10) Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi with Tahl Raz

For some reason this was supplied as a freebie with my new Palm T|X from work. (Along with Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors, and a bunch of other less useful stuff.) It’s a book about how to network effectively, and so for a compulsive networker like me was absolutely fascinating reading. What I found particularly striking is that the book is aimed at the thrusting, selfish young executive, and actually tells them to calm down, start doing little favours for other people – whoever they may be – and be generally nice to people because it is fun and good for you, and also will help your business and your career. It is an interesting combination of exhorting people to altruism by playing on their self-interest; being friendly doesn’t cost you anything, in fact it can benefit you a lot.

Suggested tactics include such glories as the “deep bump” – how to conduct a meaningful but efficiently brief conversation with someone you meet at a conference or similar networking event (though Ferrazzi loathes the concept of “networking events”), ending with a concrete proposal of how you can be useful to each other. Oddly enough last night I was out for dinner and found myself sitting beside a bloke from America who I hadn’t met before. He conducted a meaningful but efficiently brief conversation with me, ending with a concrete proposal as to how we could be useful to each other in the future. I realised with an inner grin (even as the conversation was going on) that I was being “deep bumped”. But in fact the process was a sensible use of both our time, and I probably will take him up on his offer next time I am in New York.

There are some problems with the structure and repetitiveness of this book (which shows signs of an editor attempting to make sense of a stream-of-consciousness manuscript) but the other thing I liked was the occasional historical asides. I will think of Paul Revere and Benjamin Franklin in a new light now. A thought-provoking read.

Chomsky has published a further rebuttal to the Guardian interview of two weeks ago. Now that he has seen the paper copy, he is horrified that the photographs used to illustrate it included 1) a picture of himself with John Pilger, 2) a picture of himself with Fidel Castro, and 3) a picture showing him, according to the Guardian, “in Laos en route to Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese.” Chomsky feels that this depicts him as “worshipping commie-rats and such terrible figures as John Pilger”.

Someone should take him aside and explain gently that the vast majority of Guardian readers think that US policy on Cuba is completely wrong, and that the US policy on the Vietnam War was also completely wrong, and that therefore to most Guardian readers the fact that Chomsky was once seen with Castro and on another occasion “in Laos en route to Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese” would actually be rather to his credit! (It’s also a bit difficult to see why he objects to the second caption as an “invention”, given that from his own account he actually was in Laos en route to Hanoi to speak – OK, more than one speech – to the North Vietnamese.)

And it’s even more difficult to understand why he feels tarnished by being linked with Pilger; they clearly have much in common. Pilger has written for the Guardian in the past, though he seems to have fallen out with them over a review of his latest book, and was interviewed in an article about food in war zones in last weekend’s Observer. (The verb “pilgerize” was an invention of the British right, not the Guardian.)

Chomsky does gain considerable credit from me for mentioning a Bosnian camp survivor’s “justified outrage that I or anyone could take the positions invented in the Guardian article”. However that doesn’t seem at all consistent with his attack on a publisher who refused to publish Diana Johnstone’s appalling book. I’m just saying, that’s all.

Thanks, everyone for your supportive responses to the previous post. I have now dealt with the Afghans, got almost all the way through the EU visas, and left the Azerbaijan report in better hands. So there is a sense of progress. Off for dinner with the Heinrich Böll Stiftung now.

This is just to say, a little belatedly,

THANK YOU FOR LENDING US YOUR FIREFLY DVDs!!!!

We watched the whole lot over the course of last month. I have not got around to a serious write-up here as yet, though the series very much deserves it. We just might have to watch them all again. How soon do you need them back?

We’re currently working our way through Season 3 of Buffy, and were in the middle of “Faith, Hope and Trick” this evening, when suddenly we wondered:

If there’s only one Slayer alive at a time (or in extreme circumstances, two), what do the rest of the Watchers actually do all day?

(It’s pretty poor that Giles, presumably the only Watcher who is actually Watching a Slayer, given that Faith’s Watcher has been horribly slaughtered, isn’t invited to their annual retreat.)

We struggled out of the house this afternoon to a rabbit show across the road. We bumped into our neighbours whose rabbits recently disappeared; they are thinking of getting a Flemish Giant which would be more difficult to mislay. You don’t mess with Flemish Giants.

F feeding a Flemish Giant

This handsome fellow was the champion of the whole show – a Parelgrijs van Halle (?Halle pearl-grey?) – not quite as big as some of the others!

Doesn’t happen very often, but someone has contacted me about the astrology sections of my website, to teach me the error of my ways:

If you are basing your data on the Gregorian or Julian calendar, you are grossly in error. The instituted calendar in use today is based on the Roman Catholic Church’s purposeful predetermined misinformation to the masses. The astrological planetary alignment at the time of the birth of Christ has already been scientifically and correctly determined, and the historical data derived from scripture and recorded documentation, also, has been determined in the timeline of historic events in conjunction with this planetary alignment.
Any attempt at determining prophetic insight should be based on the correct timeline derived from the base facts of this planetary alignment of the solar system. The progression of the heavenly configurations do not lie, and stand as historic and unalterable fact.

So that’s me told. He also sent me a link to his website. Glorious.

Am now reading Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett’s take on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and pondering the similarities and differences with Neil Gaiman’s version from Sandman. The two of them have often tackled similar themes in different ways, witness Hogfather and American Gods.

And of course, both of them have anthropomorphised Death as a recurrent character who likes to wear black, with an extended family. Though if you look at the two pictures below, you may spot certain subtle differences in the way each author portrays the character.

Death, by Pratchett	Death, by Gaiman

See what I mean?

Via and Cheryl Morgan, the sad news that the SCI FICTION website is to stop publishing sf at the end of this year.

I have a weekly reminder to tell me to look at it, and never quite remember to unless someone jogs my memory, but Ellen Datlow has published a number of superb stories and I think has maintained an impressive level of quality overall, at least matching the print magazines and ahead of several of them. I hope someone does/has a backup archive.

First serious attack of mouth ulcers in almost a year, brought on (I’m pretty sure) by skipping breakfast two days of last week, aftermath of minor car crash two weeks ago, and pile-up of work after a week of travel. Have been trying the steroid paste with no success at all. Now switching to straight painkillers plus tea-tree oil mouthwash. May not heal them any faster but my mouth smells nice. (I hope.)

I refer you to a book review I did at the start of last year.

8) Doctor Who: Genocide, by Paul Leonard

Picked this up really as an experiment at WorldCon. I never saw the Eighth Doctor TV movie, so this is my first encounter with him; I had no idea if his companion, Sam, was canonical or not though I now learn from Wikipedia that she had an exciting life“The Green Death”.

Well, it’s not bad. The central plot is a set of time paradoxes – will humanity survive, or will we be displaced by humane, environmentally conscious equine quadrupeds who are very reminiscent of Swift’s Houyhnhnms? The Doctor has to choose one way or the other, and either way an entire race may be destroyed, hence the genocide of the title. I felt there were one or two problems with the internal chronology of the book which could not be smoothed over by time-travel, and too many cases of a) characters promising not to move from a safe location, then immediately doing so and b) “I’m going to kill you now!” “No you’re not.” “Okay, I won’t kill you now but I might kill you later!” And one plot twist was foreshadowed many years ago by Douglas Adams, but I thought Paul Leonard invested it with a certain dignity (leaving a message in the basalt, surely inspired by the towel in the prehistoric volcano). Overall it was just about worth the £2 I paid for it.

I’m stunned to discover that there are no less than 73 books in the Eighth Doctor Adventures series! Are any of them better than this? If so, I’d be interested in looking at them…

6) A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin

If you haven’t read Martin’s previous books in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, just go out and buy them now. This is not especially a grand tale of human destiny but more a narrative of dynastic conflict, a fantasy epic with everything that Robert Jordan’s dismal Wheel of Time series doesn’t have – believable characters, believable cultural variations in a world based loosely on medieval Europe, tight plotting, surprise twists.

We’ve been waiting years for this book. I managed to get it electronically from Powell’s rather than lay out on the hardback, but I will now put in an Amazon pre-order on the paperback as there’s nothing quite like dead trees. Also the difficulty with ebooks is that you can’t easily riffle back and forth through the pages to check back on small details. There’s a difference between 784 sides of paper and 4448 “page down” clicks. It reminds you of why the codex won out over the scroll.

You couldn’t really start the series by reading A Feast for Crows, as too much depends on previous narrative, and I slightly wished that I had gone back and reread the earlier ones to re-orient myself. But hey, that’s what the Christmas holiday is for. Non-spoiler points to bear in mind – Martin has covered only half the characters here, and that doesn’t include most people’s favourites – exiled princess Daenerys Targaryen, the queen’s dwarf brother Tyrion Lannister, religious fanatic and royal pretender Stannis Baratheon; we get only a glimpse of Eddard Stark’s illegitimate son Jon Snow and hear nothing at all about his surviving brothers. We do get a whole new set of narrative viewpoints about the Greyjoys and the struggle for power on and around the Iron Islands. And we do get a couple of chapters for each of the Stark daughters, both of whom have now been forced to take on new identities – one of these chapters, “Cat of the Canals”, depicting Arya’s life in a foreign city, is a really fantastic piece of writing even taken on its own.

There were two new factors that I particularly liked in this book. First of all, Queen Cersei’s unleashing of religious fundamentalism as part of her desperate attempt to cling to power, surely at least a partial commentary on current affairs. And second, Martin’s portrayal of the devastating effects of a civil war that has now lasted for years on the ordinary people. A recurrent theme of the series has been the gap between the theory and practice of chivalry as it applies to knights and ladies. Now we seem to be seeing a lot more of what it means for those in other social categories as well.

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I commented briefly in a previous post, when I was half way through,  that the twin storylines of Jaime and Brienne, coming to terms with honour in their different ways, seem to me to be at the core of the book. Jaime’s rejection of his sister at the end is a suitable termination to his particular journey. But I really didn’t expect poor Brienne to come to such a sticky end, and that courtesy of Catelyn, of all people. She has learnt her lesson about the glamour of chivalry the hard way. (And Catelyn, surely one of the more attractive characters of the earlier books, has become literally a monster.)

Martin does have thoroughly evil characters, but they are at least comprehensible in their nastiness. Cersei is not an attractive personality, but is at least a comprehensible one, unable to trust anybody, driving away amyone competent enough to be a potential threat and thus weakened by her reliance on second-rate advisers; also shagging people to increase your power is a currency that gets devalued pretty fast the more you use it. Her fall appeared inevitable right from the beginning of the book, but again, I did not expect it to come at the hands of the religious forces she had unleashed. Presumably we leave King’s Landing with both queens in prison and in the grip of a theocracy, and the stage is set for a vicious settling of scores between rival religions in a later volume. It feels almost like Iran in the second half of January 1979, except that there is no Khomeini waiting in the wings. Is there?

I was less gripped by the side story of the Martells, possibly because I had largely forgotten who they were. They will presumably have an important part to play in the restoration of Daenerys to the throne. Similarly the story of Samwell, though it included some nice bits of writing, felt a bit detached from the main narrative, and the Greyjoy story seems marginal at the moment (and if I’m not mistaken faded out not much more than half way through the book). I suspect those parts of the book will improve once I reread the earlier volumes and see them in context a bit better.

So, in summary, great stuff, and thoroughly recommended provided you’ve read the earlier books in the series. Mostly I read sf for escapism, but the subject matter here is surprisingly close to my work…

On one of the evenings of my work trip last week, four of us were sharing a taxi back to the hotel after dinner. The taxi was small, so one of my female colleagues ended up sitting on my knee for the (short) trip.

“I’m sorry to crush you with my weight,” she commented.

“That’s OK,” I replied, “I’m pleasantly surprised.”

As Rachel famously put it in Friends, that remark sounded soooo much better in my head before I said it.

Two verbs best avoided: “to table” and “to sanction”

In American English, to “table” a topic means to remove it from the agenda for discussion. In other dialects, it means to put it on the agenda for discussion.

The verb “to sanction” means both “to permit” and “to penalise”. The meaning of the sentence “The opposition demonstrators were sanctioned” is not clear.

Or, to be more accurate, where’s Paris, or Rennes, or Toulouse, or particularly Strasbourg?

Don’t ask CNN, anyway…

(Thanks to , who like me is worried about US pre-emptive strikes on France hitting the neighbours by mistake…)

OK, I admit it, I was rooting for the Irishman rather than the Australian, out of pure national solidarity, so I was gleefully happy at the outcome.

But also, since the guy who chose Philip K Dick as his specialised subject crashed and burned, the choice was between Father Ted and Vermeer. No choice at all, really.

By the way, did anyone else notice John Humphreys’ astrophysical slip of the tongue? He asked about “Kor M” stars, pronouncing it “core emm” rather than “K or M” which is presumably what the question should have been (the answer was “red dwarfs“).

PS – , were you subtitling this one? I thought it was a good piece of work. (Neither of us is hearing impaired, but we do have loud children, so tend to put the subtitles on.)

One of the ministers from the 1974 Northern Ireland power-sharing executive has just got in touch to send a minor correction to my description of his result in the 1973 Assembly election. I had no idea that he was still alive!

5) The Days of the Consuls, by Ivo Andrić

I had previously heard of this book as Travnik Chronicle, which is the original Serbo-Croat title, but only worked out that they were the same novel as I was finishing it. It’s the story of life in Andrić’s home town of Travnik as experienced by the Austrian and French consuls during the Napoleonic wars, told mainly from the viewpoint of the foreigners living in the town. I really liked it.

When I was living in Bosnia in 1997-98, I had a choice of four routes from Banja Luka to Sarajevo – two ran east and then south, through Doboj, with the choice between a shortcut at Prnjavor or the longer but better road through Derventa; and the other two were south and then east, either the longer and better road along the Vrbas valley or the mountain road over Mount Vlašić, rejoining the main road just west of Travnik. (Nowawdays the other mountain road going east through Kotor Varoš and Maglaj has been so much improved that it is the best route.)

The Doboj route was usually faster, but the Travnik route much prettier; the beautiful old town is just at the right place for a break, and I’ve had many a cup of coffee or glass of yogurt sitting beside the Lašva river (sadly these days better known for the massacres of the 1990s). What is particularly striking – now as in the nineteenth century – is the way the old town just pops out at you from around a corner as you are travelling, fortress and minarets glowing in the sunlight reflected off the mountains (if you are lucky with the weather).

I remember once on the road back home from Sarajevo, with Anne and a very young B, we took the Mount Vlašić route. We had just crossed a temporary metal bridge over a river gorge when B started crying and we had to stop to feed her, right beside a Dutch army camp. You can’t exactly knock on the door of a large tent, but we made our presence known and begged some Douwe Egberts (the Dutch army does not stint itself on coffee). The soldiers explained, pointing at the bridge we had just crossed, that they were posted there to prevent it from being stolen. We wished them well.

But back to the book. Travnik was the administrative capital of Bosnia until 1850, so the obvious place for the consuls to be posted. I thought at first that there was no plot at all, just a series of balanced and very detailed character sketches of the consuls themselves, their wives, the three successive viziers, and their staff. The native Bosnians themselves are not at the centre of the narrative – the Catholic clergy feature quite a lot, the mainly Muslim townspeople to a large extent as stereotypes (the book’s biggest flaw), the Jewish community are reasonably well represented, the local Serbs come into it only twice quite near the end.

But I began to realise that the book is largely about how people experience other cultures. Although the foreigners – Austrians, French and Ottoman viziers – all hate living in Travnik and dealing with the locals, I think Andrić portrays this as a big mistake on their part. Danville, the French consul who arrives at the start and leaves at the end, is the most sympathetic character, perhaps closest to a viewpoint character, but he is perpetually writing bad poetry about Napoleon and missing the local drama of the town for the sake of conspiring against the Austrians. By the time I was halfway through the book I felt that it should be compulsory reading for anyone working on the Balkans, provided they were prepared to look through the Western characters’ stereotypical reactions to the Bosnians.

Am I reading it too generously? Was Andrić being serious rather than ironic? Why could he not have stated more clearly that he is exposing rather than sympathising with the foreigners’ condescension? I stand by my interpretation because Andrić wrote the book in 1942, in Nazi-occupied Belgrade. And I think that his portrayal of civilised diplomats immersed in a barbarous, violent culture takes on a whole new burden of meaning when you remember that, until the collapse under German invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Andrić was serving his country as an ambassador – in Berlin.

And so my travels come to a close.

We flew into Dubrovnik airport, and bussed to the resort village of Prčanj close to the ancient walled town of Kotor, for our senior staff retreat. Lovely place, of course; I went with a small group into Kotor itself for dinner one evening, and then on the last morning took a walk with a Kenyan colleague around the village itself – massive Catholic church on a promontory, originally built under French/Italian rule in 1809, and then revamped under Franz Josef in 1913. We also had lunch with the prime minister and dinner with the speaker of parliament. They are pretty firm about heading for an independence referendum next year.

Then 24 hours in Vienna, doing meetings in the Austrian Foreign Ministry in the morning and the OSCE in the afternoon. No time for tourism, alas, though I have been to Vienna before.

And so to Kyiv, where we’ve been having our organisation’s board meeting. Ukraine is my 44th country (will update that web page when I get home). We had dinner with the prime minister.

I managed to get out for a good walk around town with a colleague. The architecture is reminiscent of Moscow – Slavic and monumental – yet somehow a little less oriental. The Ukrainian letter І/і seems to be in every single word, so for someone like me who is used to other varieties of Cyrillic you really know which country you are in. (Have also been looking out for Ї/ї, Є/є and Ґ/ґ – plenty of the first, fewer of the second and I haven’t seen any of the third.)

We wandered through the Maidan where the revolutionary students camped at the end of last year (I bought a Yuliya Tymoshenko t-shirt), and then down the cobbled street at the bottom of which Bulgakov (or, as they say here, Bulhakov) lived. The street is full of artisan stalls, selling paintings, embroidery, matrioshka dolls, painted eggs, everything. I found one little stall selling Red Army and Soviet memorabilia, but also other second world war relics including Wehrmacht medals and more Nazi stuff than I think I’ve ever seen before. (That is, not very much but enough to cover two or three dinner plates.) I commented later to a colleague that while I’ve seen Red Army stuff for sale in Germany I’ve never seen Nazi memorabilia there. He reminded me that it is in fact illegal to sell such items in Germany.

They wouldn’t let us go around Bulgakov’s house without a tour guide and there wasn’t an English-speaking one available so we got a cab down the river to the fantastic Lavra complex of monasteries, where there is a poorly sign-posted but utterly amazing collection of Scythian gold. The Scythians obviously get a bad press from their Greek neighbours but they clearly had a very advanced material culture. It was rather stunning to compared the superb artistry of the 5th century BC with the much inferior products of the 12th century AD downstairs. Also rather fascinating was the small collection of Jewish silverwork from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries – striking, in a way, that there was so little of it. (The Khazars were mentioned in one of the earlier explanatory panels; their religion was not.)

Home this evening. Can’t wait.

NB: See subsequent posts on Chomsky for more on this.

My post last Monday drew several responses on Chomsky’s behalf, two of which were anonymous and somewhat vitriolic (one posted from an IP address in Spain, the other from Australia), as well as a link to Oliver Kamm. I have done Chomsky the honour of a little more background research, and will give him a little, but only a little, more credit than I did previously.

Chomsky says in explanation:

I did not support Diana Johnstone’s right to publish strongly enough when her book was withdrawn by the publisher after dishonest press attacks, which I reviewed in an open letter that any reporter could have easily discovered.

I don’t, in fact, detect much difference between this explanation and Chomsky’s remarks about Johnstone as originally reported in the body of the article; indeed the headline quotes (to which Chomsky reasonably objects) are not a fair representation of his words, as was clear to anyone who took the time to read the article (as I did); but surely he has been in public life long enough not to actually expects accuracy and subtlety from headline writers?

Anyway, it took me a surprising amount of googling – and my internet searching skills are not bad – but I think I have found the open letter here. In fairness, he does indeed say that Srebrenica was a terrible crime, though “much lesser” than the actions of the Indonesian government in East Timor for which he blames the US and UK (and to a lesser extent Sweden). On the other hand, he supports Johnstone’s equivocation about whether or not Srebrenica was an act of genocide.

But the last paragraph of Chomsky’s open letter really made me blink:

it would be interesting to learn how the Swedish press explains the fact that their interpretation of Johnstone’s book differs so radically from that of Britain’s leading scholarly foreign affairs journal, International Affairs. I mentioned the very respectful review by Robert Caplan, of the University of Reading and Oxford. It is obligatory, surely, for those who condemn Johnstone’s book in the terms just reviewed to issue still harsher condemnation of International Affairs, as well as of the universities of Reading and Oxford, for allowing such a review to appear, and for allowing the author to escape censure.

My friend Richard Caplan, of the Universities of Reading and Oxford, must be increasingly weary of being confused with the journalist Robert Kaplan, but it is certainly his review to which Chomsky refers. The opening paragraph – “Slobodan Milosevic emerges as a multiculturalist committed to the preservation of a reformed socialist Yugoslavia who was demonized by the West not because of his militant nationalism, which she maintains the West largely fabricated, but because he stood in the way of western hegemonic designs for the region” – is surely to be read with irony, especially since the second half of the review is devoted to identifying errors and omissions by Johnstone which critically undermine her arguments. Chomsky thinks the review is “respectful”. I would describe it more as icily polite; but read it and judge for yourself.

My own furious reaction to Chomsky’s interview in the Guardian was provoked by his reported comment on Johnstone that her work “may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work”. I’m glad to discover that Chomsky actually agrees that Bad things Happened at Srebrenica. But I’m shocked that a “top public intellectual” is unable to report accurately on the content of other people’s book reviews. And I still don’t see how any “top public intellectual” can reconcile the concept of “very careful and outstanding work” on issues as important as Srebrenica with the possibility that such work “may be wrong”. I have the fanciful notion that the concept of freedom of speech does not oblige publishers or newspaper editors to provide a platform for wicked lies.

It is dark and foggy.

3) The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany

This is a collection of a dozen pieces about sf, written between 1966 and 1976. They vary greatly in both length and quality; the longest, an article called “Shadows”, is 80 pages, split into 60 sections which really appear just thrown together at random. I found some of this book stimulating but other bits overblown – for instance, Delany’s apparently serious argument that there is no difference in average height between men and women, it’s just that tall women and short men are oppressed by society and are in hiding as a result. I really bought the book for his essay on Thomas Disch (who I haven’t read) and Roger Zelazny (who I have) and I thought that was well worth the cost (I’ve promised my thoughts on this at greater length but have probably missed her deadline by now). His longer piece on The Dispossessed had some sensible points in it but attacked the book for being insufficiently feminist and open-minded about sex, a view which will doubtless surprise many of its readers. So there we are; all interesting, but some bits much more interesting and worthwhile than others.

From :

1. What languages do you speak?
   Well, English, obviously; also French, Dutch and German to a reasonable but not-quite-professional level of fluency. Rather to my surprise I was able to carry on a brief conversation in Italian earlier today with a little old Montenegrin man who was telling me about his local church. I can manage tourist-level Serbo-Croat, and a rather lower level – not utter incomprehension, but a very long way away from being fluent – in Macedonian, Bulgarian and Russian. I shall find out how good my Ukrainian is tomorrow.
2. What book are you reading at the moment?
   Olympos, by Dan Simmons, his sequel to Ilium. Finding it slightly tough going to be honest.
3. If you could go on holiday anywhere in the world RIGHT NOW, where would you go?
   As I type, I am sitting in a hotel in Vienna, after three days in Montenegro and with the looming prospect of a weekend in Kiev. So exotic travel is not awfully high on my personal list of priorities right now, and “holiday” means “time off work. So my answer is that I would happily spend a week or so vegetating in the ancestral home in Loughbrickland, County Down.
4. What is your favourite smell?
   I do like herbs and food flavours of all kinds – garlic, curry, cardamom, coriander, tarragon, sage, dill, oregano, rosemary, thyme. My unexciting favourite is probably good old mint. I used to fantasise about having a pocket universe with only one planet in it, covered with mint plants, where I could sneak away to, alone or accompanied as necessary, when I needed a break.
5. What was your favourite subject in school?
   It will come as little surprise that I was one of those annoying gits who enjoyed everything provided that the teacher was up to it. (I never quite got the hang of what we were supposed to do in art classes.) There were only two of us doing Latin O-level in my year (the school has stopped teaching it now altogether) so that was a bit quirky and more fun. Of my four A-level subjects, maths was probably the most intellectually satisfying, and German the most stimulating. But I find it a surprisingly difficult choice.

And asks:

1. What was the best thing about growing up in Northern Ireland?
   Crumbs, not so easy to answer; I only grew up once, so it’s difficult to tell what particularly made a difference. I’m very grateful for my family, my education, and the political experience I gained a little later on. But the most Northern Ireland bit of that was the politics which I really only got into when I was in my mid-20s. So I guess I just Don’t Know.
2. If you could travel in time, would you go forwards or back? Why?
   Back, I think. I am much more interested in finding out more about what already happened than running the risk of being disappointed by the future.
3. Is there a piece of poetry that has had a lasting influence on you?
   Probably Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken“, about the choices we make in life.
4. What’s your favourite guilty pleasure song?
   I have a number, including pretty much anything by Madonna, Kylie or Britney. But the ones that always get me are the classic Meat Loaf numbers, such as Paradise by the Dashboard Light.
5. Have you ever considered a permanent move to a former-USSR state?
   I’ve only been to three former Soviet republics, Estonia, Moldova and Russia itself, though this time tomorrow I shall be in Ukraine all being well. I did live for two years in the former Yugoslavia and at one point was seriously considering making that a permanent move. But with our family situation I think moving to the ex-USSR is a bit unlikely in the near future. If someone offers me an ambassador-type position in fifteen years or so, that would be a different matter.
   

2) Moving Mars, by Greg Bear

This Nebula winner is the autobiography of Casseia Majumdar, Martian stateswoman, who is at the heart of an independence struggle that ends up with the entire planet escaping not just politically but physically from the rest of the solar system. All kinds of resonances in here from sf’s history – the three that came immediately to mind were Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, also his Red Planet and Asimov’s very early short story, “The Weapon Too Deadly To Use”. Plus the deadly nano-bots coming to life and devastating the human settlements, though a classic and almost cliched image of sf, were done very well here.

I really enjoyed this book and I’m rather surprised I hadn’t heard more about it from others. In particular, the main hard sf element of the plot, the acquisition by a relatively weak political player (the Martian government) of what is effectively a weapon of mass destruction, seemed to me awfully relevant to contemporary politics, if anything rather more so than when the book was first published in 1993. I guess that Bear’s vision of a revolutionary human society on Mars is less grandiose (though I think no less ambitious) than Kim Stanley Robinson’s massive trilogy which was coming out at around the same time, and perhaps his portrayal of how the political process appears to insiders – which I felt was realistic and well-informed – was insufficiently romanticised to leave a lasting impression in people’s memories.

I raised my eyebrows at first when Casseia was appointed to senior government office before the age of thirty (in earth years); but I had lunch yesterday with a prime minister (admittedly of a small and not-quite-independent European country) who was first appointed to that job when he was 28, and the circumstances described seemed to me to make the scenario just about plausible. And, of course, great stories are often told about unusual events.

Moving Mars scores very well on the sensawunda scale, better indeed than most Nebula winners. I felt it also worked well on the human level, with Casseia’s decisions and mistakes, both political and personal, convincingly portrayed. I have had my complaints about some past Nebula winners, but this one was a good call.

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

Another one of Time‘s top 25.

Most of my experience of Bosnia was far to the west and north of the town of Goražde, for three years a Muslim-held pocket surrounded by Serb forces. Before reading Sacco’s graphic novel, I knew precisely two anecdotes about it. One is from accounts of the peace negotiations at Dayton ten years ago this month, which provide a backdrop to Joe Sacco’s framing narrative: through use of satellite imaging, a mountain path linking Goražde to the rest of Muslim-held territory was found and actually written into the peace treaty; the exhilaration of the international negotiators at finding this solution forming a shocking contrast with the lack of enthusiasm of their local counterparts, who expected the war to resume in a year or so.

Sacco has a superb portrait here of a community under siege, not actually sure if there is a future, yet alone what it might hold (there were persistent rumours that Goražde might be traded to the Serbs in return for concessions elsewhere). He shows himself as an outsider, both slightly sinister (with his eyes never visible behind his glasses) and slightly absurd (with his lips grotesquely enlarged, giving him literally a big mouth). The inhabitants of Goražde, and their assailants, are shown as normal human beings, caught up in scenes of horror and destruction.

As well as providing a narrative of the people of Goražde, Sacco uses the book to make a couple of factual assertions that I have not seen anywhere else in writing about the war. One is that chemical weapons were used by the Serbs against refugees fleeing Srebrenica. He is completely convinced of this, although he concedes that Human Rights Watch, who also looked into the question, were not. I can add a little more supporting, though circumstantial, evidence from our report on Yugoslav arms sales to Iraq published in late 2002: it is a matter of record that the old Yugoslav army had a chemical weapons stockpile in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadžići, and that nobody (at least three years ago) seemed to know precisely what had happened to the stockpile after the army withdrew from Sarajevo in 1992. Quite likely most of it did reach military depots in Serbia, but it is far from impossible that some was diverted into Bosnian Serb hands en route, or subsequently.

Sacco’s second factual point is linked to the second of the two anecdotes I mentioned above – the notorious assertion by General Sir Michael Rose, at the time in charge of British peace-keepers, that a tank attack on the town could have been stopped by “one bloke with a crowbar” and that the defenders of Goražde were asking UN peacekeepers to do their fighting for them. Sacco’s depiction of the tank attack on a terrified and poorly armed civilian population is a far more eloquent refutation of Rose’s statement than could possibly have been achieved by the written word alone.

Perhaps few people these days will be very interested in the politics and history of Goražde. It is after all ten years since the Dayton negotiations which ended the Bosnian war. The debate about the rights and wrongs of international intervention is now, alas, completely different from the period when President Clinton and the rest of the international community displayed utter spinelessness in the face of warlordism and genocide in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, before finally doing the right thing in Kosovo.

But the book remains very much worth reading as a human story of how people do survive in extreme circumstances, and ought to be celebrated as a classic of its genre.

It is dark.