Party

Thanks very much to Paul, we had great fun last night in Faringdon; a beautiful little village, with good music and great company. Nice to see , and Leah and John, and to meet (I think) , , and and Alex. See you again soon, I expect. (Some of you very soon.)

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July Books 35) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

35) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

Well, it was a fiver from the local ASDA; so although I tried to think of something else, I bought it and read it.

I liked it more than I expected to. I thought that, with the exception of the very last expository section of What Snape Was Really Up To, Rowling kept up the narrative pace very well. With the first significant death so early in the book (never mind Mad-Eye Moody, I am referring to poor Hedwig), it becomes clear that we are playing for keeps, and that the body count is going to soar; as indeed it does. If you have managed to avoid the spoilers, there is a real suspense about who is going to live and who will die. We know this is the last book; how final will the ending be?

While this is not Great Literature, it would be churlish not to acknowledge that the characters have matured and deepened as the books have gone on. The Harry/Ron/Hermione dynamic is particularly attractive; but we also have a fair amount of parenting going on – the Weasleys, the Malfoys, Lupin and Tonks – of course, much less of this book was set in Hogwarts than the previous volumes, so there is more scope for it.

claims that many of the plot elements had been done before and better in fanfiction. Perhaps I should read more fanfiction. This will, of coutrse, remain the canonical version.
< Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | The Tales of Beedle the Bard >

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July Books 34) Doctor Who

34) Doctor Who [The Novel of the Film], by Gary Russell

This was the novel of the TV movie, written by Gary Russell (two of whose other Who novels I have read; I liked one of them). Not really a lot to say about this; he has stuck fairly closely to the script, padding out the introduction a bit more, wisely not expanding on the Doctor’s demi-humanity. I see that I found the visuals and the acting particularly attractive in the broadcast version of the story, and inevitably those get lost in the transfer to the printed page. But it’s basically OK.

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July Books 33) Kill or Cure

33) The Afterblight Chronicles: Kill or Cure, by Rebecca Levene

Bought this mainly because I knew the author at college. It is the second in a new series of novels set in a near-future world where a mysterious plague has killed off most of the population, from the same stable (roughly) as 2000 AD. If you like that sort of thing, you will like this, with plague, zombies, horrible secrets, love, loyalty, betrayal, a bit of hot girl-on-girl action, and basically a well-depicted world with (I suspect) more depth to it than you often get in this sector of the genre.

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July Books 32) The Republic

32) The Republic, by Plato

One of the disadvantages of having got into a political career through practice rather than study is that I am woefully under-read in the basics of political science. So, in order to make a beginning on putting that right, I have ploughed through the Penguin Classics edition of The Republic, having started and stalled on the Project Gutenberg version a couple of years ago.

For those of you who haven't read it (which I suspect is the vast majority of you), it is written by Plato, but all the ideas are presented as a discourse by Socrates (who had been Plato's teacher) in conversation with interlocutors whose mood ranges from interested to hostile. The core of the book is the presentation of the ideal state, in which government is conducted by a specially trained and bred class of philosophers/judges/warriors, but he diverges onto various other topics as well, in particular what the nature of their education should be.

Plato's insistence that education in philosophy (which for him includes all the sciences) would automatically produce gifted rulers must surely have seemed a bit naive even in his own day. And yet, of course, you have large parts of society constructed around this: Oxbridge classicists going into the City; the énarques in France; the Ivy League in the US. On the other hand, I observe that really intelligent people often make poor politicians; few of the skills of political leadership are intellectual. Plato would chide me that this is a problem with democracies and tyrannies, which I admit are the only polities I have particularly engaged with, and he explains why this is so in his chapters examining the problems of democracy and tyranny. I am not completely convinced though.

Striking that Plato insists on the equality of men and women, at least within his ruling classs; striking also that this is combined with a vehement advocacy of infanticide on eugenic grounds, and on the abolition of marriage in favour of a planned breeding programme. I wonder if any sf novelist has ever tried writing a society constructed along Plato's lines. There are echoes of it in a lot of places, but I can't think of any explicit example.

Of course, anyone who did try and construct a society along Plato's lines would run into the problems of the flaws and inconsistencies of the text. In particular, Plato's thoughts on the theory of forms are implicit in a lot of the text, but he is (apparently) rather unclear in his vocabulary so one is never completely sure what he is trying to get at, and the more specific he gets on basic philosophical contexts, the more adrift I felt.

Still, I'm glad I put the effort into this.

Edited to add: see comparison with Brave New World.

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Middle England

Once I have a faster connection I shall upload pictures of yesterday’s Great Pilgrimage, which ended in a drive across flooded Oxfordshire; others have posted about it too who live here, but gosh, that was drastic, wasn’t it!

On a social note, very good to see on Tuesday evening, and on Thursday morning. I shall see a few of you this evening in Faringdon, I expect.

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How did you first encounter Harry Potter?

This is sparked by a locked entry on my f-list, one of the many asking for NO SPOILERS PLEASE but also telling a story of an impulse purchase of the first book in Inverness in August 1999 and then the saga of getting into online fandom.

My own story of how I read Harry Potter is marginally interesting, so as my sole contribution to the current hype I will recount it here. It was during my first visit to Kosovo, in March 2000, and I spent a long evening renewing contact with some American friends telling me what they were doing in order to avoid going mad in those rather tense days. One of them was reading the Harry Potter books; she was the first person I had met who had done so and I was convinced at least to try them out.

On my way back, passing through Vienna Airport, I saw the rather attractive “grown-up” versions of the first two books and bought them there and then, getting the third one on my return to Brussels. I was especially impressed by Prisoner of Azkaban which I still think is the best of the six so far. As the others come out, I have been reading them diligently, though not with quite the same air of dedication as some people!

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Ancient meme

My score on The Which Ancient Language Are You Test:

Older Futhark
(You scored)

Language of the Norse, Older Futhark! Thirty symbols, all told. And no hardier, more warrior-like tongue has ever graced the longships of the Viki or left the Celts and Saxons in such quivering fear. There’s only one drawback, that being you died 800 years ago.

Link: The Which Ancient Language Are You Test
(OkCupid Free Online Dating)

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The EUBAMчики revealed…

I was amused by the other suggestions, but as and worked out, the EUBAMчики are the EU customs officers operating on the frontier between Ukraine and Moldova, in a set-up known officially as the EU Border Assistance Mission, EUBAM for short.

points out that if it is a Russian slang word, it is more likely to be EUBAMшники than EUBAMчики. I confess that the subject came up over a dinner table in a crowded restaurant, so it is possible that I misheard; it’s also possible, as suggests, that it is Ukrainian rather than Russian slang, which I suppose might make a difference.

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July Books 31) Doctor Who: The Iron Legion

This is a collection of the Doctor Who comic strips from 1979-80 featuring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, originally published in the first 38 issues of Doctor Who Monthly; all inked and drawn by Dave Gibbons, but five different stories, of which the first and third are presented as by “Pat Mills and John Wagner”, the second and fourth as by “John Wagner and Pat Mills”, and the fifth is by Steve Moore. The presentation of the material is OK, but I would have liked a bit more information about the first (and subsequent) dates of publication.

The first and third stories, “The Iron Legion” and “The Star Beast”, stand out as the best – I remember them vividly from first reading more than a quarter-century ago – and from what is said in the introduction I guess Pat Mills, who was also the first editor of 2000 AD, deserves the credit for that. They are pretty good examples of the comics medium, and while the Doctor of the drawn page isn’t always exactly like Tom Baker’s portrayal in appearance and manner, I think that the two “Mills and Wagner” stories stand on their own merits.

All three writers and Gibbons as the artist, however, get credit for Sharon, who was (unless, dear reader, you know better) the Doctor’s first non-white companion, joining him as a result of sheltering the Star Beast and sticking around for the whole of the second half of this collection. Not that they do a lot with her, but it’s a point worth noting for completists.

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July Books 29) The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; 30) City at World’s End

29) The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by Christopher Bulis
30) City at World’s End, by Christopher Bulis

Two First Doctor novels featuring the original TARDIS crew of Ian, Barbara and Susan, one of them a Virgin Missing Adventure from 1995, the other a BBC book from 1999, but both with the same author.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is quite a neat story of the Doctor and companions appearing on a planet where knights, dragons, elves, dwarves and leprechauns all appear to thrive; yet at the same time they are under threat of invasion and domination by the local galactic empire. The bad guy’s name is Marton Dahl, which of course must be a salute to Peter Purves’ portrayal of Morton Dill in The Chase. It all tied together rather pleasingly, with certain reservations which I will come back to.

City at World’s End was less successful for me. Again I thought Bulis had done very well in portraying the setting, a rain-drenched planet which is doomed to destruction in the near future, and the populace hoping to escape rather as in Utopia. But the various human (and AI) factions were rather confusingly portrayed as to their means and motivation. There’s a nice nod to Planet of Giants at the end (the novel is set before that and immediately after The Reign of Terror).

Also, a peculiar common quirk: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice featured a medieval culture without religion (and then didn’t make much of it) while City at World’s End has a very nasty church set-up, not quite consistent with the sort of hi-tech modern world we are otherwise being shown.

Both are decent enough books, with the first being better than the second. But I haven’t yet read a novel that really got to grips with Hartnell’s Doctor: so much of his performance was gesture, mannerism, bearing, visual cues, that perhaps it is impossible to capture on the printed page.

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July Books 28) City of Illusions

28) City of Illusions, by Ursula Le Guin

One of Le Guin’s early books, which I had not previously heard of; I thought it was rather impressive, though. Set in a far future depopulated American continent, the protagonist, Falk, has appeared out of nowhere with no memory and goes on a quest to recover / discover his identity. The first half of the (short) book is an Odyssey-style journey across the continent, the second half, after his arrival in Es Toch (the city of illusions in the books’s title), is his attempt to outwit the sinister Ching and fulfill his quest. It is a little pulp-ish in design and execution, but I really am surprised not to have heard more about this as part of Le Guin’s œuvre.

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EUBAMчики

I came across a lovely slang word yesterday, the first word I can remember encountering which can be correctly spelt only using the letters of two different alphabets: EUBAMчики, pronounced “you-BAM-chicky”. A special prize for the first person who can tell me who the EUBAMчики are.

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On my travels

On the road for the next few days – I owe some of you interview questions, and I owe others interview answers; you may have to wait until I have stopped moving. Hope to see one or two of you in the meantime.

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July Books 27) Earth is Room Enough

27) Earth is Room Enough, by Isaac Asimov

Collection of Asimov’s stories from the first half of the 1950s, also two rather self-indulgent Gilbert and Sullivan pastiches about writing pulp sf. A lot of the stories are extended jokes; a lot of them revolve around intellectually gifted male protagonists in unhappy marriages. The most memorable is possibly “Jokester”, in which the source of all humour is revealed. I was surprised to realise that the first story, “The Dead Past”, another memorable one about visualising history, is also more than twice as long as any other in the collection; it is set in a near-future world where the government controls and licenses all scientific research, in what seems to be just a world-building detail which becomes vital to the plot. It’s all a bit 50s, but generally well done.

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Facebook friendswheel

I find this fascinating:

Click to Enlarge.



Click to embiggen.

There are three big concentrations, colleagues from my former job at 11-12 o’clock, British Lib Dems at 4-5 o’clock and sf fans at 8-9 o’clock. But there are a few other concentrations I can identify as well; half a dozen ladies from Livejournal at 6 o’clock, relatives at 7-ish, Cambridge friends at 1-ish, Dublin friends at around 10 o’clock. Most of the top right quadrant is either people who didn’t fit any of those groups or people who the algorithm somehow couldn’t comfortably insert elsewhere where they might have belonged better, and between 3 and 4 o’clock is a peculiar jumble of Brussels contacts, IT sector contacts, Irish political contacts and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Is there a similar friends wheel algorithm for livejournal?

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July Books 26) The Successor

26) The Successor, by Ismail Kadarë

A short but really gripping novel exploring the death of the designated Successor to Albania’s Communist ruler (referred to as the Guide); did he shoot himself, or was he murdered? The event referred to is clearly the mysterious death of Mehmet Shehu in December 1981, though Kadarë has changed or invented a lot of the details – it was Shehu’s son, not his daughter, who had entered a politically unwise engagement; the date of death was the 17th not the 14th; the party session at which he was denounced was the previous month not the previous day. This is beside the point anyway; Kadarë’s point is about the damage the regime did to itself and to its people, and he tells the story from several points of view, including the foreign intelligence analysts trying to understand what had happened, the Successor’s daughter (a particularly good passage), the architect who designed his building, and the interior minister suspected of the crime, if crime there was. There is also a fantasy element, of ghosts and mediums, which adds to the sense of layers of reality. A fascinating book.

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July Books 25) What Ifs?™ of American History

25) What Ifs?™ of American History, edited by Robert Cowley

I’d read the two previous volumes in this series, which are more global and less American in scope; loved the first one, less impressed by the second. This one concentrates on US history, and is generally pretty good – the one real dud is an essay on “What if Pearl Harbour hadn’t happened?” which concludes that nothing would have been very different except that the Pacific War would have been six months late. The other Second World War essay is a bit more exciting but also concludes that it wouldn’t have made much difference if Eisenhower had gone for Berlin.

There are no less than four essays on the Civil War, one of which is James McPherson’s reprint from the first volume on “What if the South had won?”, but the other three taking interesting tacks: one by the dubious Victor Davis Hanson credits Lew Wallace’s personal disgrace at the battle of Shiloh with his later creation of the popular epic novel in Ben-Hur; one looking at the potential for insurrection against the Lincoln administration in what we now call the Mid-West, and one speculating (a bit chaotically) about the possibilities for continued insurgency in the context of Andrew Johnson as well as Abraham Lincoln being assassinated.

Two of the pieces are written from the counterfactual perspective first used, I think, by Winston Churchill in his 1931 essay “If Lee had not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”. The one on how the Cuban missile crisis turned into a global nuclear war is rather conventional stuff; but Andrew Roberts’ piece explaining the origins and course of the 1896 war between the USA and Britain is the pick of the book for me, although I don’t quite agree on the likelihood of the US being given Quebec in a peace settlement; much more likely what happened in the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War, both sides being returned to the status quo ante.

The other piece that particularly caught my eye was on John Tyler, the first Vice-President to succeed to the Presidency after the death of his running-mate. Tom Wicker points out that Tyler’s accession was far from assured by a strict reading of the constitution, and that the policies he pursued in office, in particular on the annexation of Texas, were crucial in their importance to the future of the country and not likely to have been pursued as successfully by any other potential president of the day. Tyler is much more interesting than I had realised, and the story has an exploding cannon as well, which in February 1844 killed numerous senior officials, one of whose grieving daughters found comfort in the arms of the recently widowed President Tyler, who married her four months later. (One of their grandsons is still alive.)

Anyway, a good collection for the history buff.

The Wheel In Space; The Krotons

The Wheel In Space was the last episode in Patrick Troughton’s second season as the Doctor, introducing Wendy Padbury as Zoe, and with the Cybermen back again. It has a mixed reputation among fans (and I have to admit that the astronomy is drastically inaccurate, and the plot, as so often with Cyberman stories, makes no sense at all), but I really liked it. In particular, I loved the atmosphere and appeaarance of the Wheel itself, a space station with a multi-national crew including psycho boss, sensible woman who is really keeping it all going, and the other various roles – including Zoe herself, brought up to be logical and knowledgeable, but with the Doctor and Jamie opening her mind to other possibilities. (The crew also includes one of Doctor Who’s rare overtly Irish characters, Sean Flannigan, played by James Mellor, who also plays a non-Irish alien leader in the first episode of The MutantsJ.D. Bernal.) To describe this as a mere remake of The Moonbase does not do it justice at all; it is what The Moonbase should have been.

And Zoe! Certainly now my favourite pre-Sarah Jane Smith companion. Her first exchange with Jamie is quite hilarious. Since four of the six episodes are missing, I listened to the CDs with linking narration by Wendy Padbury, who played Zoe; she does it fine, though I was not as impressed with the scripting as I have been for some of the others. (The two surviving episodes are on the Lost In Time DVD set.)

The Krotons was shown to us uncomprehending fans in 1981 as part of the Five Faces of Doctor Who season, along with An Unearthly Child, Carnival of Monsters and Logopolis, one for each Doctor to date. The choice was dictated by the fact that it was then the only surviving four-part Troughton story (Tomb of the Cybermen has since been recovered, thank goodness). Unfortunately, in a season which had palpable hits like The Invasion, The War Games and The Mind Robber, this is one of the misses (see The Dominators and The Space Pirates); which is quite surprising when you consider that the writer was Robert Holmes and the director David Maloney – the same team that was later to produce The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Oh well, one of those occasions aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus, or in this case Homeri. It’s difficult to say quite why it doesn’t work; the dodgy production values don’t help, especially the egg-box monsters with comically spinning heads (apparently, in a Spinal Tap moment, their costumes were made a size too small); but perhaps it fails most notably on the grounds where The Wheel In Space succeeds, that the Gond society just isn’t very believable and they look like actors stuck in a futuristic set. There is, however, an amusing Zoe costume malfunction at the start of episode 4 (at about 0:40 in).

That leaves me only The Seeds of Death to go of the entire black and white era. But we’re going on holiday next week, so it will be a while before I finish watching it and write it up. (Non-Who fans on the f-list breathe a sigh of relief at this news.)

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The Fourth Doctor audios

The first ever commercially produced Doctor Who audio was the 1976 Argo Records production, Doctor Who and the Pescatons, starring Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen as the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. To be honest, it is not fantastic. The plot is ripped off by writer Victor Pemberton from his Second Doctor series Fury from the DeepExploration Earth, also from 1976, an educational radio programme which just has the Doctor and Sarah travelling through time and observing the gradual geological development of the planet Earth, with a chrome alien attempting to disrupt things, who is despatched rather casually at the end.

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July Books 24) The Sharing Knife: Legacy

24) The Sharing Knife: Legacy, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Six months on from the first volume, we just got the second of the latest Bujold series (a two-parter, alas, so this is it unless she can be persuaded to return to this world). It is not a spoiler to say that it starts with the best sex scene Bujold has ever written, and then gets into a gripping narrative of mixed marriage, impossible in-laws, and unspeakable horrors of a supernatural nature. Towards the end, I thought to myself, aha, she is just going to reprise the brilliant public tribunal ending to A Civil Campaign. But no, she chose a different path this time, which made for a really satisfying end to the book. Best novel I’ve read so far this month.

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First Ladies and Second Ladies

challenges me to produce some statistics on the wives of Presidents and Vice-Presidemts of the USA (the latter, WikiPedia assures me, may be referred to as “Second Ladies”), in the light of the recent passing of Lady Bird Johnson, who had been both.

I shall work up some stats in due course, but what strikes me immediately is that women’s health has improved over the last century. Every president since Harding has been married throughout his term in office. But of earlier presidents, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren and Chester A. Arthur had in fact become widowers before becoming president, and John Tyler, Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson all lost their wives during their terms in office (Tyler and Wilson married again while in the White House; Harrison’s wife died the week before the 1892 election, which he lost). James Buchanan and Grover Cleveland both came to the White House as bachelors, though Cleveland married during his first term (Buchanan, by most accounts, not being the marrying kind). Only one president has ever been divorced, but that was thirty years before he became president (and he had remarried in the meantime).

As with presidents, there has only been one Vice-President in the twentieth century who was a widower during his term of office – Charles Curtis (1929-33). In earlier days, several of the same names crop up: Jefferson served as Vice-President under John Adams from 1797 to 1801; he and both of his own Vice-Presidents, Aaron Burr (1801-05) and George Clinton (1805-12), were widowers (though Burr married again much later in life). So were Martin Van Buren (1832-36), William Wheeler (1877-81), and Chester A. Arthur (a bit later in 1881). (John Tyler, of course, does not go on this list as his wife was still alive during the month that he was Vice-President). William Rufus King (also Vice-President for a month, in 1853) was, like his good friend James Buchanan, not the marrying kind. Richard Mentor Johnson (1837-1841) was not legally married but lived openly with a slave woman, Julia Chinn, a relationship which cost him the electoral college vote in 1836 (though the Senate voted him in in the end). Poor Julia was three years dead by then, but it still made a difference to the Virginia electors.

Thanks for the idea, . I’m very conscious that I haven’t really met your challenge; I need to actually look at the lives and lifespans of the women concerned, rather than just identifying them by their husbands’ names! So please take this as a first step towards a more informative later post. I would not be at all surprised to find a fairly sharp gap between the average lifespans of the wives of presidents and vice-presidents depending on whether they lived through the medical revolution of the late 19th century or not.

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Disagreeing with the Guardian

In this week’s Guardian Weekly (and probably in your Saturday Guardian, but not on-line as far as I can tell) one of the puzzles in Chris Maslanka’s column is as follows:

3 goats will take a week to eat all the grass in a field, and 2 goats will take 2 weeks. How long will 1 goat take?

I do not agree with his answer, which is:

Suppose there is f grass, it grows at a rate of r per week in some appropriate units of consumption and a goat can eat g grass in a week. Then the first two bits of information tell us that -3g + r + f = 0 and -4g + 2r + f = 0. Subtracting the first equation from the second gives -g + r = 0. This means that a single goat eats at the rate the grass grows, so it could never clear the field alone.

But in fact the rate of eating of the grass is not r; it depends on how much grass is left to grow in the field – from the terms of the question, once the goats have eaten it, no more grows, right? So if x is the proportion of the field still covered in grass, then the rate at which the grass is growing is rx, not r. So my first equation here, where you have n goats and f is the (variable) amount of grass in the field, is

df/dt = rx – ng

x is of course also variable. The goats are presumably not eating at a constant rate of so many square metres per day, but rather eating at a rate of so many kilos or bushels of grass per day. It’s fairly easy to show that the rate of clearance of the field, dx/dt, is inversely proportional to how much the grass has grown in the meantime, in other words to the variable f (whose initial value, the amount of grass in the field at the start, is f0):

dx/dt = -ng / f

Hah, this looks familiar from undergraduate maths. If I divide one equation by the other, then

df/dx = f – rxf / ng = (1 – rx/ng) f

which means, after a bit of scrabbling with my memories of differential equations, that

f = f0 (e x – rx2 / 2ng – 1) / (e1 – r/2ng – 1)

OK, so it’s a dubious exponential quadratic; the grass is at its longest when the goats have cleared ng/r of the total area, but as for when they have eaten the lot, that takes considerable number-crunching. I’ve long forgotten how to programme a computer to do this, but I bet just looking at it that if you can get r and g right to give the correct numbers for 1 and 2 goats, the goat on his own will take quite a lot longer to eat his way through the grass, but will get there in the end.

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July Books 23) George and Sam

23) George and Sam, by Charlotte Moore

This is a brilliant book about living with autism in your family. I found myself experiencing painful shocks of recognition every few pages, from the experience of the more “neurotypical” sibling, to the necessity of keeping important things (such as sugar and toothpaste) locked up, to the unintentional unkindnesses of friends and relatives. Our two girls are very different from Moore’s two boys, and all four are of course very different from each other – neither of ours can talk, while both of hers can; she has had more success with toilet training than we have; her boys apparently get along well with each other, while our four-year-old U is somewhat frightened of her ten-year-old sister B (who normally blithely ignores U, but has occasionally pulled her hair). Also, of course, she has managed to keep both of hers at home so far, whereas we are now expecting B to move out to full-time residential care in the next couple of months. Another extremely important difference is that my wife and I are still together. (Incidentally, I also realized that I know Moore’s father through liberal politics.) There are many good lines in the book, but I’ll just take this one from near the end as a good summary of the common ground I found with her:

These mysterious, impossible, enchanting beings will always be among us, unwitting yardsticks for our own moral behaviour, uncomprehending challengers of our definition of what it means to be human.

You couldn’t take this book as an essential medical text on autism. (For instance, Moore writes about experiments with diet as a way of improving her children’s condition, but her account should be taken as a personal history rather than a recommendation; we’ve tried that and it made no difference apart from making B grumpy because there was no cheese.) Nick Hornby in his introduction makes parallels with Wild Swans and Claire Tomalin’s life of Pepys, but I think that’s a mistake: both of those are deeply factual books which we should take as serious academic contributions to the histories of China and of seventeenth-century England.  I think a better parallel is with Rebecca West’s amazing Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is misleading and possibly even dangerous if taken as a factual history of Yugoslavia, but if read correctly as a human response to the experience of the Balkans is one of the great books of the twentieth century. Anyway, this is a great account of an important part of my world by someone who shares it.

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July Books 19-22) Four Doctor Who novelisations

19) Doctor Who – the Caves of Androzani, by Terrance Dicks
20) Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks
21) Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, by Terrance Dicks
22) Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive, by David Fisher

Four Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories from the original series here. The first two are average Terrance Dicks treatments of two of Robert Holmes’ best scripts, The Deadly Assassin being regarded by many as the Fourth Doctor’s greatest story, and The Caves of Androzani regarded by almost everyone as the Fifth Doctor’s best moment.

But with Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, Dicks has taken a Third Doctor TV story which by all accounts (I haven’t seen it) was decidedly average and turned it into a cracking good read. It was one of the first of his many many Doctor Who books (and he’s still at it), and for those of us (like me) who occasionally mock the by-the-numbers approach of his later efforts, it’s very much worth re-reading the earlier ones to remind ourselves of how good he was at turning dodgy special effects and occasionally wooden acting into a novel that caught the spirit of what he, as script editor, had no doubt hoped and intended the original TV version to be. (Like The Caves of Androzani, Planet of the Spiders has the Doctor regenerating after an adventure climbing around in caves. But I think that’s a coincidence.)

David Fisher wrote two Doctor Who novels based on his own scripts for the Fourth Doctor stories Creature from the Pit and The Leisure Hive. (He also wrote the original scripts for two Fourth Doctor Key to Time stories, The Stones of Blood and the Androids of Tara, but the novelisations of those were done by – of course – Terrance Dicks.) I remember really enjoying his Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit when it first came out, and Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive is, for the same reasons, also a hilarious read – Fisher has a Douglas Adams-like ability to build in circumstantial detail and hilarious commentary to make you feel that this is a real, zany universe in which the Doctor and Romana are dealing with complex alien societies as well as future technology. I saw the series when it was first broadcast, but missed the last episode for some reason – I see it’s now on DVD, and after reading this I am very much inclined to add that to my collection too.

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July Books 18) Harpist in the Wind

18) Harpist in the Wind, by Patricia A. McKillip

Bought this a while back because it was rated (by some people) ahead of Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise, which beat it for the 1980 Hugo Award; it also won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

I started off rather enjoying the travails of the protagonist, who has been endowed with super-powers and must save the continent, while at the same time keeping his relationship with his girlfriend on track. Unfortunately I lost patience with it about half way through; it’s the third book of a trilogy, and doesn’t really stand on its own (too much back-story needing to be explained); also I wasn’t convinced by McKillip’s world-building – very little sense of landscape or human geography. Probably my general state of fatigue didn’t help.

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July Books 17) Wilt in Nowhere

17) Wilt in Nowhere, by Tom Sharpe

I read the first third and cannot care enough about any of the characters to finish it: the bits set in England are tired ranting, the bits in America are unfunny stereotypes. As a teenager I read the first two Wilt books and was mildly bemused by the adult humour; in this latest book Sharpe has clearly lost his way. Wilt and his wife central characters were children during the second world war and yet themselves have pre-teen children in 2002, and they are not really timeless characters. I picked this up last year in Heathrow airport where someone had cast it aside. Now I know why they did so.

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