Well, there are one or two science fiction writers who are popular in some quarters but whose writing simply does nothing for me. And I have said so on my website. Well, now one of them has found my website and sent me a couple of rather sweet emails asking why? A difficult question to answer honestly, and even more difficult to answer tactfully…

Why on earth go on Mastermind to answer questions on Babylon 5 – and then do so badly that you only score four points???

Electoral vote predictor now has Kerry back in the lead, over the magic 270. Florida and Pennsylvania are crucial. (Sign up via .)

Samuel Pepys, who doesn’t like Shakespeare much, goes to a performance of Twelfth Night just because the King is there (and incidentally breaking a promise to his wife), doesn’t realise it is a Shakespeare play but hates it anyway. Also a dog which does bizarre things with dead cats. (Sign up via .)

Commemoration.

It says so in Ansible so it must be true.

Way way back four years ago I decided to compile a list of the stories which have won both Hugo and Nebula awards. Then I decided it wasn’t enough to list them, I should buy them and read them again, or for the first time if I hadn’t already. This took a good eight months, with Poul Anderson’s “Goat Song” the last story I was able to track down. Finally, I decided that I should do something a bit more substantial, and try writing pieces of around 1000-2000 words about each story, trying to delve a bit more into the background if possible, and at least explaining their impact on one reader, ie me.

I decided not to take a chronological approach but to do it alphabetically by title. So, the first was Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire”Beggars in Spain” (the short story, not the novel expansion); then Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial ManBloodchildBlood Music” (again, the short story, not the novel expansion); then Fritz Leiber’s “Catch That Zeppelin!The DispossessedDoomsday BookDreamsnakeDuneEnder’s GameEnemy MineEven The QueenFire WatchFlowers For AlgernonForever PeaceThe Forever WarThe Fountains of ParadiseAmerican GodsGatewayGeorgia on My Mind”Coraline.

So now I have reached Poul Anderson’s “Goat Song” – 23 reviews done, 32 to go. At some more significant point, like the 28th review which will be the half way mark, I shall pause to think about what if anything I have learnt from the process.

‘s adventure.

I got a note yesterday from my website service provider to the effect that I had come close to my bandwidth quota for this month – on the 10th! Since the language quiz was picked up by, in particular, Crooked Timber and also and Language Hat, I had over a thousand visitors on Wednesday and over 1300 on Thursday. With only 500 yesterday, things seem to be calming down. Loads of helpful corrections for mistakes made by me (or perhaps McDonald’s) in my Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, and Slovenian.

It’s weird, given also that I’ve been all over the Macedonian media for the last two weeks, to have this level of visibility in a completely different sphere of human activity for a completely different reason at precisely the same time.

Here.

Went to an awards ceremony presented by the European Centre for Common Ground last night, largely out of respect for President Trajkovski of Macedonia, who was killied in a plane crash in February, and whose wife was collecting a posthumous award on his behalf. I got to talk to her afterwards, which was nice; we managed to stay off Macedonian politics, which was a relief since I’ve spent most of the last two weeks immersed in it.

The evening was mainly devoted to awards for Middle East journalism, one of which was presented by John Hume, of all people. He made a speech about how if we could get peace in the Middle East there would be no more war anywhere (sentiment good, logic less so). There was a Brussels-based Mediterranean band which finished off the evening with a chorus of “Bella Ciao”. Then just as we were about to go to the buffet reception, John Hume grabbed the microphone and treated us to an unaccompanied chorus of “Danny Boy”. He was surprisingly good.

Now on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3638446.stm

“Rove, who cooks eggies, has masterminded Bush’s career”

Cooks eggies?

…to Democratic Senator Zell Miller, in the wake of the latter’s speech at the Republican convention:

You seem to have forgotten that loyal Democrats elected you as mayor and as state senator. Loyal Democrats, including members of my family and me, elected you as lieutenant governor and as governor. It was a loyal Democrat, Lester Maddox, who assigned you to high positions in the state government when you were out of office. It was a loyal Democrat, Roy Barnes, who appointed you as U.S. Senator when you were out of office. By your historically unprecedented disloyalty, you have betrayed our trust.

Great Georgia Democrats who served in the past, including Walter George, Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, and Sam Nunn disagreed strongly with the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and me, but they remained loyal to the party in which they gained their public office. Other Democrats, because of philosophical differences or the race issue, like Bo Callaway and Strom Thurmond, at least had the decency to become Republicans.

Everyone knows that you were chosen to speak at the Republican Convention because of your being a “Democrat,” and it’s quite possible that your rabid and mean-spirited speech damaged our party and paid the Republicans some transient dividends.

Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the character of opponents by wild and false allegations. The Bush campaign’s personal attacks on the character of John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 was a vivid example. The claim that war hero Max Cleland was a disloyal American and an ally of Osama bin Laden should have given you pause, but you have joined in this ploy by your bizarre claims that another war hero, John Kerry, would not defend the security of our nation except with spitballs. (This is the same man whom you described previously as “one of this nation’s authentic heroes, one of this party’s best-known and greatest leaders — and a good friend.”)

I, myself, never claimed to have been a war hero, but I served in the navy from 1942 to 1953, and, as president, greatly strengthened our military forces and protected our nation and its interests in every way. I don’t believe this warrants your referring to me as a pacificist.

Zell, I have known you for forty-two years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral preemptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause. These are not the characteristics of great Democrats whose legacy you and I have inherited.

Thanks to Talking Points Memo and others.

Welcome to livejournal, !

Also, my old friend David Feige has a blog.

Wow! Hundreds of hits by way of Crooked Timber, tens from Language Hat, a dozen from Des Von Bladet, and a few from Davos Newbies and The Couch. Well, I guess this is my fifteen minutes of fame in the blogosphere…

So, I got called to a business lunch at fifteen minutes’ notice. The Deputy Prime Minister of country X had been told to look me up while he was in Brussels so he invited me to lunch, somewhat to the annoyance of his hosts. He and I then huddled at one end of the table, muttering conspiratorially to each other in German (our best mutual language as it turned out) while his aides and bodyguards trapped our hosts (who actually were German) at the other end. But it was a very useful conversation.

Then a reception in the evening. the deputy head of one of the other embassies told me she’d been busy because of the arrical of her ambassador. “Oh!” I exclaimed in delight, “You have a new ambassador then?” No, she explained, it was just that the old one had been on holiday and had just come back. But, she whispered, he actually is going to be replaced – but he doesn’t know that yet! (The deputy head of mission and her foreign minister are from one political faction; the ambassador from another, thanks to the delicate power-sharing arrangement in their country. He is also not very good at his job.)

And my boss is back after three weeks travelling. Things will pick up around the office now…

Ow, my eyes hurt.

This kind of thing really annoys me:

Beqiri was given an official platform at the behest of ICG Balkans head honcho Nicholas Whyte, who invited him to speak on the very pressing need for all Albanians to live in one tidy state. While Whyte was careful to “express disagreements,” but promised to include the FBKSH platform as one of the three possible solutions to the Empire’s Balkan quagmire.

This tepid response was, of course, trumped by the fact that a criminal militant urging violent changes of international borders was invited to speak in the decorous and oh-so altruistic confines of the ICG anterooms. Hey, way to marginalize the extremists, guys!

As I noted in this journal at the time, I thought this was a confidential meeting rather than an “official platform” when I organised it. The conversation took place in a nearby cafe rather than in our anterooms (I don’t think we have any anterooms anyway). And my job is actually to talk to people who I often don’t like and usually disagree with, in order to find out what they really think.

It’s such a crappy piece anyway. I mean, the next paragraph:

German authorities did not provide any details on possible extradition to Albania, and the case seems to have vanished from the radar thereafter. However, it seems likely that Beqiri made it back to the fatherland.

– well, the author seems to have missed the news reports of the German extradition procedures in June.

Aaargh.

asks about my favourite sf authors. A proper answer will have to wait a few days. But authors I particularly enjoy include Brian Aldiss; Iain Banks; Ray Bradbury; Lois McMaster Bujold; Ted Chiang; Arthur C. Clarke; Philip K. Dick; Neil Gaiman; Ursula Le Guin; Madeleine L’Engle; H.P. Lovecraft; Ian McDonald; Ken MacLeod; Terry Pratchett; J.K. Rowling; Neal Stephenson; Sherri S Tepper; J.R.R. Tolkien; Connie Willis; last but by no means least Roger Zelazny. More information on my tastes can be found here and here. More, as they say, later. I’ll just say I’ve gone right off Asimov after a teenage fling.

Earlier today I was at a presentation of a report on Turkey’s prospects for EU membership. All pretty much as you would expect; and then someone asked one of the authors of the report, a former French Prime Minister, why he felt that Turkey was no threat to the European project. And he replied, more or less:

“I was born in 1930. I became a European federalist at the age of 17. I wanted to build a Carolingian European state, able to challenge the Americans as a real superpower. But this all changed once we let in the British, and the dream was killed off by the Maastricht Treaty. So, since Europe doesn’t have the will to be anything more than a rather well developed rules-based market economy, why not let Turkey in? It does them good and it doesn’t do us any further harm. And people who say that letting Turkey in is dangerous to the Euro-federalist project are lying. Turkey would indeed be dangerous to that project if it was still alive. But it is dead.”

Two extraordinary things about the spech. First of all, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone before publicly recant federalism in quite such graphic terms in public in front of a Brussels audience. And secondly, I imagine that even as recently as ten years ago a former French Prime Minister would have naturally made his remarks in French. (The report was published in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Turkish.)

The Finnish chairman of the report committee, and its Austrian rapporteur, shuffled their feet in some embarrassment. Both had played important roles in bringing their respective countries into the EU; and it’s easy to forget that that was less than ten years ago.

I just realised I am the same age as the protagonists of both Casablanca and Flowers for Algernon.

devours the brains of various people.

Well, no really bad story won, and only one category really disappointed me.

Best Novel: Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I’m a fervent Bujoldian, and really like this book; I just happened to think two other nominees were 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.

Best Novella: The Cookie Monster by Vernor Vinge. I thought it would win, as Vinge tends to win Hugo awards these days. Seems at first to be a normal story a la Microserfs. But then it turns out to be much much closer to numerous classic sf stories, mentioning any one of which will give away the main point of the plot. I don’t normally go for Vinge but I thought this was pretty good (though Frederik Pohl did it better). I still preferred The Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker.

Best Novelette: Legions of Time, by Michael Swanwick. I find Swanwick’s sense of humour sometimes a bit wearing, but this one worked for me. Woman in 1930s New York has a job where she Must Not Open The Door. She opens the door. Time-travelling and saving the world ensue. Good fun, but I put it fifth out of six.

Best Short Story: A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman. This is by far the best story from a collection of stories melding the worlds of Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft; the narrator takes us through his unspeakable experiences in Afghanistan, his eccentric Baker Street flatmate, and encounters with a royal family whose habits are rather unlike the home life of our own dear queen, and a final confrontation with his version of England’s subversive mastermind. I think Gaiman’s writing is a bit more uneven than most people like to admit, but he’s caught the voice of Conan Doyle perfectly here, and interspersed the narrative with slyly allusive small ads from the alternative London he has envisaged.

Bujold now has twice as many Best Novel Hugos as any other living author (Heinlein ahead of her on five, but only if you count the retro-Hugo he was awarded on Friday, and Brin, Card, Cherryh, Clarke, Haldeman, Le Guin, Vinge, Willis, and the late Asimov and Zelazny on two each). Swanwick has now won five Hugos in the last six years, a unique winning streak. Gaiman has won three Hugos in different categories in consecutive years, a feat only previously managed by Ursula Le Guin in 1973-75.

3) The Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman. a recent coda to the Sandman series, with one short story for each of the seven Endless siblings. A couple of them – Despair and Destiny – really seemed pretty pointless, and I didn’t think much of the Dream story either. I enjoyed all the others though; a marvellously sultry tale of Desire, and the Destruction, Delirium and Death stories all left me wishing they had been longer.

2) Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi. I bought this today to continue my comics education, from Het Besloten Land, the shop on Parijsstraat in Leuven which seems to have a sense of combining the bandes dessinées tradition and Anglophone graphic novels. Persepolis fits both. Its original language of publication was French, but its story of a young girl’s life through the rise of a repressive regime, and her eventual escape, is of course reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. I learnt a lot from it. OK, it’s not an average story – Satrapi’s great-grandfather was the emperor overthrown by the last Shah’s father in 1925, and she uses this for certain historical insights – but it’s a gripping and human tale. One forgets just how much happened in Iran, in terms of total social dislocation, between the start of the narrative in 1979 and the end in 1984. Apparently the sequel will be out in English Real Soon Now. I can’t wait.

The news from North Ossetia gets worse and worse. This morning’s Guardian had 150 dead. This morning’s BBC news had 250. And this evening the BBC reports 350. Ruthless and also it seems incompetent terrorists, combined with incompetent and trigger-happy state seciurity forces. Dreadful.

And, though it’s not on the same scale of horror, the electoral college predictor has Bush ahead for the first time since June. Rasmussen think it’s too close to call. Pennsylvania is the key state, I reckon.