Perturbing conversation with a friend in NATO who is going for both the jobs that I am going for. And he has a significant advantage over me for both; he’s a NATO insider, so will have a good track on the NATO job, and his mother is from the same small country as the commissioner most likely to get the relevant EU post, so he speaks the right language (literally). But I got the impression he hadn’t done any background work with the Brits, even though he too is a British citizen, so I might just be able to have the edge on him there in that I have been doing a little hacking. To be honest I’d thought of him as an obvious successor for me in this post as well. But since he’s currently working for NATO he won’t want the pay cut.

Bah, just checked his CV which I found on-line, and he’s eight months older than me. Not sure why this bothers me. Probably just means it’s time for dinner.

Our office in country X (not one of mine) has had to close due to government oppression, and I’ve been able to steal one of the analysts to do some work for me in country Y. It’s an ill wind…

B’s at the respite care place for a few days, and I had the day off work, so took F to see Mini Europe at the foot of the Atomium north of Brussels. Quite fun, and filled with tourists. Highlights for me: the motorway bridge representing Luxembourg with model traffic jam on top of it; the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, you can knock a bit of it down and then it pops back up again for the next customer; the Ariane rocket; the Irish national anthem which swells to a climax and then omits to play the last line; trying to get F to remember the name of Big Ben. Highlights for F: the model TGV, the model Eurostar, the model trucks and boats; the real ducks and fish in the ponds; the ice cream in the restaurant afterwards. Highlight for us both: the model of Vesuvius which erupts with smoke and earthquake. Most of the cultural stuff is lost on a four-year-old but I think we’ll go back.

West Belfast is done. Now all I have to do is redesign the front page…

So I’ve got Strangford done. And then discovered that the interns managed to scramble the data for the last constituency, which is of course the one which interests more people than any other… Will have to reconstruct from scratch.

An excellent profession of faith from Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

North Belfast, where I myself got a glorious 4.1% of the votes back in 1996.

I was browsing in a bookshop during the week and came across the autobiography of a well-known writer, who has been dead now for over a decade. I was struck by his description of his son, who had “normal” intelligence, but “could not keep a job because he could not get along with his fellow employees” and was now a “gentleman of leisure”, living off his father’s support and happy being alone with his TV and VCR.

I have, unfortunately, enough experience with and knowledge of autism to have my antennae prickle. The son was born only a few years after Kanner first identified autism as a syndrome in 1943 and Asperger identified his syndrome in 1944, but it sounds very like it to me (diagnosing someone I’ve never met from a half page of text written by an observer who was far from neutral). The father seemed, as I read it, to blame his son for some moral failing, rather than to take on board that this was a disability. It must have been grim for everyone involved and I’m not very surprised that the parents separated at the point when their son was in his late teens and clearly never going to live an independent economic existence.

The story has a rather grim twist, in that the son was busted a few years ago (long after his father’s death) for possession of child porn among his many videotapes. Interestingly, he was given a non-custodial sentence after psychiatric reports. Conspiracy theorists mutter that this was obviously due to a political fix thanks to the connections of his (by then long dead) father. I think it’s much more likely that the court psychiatrists made the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, or perhaps even autism, that should have been made decades before.

South Down (having problems uploading though)

Just back from church and hunting of Easter eggs in the garden. Here in Belgium, the church bells all go off to visit the Holy Land on Good Friday and return for Easter, bringing the Easter eggs with them. However bunnification has hit most of the chocolate eggs on sale here, I’m sorry to say.

Three years ago I myself was in the Holy Land for Pentecost. I was completely fascinated though also somewhat appalled by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It covers under one roof the traditional sites of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, ie a hilltop and a quarry, so there’s a huge vertical range – you go in the (only) door, and there’s a sort of gallery way up to the right where you can feel (but not see) the holes into which the three crosses were put, and then way way down to the left is the grand domed chamber in the middle of which is the Aediculum enclosing what’s left of the tomb. Then way down again underneath the entrance is the chapel of the Invention where the emperor Constantine’s mother happened to discover the True Cross, almost three centuries on.

I doubt very much that she found anything of the kind, let alone that three carefully chosen pot-holes in the cliff face happened to be the very same three holes used for a routine execution. But having read up on the evidence, it does seem to me likely that this is the site that was traditionally associated with the tomb from quite an early stage. The extraordinary thing is that a shrine which ought by rights to be the pulsing vibrant centre of Christianity is no such thing; it’s not that it’s too big – St Peter’s is bigger, and has the right sort of aura – but that the space is not harmonised; the six squabbling sects who are perpetually renegotiating the territory within the church have been unable to create a space for reflection. Symptomatic is the ladder visible outside one of the windows which has been there since the Crimean War, as nobody can agree who has the right to move it.

Personally I felt much closer to the roots of my faith this morning, standing with my hands linked to the rest of the congregation, chanting the Lord’s Prayer in Flemish, musing on the symbolism of canles, light, water, darkness. And eggs of course. Must go and cook lunch.

South Antrim.

3) Green Shadows, White Whale by Ray Bradbury

I’ve had this on my list of sf/fantasy books with an Irish dimension for a while; I had a discussion of it with back in September, and finally picked it up last weekend in the remaindered section in the American bookshop in Leuven.

It’s the story of young sf writer Ray Bradbury, brought to Ireland by film director John Huston, to write a screenplay for Moby Dick. Huston comes across as a real monster, incessantly bullying his wife, Bradbury and other colleagues, with almost no redeeming features. I found Bradbury’s portrayal of Ireland and the Irish irritating at first and then I realised that he was doing nothing more than writing in his usual style; it might as well have been Mars.

The short stories dropped into the narrative – including two with fantasy elements, which I list on my web page – are the best bits of a very uneven book. The only other “novel” I’ve read by Bradbury, To the Dust Returned, was equally uneven. Perhaps he is someone who needs the discipline of the short story form to write quality stuff. For €7.50 I can’t complain too much.

North Down. Unusual in that no decimal places are involved.

Novella nominees (four out of five):

Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker – also a Nebula nominee; oddly enough I printed it off a few days ago, but hadn’t yet read it.
The Green Leopard Plague, by Walter Jon Williams
Just Like the Ones We Used to KNow, by Connie Willis
The Cookie Monster, by Vernor Vinge

Novelette nominees (two out of six):

The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford – as with the Kage Baker story, I’ve printed it off but not yet read it.
Bernardo’s House, James Patrick Kelly

Short Story nominees (just one out of five):

Robots Don’t Cry by Mike Resnick.

No doubt more will be added now that the nominations are public.

South Belfast. 127.43 votes separated the runner-up from the last candidate elected.

The Hugo nominations have been announced.

OK, time to get reading. (And ordering.)

West Tyrone. Several interesting features for connoisseurs of the Single Transferable vote (probably none are reading this).

Over the long weekend I will try and complete putting up the Assembly election results.

Tonight: Upper Bann

Die Lösung

Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?

The Solution

After the uprising on June 17th
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had flyers distributed in Stalin Way that said
That the People had frivolously
Thrown away the Government’s Confidence
And that they could only regain it
Through Redoubled Work. But wouldn’t it be
Simpler if the Government
Simply dissolved the People
And elected another?

For those who haven’t seen this astonishing first-person account by a Buffy fan on livejournal who was part of the international force evacuated from (as far as I can tell) Kut on Wednesday, click here and then here.

From a House of Commons committee meeting of 1 March 2001:

Simon Hughes: Probably every single person in the Room—including members of the Committee, Officers of the House, civil servants and visitors—has played the game of trying to get an illegal drink or two before reaching the age of 18. [HON. MEMBERS: “Oh.”] Methinks my colleagues protest too much. I was not even referring to the leader of the Conservative party—who did it all the time according to his own reminiscences—but speaking for myself.

Jackie Ballard (Taunton): Only you can do that.

Simon Hughes: Indeed.

It was part of school life to go to places that were out of bounds and where one could buy cigarettes and drink. I shall not mention the third thing, but that was available too, if one looked in the right place. It probably had more attraction than the other two for some people.

Charles Clarke: What?

Jackie Ballard: Sex.

Simon Hughes: My hon. Friend is helpful to the Minister, who is clearly innocent of such matters and must have had a delayed upbringing.

How it will work in Ireland:

http://www.1mho.com/evoting/

about Shakespeare’s views on alchemy.

(And the other participant is not , but someone else of the same name.)

Kosovo draft paper done! Well, not actually published, which will probably take another week. Now for Transdniestria. And then Azerbaijan, and the EU’s conflict prevention mechanisms.

http://www.dr-joe.net/quiz.html

Have been sitting here insomniacally for the last two hours musing about the fuss over Kos and Kathryn Cramer’s comments on the Fallujah killings of last week. I think Cramer comes out better; she posted some irresponsible speculations, and then withdrew them and apologised for it. In my line of work we come across the sort of links that she thought she had found all the time; sometimes the evidence we have is not sufficient to publish, although we may feel (or have it on good, non-attributable authority) that we’ve got it right. Putting an account of the entire research process on-line, including accounts of false leads or insufficiently supported leads, would be, er, foolish, as she has now discovered.

Having said that, the threats of physical violence she has been getting are disgusting, and it’s absolutely weird that the nutcases who are harassing her are now objecting to the fact that she retracted and withdrew her original comments.

Kos is a somewhat different matter. He has his own sincerely held views on Fallujah, based on his own personal experiences, which make uncomfortable reading even for people who generally agree with him. The specific direct action that his right-wing opponents succeeded in doing was to persuade several of his advertisers to pull their sponsorship of his site. Without getting into the rights and wrongs of it, that sort of tactic (as opposed to the death threats which he has also received) is surely fair enough. As a student activist I supported the boycott of Barclays for their involvement in South Africa, and of Nestle because of their campaigns against breast-feeding (the latter quite a sacrifice because I live on Nescafé). If you dish it out you have to be prepared to take it, and it seems that Kos is indeed prepared to take the consequences of publishing unpopular views. That too is fair enough; I disagree with what he said, but I think it would be a poorer world if he was prevented from saying it.

Some years ago – eight, to be precise – a friend of mine was threatened by the listowner of a political discussion list, most of whose subscribers had a different point of view to ours; he had sent her a private (if somewhat rude) email which she then posted to the list, with the comment “Do with him as you will”. He and I signed up to her list ourselves, and over the next weekend we both responded to every post, putting our point of view. This of course generated a lot of traffic from people who disagreed with us and weren’t used to an argument. And even more from the subscribers who came in on the Monday morning to find that they had 300 messages in their inboxes (those were more innocent days, when this was unusual). We were basically kicked off the list in the end. Legitimately enough, in fairness, though it did expose the pretensions of the list owner (and many of the subscribers) to openness and tolerance as the hypocrisy they were.

What troubles me about American political discourse, though, is the sheer gulf between the two sides and the intransigent nastiness of the debate. Death threats and threats of violence appear to be standard fare from some parts of the right. I don’t notice the same sort of tactic being used by lefties against right-wing commentators; maybe I’m not looking hard enough? And I also don’t notice more moderate right-wing commentators feeling under the same pressure to distance themselves from their violent political allies as the left have been to distance themselves from Kos, who has not actually directly threatened anybody.

Our work email is down, but I shall go in now and try to finish the infamous Kosovo paper.

Interviewed here. Warning: graphic details.

“I was more of a communist. I believed in [Ceausescu’s] speeches, in his texts, in his congresses. I was his product. In a way, I was driven by a proletarian wrath. If I’m not wrong, the entire trial had this character. We were angry at the system and not at the man Ceausescu. Anyway, I wouldn’t do this [again], and I wouldn’t wish such an experience on anyone. To take someone’s life violates biblical teachings. We’ve already been booed, cursed for what we did on the holy day of Christmas. Every Christmas, you can be sure that we’re not doing OK. Not even on 26 January. [Ceausescu’s birthday]. I wouldn’t do it again.”

As “statistically established” by Peter Sykes. As usual, have bolded the ones I’ve read (79 of 100) and linked to reviews if I’ve written one, with brief comment if I haven’t written a review elsewhere:

1 Frank Herbert, Dune 1965
2 Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game [S1] 1985
3 Isaac Asimov, Foundation 1951 – grand historical sweep
4 William Gibson, Neuromancer 1984
5 Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness 1969
6 Robert A Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land 1961 – start of the swinging sixties
7 Larry Niven, Ringworld 1970
8 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949 – dystopian classic
9 Robert A Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress 1966 – more revolution
10 Dan Simmons, Hyperion 1989 – great stuff, Chaucer sort of retold
11 Frederik Pohl, Gateway 1977
12 Walter M Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz 1959 – maybe the greatest sf and religion novel
13 Joe Haldeman, The Forever War 1974
14 Arthur C Clarke, Childhood’s End 1954 – the next step in human evolution
15 Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed 1974
16 David Brin, Startide Rising  1983
17 Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man 1953
18 Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 1979 – still hilarious despite my reservations about his other work
19 Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles 1950 – wonderful landscape of another planet
20 Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer 1980 – dense and eerie
21 Ben Bova, [ed] The Best of the Nebulas 1989
22 Arthur C Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama 1973
23 Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination 1956 – bizarre but gripping
24 John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar 1969 – didn’t like this
25 Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human 1953 – also next step in human evolution
26 Isaac Asimov, I, Robot 1950 – I’ve grown out of this one, I’m afraid
27 Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light 1967 – Zelazny’s best single work
28 Robert A Heinlein, Starship Troopers 1959 – not quite as fascist as it is reputed to be
29 Philip K Dick, The Man in the High Castle 1962 – alternate history without the whimsy
30 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 1954 – another chilling dystopia
31 Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead 1986
32 Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon 1966
33 H G Wells, The Time Machine 1895 – political fantasy disguised as time travel
34 Harlan Ellison, [ed] Dangerous Visions 1967 – great anthology
35 Niven & Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye 1975 – best from this collaboration, though over-rated here
36 Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars 1992 – first of grand political series where the planet is the story
37 Clifford Simak, Way Station 1963
38 H G Wells, The War of the Worlds 1898 – first great invasion-of-earth story
39 David Brin, The Uplift War 1987 – great world-setting in this series, though sadly later volumes have bloated rather than illuminated
40 Gregory Benford, Timescape 1980 – environmental sf disguised as time travel (paradox never quite resolved)
41 Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep 1991 – great stuff, esp the aliens
42 Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968 – the basis of Blade Runner but a great book on its own merits
43 Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves 1972
44 Connie Willis, Doomsday Book 1992
45 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash 1992 – fantastic cyberpunk, still Stephenson’s best
46 Philip Jose Farmer, To Your Scattered Bodies Go 1971 – first and best of the Riverworld series
47 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 1932 – another classic of an over-technologised and despiritualised future
48 Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968 – great book though greater film
49 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 1818 – oddly, a really bad book, but carried along by the central idea
50 C J Cherryh, Downbelow Station 1981
51 Hal Clement, Mission of Gravity 1953 – superb extreme planetary environment
52 Gardner Dozois, [ed] The Year’s Best Science Fiction 1984 – unbolded as I’ve only got the last half dozen or so of this excellent series, and certainly haven’t read the very first
53 Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside 1972 – telepath loses his powers; heavy metaphors
54 John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids 1951 – everyone goes blind and we are attacked by walking poisonous plants – superb
55 Greg Bear, Blood Music 1985 (earlier version)
56 Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel 1954 – desperate attempt to mix detective and sf genres
57 Anthony A Burgess, Clockwork Orange 1962
58 James Blish, A Case of Conscience 1958 – the other great sf and religion novel
59 Pohl & Kornbluth, The Space Merchants 1953
60 Clifford Simak, City 1952
61 Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates 1983 – great timetravel novel
62 George R Stewart, Earth Abides 1949 – death of humanity
63 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five 1969 – time-twisted rather than time-travelling
64 Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 1870 – supertechnology (ie submarine) in private hands
65 Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars 1912
66 Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar 1991 – the most celebrated of her Vorkosigan series but I prefer some of the later ones
67 Isaac Asimov, (et al) [eds] Hugo Winners/New Hugo Winners 1962 etc – classic collections
68 Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age 1995 – Stephenson’s other great book, before cryptography completely went to his head
69 Arthur C Clarke, The City and the Stars 1956 – superb far future stuff
70 Philip K Dick, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch 1964 – typically bizarre

71 Joan D Vinge, The Snow Queen 1980
72 Philip K Dick, Ubik 1969 – bizarre and sinister
73 Brian Aldiss, Helliconia Spring 1982 – first and best of the trilogy
74 James Blish, Earthman, Come Home 1955 – at least I think I’ve only read the first in this series, but it was a long time ago
75 Poul Anderson, Tau Zero 1970
76 E E ‘Doc’ Smith, Grey Lensman 1951
77 Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan 1959 – funnier than Slaughterhouse Five, perhaps better
78 Frederik Pohl, Man Plus 1976 – man gets to Mars but at what sacrifice?
79 Robert A Heinlein, The Door Into Summer 1956
80 Harlan Ellison, [ed] Again, Dangerous Visions 1972 – second volume of classic collection
81 Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men 1930
82 Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth 1864 – actually only a few miles down, typical rollicking fun
83 Thomas M Disch, Camp Concentration 1968
84 C J Cherryh, Cyteen: The Betrayal 1988
85 Michael Bishop, No Enemy But Time 1982
86 Arthur C Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise 1979

87 Joanna Russ, The Female Man 1975
88 Robert A Heinlein, Double Star 1956
89 Vonda N McIntyre, Dreamsnake 1978
90 Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough For Love 1973 – one of the silly ones, with brain transplants
91 Robert A Heinlein, The Puppet Masters 1951 – great alien invasion story with nudity
92 Robert A Heinlein, The Past Through Tomorrow 1967 – superb future history even if dodgy politics
93 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale 1985 – male-dominated dystopia
94 Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle 1963 – his best book, a Cold War parable
95 Robert Silverberg, [ed] Science Fiction Hall of Fame 1 1970 – stories all look familiar but they’ve all been collected many times
96 John Varley, Titan 1979 – not really so great
97 Samuel R Delany, Babel-17 1966
98 Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers 1954
99 David Brin, The Postman 1985 – not quite as bad as the film
100 Robert A Heinlein, Have Space-Suit – Will Travel 1958 – one of his best juvenile novels

Interesting to see how many Heinlein novels come up here. I was struck that Ken MacLeod, who should know, suggests in his essay in the Cambridge Science Fiction Companion that all political sf should be considered as a response to Heinlein. He has a point.

[Later edit: since making this post, I have read:
The Demolished Man
Way Station
Downbelow Station
The Door Into Summer
Cyteen]

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:
219. Conductor, please tell me where I must get off. Кондуктор, пожалуйсте скажете, где мне сойти.

2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?:
brick wall – at elbow distance.

3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?:
Video of The Office.

4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is:
2310.

5: Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?:
2304

6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?:
Kettle boiling.

7: When did you last step outside? What were you doing?:
Went to work this afternoon (on Sunday, ugh).

8: before you came to this website, what did you look at?:
More Livejournal, including one where I found this meme.

9: what are you wearing?:
Favourite though somewhat smelly pullover. Favourite black jeans.

10: Did you dream last night?:
Can’t remember.

11: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nut case or someone who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?
I’m not impressed. (Thanks to politics content this post is friends-only.)

12: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?:
She is; we called her Bridget.

13: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?:
Too late now!

14: Would you ever consider living abroad?:
I do!

15: When did you last laugh?
At the video of The Office.

16: What is on the walls of the room you are in?
Bricks to my left, white wallpaper on the other walls; many bookshelves, alos three framed maps and an aerial photograph.

17: Seen anything weird lately?
Not sure. I try to keep an open mind. The weirdest thing I’ve heard recently is about a certain country’s foreign minister actually being on the payroll of a different country’s foreign ministry; I think that’s taking co-ordination rather far.

18: What do you think of this quiz?
Mercifully brief and easy.

19: What is the last film you saw?
RotK, with Anne.

20: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
Books.

21: Tell us something about you that we don’t know.
My favourite herbal tea is vervain. I’m going to make some now.

22: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
Give people enough to eat.

23: Do you like to dance?
I don’t mind. I’ll do it every now and then but I don’t seek out opportunities to dance.

2) The Salmon of Doubt: Hitch-hiking the Galaxy One Last Time, by Douglas Adams (edited by Peter Guzzardi)

I bought this yesterday, along with F’s Dr Seuss book, and zoomed through it this morning. It’s a quick read, and though marketed as fiction in fact two-thirds of it consists of essays, shorter pieces and even sleeve notes for a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos, all scavenged off Adams’ various hard disks after his unexpected death in May 2001.

And it’s all good stuff, with perhaps the exception of a long and rambling speech made in Cambridge in 1998. The first chapters of Adams’ unfinished novel take up the last few dozen pages, and point to the usual mix of transcendental enigmas and sharp one-liners that substituted for content in his later books.

But the sad fact is that none of the fiction Adams wrote after 1980 was really much good. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency at first looks like an up-tick on the graph, but it was basically cannibalised out of two Doctor Who stories he wrote in the late 1970s. One of the later inferior novels ends with the sentence: “There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind” – and that could almost stand for his whole post-1981 fictional oeuvre.

He would have done better to expend energy on his non-fiction writing – which as this volume demonstrates was excellent – and on evangelising for the ecological and technological causes – working to preserve beautiful endangered species such as the ring-tailed lemur and the Apple Macintosh – which he made his own. Then, once he no longer felt a need to prove himself as equal to the task of producing another Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, he would probably have done so to everyone’s surprise, not least his own. But, alas, we shall never know.