoverished children forming an orchestra with instruments made from material recycled from the city rubbish dump. It sounds a bit glurgy to be honest but reviews seem positive.

The Drunken Forest is one of Gerald Durrell’s earlier travel books about collecting animals for his zoo, in Argentina and Paraguay in 1954. The process is interrupted by a real-world political intrusion unusual in Durrell’s writing, when the 1954 coup that brought Alfredo Stroessner to power forces him and his wife to go home in a hurry, leaving behind most of the animals.

I, the Supreme is the top book on this list by a Paraguayan author. It is a fictionalized biography of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco, known as Doctor Francia, Paraguay’s first dictator who ruled from 1814-1840. Published in 1974, it was seen as commentary on the Stroessner regime (not least by Stroessner himself) and Roa Bastos was exiled.

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a travel book about Paraguay from 2003.

Forgotten Fatherland traces another European woman who, like Eliza Lynch, had a Paraguayan adventure: Elizabeth Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who set up the colony of Nueva Germania in Paraguay on Aryan and anti-Semitic principles in 1886. It collapsed almost immediately.

Son of Man, Roa Bastos’ second book in this week’s table, chronicles the struggles of the oppressed in Paraguay between 1912 and 1936 through a Biblically inspired magical realist lens.

The book that I hesitated about disqualifying is Novela B by Mónica Bustos, Paraguay’s best known contemporary woman writer, but the summaries of it that I found indicate that it is set across South America in various locations, so I deduce that less than half of it is in Paraguay. In fact none of her books appears to be set in Paraguay as far as I can tell.

The one woman writer who I find on all three systems and whose work does seem to be set in Paraguay is Josefina Plá. Although she was born in Spain, she adopted Paraguayan citizenship.

Paraguay figures in three books on my own shelves: Siân Rees’ The Shadows of Eliza Lynch is on the same subject as Lily Tuck’s book above; Paraguay (played by Spain in the TV series) is where Kessler ends up in the sequel to Secret Army and its novelisation; and one of the members of Brian Killick’s The Camelot Club invades Paraguay.

Back to Europe for the next two countries, Bulgaria and Serbia; then Congo (Brazzaville) and El Salvador.

October 2005 books

Posted on 12 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

My two trips in October 2005 were to the Netherlands, where unfortunately I had a car accident on the outskirts of The Hague – nobody hurt, but I was pretty shaken and the other car was a write-off – and at the end of the month to Montenegro. (You can see me in Montenegro at 2:00 into this video.) At work we published the second report on Nagorno-Karabakh and I had an op-ed on Bosnia in European Voice which I am still rather pleased with.

At home we had our twelfth wedding anniversary. I got a nice pic of young F in the cupola of the Bozar museum in Brussels, the royal palace in the background.

F meanwhile was occasionally commandeering my camera to take pictures of other family members.

Due to less international travel, and commuting by car, I read only 10 books in October 2005.

Non-fiction 2 (YTD 36)
Macedonia: The Bradt Travel Guide, by Thammy Evans
Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary

Non-genre 1(YTD 8)
A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburō Ōe

SF 7 (YTD 65)
Travelling Towards Epsilon, ed. by Maxim Jakubowski
The Hidden Family, by Charles Stross
The Clan Corporate, by Charles Stross
Accelerando, by Charles Stross
Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany
Ten Years to Oblivion, by Clem Macartney
Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

2,700 pages (YTD 36,700)
2/10 by women (YTD 26/116)
2/10 by PoC (YTD 3/116)

Links above to my reviews, below to Amazon.

The best of these was Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, which won the Hugo for Best Related Work that year. You can get it here. I’m not going to pick on those I didn’t like; three others that I did like were Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, which you can get here, Charles Stross’s The Clan Corporate, which you can get here in omnibus, and Thammy Evans’ Macedonia Travel Guide, which you can get (in a newer and retitled edition) here.

WSFS Business Meeting 2026

Posted on 11 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

This is my own take on the items on the agenda for this year’s WSFS Business Meeting, whose first (virtual) session will take place this coming Friday. The full agenda is available here. At 109 pages, it is still rather long, and I also have to admit that of the 19 pages of proposed new constitutional changes, more than half (11 to be precise) are occupied by proposals that I myself have signed (though it’s only three of them, one of which requires a long explanation).

The meeting will be held online again following last year’s successful experiment. We are advised to expect the business to be dealt with as follows:

Preliminary Business Meeting, Friday July 17, 2026: Committee reports, Standing Rule changes (Section C), Resolutions (Section D), Mark Protection Committee nominations, setting debate times for Business Passed On and New Constitutional Changes
First Main Business Meeting, Sunday July 26, 2026: Balloting for committee elections, ratifications of Business Passed On (Section E)
Second Main Business Meeting, Saturday August 1, 2026: Results of committee elections, New Constitutional Changes (Section F)
Third Main Business Meeting, Sunday August 9, 2026: Report from the Trial Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards
Site Selection Business Meeting, Sunday August 30, 2026 (in person in the Anaheim Convention Center): Results of 2028 Site Selection, Question and Answer Time for Future Seated Worldcons.

Personally I hope that the 26 July session will deal expediently with the Business Passed On from 2025, and move to the first few proposed new constitutional changes. However there are 15 items of Business Passed On, so my hopes may not be fulfilled.

C. Standing Rule Changes

C.1 Calling the Question At Any Point
C.2 Minimum Substantive Debate on Main Motions

Both of these are proposed by the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee, and on the face of it seem to speed up procedures, if only slightly. Support.

C.3 Business Meeting Dislocation

Removes ambiguity about the constitutional status of virtual Business Meetings. Support.

D. Resolutions

D.1 Clarifying Hugo Award Authority Delegation

Very important – tidies up the Constitution after last year’s decision to enshrine the practice of Hugo administration being carried out by a subcommittee rather than by the Worldcon committee as a whole. I can’t see any future Worldcon committee wanting to return to past practice here. Support.

D.2 WSFS Code of Ethics
D.3 Whistleblower Policy
D.4 Interim Ombuds Office

All proposed by the Ethics and Whistleblower (“Sparkle Unicorn”) subcommittee in the wake of the Chengdu Hugo debacle, to set up new structures to safeguard the Hugo process against ethics breaches. I will need to reflect on this to be honest. Would these changes have made any difference, if they had been in force in 2023? Do they place an extra burden on the system, greater than the benefit gained? Most of all, is the Mark Protection Committee really best placed to supervise these new processes? I am not convinced, but open to persuasion.

D.5 Bidding Trust & Safety

Proposes creating a committee to look at how to oblige bids to formally state whether or not they are in safe countries. I don’t honestly think this will help in any way, and will probably vote against.

D.6 Resolution Brought by Trial Committee (A)
D.7 Resolution Brought by Trial Committee (B
D.8 Resolution Brought by Trial Committee (C)
D.9 Resolution Brought by Trial Committee (D)

The last outworking of the WSFS investigation into the Chengdu Hugo debacle. I have not seen these resolutions, though I gave some very minor input to the Trial Committee. I hope and expect that the committee will propose long-term bans from WSFS activity for some of those involved.

E. Business Passed On

E.1 Clarifying Active Bids

I wrote last year: The word change proposed is to refine the definition of an “active” Worldcon bid… I suppose it makes sense.

E.2 Clarifying Hugo Award Administrator’s Discretion

I wrote last year, “makes it clear that Hugo administrators must act within the constitution, citing claims on social media that this is not the case. I did not see any such claims, so I am surprised that the proposers felt we needed to spend time on this, but since it has been proposed, I hope that it can go through quickly.”

E.3 Clarifying Best Graphic Story or Comic
E.4 Clarifying Best Series
E.5 Clarifying the Best Dramatic Presentation Categories
E.6 Clarifying Nominee Diversity

These were all proposed by myself and Tammy Coxen last year, and all tidy up parts of the constitution whose imperfect drafting has been a source of annoyance to Hugo administrators. I don’t believe that any of them is a substantial change to current practice, but I do believe that they are all important for clarification and improvement.

E.7 Clarifying WSFS Membership Rights (A)

Enumerates a list of rights that come with WSFS membership. I am not sure that it makes sense to encode what may be a moving target in this way. I remain to be convinced.

E.8 Clarifying WSFS Membership Rights (B)

This on the other hand clarifies that virtual Business Meetings are a legitimate part of WSFS proceedings, so I firmly support it.

E.9 Hugo Award Software Source

Mandates Open Source software for counting Hugo votes. If it weren’t for the fact that the people who I have relied on for Hugo software have endorsed this, I would be firmly against it; I don’t think that WSFS should be tying itself to external standards without good cause.

E.10 Site Selection Concordance

Gives all bids a veto on site selection software. On balance I think I am against this; it creates an opportunity for spoilers.

E.11 Mandated Hugo Award Admin Reports

Instructs Hugo administrators to publish a detailed summary of any eligibility rulings made during the process. I did this in 2017 and 2024, and wrote a large part of the 2025 report, so it would be odd if I opposed it.

E.12 Speculative Poetry Hugo Award

Creates yet another new category without getting rid of any of the existing ones. I recognize that there is a wave of sympathy for this one from the community, but I am voting against. I’m also not wildly impressed by the participation numbers in the special Hugo category for Best Poem from last year and this.

E.13 Retire NASFiC

Support. I wrote about this last year. I think it looks very weird that North America alone should get special geographical treatment in the form of an extra WSFS-validated convention in compensation if WorldCon is elsewhere. 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.

E.14 Unnecessary PII

Support. Restricts Worldcons from gathering too much personally identifying information about members. Essential in this day and age.

E.15 End the False Binary!

A proposal to amend the Best Artist categories which was sneaked into the in-person Business Meeting last year after the meeting was extended by a 43-42 vote. I don’t like the way it was handled by the original proposer and would be inclined to vote against as it stands. However I understand that some improving amendments will be proposed at the Business Meeting which will make it much better. If they are passed, I will probably support, though I don’t like the renaming of the Best Professional Artist category.

F. New Constitutional Changes

F.1 Ethics Ombuds Office

Established a new supervisory body to monitor ethics breaches. Am not convinced that it is needed or that the MPC is the right body to oversee it. Will probably vote against its creation; however if I lose that vote, I would be interested in serving on it.

F.2 There’s No Business Like Virtual Business

Support. Again, one of the amendments which clarifies the legitimacy of online business meetings.

F.3 Conversion Rights

Resubmitted from last year. 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.

F.4 Fixed Bid Deadlines

Resubmitted from last year. Would have prevented the Winnipeg bid in 2021. I am not convinced that entrenching the management of Site Selection into the Constitution is a solution to whatever problem there may be. Voting against.

F.5 Advance Notice of Business Meeting Deadlines

Also absurdly constrains Worldcons’ freedom of action in how to run the Business Meeting. There is no need to put this in the Constitution. Oppose.

F.6 Responsive Late Business

Worries that if a committee fails to report then people who were holding back on proposals because they expected that committee to report will not have time to make their proposals. Ridiculous over-engineering. Oppose.

F.7 Limitation on Listed Contributors for Hugo Award Finalists

This one has my name on it, and has been the subject of much online discussion. I understand why large teams want to see everyone celebrated if they get a spot on the Hugo final ballot; I don’t think it is sufficiently appreciated that each new name on the list means an extra burden on convention resources, particularly volunteer time, and I don’t think that voters particularly appreciate large chunks of ballot paper real estate being taken up with a list of names. And I really don’t see why anyone needs to list their pet necromancer, as one finalist this year has done. What is wrong with requiring publications to simply list their senior editorial team? And what is wrong with capping that list at eight? Support. (Though I understand that it may be withdrawn for further consideration.)

F.8 Purposeful Proportionality

OK, I have a real bee in my bonnet about this one. The current system of conducting WSFS internal elections for multiple winners is flawed. There is a serious risk that a single large faction of voters can sweep the board, giving the election an unrepresentative result. Arguably this has already happened – in the MPC election of 2025, one candidate endorsed two others, and all three were elected to the three vacant seats thanks to the transfers of the votes for the leading candidate. (Disclosure: that candidate was, er, me.)

We should instead use the multiple seat transferable vote system of election currently used for parliamentary and other elections in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Malta, Tasmania, the Australian Senate and municipal elections in Scotland, New Zealand, Cambridge Massachusetts and Portland Oregon. It’s a well established system which will bring transparency and representation to WSFS internal processes. Please support.

F.9 The Tie that Doesn’t Bind

This also has my name on it – a brilliant spot by Andrew January that, in case there is a tie for last place and you end up with more than six finalists in a category, under the current rules if one of those withdraws or is ineligible they must be replaced, keeping the number of finalists at more than six. That’s not what we thought we were passing back in 2015-16, but it seems to be what we have unintentionally ended up with. It’s a straightforward and simple fix for a theoretical and admittedly improbable situation. Support.

Three WW1 Doctor Who stories

Posted on 10 July 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

I wrote this piece two weeks ago, on Sunday 28 June, and later learned to my deep sorrow and dismay that Justin Richards, probably the most prolific Doctor Who writer of all time, had died that very day, aged 64. I never met him or corresponded with him, but his writing was usually reliable and sometimes brilliant. I am sure that I still have some of his work to write up here, but, sadly, no more will be produced.

After opening with The Thing from the Sea, the BBC audiobooks range commissioned three stories from Justin Richards to commemorate the end of the First World War. This is a tricky subject for Who, though not as tricky as Irish history or Hitler’s Germany, especially since (SPOILER) the villain is a well-enough intentioned chap who just wants to stop the killing from happening by the means of time travel.

The first story, Men of War, has Peter Purves telling a story of the First Doctor, Steven Taylor and Sara Kingdom materialising in 1916 to find that the Battle of the Somme has not started on schedule and that Time is trying to reclaim those who should have died. It’s bleak and creepy. Purves tells the story not as Steven but as a British officer trying to make sense of the madness around him. You can get Men of War here.

Horrors of War had come to my notice before as one of the couple of dozen Who stories set in Belgium. This time it’s Katy Manning telling the story of the Third Doctor and Jo Grant arriving at a field hospital near Ypres, where they meet Annie Grantham (who is the narrating character, so as with Peter Purves, Katy Manning does her own Who persona in the third person). This was of particular interest to me because they all go back to Sarajevo to observe the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, which has gone askew in this timeline. I twitched a bit at some of the details which don’t match the Bosnian geography, but I can’t blame Richards for doing less research on Sarajevo than I have (see here and here). Apart from that, I appreciated what Richards was doing. You can get Horrors of War here.

Fortunes of War concludes the trilogy by bringing the Sixth Doctor together with the captain from the first story and the nurse from the second, Colin Baker narrating it in character. They end up investigating the origin of the mystery in a remote forest in northwestern Germany (oddly enough, I too was in a remote forest in northwestern Germany shortly after listening to this) and trying to close the wobbling time loops. I found it very satisfactory. You can get Fortunes of War here.

As I said up front, this is a difficult subject for Who to tackle, but I think it was done well by Richards and the performers, with some great soundscaping as well. Recommended, even now that we are some years past the anniversary.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Welcome

Featured

The Web Planet, by Bridget Cherry; Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton

There is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm

March 2006 books

The best known books set in each country: Serbia

The Odyssey – a brief note

Art in Gent

The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are, by Libby Copeland

February 2006 books

Thursday reading

Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins

Lessons From Kosovo: The KFOR Experience, ed Larry Wentz

Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps, by Mansoureh Kamari

January 2006 books

Aliens of London, by Joseph Lidster

The best known books set in each country: Bulgaria

The Wassenaar massacre

December 2005 books and 2005 reading roundup

A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Thursday reading

O the Chimneys, by Nelly Sachs

Halflife, by Mark Michalowski

November 2005 books

Oathbound, by Tracy Deonn

Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor

They Bloom at Night, by Trang Thanh Tran

13 July 2006 – Witnessing the independence of a new and old state

The best known books set in each country: Paraguay

October 2005 books

WSFS Business Meeting 2026

C. Standing Rule Changes

D. Resolutions

E. Business Passed On

F. New Constitutional Changes

Three WW1 Doctor Who stories