Just watched last night’s Doctor Who Confidential, and found it impossible to ignore the fact that Billie Piper wasn’t even in shot when the cast did their read-through of the script.

Mind you, this is the same person who, when asked “Were you a big sci-fi fan before [_Dr Who_]?” replied “Not really. But when I read the scripts, I found it was a great balance between sci-fi, which can be a bit detached, and real, genuine, emotions.” (Thanks to Ansible for that gem.)

…I discover that Joe Haldeman has been looking at my website, to check how many Nebulas he has won.

2) Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

I’ve read two of Wilson’s previous novels, Hugo nominees Blind Lake and The Chronoliths, and based on that experience probably wouldn’t have bothered reading this if it had not also been nominated for the Hugo this year. And that would have been a mistake: much as I have enjoyed reading the other Hugo nominees, and much as I respect and like the other authors concerned, I think Spin is going at the top of my list. (Yes, I have bought a non-attending membership of LaCon IV.)

The Chronoliths had a fantastic story of Strange Alien Happenings in the near future on such a wide scale that the world is changed for ever; but lost out rather badly on the denouement. Blind Lake was a bit more modest on the Strange Alien Happenings front, concentrating a bit more on the social drama for the main characters, but essentially also failed in the delivery. Spin takes all the best aspects of the previous two, combines them with some very interesting political and philosophical commentary, and delivers a climax whose punch matches the expectations the rest of the story sets up.

The basic story is that one day, some time in the near future, humanity wakes up to find that the stars have disappeared, and that the earth is surrounded by a mysterious barrier. The mystery deepens when it becomes plain that time outside the barrier is passing 100 million times faster than time inside. But rather than rely on sensawunda to sell the story for him, Wilson concentrates on the implications of such a massive disruption for human society, telling it as the story of a family who are heavily implicated in the politics of the change.

Having just read Carl Yoke’s book on Zelazny, I was struck also by the Christ-like career of Wilson’s main character, Jason Lawton, perhaps a deliberate subtle contrast with the nutty Christian cultists with whom his sister Diane gets deeply involved. There is also a fascinating Martian character, who gives interesting responses to Wells, Bradbury and Heinlein’s takes on his own planet.

A really good book. Haven’t read Scalzi’s Old Man’s War yet – in fact I think that is the last piece of Hugo-nominated fiction for me to read this year – but I doubt it will change my mind: hope it wins.

My PC at home (a Compaq Presario) currently is partitioned into a 7.35 GB main drive and a 2 GB backup. Both are practically full. Our needs have changed in the last few months, as F has discovered games and I have discovered, cough, archived videos. We've had it for just over five years.

Is there hope? Can I add much extra memory to it without having to resort to buying a new machine? If I do get a new computer, is it worth while considering getting one that I can just plug into the existing peripherals (printer, monitor/microphone, speakers)?

Your advice is welcome.

This doesn’t seem to have hit the wires yet – Scott Edelman’s attempt to liveblog the event apparently never having started, and the SFWA website still not updated – but Jayme Lynne Blaschke has come up with the goods. I guess everyone else went to bed straight after the ceremony.

Best Novel: Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman. This beat three other books that I have read (1, 2, 3) and enjoyed, and two that I didn’t plan to read. Must therefore now go and get it, and see if the Nebula voters made a reasonable choice (as they appear to have in the other categories). This evens out Haldeman’s major award wins, now at 5 each for Hugos and Nebulas.

Best Novella: “Magic for Beginners“, by Kelly Link. Heavily tipped for this year’s Hugo as well. Unusual these days for anything to win the Nebula the year after publication, rather than two years after. Link’s second Nebula, for a great story which was clearly the best in its category.

Best Novelette: “The Faery Handbag“, by Kelly Link. The first time anyone has won two Nebulas on the same night since Connie Willis in 1993. Both of her stories that night (Doomsday Book and “Even the Queen”) also won Hugos. “Magic for Beginners” is up for one this year, and “The Faery Handbag” has already won, making it the 57th on my list of joint winners.

Trivia point: other people who have won two Nebulas in the same year: Pamela Sargent in 1988 – The Falling Woman and “Rachel in Love”“Hardfought” and “Blood Music““Fire Watch“ and “A Letter from the Clearys”The Dispossessed and “The Day Before the Revolution”The Einstein Intersection and “Aye, and Gomorrah…”“He Who Shapes” and “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth“.

Best Short Story: “I Live With You“, by Carol Emshwiller. It seemed more on the lines of horror to me than sf, and suffers from the cardinal defect of not being Margo Lanagan’s superb “Singing My Sister Down”. Not actually a bad story, but not I thought even the second-best on the short-list.

Best Script: Serenity. No surprise there; I haven’t seen the Battlestar Galactiva which was its sole opposition, but it would have needed to be exceptional to beat Whedon.

I previously blogged about the short-list here and the long-list here. Right, off to update my website…

(PS: The Andre Norton Award, if anyone’s interested, went to Valiant by Holly Black.)

I see that Interaction has put the opening and closing remarks from last year's Hugo ceremony on-line (49 MB WMV file). To be honest I'm not sure that this was all that smart. It is, after all, in competition in the same category as "Dalek", "Father's Day" and "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances". While those who were there will remember it fondly as an entertaining and witty frame for a jolly good evening, it doesn't really improve on re-watching. Though Kim Newman's line about "the then-secret Grand Bombe Atomique, the weapon which allowed France to prevail in the Great War of August 1914 to later that afternoon in August 1914" still raises a laugh.

(I see the Nebulas are being announced tonight.)

While tonight's Doctor Who didn't pack the same emotional punch as last week's, and the plot was rather ripped off from Tom's Midnight Garden, I still enjoyed it. I thought Sophia Myles was superb. Only at one point, as the Doctor was pretending to be drunk, did I feel we had strayed into "Coupling" territory.

But next week there will be Cybermen!

Afterwards and I went outside – and I brought F downstairs – to see if we could catch the International Space Station, supposedly visible from 2154 to 2159 at our location according to the wondrous Sky and Telescope site. I'm pretty sure we were looking in the right direction but the sky was still too bright. Oh well, there's always tomorrow evening from 2219 to 2222.

1) Roger Zelazny, by Carl Yoke

As some of you may have noticed, I am a big fan of the late Roger Zelazny, and have been looking for this book for some time. It was not easy to track down – an Amazon Marketplace order failed to find it in over a year, eventually I found a copy on eBay, and then even that took almost two months to reach me from the California dealer (plus I had to pay €10 customs on it).

It was worth the wait. This is easily as good as the other two and a half books I’ve read about Zelazny (by Theodore Krulik, Jane Lindskold, and a much shorter effort also by Yoke) put together. Unfortunately it was written in 1977, less than halfway through Zelazny’s writing career, which was cut short so prematurely ten years ago next month. Fortunately, it still covers what are generally considered to be Zelazny’s best works. There is a chapter each on “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”, This Immortal, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”, The Dream Master, Lord of Light, “Home is the Hangman” (and the other two stories in that series), and the first five Amber books. Each of these is about ten pages long; I see that Yoke is an associate professor of English at Kent State University, so perhaps that explains why they read a bit like notes for a lecture course.

I found Yoke’s exploration of the layers of myth and meaning behind Zelazny’s early great work very enlightening. The most densely packed chapter is the one on The Dream Master and the Arthurian mythos. The most interesting, for me, was the one on “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”, exploring its parallels with the Book of Job (which reminds me that I am still working on a piece on Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God” for my website). It was also interesting to have flagged up front the recurring symbolism of the rose in “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” and the Amber books, and other uses of dance, water, and rings. And I found his explanation of Zelazny’s themes of form vs chaos, maturation and heroism, very convincing.

Having said that this is the best book I have found about Zelazny, there is surely scope for a better one. The prose is sometimes repetitive, and occasionally mises obvious points – for instance, while I am persuaded that it is important that Render, the name of the hero of The Dream Master, means “to represent or depict”, surely it’s also important that the word can additionally mean “one who tears apart”? Several chapters rely too heavily on a single authoritative theoretical source (Peters’ Rilke, for instance for “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”). And I simply can’t agree that Flora and Fiona are difficult to distinguish in the Amber books!

Anyway, food for thought.

How a carefully designed consociational power-sharing arrangement was subverted by a young mathematical politician

(I’ve taken this from R.J. Crampton’s excellent History of Bulgaria, page 21; some subsequent correspondence with Crampton; and Sava Grozdev’s account as given in Paul Jainta’s article, “Problem Corner: Contests from Bulgaria, I” in the European Mathematical Society’s Newsletter No. 45, September 2002)

The problem is this:

Given a set A = {a1, a2, …, a10}, find 30 subsets Ai, each with 6 elements, such that each element of A belongs to exactly 10 of the subsets Ai.

The context was the Treaty of Berlin of 1878. Bulgaria had gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in possession of a huge swathe of territory in the southern Balkans; the western Great Powers felt that this would give Russia too much influence and divided it three ways, with Macedonia going back to Ottoman control, a much smaller Bulgarian principality set up with its capital in Sofia, and an even smaller autonomous province called Eastern Rumelia, with its capital at Plovdiv (then called Philippopolis in English).

(More maps here and here, taken from WikiPedia)

The Great Powers wanted to set up the Eastern Rumelian government in such a way that the Greek and Turkish minorities would be represented in it. The province held elections for an assembly, and each member of the assembly got six votes for candidates for the ten-member “Permanent Commission” which was to be the province’s government. Richard Crampton tells me that on the eve of the elections in 1879, the 30 Bulgaria Orthodox assembly members met in Plovdiv under the chairmanship of Metropolitan Panaret. Ivan Salabashev, who had a PhD in maths (from Bolgrad in Bessarabia, now Bolhrad in Ukraine, where a lot of Bulgarian emigres to the Russian empire had settled), showed they how they could secure all ten seats for Bulgarian Orthodox representatives. The delegates refused to believe him and remained unconvinced until he staged a mock poll, or dry run. This changed things, and on the following day, Salabashev wrote out the voting slips for all the Bulgarian Orthodox delegates, and the result was as he had said it would be.

The subsequent history of Eastern Rumelia is brief. With its government firmly in the hands of ethnic Bulgarians, it voted to unify with the larger principality to the north in 1885, sparking war with Serbia. The Bulgarians won quite rapidly, and the war is now remembered outside the region, if at all, only as the setting for George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man”.

The subsequent history of Ivan Salabashev is a bit longer. According to the Ministry website he served three times as Minister of Finance of the unified Bulgarian state, and spent the last fourteen years of his life representing his country in Vienna. (I am intrigued by the ministry’s comment that he served as head of the “department of National Enlightenment” – “Дирекцията на народното просвещение” – in Eastern Rumelia in the 1879-1885 period – sounds pretty sinister, though I imagine it just means that he got the job equivalent to Minister of Education, which seems appropriate enough.)

Anyway, it all goes to show that no matter how many bells and whistles the international community may try and put into such arrangements, it is always vulnerable to the locals being willing to comply, and runs into real difficulty if the locals are smarter than the diplomats who set it up.

On TV:
An Unearthly Child – great.
Mawdryn Undead – Not bad.
Resurrection Remembrance of the Daleks – I was not impressed (thanks to for correction).
School Reunion – Simply superb.

Elsewhere:
Paul Cornell’s novel Human Nature – liked it a lot.
Downtime spin-off video – haven’t seen it.

Any others I’ve missed? Is Downtime worth looking out for?

I had a Bulgarian student in yesterday asking me questions for her thesis about the EU’s role in conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Macedonia. An interesting trio, and I think it will not be an easy task for her to pull parallels out of them.

Very often people come to me and ask what the master solution for conflicts like these is. I reply that countries are a bit like families, as Tolstoy described them: “Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему” – “All happy families are alike; all unhappy familieies are unhappy for different reasons”. There is no systematic reason as to why power-sharing / consociationalism has worked best in Macedonia and worst in Cyprus. Consider the following :

	Most	Medium	Least
Success of implementing power-sharing	Macedonia	Northern Ireland	Cyprus
Relative size of largest minority	Northern Ireland (45%)	Macedonia (25%)	Cyprus (15%)
Effective military power of minority insurgents	Cyprus	Macedonia	Northern Ireland

Really the biggest determining factors are local political culture and the personalities of the leaders. The one factor on which Macedonia does score better than the other two is the violence of the conflict, at least in its most recent phase, which was clearly worse in Northern Ireland and worst in Cyprus. However there are

Thanks to ‘s generosity and a mishap with the Belgian postal system, I have an extra copy each of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, both of which are Hugo nominees this year.

Anyone interested? Especially people who are within range of Brussels or Leuven, and who are likely to write about them on their own lj’s?

The Italian ambassador I mentioned previously has replied to my email:

Not in my empire, but I will enquire and come back to you. It seems tailor made for you.!

I hope he’s not just being diplomatic. (Actually I know him well enough that he would tell me if he thought it was a stupid idea.) Anyway, we’ll see what transpires.

I gave an impromptu talk on Tuesday at the Committee of the Regions (one of the more obscure bits of the EU). I did it in my usual style – drafted out a few talking points on a sheet of paper while the two previous speakers were speaking, and then attempted to deliver as well as I could. I was slightly distracted by the fact that the speaker immediately before me came pretty close to lying by omission about one of the countries I deal with. I decided to say that I regretted that the Commission representative had left out a few important facts, and that members of the Committee might therefore be misled unless I corrected them. Two people came up to me separately afterwards and said it was the best speech they had heard all afternoon, and one asked me for my script. (Which is why I got all excited when I heard from that she had seen me on TV yesterday, and hoped that my words of wisdom might have been preserved forever on film; but it seems that she saw an old interview being rebroadcast.)

Thanks to whoever it was in Northern Ireland that sent me three music CDs as a belated birthday present!

But I don’t recognise your handwriting, and so I have absolutely no idea who you are!

(Am trying to think of friends who live in NI and would know enough Dutch to write “Do Not Bend / Niet Vouwen AUB” on the envelope, but am really drawing a blank…)

Ambassador Alpo Rusi has emailed me a 16-page document in German which, he insists, completely clears his name (he was famously accused of being a Stasi spy). He asks me to disseminate it freely to any German-speaking friends who are interested in Finnish politics. I suspect this is a fairly small section of my friends-list, but if you are interested post below and I’ll email it to you. It’s quite an interesting read of how the East German spy network in Helsinki actually functioned.

(Locked entry, for obvious reasons; comments screened.)

Good luck to everyone who I know who is pounding the streets today in the local elections in England and Wales, whatever party you may be in.

In particular, good luck to my former Cambridge Lib Dem colleagues Max Boyce and Colin Rosenstiel, running for re-election, and to Marian Holness, a former housemate of mine who I discover is standing in a winnable seat there!

“Yes, I was. Now I’m Number Six.”

(hat-tip to )

Foreign Policy has just published its annual Failed States Index, ranking 146 countries from Sudan to Norway in order of vulnerability to state failure.

As with all of these things, it’s good to have a basis for argument. I do take issue with some of the rankings. While I don’t think many people would dispute that the top eight countries on the list probably are in pretty bad shape (Sudan, DR Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Chad, Somalia and Haiti) I’m a bit surprised to see Pakistan listed next, as being in a worse situation than Afghanistan, Guinea or Liberia. Serbia and Montenegro is very likely to split apart later this month, but is only 55th on the table. (OK, so it’s not exactly “state failure”, in that there will be little disruption to existing structures.)

Anyhow, food for thought.

Some of you will have seen my list of sf and fantasy novels set in Ireland. I have been living in Belgium now for over seven years, and it occurred to me that there must be a similar list possible of sf and fantasy set here.

I have two items to start off with:

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (2004): one of the nested stories is set in Zedelghem.

The Guns of Avalon, by Roger Zelazny (1972):

“From Antwerp we had traveled to Brussels, spending several evenings at a club on the Rue de Char et Pain before the man I wanted found me.”

Anything more?

(I’m specifically thinking of written sf and fantasy. If we expand the scope out to comics there are an awful lot more, starting with Tintin.)

Edited to add: reminds me – as I should have remembered perfectly well – of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke (2004) which features the Battle of Waterloo.

Michael Ross raises the question of Kate Elliot’s “Crown of Stars” series. As far as I can tell these are set in a rather distorted Europe, to the point that you couldn’t really count it as “set” in France, Belgium, etc. Same goes for the Kushiel trilogy (though as far as I remember they avoid the Low Countries entirely).

Alex Wilcock reveals the missing scene.

Slightly to my surprise I applied for a job with the European Commission yesterday. They put up an advertisement last week for a political adviser in an area I know something about and am very interested in, deadline for applications being 5 pm yesterday. So I pulled together the standard CV (and completing their CV tool is an experience in itself). I suspect I may just miss the cut in that I have been in international politics for only nine years and they want ten. Also the furtiveness of the advertisement suggests that they are only advertsising it in order to regularise the position of the temporary appointee who may be doing it at the moment (or that in some other way the post is already earmarked for someone). But nothing venture, nothing gain; I got the form handed in at 4.15 pm, and sent an email to the Italian ex-ambassador who would be my boss if it works out. (It occurs to me that this is a week when talented Italians who have been in political exile for the last five years may be heading home; perhaps this has created the vacancy?)

Never got around to writing up last weekend.

I took the Saturday as a day of relaxation in Stockholm. My Macedonian friends S and B (or perhaps I should say С and Б) and I spent the morning in the Vasa museum, which is absolutely superb. The centrepiece is this massive warship which sank in Stockholm harbour on its maiden voyage in 1628, and was successfully salvaged, pretty much intact, in the 1960s – an early example of a military project where the political necessity of meeting the deadline for the launch was allowed to supersede operational requirements, like making sure it would actually float. Great exhibits about life in the 17th century and the salvaging process, bilingually in English and Swedish.

I realised – as I should have done ages back – that Swedish, and I suppose Danish/Norwegian as well (and Faroese? Icelandic?), adds the definite article to the end of the word, so “Museet” for “the Museum”. The only other languages I’ve come across which do that are the Balkan Sprachbund of Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian-Romanian. (Insert conspiracy theory about ancient Scandiwegian/Balkan links here.)

We met up with and T for lunch, and then went on to the Nobel museum. To be honest this was a little disappointing. There was a nice little exhibition about Albert Einstein, and two audiovisual displays, one with extracts from speeches and interviews of a fairly random set of Nobel Prize winners, and the other with a series of short films about places where genius thrives – I did get a nostalgic kick out of the one about Cambridge, which seemed to highlight college catering: gasped with surprise at the New Hall serving area, which at one time I encountered several times a week. There was also a not very exciting set of relics from the life of Nobel himself. I would have liked some more exploration of the meaning of the prize, and most of all an actual list of the winners.

I have encountered several Nobel laureates. I chatted to Seamus Heaney one evening in a Dublin pub; had lunch with Robert Mundell in my previous job at CEPS; encountered both John Hume and David Trimble through my work in Northern Ireland politics; and interviewed Ernest Walton for my Ph D thesis a few months before he died. In addition I have at least shaken hands with Kofi Annan and Oscar Arias Sánchez, and also asked Brian Josephson to vote for me when I ran for Cambridge City Council in 1990. (I don’t think I persuaded him.) Oddly, I don’t recall bumping into any of the numerous laureates around Cambridge during my three years running to and from the Cavendish labs while studying Physics in the late 1980s (my minimal exchange with Josephson was conducted at his front door, and after I had graduated). Perhaps they were lying low; or perhaps it was an early sign, which I should have heeded, of the shallowness of my real interest in science.

Home on Saturday; spent Sunday alternately watching Doctor Who and trying to finish a piece of writing. Monday was a grey day, unfortunately, but we had a good time with and , visiting on their Benelux honeymoon. The plan to do the Atomium and Mini-Europe was aborted by the weather (and long queues for the Atomium), but we just came back to our house, consumed beer, and set the world to rights. Always nice to meet folks from livejournal who are passing through!

…it was the pilot I watched yesterday morning, because we watched the real thing later on in the evening. Thanks to , and Paul Cornell for putting me right.

Didn’t think there was much to choose between them, to be honest. The broadcast version is a slight improvement, with the Doctor’s costume and the line “Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be travellers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles?”.

I’ve compiled a list of School Reunion entires from other people’s LJ’s, not just my own f-list but following links from comments to other pages. Haven’t done it systematically but some highlights that caught my eye below:

To start off with, I’m with :

Oh, I am so relieved that Doctor Who was good this week. This is the kind of stuff I want to see. A really excellent episode. What a relief. Delivered on all accounts I think.

And :

Well, that was practically perfect in every way.

And :

Sarah Jane! Sarah Jane! Sarah Jane! And done so well, not only acting but writing. And how the Doctor was so pleased to see her, though he couldn’t let her know who he was, though he gave her a hint with his “John Smith” line. And how she figured it out as soon as she saw the TARDIS.

To which revealingly adds:

Oh, Sarah Jane. Never watched a single DW episode before the new series, so I can’t even imagine how cool seeing her must be for Old School Whovians, but she is so clearly Teh Awesome. The fact she never quite managed to move on is both inevitable and heart-breaking. And yet, how amazing is it that she wouldn’t change the experience for the world? She’s right, some things *are* worth getting your heart broken for.

:

Now we begin to see that the Doctor not only has his own agendas, but also quite frivolously wrecks lives, by picking up mere mortals, putting them through what is essentially the most exciting kind of whirlwind romance (a one night stand surely, from the perspective of a Time Lord) and dumping them, before he has to watch them wither and age. Not for their sake, but for his.

comments in reply to :

It also explained why they gave the Doctor delusions of godhood last week – so that the temptation scene this week would be even more effective. (The programme has always borrowed ideas from all over, but last night’s was the first that I can recall to borrow from the New Testament, with the Doctor in the role of Christ and Finch in the role of the Devil.)

noticed:

that little moment where Rose reaches for the sonic screwdriver, but Ten is already handing it to Sarah

reflects:

The in-story isn’t gendered but it is being presented in a gendered way, specifically about female ageing. I try not to get all FemLitCrit too often, because I think it’s over-used and often whiny, but seriously, would they have written the same story for Peter Purves? (if PP had been dumped the same way and had a longer history). Would RTD have directed the confrontation to be written like a ‘Sex And The City’ scene? Actually, imagining Peter Purves in all these scenes is very funny. Here he is, geting outraged at being left behind, bitching about school lessons with Rose and then getting a ginormous huggle. Cheering me up no end. Especially if you imagine it all in a big aran jumper.

See also vast comment thread over at ‘s invoking comparison with Whedon and Highlander, and the usual indepth from the Behind the Sofa crew. Minority views from here and coleberg.

I’m with the majority here, for all the reasons mentioned above.

It is getting increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that Billie Piper has not featured once in this season’s Doctor Who Confidentials. Anyone know what the story is there?