Since late 2003, I’ve been recording (almost) every book that I have read. At 200-300 books a year, that’s over 5,000 books that I have written up here. These are the most recent; I also record the books I have read each week and each month. These days each review includes the second paragraph of the third chapter of each book, just for fun; and also a purchase link for Amazon UK. (Yes, I know; but I get no other financial reward for writing all of this.)
This WordPress blog replaced my Livejournal in March 2022. I was able to copy across all of my old Livejournal posts; unfortunately the internal links in old posts will still in general point back to Livejournal, and though I was able to import images, I wasn’t able to import videos, so it’s a little imperfect.
Second paragraph of third chapter (which is presented bilingually in the original text):
Hoe bijzonder het precies is dat Jardin d’émail als monumentale tuin gerealiseerd is, is moeilijk te bevatten. Natuurlijk, het was Dubuffet die het kunstwerk schiep, eerst als een Édifice van twee bij drie meter met de titel Jardin d’émail. Maar het is museumdirecteur Oxenaar die zorgt voor de ‘vergroting’ van het idee, zoals Dubuffet dat in een brief verwoordt. Binnen het oeuvre van Dubuffet wordt Jardin d’émail gerekend tot de belangrijkste voorbeelden van zijn L’Hourloupe-architectuur samen met Closerie Falbala en de Groupe de quatres arbres, een groep van vier bomen voor een bankgebouw in New York en gemaakt in opdracht van de Amerikaanse bankier Rockefeller. (afb. pp. 38-39)
It is difficult to comprehend how amazing it is that Jardin d’émail has been realized as a monumental garden. Of course, it was Dubuffet who created the artwork, initially as an Édifice measuring two by three metres and with the title Jardin d’émail. But it is the museum director Oxenaar who enables the ‘enlargement’ of the idea, as Dubuffet puts it in a letter. Within Dubuffet’s oeuvre, Jardin d’émail is considered one of the most important examples of his L’Hourloupe architecture, together with Closerie Falbala and the Groupe de quatres arbres, a group of four trees for a bank building in New York, commissioned by the American banker Rockefeller. (image pp. 38-39)
The Jardin d’émail (Enamel Garden) is one of the most striking sculptures in the Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo, in the Netherlands. It’s twenty metres by thirty, a stylised garden made not of enamel but of concrete, epoxy resin, polyurethane and paint. It’s probably the biggest single artwork in the whole museum.
We went to see it in 2005 and again in 2022. Here’s my attempt to recreate the same scene twice.
And here’s me beside the central butterfly:
This short book about it by art historian Roos van der Lint describes it as “deeply embedded” in the Dutch national consciousness, and goes into the story of Jean Dubuffet’s career (originally in the family wine shipping trade, but became an artist during the second world war) and how museum director Rudi Oxenaar was impressed by a smaller version, two metres by three, and commissioned the larger one for the Kröller-Müller Museum, built between 1968 and 1973. It also explains the extensive process of restoration in 2020 – it certainly seemed in much better shape the second time we went.
It’s possibly the single most interesting object in the entire Dutch province of Gelderland, and if you ever have a chance to see it, you should take it. Otherwise you can get this little book here, for only €12,50 plus postage, which I think is a real snip.
Current Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs
Last books finished The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly (did not finish)
Next books Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
The Clarke shortlist has been out for a couple of days, but I’ve been quite busy so am posting the ownership stats for the six lucky books only today. I’m also noting the ranking of each book in the equivalent table for the long list.
Goodreads
LibraryThing
raters
rating
owners
rating
(1)
The Ministry of Time
KalianeBradley
139,555
3.59
1,976
3.71
(5)
Annie Bot
Sierra Greer
52,555
3.83
529
3.74
(13)
Service Model
Adrian Tchaikovsky
11,505
4.04
350
3.83
(21)
Private Rites
Julia Armfield
8,632
3.68
213
3.81
(60)
Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock
Maud Woolf
642
3.69
27
3.75
(79)
Extremophile
Ian Green
139
3.90
16
–
None of these was in the top quintiles of reader ratings from the long list. The last two seem to have made a big impression on judges despite low print runs.
I’m planning to be at the ceremony on 25 June – see you there perhaps.
She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over. ‘But mostly it is horrible. The farmers here, they are not like the boys of Bombay.’
One of William Dalrymple’s lyrical explorations of India, this tells the stories of nine people with roles in Indian religion – mostly Hinduism, though the point is well made both by Dalrymple and by several of his interlocutors that it’s all a bit syncretic, and drawing strict boundaries between different faiths is not a good path to understanding.
People who think that all religion is bollocks won’t find much to like in this book. But if you are interested in the belief and faith systems of the largest country in the world by population, this is a very enlightening guide to what nine of the 1.4 billion think, at least as reported by one observer. (No doubt, like any good writer, he has combined material from a number of sources to create nine good stories.)
There’s the Jain nun. There’s the prison warder who becomes a dancing god for two months a year. There’s the singer of epic poems which take five days to recite. There’s the woman Sufi mystic. There’s the maker of bronze idols. There’s the tantric guardian of the cremation grounds. There’s the blind bard of Bengal. Dalrymple respectfully gives them all their voices
And saddest of all is the Devadasi, the temple prostitute who has been servicing worshippers sexually since she was a young girl. Supposedly this practice was made illegal by both the British and by independent India, but it has simply gone underground, with even less protection for the women and girls who get involved. In general my instincts are for the legalisation of sex work where all involved are consenting adults, but that’s not what is going on here, and the story of Rani Bai is heart-rending.
Anyway, well worth getting, and you can get it here. This was the top unread non-fiction book on my shelves; next is the English translation of The Burgundians, by Bart van Loo.
Now that I have been unexpectedly liberated to discuss my Hugo votes, here they are in the first category that I completed. These are all good, by the way, and I found it quite difficult to rank them. (This is not the case for every category.)
6) The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Okay,” said Dr. Marjorie. “That’s it. You’re on your own.”
Generation starship where slaves v masters plays into a brutal take on academia. Get it here.
5) The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. Second paragraph of third chapter:
“People report different things. Some say they feel nothing at all. Others say the scan brings up memories. That it somehow brushes up against them and brings them back to consciousness. They see their lives. Memory by memory, before them.”
Mammoth researchers upload the mind of a long-dead mammoth expert into the brain of a resurrected mammoth. Get it here.
4) What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:
It occurs to me that you may think that I am making a great deal of nothing about traveling, granted that I had spent much of my youth gallivanting across Europe, sometimes while being shot at. Possibly you’re right. All I can say in my defense is that while I was in the army, no matter where we went, we had a routine. We got up, we ate bad food, we complained, we tended the horses, we were extremely bored, we ate again, we went to sleep. Occasionally we would go somewhere else and be bored there. Once in a very great while, we would spend an absolutely nerve-wracking few hours, and afterward we would be shaky and bored, but in general, the routine reigned supreme.
Haunted holiday cottage in fictional but richly realised European country. Get it here.
3) The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo. Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Oh, get up, get up, please,” Nhung begged.
Something sinister is up with the arranged wedding that Cleric Chih gets involved with. Get it here.
2) The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. Second paragraph of third chapter:
“No,” Veris said, glancing back at the handful of guards waiting silently in the front garden. A few had also crept to the back, she knew, to guard the door in case she still, unthinkably, tried to escape.
Only the heroine can rescue two children who have been kidnapped by a monster. Get it here.
1) Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard. Second paragraph of third chapter:
As to the others… Bảo Duy was endearing but reckless, and Lành was extremely difficult to deal with or protect, which added to the annoyance.
A lovely dark story about four young women thrown together to ward off the unspeakable. In space. Get it here.
I intend to do these collages of covers for each of the relevant Hugo categories. I do them by hand using PowerPoint and Paint, without use of AI.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Côte d’Ivoire, also known in English as Ivory Coast (personally I take the position that you call people and countries by the names they wish to be known by).
I have not been to Côte d’Ivoire myself, though I have advised its government on a couple of occasions.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Aya
Marguerite Abouet
6,986
664
The Bitter Side of Sweet
Tara Sullivan
3,646
277
Aya of Yop City
Marguerite Abouet
2,421
260
Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing
Wess Stafford
1,142
505
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village
Sarah Erdman
1,784
312
Aya: Life in Yop City (Aya #1-3)
Marguerite Abouet
1,683
166
Aya: The Secrets Come Out
Marguerite Abouet
1,331
154
Aya: Love in Yop City (Aya #4-6)
Marguerite Abouet
885
127
So, I confess I had not heard of the popular graphic novel sequence by Marguerite Abouet about her heroine Aya, set in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1970s, but I’ll have to look out for them now. It’s also nice to see a success for the bande dessinée genre.
If I count correctly, this is the sixth country where seven of the top eight books are by women, joining Canada, South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran.
I disqualified eleven books. For about half of them, this was because they were set in or about a number of countries including Côte d’Ivoire, but much less than half set there. This knocked out Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert, The Fortunes of Africa by Martin Meredith, Dictatorland by Paul Kenyon, Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus by David Quammen, and Africa Is Not a Country by Margy Burns Knight.
I really hesitated with The Suns of Independence by Ahmadou Kourouma, which is set between two fictional countries, the Socialist Republic of Nikinai and Ebony Coast. Kourouma himself was firmly Ivoirian, but in the end I feel he deliberately set the book in a fictional place which is as closely related to Côte d’Ivoire as, say, the Shire is to England.
There were a couple with very little Ivoirian material, and I fear that people tagging them on LT / GR get mixed up between West African countries. Tété-Michel Kpomassie, author of An African in Greenland, is from Togo. Allah Is Not Obliged, by Ahmadou Kourouma, does start in Côte d’Ivoire but is mostly set in Liberia. The Dragons, the Giant, the Women by Wayétu Moore is set in Liberia and the USA. Standing Heavy, by Gauz, is set among Ivoirians in Paris. Arab Jazz, by Karim Miské, is set among Arabs in Paris; Miské was born in Côte d’Ivoire, but identifies as Mauritanian-French.
Content warnings: racism, spousal abuse, child marriage
Rosemary Sutcliff notes that her aunt Edith married
…Archie, weak-willed and amiable, who did not tell her beforehand that he was a quarter Indian — his mother being the product of an Indian Army colonel and a rajah’s daughter — what would have happened if he had told Aunt Edith before it was too late, there’s no knowing. Maybe she would still have married him, but I very much doubt it. As it was, finding out afterwards, she refused to have children — I very much doubt if she even allowed him into her bed! — and set out to make his life a cold hell to his dying day. I have been there at some family gathering myself, puzzled as a dog may be by stresses in the air, the electric discharge of things I did not understand, when he came into the room…
For many years, the family were quite seriously prepared for Uncle Archie to murder her one day, and prepared, if he did, to go into the witness-box on his behalf and swear that he did it under unendurable provocation.
This is an uncomfortable passage about the racism of her aunt, and the readiness of the rest of the family to turn a blind eye to both the aunt’s racism and the potential for her to be murdered by her husband. Sutcliff attempts to play both for laughs, but I doubt if it went down well in the 1980s when the book was published and it certainly doesn’t work for today’s reader.
‘Race’ is a social construct anyway, but NB that if Uncle Archie’s grandmother was a rajah’s daughter, but had a European mother (as is implied), Archie himself would have been an eighth of Indian heritage rather than a quarter.
I decided to check up on the details of the story, and found some interesting data. “Aunt Edith” is Edith Fanny Sutcliff (1871-1960), who in 1897 married “Uncle Archie”, Archibald Gordon Selwood Langley (1872-1943), son of Charles Archibald Langley (1841-1877) and Sarah Elizabeth Hewett (born 1850, married Charles on her 20th birthday, lived to at least 1901). Sarah is reported as being the daughter of Colonel William Selwood Hewett (1824-1889) and Frances Elizabeth Hall (1835-1865). All were born in India. Sarah’s birthdate is recorded as 5 December 1850, and her parents’ wedding as 30 October 1849. Frances’ birthdate is recorded as 14 September 1835, so she was married six weeks after her 14th birthday and gave birth to Sarah a couple of months after her fifteenth birthday. Errm…
Frances herself was the daughter of James Frederick Hall (1809–1837) and Ann Clifford (1816–1865). She was the third of her parents’ four children, born between 1832 and 1837, and her mother then had another seven children with her second husband. James and Ann married in 1831, when Ann was still 14, so errm once more. Again, this is all happening in (British) India. But this doesn’t fit Sutcliff’s story, which is that Archie’s maternal grandmother (Frances) was a rajah’s daughter; unless the suggestion is that Ann had an extramarital relationship with a rajah in her late teens, a couple of years after her marriage to James.
But maybe the story got confused down the generations. James Fredrick Hall’s parents were born in England, but I note that the records of Ann Clifford’s parents are sparse; her father John Clifford is known to have died in 1830, a year before her early marriage, and the only information we have about Ann’s mother, Archie’s great-grandmother, is her first name, Elizabeth. It could have been Elizabeth who was begotten by an Indian father in the closing years of the eighteenth century. This would have made Uncle Archie technically only a sixteenth Indian rather than a quarter or an eighth, but prejudice is rarely interested in the facts. (Or indeed Elizabeth herself might have been the daughter of two Indian parents, and then become known by an English name.)
And Aunt Edith still sounds horrifying, no matter what her husband’s ancestry was.
I am at home today, and gave a lecture on global politics at the Irish College in Leuven this morning. I do that kind of thing fairly often, but today I had to change my usual script to take account of yesterday’s events.
Pope Leo XIV comes to power at a moment when the right wing of the Catholic church in the USA is being instrumentalised as part of the Trump MAGA movement, and some are choosing to interpret the papal election in that light. Cardinal Prevost was probably the least American of the American cardinals, and his social media record is one of clapping back at J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. But that really isn’t the place to start, and it probably isn’t even the important part.
What struck me, the moment that the new Pope opened his mouth, is that his Italian is fluent and (as far as I could tell) without an American accent. A little digging and I found that his paternal grandfather, Jean/John Prevost (1876-1960) was born in Turin, Italy, and ran a language school in Chicago; his grandson was only four when he died, but the Pope’s father Louis Marius Prevost (1920-1997) was also a teacher and school administrator. Perhaps in the multicultural neighbourhood of Denton, there was an opportunity for a bright kid to pick up on languages.
The Pope’s paternal grandmother Suzanne Louise Marie Fontaine (1894-1979) was from Le Havre in France. She and Jean were already married at the point that Suzanne moved to the United States in 1917, and moved to Chicago before the Pope’s father was born in 1920. Some sources suggest that Suzanne’s mother’s maiden name was also Prevost, which suggests that she and her husband Jean/John were related (and the fact that he was known as “Jean” suggests close French ties) but the evidence is circumstantial and ambiguous.
The Pope’s mother, Mildred Agnes Martinez (1911-1990) is described in press reports as of Spanish descent. This is not the whole truth. Her father, Joseph Norval Martinez (1864–1926), was born in Haiti shortly before his family moved to New Orleans, and her mother Louise Baquie (1868–1945) was a Seventh Ward Creole; both are recorded as “mulatto” along with the rest of their families in the 1870 census, but as “white” in the 1880 census, which demonstrates the social construction of race. “Martinez” is obviously a Spanish name, so describing Mildred’s ancestry as Spanish is convenient shorthand.
So although the Pope’s parents were both born in Chicago, his four grandparents were born in four different countries. That in itself doesn’t guarantee anything of course (Donald Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, and his father’s family were all first or second generation German immigrants) but it’s an interesting start.
(Also I wonder who the last Pope with a degree in mathematics was.)
But even before the new Pope opened his mouth to speak fluent Italian (and Spanish), an important signal came from his choice of name. People have been having a lot of fun with the more dubious historical popes who took the name Leo, notably Leo IX who is generally regarded as responsible for the Great Schism of 1054, and Leo X whose sale of indulgences for the construction of St Peter’s was one of the triggers of the Reformation. (Add also Leo VIII, who was Pope twice, though is officially regarded as having been an antipope first time round.)
The new chap is too smart not to be aware of these, but for today’s Vatican the most recent Leo is the most important. Leo XIII became Pope just before his 68th birthday in 1878, and ruled for 25 years. Leo XIV is 69 and looks in good shape, and one message from his choice of name is that he expects to be around for a good while. I myself just turned 58; it’s weird to think that the next Pope will probably be younger than me. (And the one after certainly will be.)
Leo XIII pulled the church past the traumas of the unsuccessful conservatism of Pius IX, who had catastrophically lost the Papal States to the new Kingdom of Italy. He reopened the Vatican observatory and insisted that science and religion should coexist. But he is particularly remembered for Rerum novarum, the 1891 encyclical which commits the church to the amelioration of “the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.”
Leo XIII was not a socialist – indeed Rerum novarum was very much an anti-socialist document. But it was a conscious effort to position the church on the progressive side of political discourse, and it’s the intellectual basis for the more centrist European tradition of Christian Democracy (which has been rather weaker of late). I think it’s fair to describe Leo XIII as the least right-wing Pope since the term “right-wing” acquired political meaning. The new guy’s choice of the same name is a strong indicator that he’s heading in a similar political direction.
These things are relative of course. Leo XIII criticised Irish Nationalism, which certainly puts him on the wrong side of history. Leo XIV is, to put it politely, on a personal journey with regard to LGBTQ+ issues; though better informed observers than me find the initial signs encouraging.
Incidentally the speed of the election shows that the media narrative of the strength of the hard-line right-wing factions among the College of Cardinals was overblown. There is no way that Leo XIV can be regarded as anything other than the continuity candidate for Francis, breaking the traditional cycle of alternation between moderates and conservatives. The cardinals would have been very aware that voting for the man who selected Francis’s bishops was not going to turn the clock back, and it took them roughly 24 hours of actual voting time to get there.
One other thing to mention is that a couple of years ago I connected with my second cousin once removed Christopher Lamb, whose great-grandmother was my grandfather’s sister. He is now CNN’s Vatican correspondent, so he’s had three of the most significant weeks of his career since Easter Monday.
For myself, having been brought up Catholic, I have very much drifted away from the church in recent years. However I did attend the 1 May service at our local chapel last week. This place of ancient devotion celebrates just four masses a year, on 2 February, 1 May, 15 August, 1 November and 25 December; the ancient quarter days (Lammas shifted by a fortnight) and Christmas. The May ritual is dedicated to the Mother of Christ, whose statue miraculously appeared on the site in the late middle ages (and was stolen in 1974). Its replacement presides over the open air Mass (in good weather, which we had last week). Devotional hymns are sung.
The chapel is located right beside a holy well, and across the valley from two once-grand Bronze Age burial mounds. 1 May is Beltane in the old Celtic calendar, or Walpurgis Night here, when fires were lit to ward off evil and greet the turning of the seasons. So the candles lit by the congregation last week, and the procession around the Zoete Waters (sadly drained dry for maintenance at the moment), were part of a cycle of annual commemoration on or near that spot that probably goes back well before Christianity. I enjoyed the feeling of connection to the history of this place and this time of year.
Unexpectedly the service was a moment of geographical as well as historical connection. Under the late Pope Francis, the People’s Republic of China and the Church negotiated a reset of relations, though the process of appointing bishops is still a matter of dispute. (Hmm, and remind me who was staffing the Vatican side of that dispute until yesterday?) I know I keep saying this, but the rise of China is the central geopolitical fact in today’s world. Leuven has a long connection with China going back to Ferdinand Verbiest, and twenty visiting Chinese priests were in the congregation along with us locals. During the procession they belted out Chinese hymns.
The church’s central problems remain the same – falling numbers of worshippers, decreasing relevance, appalling failure to come to terms with the abuses of the past. I tend to think that if the answers can be found, it will be by looking forward and outward rather than backward and inward; and I am pleasantly surprised to find that the College of Cardinals (or at least two thirds of it) takes the same view.
Sam’s eyes snapped open, and half the class burst into laughter. “Very funny,” he said. “But you’ve only got ten minutes left, so you should probably save the jokes until then.”
Another of the short works that I have been saving up from the 2020 Hugo packet, this is about a contemporary world where people start to live on different sleeping schedules from each other, and how we can cope; and whether this is in fact something that needs to be corrected, or whether society needs to make accommodations for those who are different. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe.
Current City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James
Last books finished Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris
Next books Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
In the vile weather and the unaccustomed seaways, the White Russian prince mislaid Marseilles altogether, and finally, answering calls for professional help from the bridge, my father brought the Lublyana into harbour himself.
As a child and teenager, I enjoyed a lot of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels – I particularly remember the Eagle of the Ninth trilogy, The Hound of Ulster, and Warrior Scarlet. I picked up this autobiography a few Eastercons ago without really looking at it, and plucked it off the shelves at random the other day, interested to get to know more about a much-loved writer. (She lived from 1920 to 1993.)
My first surprise, once I actually looked at the front cover, was to see that it has an introduction by Tom Shakespeare. I knew Tom vaguely when we were students at Cambridge, and he once managed to get a front page photograph in the Guardian by eating fire on King’s Parade in protest at the government’s student loans proposals. We’ve exchanged the odd note over the last few years. He has achondroplasia, the most visible symptom of which is dwarfism, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the politics of disability.
Why, I wondered, would he write a foreword to Rosemary Sutcliff’s autobiography? I supposed that he might have shared my youthful enthusiasm for her writing, possibly even more so (he started Cambridge with the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic course, before switching to Social and Political Sciences). My copy of the book, which features a head-and-neck photograph of Sutcliff, failed to give me the vital clue that the two earlier editions would have done as soon as I looked at them.
Rosemary Sutcliff had Still’s Disease, systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and suffered various medical treatments and operations which were deemed necessary by the doctors advising her parents. (Tom Shakespeare points out that “orthopaedics” literally means “putting children right”.) She spent long periods in hospitals, isolated from her family and her few friends. (She was an only child; a sister had died before she was born.) As an adult, she used a wheelchair (after the death of her mother, who refused to allow her to have one). Writing cannot have been comfortable for her; but at her peak, she wrote 1800 words a day, by hand.
Once you know all this, a lot about her writing makes more sense. Tom Shakespeare lists nineteen of her novels where a major character has either a congenital or an acquired physical disability, and comments, “I cannot think of another writer who has done more or better.” And her disabled characters are not defined by their disabilities. They are simply people getting along as best they can in challenging circumstances. And it makes sense to choose Tom Shakespeare as the writer of the introduction to the book.
Sutcliff’s father was in the Navy, her mother was difficult (possibly bipolar) and her childhood was one of bouncing around between different ports, including Sheerness, Chatham and more exotically Malta. She was very slow to learn to read and write, left school at fourteen and worked as an artist until she rather suddenly became a full-time writer at the age of twenty-nine.
Having said all of that, it’s not a sad book. We live the life we get to live, and Sutcliffe makes the most of it, with occasional shafts of real humour. “I have always been sorry for children born more than two hundred years ago, and therefore denied the pleasure of popping fuchsia buds.” (This got some extraordinary responses when I posted it to Facebook.) She has a great eye for the countryside, and depicts friends and pets with love and candour. It’s a portrait of a particular time from a particular viewpoint, but it’s very nicely done.
In the last couple of chapters, she tells of her romantic relationship with Rupert King, a year younger than her but already separated from his first wife and the father of two sons. Eventually he decided to marry someone else, and she decided that she could not bear to be the third person in that relationship. It’s an intense and ultimately unhappy story, but she clearly feels that this thwarted romance was good for her in the end. I did a bit of my own delving on Rupert, using the online genealogy resources; he was married four times in all, with three more children on top of the two from his first marriage, and ended up in Australia. I don’t think he’d have made Rosemary happy in the medium to long term.
There were many models for us to choose from: John Glenn, with his sense of obligation and higher purpose. Tough, intense, cocky Gus Grissom, the kind of guy who didn’t care if the sun came out or not. Scott Carpenter and Gordon Cooper were independent and adventuresome and seemed willing to pay the price. They both did.
This was the third of three astronaut memoirs that I got in 2020 after reading this article, the first two being Michael Collins’ superb Carrying the Fire and Al Worden’s entertaining Falling to Earth. I would rank All American Boys between the other two. There are some very good parts. The books starts with the Apollo 1 fire, in which three of Cunningham’s friends and colleagues died horribly; and then it backtracks to become more of a social history of the US space programme, looking very much at the human side of the astronauts of the time, warts, sex, and all. Cunningham himself flew only one flight, Apollo 7, the first after the Apollo 1 disaster, but shares his pride in everything that the Apollo programme (and before it the Mercury and Gemini programmes) achieved, and reflects a bit on what being an astronaut meant at the peak of his career.
The last section of the book, added in 2003 after the original publication in 1977, is about what has Gone Wrong with NASA since the glory days, and is rather relentlessly Grumpy Old Man, railing against various targets such as political correctness in hiring, and Washington’s obsession with keeping the Russian space programme afloat. Even this has some fascinating moments – I had forgotten about the horrifying near-disaster of Soyuz 5, for instance. But Cunningham slightly loses the run of himself and vents personal grievances without much supporting evidence.
This was both the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves, and my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on those piles respectively are Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead by Deborah Blum, and Amnesty by Lara Elena Donnelly.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Madagascar.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Hot Ice
Nora Roberts
17,304
1,468
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
David Graeber
2,145
297
Red Island House
Andrea Lee
2,894
206
Ghost of Chance
William S. Burroughs
1,168
357
The Aye-Aye and I
Gerald Durrell
1,286
284
Return to the Enchanted Island
Johary Ravaloson
830
131
Thea Stilton and the Madagascar Madness
Thea Stilton [Elisabetta Dami]
723
146
The Pirate’s Son
Geraldine McCaughrean
247
240
There are a couple of authors I didn’t expect to see here, including in particular Nora Roberts; I checked, and yes, more than half of Hot ice is actually set on Madagascar, so it qualifies for my top spot this week. It sounds like ratehr a laugh; even diehard Nora Roberts fans seem to be a bit embarrassed by it. I am not 100% sure about Return to the Enchanted Island, a substantial part of which is set in France, but it was the only book by a Malagasy author that scored at all well.
The Pirate Enlightenment book sounds really interesting too, about the intersection of Enlightenment ideology with the real life Malagasy pirates of the eighteenth century.
I disqualified seven books. Six of them are set in various countries with Madagascar occupying less than 50% of the text, sometimes much less; those were Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond; Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine; Lost Empire, by Clive Cussler; Flashman’s Lady, by George MacDonald Fraser (this surprised me; all the memorable bits of the book are set on Madagascar, but Flashman doesn’t actually get there until almost two thirds of the way through); A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth, by Samantha Weinberg (also surprised me, but the author ranges all over the Western Indian Ocean); and In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean, by Hawa Hassan. I also disqualified The Flanders Route, by Claude Simon, which has nothing to do with Madagascar except that the author was born there.
Next up: Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Nepal and Venezuela.
My great-grandmother’s sister, born Frances Belt Wickersham (1862-1949), married the Sheffield steel man Sir Robert Hadfield (1858-1940) in 1894. The Hadfields had no children, but informally adopted my grandmother (after her own mother’s early death).
Sir Robert and Lady Hadfield on a cruise on the Nile in 1909.
Frances, known as Bunnie to the family, was very active in wartime nursing. In the first world war, she established the Anglo-American Hospital, also called No.5 British Red Cross Hospital or just “Lady Hadfield’s Hospital”, at Wimereux in northern France in December 1914. It provided 100 beds, and closed on 10th of January 1919 having treated over 16,000 patients. She was appointed a CBE in the 1919 Birthday Honours.
Bunnie Hadfield in nursing uniform.
In the second world war, she again established the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit, which started work in France in 1940 but ended up travelling with Free French forces in the Middle East, North Africa, Italy and finally France again in the course of the war. In both cases, Sir Robert put up the money but Lady Hadfield did the actual setting up, and she was reputedly fairly hands-on in running the Wimereux hospital.
Portrait of Bunnie Hadfield by Jan Juta, an artist friend of my grandmother’s; and photograph of Juta actually painting it, from the collection of Christopher Scholz. We do not know where the portrait currently is, or who took the photograph.
Lady Frances is buried together with her husband Sir Robert, her sister, her mother and her niece (my grandmother) in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking. I found them in 2022.
In April last year I visited Sheffield for David and Fred’s belated wedding celebration, and went in search of the Hadfield legacy. The Department of Metallurgy and related bits of Sheffield University are housed in a building which is named after Sir Robert, which is fair enough given that he invented manganese steel and so on. There’s a portrait and a rather striking bust in the Sir Robert Hadfield Meetings Room.
With Jennifer M of the School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering, in the Sir Robert Hadfield Meetings Room of the Hadfield Building
I noticed also that there is a Hadfield Wing at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, so I ventured out to look at it. I was really quite shocked to see that only Sir Robert was commemorated in the building; there was no mention whatsoever of his wife.
There are in fact nine distinct buildings of the Northern General Hospital, all of them named after men, of whom I find precisely one whose professional career had any connection with medicine (Bev Stokes, a former Chairman of the hospital’s Board). I find no record of Sir Robert Hadfield ever taking a direct interest in medicine, other than his own health and supporting his wife (their marriage was rocky, but he was ready to help here).
So I wrote directly to the Chair and the Chief Executive of the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the Northern General Hospital, and requested that they consider renaming the building, or at least acknowledging Lady Frances’ work. (Incidentally, both the Chair and the Chief Executive are women.) This eventually got me into courteous correspondence with the Chief Nurse, Professor Morley, who politely pointed out that renaming a building cannot be done casually or quickly, but added that they would look into the options.
In the last few days, I have heard that the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust will install a permanent display about Lady Frances Hadfield in the atrium of the Hadfield Wing. So at least there will be one woman commemorated across the various buildings of the Northern General Hospital, and my great-great-aunt’s efforts will be recognised in her husband’s home city. It’s always worth raising your voice.
The Arthur C. Clarke Award submissions list is out! So, as usual, I am looking at the total number of users who have rated the book on Goodreads, the total number who say that they own it on LibraryThing, and the average ratings on both systems. The top quintile in each column is in bold. Again, this is of course no more than a reflection of the tastes of the user base on both systems, and certainly not a good guide to the Clarke judges’ tastes; it may (or may not) be useful to assess how far each of the books has penetrated the market.
NB these numbers were hand-crunched, without the use of AI.
Goodreads
LibraryThing
raters
rating
owners
rating
The Ministry of Time
Kaliane Bradley
135,137
3.59
1,918
3.72
The Life Impossible
Matt Haig
98,845
3.49
940
3.54
The Husbands
Holly Gramazio
103,690
3.52
803
3.76
Real Americans
Rachel Khong
71,350
3.97
600
3.78
Annie Bot
Sierra Greer
51,572
3.83
533
3.72
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner
23,933
3.4
730
3.54
The Mercy of Gods
James S.A. Corey
26,475
4.18
570
3.98
The Last Murder at the End of the World
Stuart Turton
14,857
3.67
806
3.77
The Other Valley
Scott Alexander Howard
17,250
3.88
355
3.8
The Family Experiment
John Marrs
38,783
4.06
131
3.58
Heavenly Tyrant
Xiran Jay Zhao
8,574
3.88
462
4.05
The Book of Elsewhere
Reeves and Miéville
6,733
3.33
565
3.3
Service Model
Adrian Tchaikovsky
11,197
4.04
338
3.87
The Book of Love
Kelly Link
8,252
3.48
449
3.73
You Dreamed of Empires
Álvaro Enrigue
9,863
3.78
354
3.8
Alien Clay
Adrian Tchaikovsky
9,483
4.03
312
3.89
Absolution
Jeff VanderMeer
6,779
3.63
402
3.75
The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands
Sarah Brooks
6,913
3.63
334
3.68
Hum
Helen Phillips
8,236
3.51
262
3.49
The Stardust Grail
Yume Kitasei
6,084
3.68
292
3.86
Private Rites
Julia Armfield
8,378
3.68
208
3.79
I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom
Jason Pargin
9,003
3.99
191
4.23
A Letter to the Luminous Deep
Sylvie Cathrall
4,925
3.67
270
3.74
Polostan
Neal Stephenson
4,242
3.88
299
3.58
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
Anne de Marcken
7,115
3.71
159
3.6
William
Mason Coile
9,159
3.54
118
3.5
The Mars House
Natasha Pulley
3,215
4.01
193
4.14
Gliff
Ali Smith
3,764
3.98
157
3.81
Machine Vendetta
Alastair Reynolds
3,283
4.31
143
3.97
The Great When
Alan Moore
1,736
3.63
234
3.71
Juice
Tim Winton
4,303
3.99
92
4.13
Echo of Worlds
M.R. Carey
3,273
4.32
91
4.31
The Principle of Moments
Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson
1,286
3.62
223
3.94
Hammajang Luck
Makana Yamamoto
1,872
3.61
147
3.13
Crypt of the Moon Spider
Nathan Ballingrud
2,511
3.94
100
3.96
Mal Goes to War
Edward Ashton
2,315
4
106
3.64
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
Molly McGhee
2,433
3.47
97
3.73
A Better World
Sarah Langan
2,562
3.61
83
3.82
Toward Eternity
Anton Hur
1,666
3.82
102
3.43
The Last Gifts of the Universe
Riley August
2,073
3.81
70
3.54
Apostles of Mercy
Linday Ellis
1,865
4.15
77
3.68
The Mark
Fríða Ísberg
3,059
3.66
44
3.15
Hagstone
Sinéad Gleeson
2,401
3.55
53
3.58
The Bound Worlds
Megan E. O’Keefe
1,712
4.15
67
3.71
Gogmagog
Jeff Noon & Steve Beard
850
3.64
91
3.55
Deep Black
Miles Cameron
1,529
4.31
44
4
In Universes
Emet North
940
3.83
64
3.63
Lady Eve’s Last Con
Rebecca Fraimow
744
3.87
77
3.82
Jumpnauts
Hao Jingfang
753
3.29
56
2.82
Revenant-X
David Wellington
882
4.06
38
3.29
Hey, Zoey
Sarah Crossan
1,249
3.29
26
2.7
On Vicious Worlds
Bethany Jacobs
909
4.34
33
4.14
Calypso
Oliver K. Langmead
526
3.64
56
3.56
High Vaultage
Jen & Chris Sugden
555
4.16
53
4.4
The Doomed Earth: In Our Stars
Jack Campbell
553
3.8
48
3.57
World Walkers
Neal Asher
595
4.13
34
4.25
The Siege of Burning Grass
Premee Mohamed
364
3.81
51
3.77
Beyond the Light Horizon
Ken MacLeod
475
4
37
4
Key Lime Sky
Al Hess
445
3.74
38
3.07
Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock
Maud Woolf
637
3.69
26
3.75
Lake of Darkness
Adam Roberts
351
3.69
42
3.65
Past Crimes
Jason Pinter
641
3.61
19
3.93
Out of the Drowning Deep
A.C. Wise
295
3.71
39
3.95
Three Eight One
Aliya Whiteley
258
3.33
39
3.33
Interstellar MegaChef
Lavanya Lakshminarayan
401
3.57
21
3.33
The Collapsing Wave
Doug Johnstone
430
4.23
18
3.58
Briefly Very Beautiful
Roz Dineen
315
3.81
24
4.17
The Glass Woman
Alice McIlroy
494
3.38
15
–
Welcome to Forever
Nathan Tavares
270
3.74
27
4.5
Blacklight Born
Alexander Darwin
503
3.92
13
3.67
Tomorrow’s Children
Daniel Polansky
339
3.63
19
3.63
Ghost of the Neon God
T.R. Napper
263
4.02
18
4.25
This Is How You Remember It
Catherine Prasifka
903
4.04
5
–
The Knife and the Serpent
Tim Pratt
148
3.75
27
3.3
The Escher Man
T.R. Napper
214
3.99
15
4
Darkome
Hannu Rajaniemi
198
3.69
14
3.5
The Unrelenting Earth
Kritika H. Rao
197
3.62
14
–
The Watermark
Sam Mills
141
3.51
18
4
Extremophile
Ian Green
133
3.9
15
–
Bonding
Mariel Franklin
214
3.23
9
3.5
Fortress Sol
Stephen Baxter
191
3.35
10
3.5
Any Human Power
Manda Scott
174
3.89
10
–
Ninth Life
Stark Holborn
126
4.44
13
4.33
Toxxic
Jane Hennigan
239
4.07
5
–
Fight Me
Austin Grossman
114
3.75
9
3.25
Spiral
Cameron Ward
170
4.09
6
2
We Are All Ghosts in the Forest
Lorraine Wilson
121
3.83
8
3.75
Ardent Violet and the Infinite Eye
Alex White
102
4.32
8
5
The Wilding
Ian McDonald
40
3.72
18
4.33
The Seventh Spell
Davis Bunn
62
3.31
6
4.5
Jubilee
Stephen K. Stanford
49
3.76
6
–
The Book Lovers
Steve Aylett
20
3.8
10
2.74
The Dream Traveller: Dark Rising
John Nassari
49
4.45
3
–
The Edge of Solitude
Katie Hale
73
3.7
2
–
The Final Orchard
CJ Rivera
119
4.01
1
–
Vigilance
Allen Stroud
19
4.05
3
–
No/Mad/Land
Francesco Verso
10
3.9
4
–
The Consciousness Company
M.N. Rosen
33
4.36
1
2
Her Gilded Voice
K.C. Aegis
24
4.33
1
5
Heat: “Beyond Mindslip”
Tony Harmsworth
10
4.3
2
–
Idolatry
Aditya Sudarshan
18
3.5
1
–
Dark Shepherd
Fred Gambino
3
3.67
5
–
The Headland
Abi Curtis
13
4
1
–
Indigo Starling
Dundas Glass
6
4.83
2
–
Lacuna
Erin Hosfield
12
4.92
1
–
The Past Master
Patience Agbabi
9
4.22
1
–
Birdwatching at the End of the World
G.W. Dexter
2
4
4
–
A Truth Beyond Full
Rosie Oliver
2
5
1
–
The Cosmic Caretaker
Ange Anderson
1
5
1
–
Worlds Aligned : Worlds Apart 2
Terry Jackman
1
5
1
–
Dakini Atoll
Nikhil Singh
1
4
1
–
New Adventures of a Chinese Time Machine
Ian Watson
0
–
3
–
Well, there’s a rather clear leader there… On the other hand, I’m astonished to see a book by Ian Watson, who is hardly an obscure writer, which has no owners on Goodreads at all.
Second paragraph of third story (“Mission to Galacton”, by Justin Richards):
A constant stream of freight ships carried resources plundered from worlds the Daleks had conquered. As the empire continued to expand, so the need for supplies grew ever greater, and Dalek task forces ventured further and further into neutral and hostile space in search of planets to ransack. In the centuries before the Great Time War, nothing could stop the Daleks…
A collection of 26 short stories, 16 of them by Justin Richards, previously published in the Doctor Who annuals and other spinoff material. Eleven Tenth Doctor Stories, six Eleventh Doctor, two Twelfth, one with the War Doctor, and also a half-dozen Doctor-lite stories exploring a bit more of the Whoniverse. A couple of weak ones, but several corkers; having been mean to him in my last review, I particularly liked the pair of stories where Amy and Rory have the same adventure from opposite directions without either realising that the other is involved. Decent internal art. No artist or editor is credited. You can get it here.
As a schoolgirl studying geography in Madras, India, Hema had to mark where coal and wool were produced on a map of the British Isles. Africa figured in the curriculum as a playground for Portugal, Britain, and France, and a place for Livingstone to find the spectacular falls he named after Queen Victoria, and for Stanley to find Livingstone. In future years, as my brother, Shiva, and I made the journey with Hema, she would teach us the practical geography she had taught herself. She’d point down to the Red Sea and say, “Imagine that ribbon of water running up like a slit in a skirt, separating Saudi Arabia from Sudan, then farther up keeping Jordan away from Egypt. I think God meant to snap the Arabian Peninsula free of Africa. And why not? What do the people on this side have in common with the people on the other side?”
Another long book which I was reading alongside Paladin of Souls, this came to my attention as the best-known book set in Ethiopia , a country that I know mainly because I once spent two days in Addis Ababa by accident (my flight to Juba was delayed) in April 2010. It’s a fascinating country, with 135 million inhabitants, more than any other African country except Nigeria and more than any European country except Russia (if that counts). At present it is suffering a lot of internal instability, but when Ethiopia has its act together the rest of us will need to pay attention. Dervla Murphy visited it in more innocent times.
Most of Cutting for Stone is set in Addis, the protagonist being the son of an Indian mother and American father, brought up in a hospital with his twin brother; both of them train to be doctors, like their parents, and live through the tumultuous years of the third quarter of the twentieth century (the protagonist is born in 1954, and flees to the USA in 1979). It’s told from a place of love and sympathy for Ethiopia and its people; I actually felt it went slightly off track when we eventually reach America and the search for the protagonist’s long-lost father, and the climax of the book, involving sexually transmitted hepatitis and a liver transplant, was a bit too neat (and not very empowering for the women in the story). The faint-hearted will also be deterred by surgical details throughout the book, especially the graphic gynæcological descriptions at the beginning.
Still, I very much enjoyed it. The author himself was born and brought up in a medical environment in Addis Ababa, so he clearly knows whereof he writes. He is a year younger than the central character of the book, he left Ethiopia in 1974 rather than 1979, and both his parents are Indian rather than just one, so it’s not completely autobiographical, but must include a lot of life experience (there is nonetheless an impressive bibliography). You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that list is Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch.
Read in the last week Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (did not finish) What Feasts at Night, by T. Kingfisher Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (did not finish) Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis, by Kevin Clarke All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Blue Remembered Hills, by Rosemary Sutcliff Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan The Maid and the Crocodile, by Jordan Ifueko Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple
(ten in total for the week, thanks to some short and unfinished books, and a relaxed birthday weekend)
April 2025 totals
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 22) A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Blue Remembered Hills, by Rosemary Sutcliff Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple
Non-genre 4 (YTD 17) The Vegetarian, by Kang Han Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells How Many Miles to Babylon, by Jennifer Johnston Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
SF 16 (YTD 44) The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger The Vetting, by Michael Cassutt The Birds, and other stories, by Daphne du Maurier Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Tusks of Extinction, by Ray Naylor The Feast Makers, by H.A. Clarke (did not finish) Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell The Brides of High Hill, by Nghi Vo Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold Moonstorm, by Yoon Ha Lee Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (did not finish) What Feasts at Night, by T. Kingfisher Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan The Maid and the Crocodile, by Jordan Ifueko
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 10) Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis, by Kevin Clarke
Comics 4 (YTD 12 ) It Came from Outer Space, by Tony Lee et al The Hunger and the Dusk vol. 1, by G. Willow Wilson, Chris Wildgoose and Msassyk The Deep Dark, by Molly Knox Ostertag Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (did not finish)
8,700 pages (YTD 28,100) 13/31 (YTD 39/97) by non-male writers (Sutcliff, Kang, Johnston, Little Badger, du Maurier, Clarke, Vo, Bujold, “Kingfisher”, Ifueko, Wilson, Ostertag, Liu/Takeda) 7/31 (YTD 18/97) by non-white writers (Kang, Verghese, Little Badger, Vo, Lee, Ifueko, Liu/Takeda) 3/31 rereads (Paladin of Souls, Dragon’s Wrath, Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis)
251 books currently tagged unread, up 19 from last month (thanks to the Hugo packet), down 63 from April 2024
Reading now Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold
Coming soon (perhaps)
Dead Man’s Hand, by Tony Lee et al Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay
Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb “The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch ‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Liss was clearly happier to be sent off to the stables to select the most suitable riding horse and baggage mule. One baggage mule. By midday Ista’s feverish single-mindedness resulted in both women dressed for the road, the horses saddled, and the mule packed. The dy Gura brothers found them standing in the cobbled courtyard when they rode through the castle gate heading ten mounted men in the garb of the Daughter’s Order, dy Cabon following on his white mule.
I got this almost as soon as it came out in 2004, and rather enjoyed it; but a minutely observed story of human nature, with a well-worked out system of gods and worshippers, a society where the social structure is Age of Chivalry but the landscape is the American West, and the boundary between life and death is a real feature that has to be navigated with great skill. It’s also nice to have protagonists who are middle-aged. You can get it here.
It is however very long, and I would not recommend reading it unless you first read The Curse of Chalion which establishes the parameters of the World of the Five Gods. The whole series won the second Hugo for Best Series, Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga having won the first such award.
Back in the day, I actually rated this third of the five Hugo finalists that year, behind Singularity Sky by Charles Stross and Ilium by Dan Simmons.
I’m a fervent Bujoldian, and really like this book; I just happen to think the other two are slightly better. Bujold’s third fantasy novel, and her second in the world of The Curse of Chalion, the action is set in a much smaller scale than the continent-spanning action of its predecessor; the characters are beautifully drawn, in a world where theology is an applied science; and it’s nice to have an adventure and romance story whose character is actually middle-aged.
I regret my preference for Ilium in retrospect, but I still feel that the win for Paladin of Souls was more of a reward for a body of work than for new and exciting writing.
The other Hugo winners in the written categories that year were “The Cookie Monster”, by Vernor Vinge (novella); “Legions in Time”, by Michael Swanwick (novelette) and “A Study in Emerald”, by Neil Gaiman (short story). The other Nebula winners were “The Green Leopard Plague”, by Walter Jon Williams; “Basement Magic”, by Ellen Klages; and “Coming to Terms”, by Eileen Gunn.
The Nebula for Best Script and the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form (and indeed the Osca) went to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form went to Gollum’s acceptance speech for the MTV Awards, the only time since the Hugo Dramatic Presentation category was split that both awards went to the same franchise.
The following year saw two joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards in the written fiction categories, “The Faery Handbag” by Kelly Link and “Two Hearts” by Peter S. Beagle. (As previously noted, I skipped a couple of joint winners after “The Ultimate Earth” by Jack Williamson.)
‘So, what do you think?’ Benny asked for about the fifth time in as many minutes.
Justin Richards is the most prolific of living Doctor Who authors – I am not completely sure if he has overtaken Terrance Dicks by now, but if not, I am sure that he will. Usually his writing is accessible and enjoyable, so I’m sorry to report that I somewhat bounced off this, the second of the independent Bernice Summerfield novels. It’s a story about a historical artefact which appears to exist in several duplicate forms, but the format kept shifting from strange dig to heist to detective novel to courtroom drama, and I felt too much was being put in without enough explanation of what was going on. A rare miss for me, for both author and series. You can get it here, at a price.
When I listened to the audio version first time round, in 2007, I wrote:
Dragon’s Wrath, like Oh, No It Isn’t!, is detached from the narrative of the other four stories. It is, frankly, not as good; plot too obvious, guest star (Richard Franklin) not sufficiently engaged, sound recording rather poor in places, basically rather skippable.
Re-listening confirmed my impressions from the first time around, and I will add that the end is very rushed. It’s interesting the Big Finish slipped it in at the end of their first Bernice Summerfield season, getting the other (and in my view better) stories out the door first. You can get it here.
I’m allowing the winner even though it is short on geographical detail, because there is absolutely no doubt as to which country it is written about, and many of the individual suras are tagged as being written in Medina or Mecca. Incidentally I had to add together a bunch of different LibraryThing editions which had not been combined, presumably for good reason; the real LT number must be much higher.
Apart from Dave Eggers, the other books are all by women, though only one (Girls of Riyadh) by a Saudi woman.
I disqualified half a dozen. I was a bit surprised to see The Power, by Naomi Alderman, topping the list – very little of the book is set in Saudi. I Am Pilgrim, by Terry Hayes, Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, all cover many countries, with less than half of any of them being set in the Kingdom.
I was a bit surprised to find myself then excluding Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence, and Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger; but in fact the former is largely set on the territory of what is now Jordan (and when I get there I’ll do a strict page count to see if it’s over 50%) and the latter spends a lot of time in Oman and what are now the UAE, the core visits to the Rub’ al Khali taking up less than a hundred of the 320 pages of text.
Next up are Madagascar, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and to my surprise Nepal, whose population is around the 30 million mark.
(reposted and updated from April 2005 and then February 2013)
Since it’s that time of century, I thought I would dig out of my memory four books I remember having read where the protagonist becomes Pope. I’ve lost my copies of them, if I ever had them, long ago.
Peter de Rosa, Pope Patrick. Written in 1995, set in 2009 after the (fictional) death of John Paul II. This has got some quite good reviews, but I don’t know why; I thought it was a load of rubbish. Irish country priest gets sort of accidentally elected Pope; outlaws banking (or at least banking with interest); bonds with the (Catholic) US president who defeated Sylvester Stallone in the 2008 election; eventually wiped out in a nuclear war with the Islamic world. Full of cod-Irishry. You can get it here.
Morris West, Shoes of the Fisherman. Written and set in 1963, the year of the death of John XXIII. Starts dramatically as a Ukrainian is elected pope without a ballot, the cardinals being suddenly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Nothing much then happens; the Church attempts to bridge the gap between the Soviet empire and the West, and somebody resembling Teilhard de Chardin gets into theological trouble. You can get it here. Made into a 1968 film with Anthony Quinn, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud. Unlike the other three books I list here, the Pope lives on for two sequels, which I have not read.
Fr Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Hadrian the Seventh. Written and set in 1904. Total wish-fulfillment of the author, himself a failed priest; the Cardinals, unable to agree on the new Pope, come and beg him to take over; he duly does so, sorts out the entire world by allocating large chunks of it to the Germans to run more efficiently, and is, inevitably, assassinated. Horrendously right-wing, even I suspect for 1904, but more passionately written than the above two. Get it here in hard copy, here for free electronically.
Walter F. Murphy, Vicar of Christ. I think I have listed these in reverse order of when I read them and this was the first. Written and set in 1979. The hero in this case is much more interesting, an American war hero who has served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and then abruptly retires to a monastery after his wife is killed in a car crash. Like de Rosa’s book, set after the death of John Paul II (but in this case after a one-year rather than a thirty-year reign); like in Hadrian the Seventh, the cardinals are deadlocked and go for an outside candidate, ie our protagonist. He takes the name Franciscus I, proceeds to reform the Church drastically (reforms that are all still needed) and is, of course, assassinated at the end. Get it here (with foreword by Samuel Alito).
There are a load of others that I haven’t read, most notably Conclave by Robert Harris, though I really enjoyed the film.
All of these books veer from earnest to silly, and I haven’t read any of them for about three decades. I might revisit Hadrian the Seventh, even though it is on the sillier side, because it is mercifully short.
29 years ago today I was preparing to stand in my last election. (My last election to date, that is – who knows what the future will bring.)
The election was in the middle of the Northern Ireland peace process, for 110 members of a consultative forum who would also be potential delegates to the all-party peace talks chaired by George Mitchell.
Those were wild days. I had moved back to Belfast in 1991 to do the project that eventually became my PhD, and through various channels – in particular, through my existing friendship with the Liberal Democrats’ then deputy director of policy, and through my past involvement with the British Irish Association’s annual conferences – I am surprised in retrospect that it took me as long as a year and a half to get sucked back into politics.
By the end of 1993 I was the Alliance Party’s Director of Elections, later renamed Party Organiser. I was a PhD student with not a lot of motivation for the actual topic of my thesis, and basically loved hanging around party headquarters to do whatever jobs needed to be done – not just number-crunching for the proposed new parliamentary boundaries, but also bringing in new canvassing software, and plentiful knocking on doors during local council by-elections – which, quite fortuitously, happened in a number of good areas for Alliance during my period of involvement.
I won’t go into huge detail of the mishandling by all sides of the first years of the peace process from the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. I was both too close to it and also not involved in the key decisions. It still stuns me that politicians as thick as Sir Patrick Mayhew, and his sidekick the even more dismal Sir John Wheeler, were put in charge of such delicate negotiations at a key stage of Northern Ireland’s history; though I guess since then, Brexit has exposed the flaws of the UK’s political system even more brutally.
The particular detail that involved me most, from pretty early on, was the possibility of elections taking place as a part of the peace process, and the likelihood that rather than using either of the off-the-shelf electoral systems available, the British government (in order to get the Unionists to buy into the process) might decide to go for some sort of closed list system across the whole of Northern Ireland from which talks delegates might be selected.
I (and the Alliance Party) very much opposed this, partly for the principled reason that the Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies is simply the best system possible, and partly for the selfish reason that Alliance suspected the party would do less well in a Northern Ireland-wide vote, rather than a vote using the 18 new electoral districts (elections for the European Parliament had always been very bad for Alliance) especially if there were no transferable element to the voting system (which does help the party punch a little above its weight, though less than conventional wisdom would have it).
The government, of course, were faced with several competing priorities – to get buy-in from the Ulster Unionist Party, and also to try and get the two small Loyalist parties, the UDP and PUP, inserted into the talks somehow. After experimenting with various models including, at one point, an “indexation” system – you would get two seats if you scored between 1% and 5%, three from 5% to 15% and four from 15% up, or something like that – they eventually came up with a proposal for electing five representatives from each of the 18 parliamentary constituencies, plus giving the top ten parties an extra two seats each, all chosen from closed lists.
This was the apogee of my Northern Irish political career, such as it was. I remember flying to London one day to meet with Sir Patrick Mayhew, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and on the way back pausing at Heathrow Airport to contact Prionsias de Rossa, then one of the leaders of the coalition parties in the Irish government. I had to get him to call me back at the payphone in the airport terminal building. (That government had an unnervingly informal approach to phone calls – I remember sitting in the party headquarters one evening, and answering the phone as it rang: the caller asked for John Alderdice, explaining that he was John Bruton, the Taoiseach. “Yes, I know who you are…” I replied.)
It was all for nothing, though, and this very peculiar system went ahead. At the start of the campaign my optimistic predictions were that Alliance should get six constituency seats, plus two top-up seats as the party should be comfortably among the top ten, and stood a decent chance of another two constituency seats (hoping especially for second seats in East Belfast and East Antrim). I myself was the lead candidate in North Belfast, where Alliance had won one of five seats starting from only 7% in the 1982 Assembly election; I was not foolish enough to expect to come anywhere close to winning, but did hope to at least equal the 6% scored by the party’s candidate in the 1992 Westminster election (on slightly different boundaries). We had a good, dedicated team – my election agent was only 17, and most of the rest of the North Belfast branch were pretty elderly, but we covered the territory we needed to cover, the intention being not to actually win but to lay the foundations for winning a seat on Belfast City Council in the 1997 elections (which duly happened, and indeed Alliance won one of the five Assembly seats in 2022).
Most of my time during the campaign was spent either at headquarters or knocking doors. I did two public meetings. The first was a mild-mannered affair in an upper-middle-class area, after which Dr John Dunlop, the former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, dropped me home. The other, on the Crumlin Road/Ardoyne interface was rather more dramatic. The panellists included Gerry Kelly of Sinn Fein, me, and a bunch of minor parties (I suppose I should say other minor parties). The press were all there for Kelly, but I got my soundbite broadcast anyway thanks to the requirements of fairness from broadcasters. One of the audience accused me of having absolutely no sense of reality because I suggested that the police might not be utterly and irredeemably evil. The audience as a whole were really deciding whether to vote for Kelly or not to vote at all; I don’t think I won many for the cause that evening. I departed so rapidly that I forgot my coat, and had to go back for it the next day.
In the event the Alliance vote dropped, and the party won only five of the six seats I had thought were safe (suffering a double squeeze in Lagan Valley, as Catholic voters who had previously voted Alliance, faute de mieux, opted for the SDLP for the first time, and Protestants voted for the nice “reformed” Loyalists to encourage them to keep up the ceasefire). I scored 4% in North Belfast (along with my two co-candidates). In my PhD thesis, and in the book based on it, I note:
Thanks to the electorate of North Belfast not supporting me in sufficient numbers in May 1996, I did not become their elected representative to the Northern Ireland Forum and multi-party talks and so had enough time to complete this thesis. For some reason I feel more kindly towards the 1,670 who did vote for me.
Election counts are always slightly odd in Northern Ireland – for once, political foes of every stripe are united in their fear of their common enemy – the voter! Once it became clear (as it did pretty rapidly) that I had no chance of winning, I managed to get hacked into RTE’s live radio coverage of the event and stayed in their Belfast studio for the rest of the day, my jaw dropping at the surprisingly high vote for Sinn Fein – they had predicted it almost precisely, and I had pooh-poohed their predictions, an experience that left me with a profound respect for their electoral forecasts which lasted for several electoral cycles (until they started to let hubris rather than calculation inform their forecasts). And so to a rather subdued, but relieved, celebration in the party leader’s constituency office in East Belfast.
Of course, just because I wasn’t elected didn’t mean that I was not involved with the talks once they started. I got a paid political position as one of the researchers to the Alliance delegation, and though I missed the dramatic first night of the talks – where British officials physically restrained the Unionists from occupying the chairs set aside for George Mitchell and his co-chairs – I sat in on a number of the set-pieces for the first six months, including a memorably brutal session at the end of July 1996 following the vicious marching season of that year. Mitchell has written in his own book of his despair after that particular meeting; he was the consummate professional and sounded entirely sincere when he thanked everyone for their heartfelt and vigorous contributions to the discussion, without a hint of irony.
Anyway, at the end of the year I got a job in Bosnia, and my career basically took off in a completely unexpected, and personally much more rewarding, direction. I don’t say “never again”, but I do say that the next time I stand for election, I want to have a much stronger chance of winning. But today, 29 years on from 1996, I just want to remember the election campaign that I fought when I was 29 years old in 1996. As you have probably worked out, 29+29 = 58, and today is my 58th birthday.
As early as 1940 there had been proposals in Britain for sharing sovereignty with another European country, namely France. Jean Monnet was yet again working to coordinate the economic efforts of the two allies, and convinced the British government to seek political union with his native country. On 16 June de Gaulle transmitted the offer to Paul Reynaud’s French government in Bordeaux, but Reynaud lost power to Marshal Pétain on the same day. Pétain, who favoured an armistice with the Germans, asked why France would wish to ‘fuse with a corpse’.² And so it is perhaps not so surprising that Winston Churchill emerged after the war as one of the leading champions of a united Europe. Out of power since July 1945, in September of the following year he gave a speech in Zurich in which he called for the construction of ‘a kind of United States of Europe’. ‘The first step in the recreation of the European Family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral and cultural leadership of Europe … In all this urgent work, France and Germany must take the lead together.’ (At this stage, it must be said, the French doubted the wisdom of giving the Germans such a role.) Over the next two years Churchill tirelessly advocated for a united Europe, which he regarded as being fully compatible with Britain’s imperial commitments. Indeed, Britain’s claim to continuing great-power status lay precisely in the fact that the country, uniquely, lay at the centre of ‘three interlinked circles’: the first and most important was the British Commonwealth and Empire, the second was the English-speaking world, and the third was a united Europe.³ ² Ibid. [Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016)], p. 18. ³ https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-160/articles-wsc-s-three-majestic-circles/.
I know Kevin O’Rourke from many years ago when the two of us were invited on a residential seminar in Tuscany by a mutual friend, and I also vaguely knew his father, a senior Irish ambassador, but we have not met in 35 years. Since then he has become a prominent economic historian, currently teaching in Abu Dhabi, but in Oxford at the time this book was being written, during the death throes of Brexit in the summer of 2019.
Because of its timing, the book misses the excitement of the end of the chase – the hasty just-before-Christmas deal of 2019, followed by the Johnson and then Truss governments’ attempts to wriggle out of their own commitments, ending, at least for now, with Sunak’s deal (his only significant achievement in two years at the top).
But it makes up for that with a significant amount of detail about how the EU was set up in the first place, and the UK’s role outside and inside the process, a story which is centred on France and its relationship with Germany and to a lesser extent the UK, and therefore tends to be neglected by British commentators. He also goes in detail into the economic history of Ireland and why EU membership became fundamental to the Irish state. I think that both of these elements are possibly educational for readers who consumed only the mainstream (ie non-Irish) Anglophone media during the process while it was happening.
He doesn’t waste much time on David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate the UK’s membership of the EU, but looks in some detail at the referendum result (which he feels was overdetermined; I tend to agree), and then does his best to explain Theresa May’s negotiation process. I still find it difficult to believe how pathetic the UK’s approach was in those early stages; May was ill-served by her treacherous and stupid ministers, Johnson and Davis, but the failure to come up with a detailed plan for the UK was her fault and her responsibility.
Anyway, the book itself as an important antidote to the UK perspective that Brexit was a purely British political story, in particular presenting the Irish view in its European context. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my bookshelves. Next on that pile is All American Boys, by Walter Cunningham.
(Various factors combine to mean that you’re getting a bunch of Doctor Who reviews this week.)
Second frame of third issue:
A collection of five Eleventh Doctor / Amy / Rory stories, of which the most memorable is the two-part second story in which the Doctor and Amy swap bodies. More could be done with that concept, but you’ve got to start somewhere! You can get it here.
Current All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
Last books finished Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell The Brides of High Hill, by Nghi Vo Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold The Deep Dark, by Molly Knox Ostertag Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese Moonstorm, by Yoon Ha Lee
Next books Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis, by Kevin Clarke Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I like Simon Guerrier; up to now I have generally liked his writing; I love Peter Purves both as Stephen and playing the Doctor; in the week when we got the sad news of Jean Marsh’s death, it was lovely to hear her resuming the role of Sara Kingdom; and the story of the Doctor’s first encounter with Sontarans – proper bloodthirsty Lynx and Styre type Sontarans – is well structured and well told.
But I am afraid I don’t like torture scenes, and although of course it’s perfectly consistent with Styre in The Sontaran Experiment, I didn’t like that much either. So it’s a rare thumbs down for me for this particular combination of creators.
Soon after reading some of her father’s work, I got hold of his daughter’s best known book. The only work of hers that I previously remember reading is The Captains and the Kings, at least thirty-five years ago.
This is a short, swift, very sad story about a friendship across class and religious lines in pre-first world war rural Ireland, which then plays out grimly in the trenches. There’s a wealth of hidden sexuality and buried family secrets, and the politics of conflict which plays out as much in the internal tensions of the Irish troops as with the Germans. It’s very well done. You can get it here.
Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival
Joe Simpson
62,315
2,763
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Mario Vargas Llosa
22,064
2,788
The Time of the Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
25,982
1,910
Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time
Mark Adams
20,164
1,172
Conversation in the Cathedral
Mario Vargas Llosa
10,654
1,341
These are pretty solid numbers, after a few countries which scored less well.
Slightly controversially, perhaps, I’m allowing the top spot to Bel Canto. Even though it is not explicitly set in Peru, everyone agrees that it’s based on the 1996-97 hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Lima, so I think it qualifies. I was a bit surprised to find that the book in second spot, The Celestine Prophecy, is also set in Peru – I don’t feel the slightest inclination to read it – but apparently that’s the case. The others are much less surprising, with the recently departed Mario Vargas Llosa filling a lot of the spots as you go down the table.
I disqualified the following:
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder – only two of its five parts is set in Peru
The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in the Dominican Republic
The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in various countries
Inés of My Soul, by Isabel Allende – only one part set in Peru
The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in Brazil
People seem to have a tendency to slap the ‘Peru’ tag onto books by Mario Vargas Llosa, whether or not his country is represented in the actual content.
In the brief downtime between announcing the Hugo final ballot, and getting voting under way (which will be Real Soon Now), I reflected that the two disqualifications and two withdrawals from the ballot this year seemed rather low by recent standards. So I looked into the records, and found indeed that of the seven years that I have been involved with running the Hugos, only one had fewer such cases – two were disqualified, and one declined, in 2021, otherwise a really crazy year for Worldcon.
(For these purposes I’m counting a disqualification as any exclusion of an otherwise valid nominee by the administrators under their interpretation of the rules. This includes the various permutations under the Best Dramatic Presentation categories, and also the bad decisions made and published by the Chengdu Worldcon team in 2023.)
The proliferation of withdrawals and disqualifications is a recent phenomenon. I have access to the nomination statistics for 1980 and 1996, and for every year since 1998. From 1998 to 2002, and again in 2007, there were no disqualifications or withdrawals from the Hugo ballot at all, and in the four intervening years there was only one each time. (Ted Chiang, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman declined fiction nominations in 2003, 2005 and 2006, and there was a disqualification in the Best Semiprozine category in 2004.)
One potential finalist was disqualified in 2008, and two potential finalists declined nomination in 2009, 2010 and 2011; and since then there have been at least three withdrawals and/or disqualifications each year. The high water mark was, infamously, 2023, where (according to the official statistics) twelve potential finalists were disqualified and another three declined nomination, though evidence suggests that votes for many more Chinese nominees were removed from the system at an earlier stage, effectively disqualifying over twenty of them without making it public.
The second highest total for withdrawals and disqualifications was the previous year, 2022, when I was Deputy Administrator. We disqualified seven potential finalists that year, four of them in the Best Editor, Long From category (where another potential finalist withdrew); a unique issue at that time was the blockage to global supply chains caused by the pandemic, as a result of which a lot of 2021 publication schedules slipped, though in my view it also shows the difficulties of voter awareness of the editing process.
The only other ballots that saw as many as seven disqualifications were the 1939 and 1941 Retro Hugos. 1939 (awarded in 2014) saw a lot of eligibility confusion, and in 1941 (awarded in 2016) three of the disqualified potential finalists had had sufficient support to qualify in both Dramatic Presentation categories, and of course they could only be on the ballot in one, and therefore were disqualified from the other.
Among the Hugos, the Best Dramatic Presentation categories have generally had the most disqualifications, largely thanks to the rule (or custom) preventing entire TV series and individual episodes of that series appearing on the same ballot. Thirteen BDP Short Form and five BDP Long Form nominees have been disqualified by administrators in the years that those categories have existed, though in many of these cases at least part of the material disqualified in one category appeared on the ballot in another.
The other category with a lot of disqualifications is the Astounding Award, previously the Campbell Award, where there have been seven disqualifications over the years where I have data (including one each in 1980 and in 1996). Sometimes voters (and indeed writers themselves) are uncertain as to when a writer’s career actually started.
The only disqualification for Best Fan Writer on record was the incomprehensible decision to exclude Paul Weimer in 2023; it’s rather difficult to see how anyone who has published anything fannish in the year of eligibility could be ruled out in that category. Apart from Retro Hugos, nobody has ever been disqualified in Best Fanzine or Best Novella, at least in the years for which I have data; nor for the Lodestar, which is also a recent innovation and whose criteria again are broad. Best Game or Interactive Work is the only category where there has not yet been either a withdrawal or a disqualification, but since it has only been going for two years, there is plenty of time…
The largest number of voluntary withdrawals of finalists who would otherwise have qualified numerically is six, in 2016. There were five withdrawals in 2015 and also last year, 2024. As noted above, the last year in which there were no withdrawals from the regular Hugos was 2013.
Seven finalists for the Best Novel and the Best Editor, Long Form categories have withdrawn from the ballot. Pro Artists have declined nomination five times, and Fan Writers and authors of both Novellas and Novelettes four times each, in the years where I have full data.
We have yet to see a voluntary withdrawal in the Best Graphic Story or Comic, BDP Short Form, Game / Interactive Work, and Editor Short Form Hugo categories, or for the Astounding Award or its predecessor, as far as I know. The first and so far only withdrawal from the Lodestar was this year, the first and only withdrawal from Best Related Work that I know of was last year, and the the first only withdrawal from BDP Long was in 2023.
There are two very striking shifts in the numbers. Up to 2011, there were an average of 0.375 disqualifications each year. Since 2012, counting the regular Hugos only, there has been an average of 4.00 disqualifications each year. It’s an abrupt change.
The shift in the number of withdrawals is a little later. Up to 2014, the average was 0.73 per year. Since 2015, the average number of withdrawals from that year’s Hugos is 3.4.
The five rounds of Retro Hugos run between 2014 and 2020 saw no withdrawals at all, hardly surprising in that few of the nominees were in a position to accept or decline nomination, but there were an average of 4.4 disqualifications each year.
(Not that it is a significant difference, but the average number of withdrawals in 2017, 2019-22 and 2024-25, the years where I was personally involved with administering the nominations, is lower – 2.43 rather than 3.4 – and so is the average number of disqualifications – 3.57 rather than 4.00 – but I think this simply shows that the two big years for withdrawals were just before my time, and also I fortunately was not involved with the massive number of disqualifications in 2023.)
I think we are seeing a couple of different effects here over time. Taking withdrawals first: this had never been a huge factor in the Hugos until the Puppy years, when (as noted earlier) a record number of potential finalists declined nomination in both 2015 and 2016. Perhaps one of the lasting effects has been that nominees now feel more comfortable about saying no in general. Also, the aftermath of Chengdu drove the number of withdrawals up again – two of the five in 2024 were directly related to the previous year’s events.
(Kathryn Duval has pointed out to me in conversation that it’s also possible that Hugo administrators in the olden days did not need to be as diligent in chasing nominees for consent as we have been since she and I first administered the awards in 2017. That perhaps is another effect of the traumas of 2015/2016.)
The massive increase in disqualifications since roughly 2012 has several causes. The biggest chunk of disqualifications has been in the Best Dramatic Presentation categories, starting from the year that the entire first series of Game of Thrones was on the ballot, and usually because of a conflict of nominations between the two categories; I have written before about this. And I noted earlier that the special circumstances of the pandemic hit Best Editor, Long Form in 2022.
The constitutional criteria, which are complex in some cases, must also be a factor. The Astounding/Campbell rules are somewhat arcane. The rules in the Artist categories are frankly obsolete. And have you ever had to explain the concept of a Semiprozine? (In Korean?) It all causes a lot of head-scratching for us administrators – it’s not surprising or blameworthy that voters can get it wrong. And the more categories that are added, the greater the opportunity for everyone to make mistakes.
But the other big change, one that almost exactly matches the explosion in the number of disqualifications, is the impressive and welcome surge in the number of voters. I don’t think it is as widely appreciated as it should be that the numbers participating in Hugo voting shifted abruptly upwards in 2009-2011, and now show no sign of declining to their previous level. Before 2009 there had only once been more than 1500 votes on the final ballot, and never been more than 800 voters at the nominations phase. Since 2011, only one year (2023 / Chengdu) has seen less than 1800 final ballot votes (peaking at 5950 in 2015, the first Puppy year), and the lowest number of nomination votes cast was 1249 in 2021 (peaking at 4032 in 2016, the second Puppy year).
NB that this graph includes the published number of nomination and final ballot votes for Chengdu in 2023, which cannot be considered reliable, and the final ballot votes for Glasgow 2024 after 377 fraudulent ballots were disqualified. Blank columns are where I don’t have the data.
Probably the biggest single factor here is the Hugo Voter Packet, which gives hundreds of dollars / pounds / euros worth of books to voters who buy a WSFS membership. It started in 2009 and was really integrated into Worldcon marketing from 2011, almost exactly matching the expansion in participation.
But I think that there was also an effort – perhaps it is too much to call it a campaign – by many people, perhaps in reaction to the 2007 ballot which included only one work of fiction by a woman, to broaden the appeal of the Hugos and make them more diverse. This is a Good Thing. The Puppy argument that the Hugos were locked in a vicious circle of declining participation and political correctness was precisely backwards: by the early 2010s, Hugo participation was rising, not falling, and this was adding some very welcome and needed diversity to the ecosystem.
The effect has been to bring in a cohort of voters who are less invested in some of the older (indeed, oldest) categories, as fan culture itself is de-emphasising the traditional channels. Twenty years ago, in 2005, 546 nominating votes were cast in the Hugos, and a nominee needed 20 votes to get onto the Best Professional Artist ballot, 36 for Best Semiprozine, 24 for Best Fanzine, 30 for Best Fan Writer and 26 for Best Fan Artist. This year there were 1338 nominating votes, almost 2.5 times more than in 2005, but the effective thresholds to qualify for those five categories are the same or lower: 14 for Best Professional Artist, 38 for Best Semiprozine, 25 for Best Fanzine, 27 for Best Fan Writer and 16 for Best Fan Artist. (Though of course there are now six finalists per category rather than five.)
Analyzing the historical levels of participation in each category in depth is for another blogpost (and maybe someone else will do it before I do, which is fine by me). But I think it’s clear that in a number of categories, the Hugo electorate of today is broadly less invested than the Hugo electorate of twenty years ago, and it is therefore more likely that well-known but unwilling or ineligible nominees will be chosen.
As an administrator, I always feel a bit sad and uncomfortable when removing any nominee from the ballot. Most people’s votes are cast in good faith, and they should in general be respected. At the same time, the nominees themselves have the absolute right to choose whether or not to participate in the Hugos; and the rules are there for many reasons (mostly good reasons) and need to be implemented to maintain the integrity of the process. So when it has to be done, it has to be done.
