6) The Age of Chaos, by Colin Baker

Yes, it's a real rarity – the only full-length Doctor Who book written by one of the Doctor Who actors. Colin Baker had written three Sixth Doctor stories featuring his own character and Bonnie Langford's Mel, but here's a full 96-page graphic novel published by Marvel in 1994, taking the story of Peri further. I have not seen the series in which she gets married off to Brian Blessed (or killed, depending on the interpretation), but Colin Baker obviously feels as strongly about it as most fans do:

Anyway, it's a fun quest story, rather in the Conan the Barbarian genre of medieval romps, though with inevitable science fictional overtones; the Doctor, his penguin-shaped companion Frobisher, and a locally recruited warrior set off to save Peri's grandchildren and their kingdom, Peri herself having disappeared some time back. My only problem with it is that the artist who drew three quarters of the book, Barrie Mitchell, referred to so positively by Baker in the introduction, doesn't actually draw the Doctor to look very much like Baker at all! (Mitchell is apparently best known for having drawn "The Four Marys" in the girls' comic Bunty, though I doubt that he did it for the whole run from 1958 to 2001 as WikiPedia implies.) (Edited to add: see Mitchell's comment below.) The artist of the first quarter of the book, veteran John M Burns, seemed to me to catch him rather better.

Barrie Mitchell's depiction of the Sixth Doctor

John M. Burns' depiction of the Sixth Doctor

This books is something of a curio, admittedly, but quite fun. Edited to add: For more on it see here and here.

5) Preacher [#6]: War in the Sun, by Garth Ennis

Hmm. More in the series of the eponymous preacher, his girlfriend and his Irish vampire colleague; here we get the back-story to one of the villains, a sinister German, and a nuclear attack fails to take out any of our main characters. I am wondering if I will persevere with this series. I don’t like what appears to be a consistent tone of mocking people with disabilities. Arseface seems more and more presented as comic relief; but what is really very funny about having a disfigured face and brain damage? And there are several other characters in this volume who are also in a similar situation. By the end of the book, our main hero Jesse Custer appears to have lost an eye, but remains handsome and smart. I don’t really like the undertones.

Can anyone tell me anything about these people?

• Mark Wright, The Stage
• St John Donald, PFD (and what is PFD, anyway?)
• Peter Norris, Producer (and is that a job description, or a publication?)

I have a theory but I may be missing something obvious.

4) [In Search of Lost Time #3] The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust

I don’t think I will manage to finish all seven volumes of Proust this year, but I’m not doing badly. This took me several weeks of dipping in and out of it while reading other books, which I’m coming to realise may be the way to approach Proust. I have to say it is my favourite of the three volumes I have read so far. I felt that the descriptive passages near the beginning were, once again, beautiful reflections on memory and on how we see and remember other people, and felt almost a bit resentful when elements of actual plot began to intrude on the writing. But in fact, there isn’t a lot of plot, and what there is more or less frames two big set-piece social events organised by the Guermantes family, which together take up 250 of the 600 pages.

I felt I could relate to the structure of the book a lot better than the previous volumes, though again perhaps this is just me getting used to it; I found it much easier to sort out the characters in my mind and to be interested in them. The translation is very good too – especially dealing with the excruciating puns perpetrated by some of Proust’s characters, with discreet footnotes explaining them and subtly leaving you with the impression that, like Proust’s narrator, the translator (Mark Treharne) didn’t really think they were very funny.

Anyway, will keep it up. Bits of this will linger with me for a good while – not so much the two big set-pieces, but the disastrous lunch with Rachel, the grandmother’s death, the psychopathic M. de Charlus, the seduction of Albertine, the narrator’s unspoken love for Robert de Saint-Loup.

(Another Proust site here.)

Rapleaf Spams You Then Asks for More Addresses to Spam (see further here).

RapLeaf: Social Media’s Trojan Horse (also here).

Also thanks! to Andrew Sherman.

Your Score: The Second Doctor

You scored 46% intelligence, 15% compassion, 54% sense of humor, and 17% weirdness!

Ah, the comedian! But a *capable* clown. You like to come across as a lovable goof, but in reality you’re a genius who succumbs to occasional absent-mindedness. You know when to cut and run, and you know when you deny authority, no matter how laughable you sound. Your turn-ons include Charlie Chaplin, The Beatles, men in kilts, women in catsuits, flutists, and your giddy aunt. Your turn-offs include omnipotent beings who like to interfere with your affairs, the ever-persistent Cybermen (heck, you don’t even like cybersex!), and thinking about the lisping dandy you’ll eventually become.

Well, my doctorate is in history of science and I got it in an anthropology department… and my first degree was in physics…

As part of the aftermath of dealing with Rapleaf’s appalling behaviour, I’ve been looking into the whole social search engine thing a bit more. You may like to try this too, to see what they have got on you. All searches were carried out this evening on my real name but with no geographical or other details, using the very handy list given in this article.

Spock claims to be the leader in these matters. It pulls up both my active LinkedIn profile, and a dud for an old address; but it pulls up two MySpace profiles, one of which belongs to a namesake of mine who was killed in Iraq last year, the other I suspect also a dud Myspace of his (wrong age but right home town and star sign).

Wink also pulls up the two LinkedIn profiles; also someone else’s Bebo page (I have one too, but I hardly use it and anyway this appears to be someone else), and an Australian child’s largely empty Windows Live page. It also pulls up eight web links, five of which are in fact material written and published by me, one media interview with me, a page about the Iraq casualty and another about a nineteenth century artist of the same name.

Ziki pulls up a rather unimpressive list of 82 web links; it’s really not a lot different from what you’d get off Google, and the very first link given, to my home page, is now obsolete. There is a lot of repetition and news articles in foreign languages. About 85% of the results given are really me, with the Boorklyn marine in second place.

• Browsing through it, I did discover that this guy made me his website of the week last week, which I hadn’t known before. So that’s nice.

PeekYou found one MySpace page belonging to someone in Florida. I’m rather surprised not to have come up – I’m not exactly invisible on the web. Maybe it only does Americans.

ZoomInfo pulls up no less than 37 separate hits on my name or its most obvious variant, mostly from media reports, book reviews, academic websites. 23 of these are in fact me. (The second most frequent hit here is a Canadian political activist.) The casual user would have to spend some time working out which of these are really me and which are not; and I have to say I don’t mind the fact that it is not straightforward.

Pipl is rather impressive. It worked out (no doubt from my IP address) that I was probably interested in people from Belgium, and gave me the results of searches both with and without that restriction. With “Belgiunm” in the mix, pulls up my Amazon.com profile (but not my more frequently used amazon.co.uk profile), both LinkedIn profiles, and my rarely used MySpace page. Without “Belgium” it pulls up 20 “quick facts” of which no fewer than 19 are in fact about me (though mostly referring to out of date information). The 20th is about a nineteenth-century New York architect who I already knew about. Then there are another six links, including one to the ZoomInfo page I just reviewed, and finishes up with the standard Google searches.

ex.plode.us pulls up my rarely used Flickr page, and then a bunch of other people who share either my first name or my surname but not both.

Next is RapLeaf, but we’re not using them.

Naymz doesn’t have me and frankly I think I’d rather keep it that way.

WikiYou has a blank page with my name on it, and again I think I’d rather keep it that way.

So, in summary: Pipl scores well, in that it clearly only uses public sources but seems to go a bit better than yer standard search engine; RapLeaf, Naymz and WikiYou encourage you to register yourself, which I’m certainly not going to do, and RapLeaf and Naymz do badly on the creepiness factor; Spock, Wink, Ziki, ZoomInfo and ex.plode.us are all a bit random and tend not to do any better than Google would; and PeekYou’s inability to find me is just strange. (Google pulls up 28,500 hits on my name as a string; scanning through them, about 90% seem to be really me.)

Now, I’m fairly prominent in a number of fields, having stood for election to public office in 1990 and 1996, not to mention my various other activist activities, so I basically shrug and accept this as long as (unlike RapLeaf) the information has been gathered fairly. Those of you who feel more threatened by this sort of thing may want to try other methods. I’m interested in the ClaimID concept, and am playing with that as a possible way of centralising my own control of information about me on the web. But I think I will settle for just updating my website some time soon.

I suddenly need accommodation in London for Wednesday and Thursday nights this week!

<small voice>Any offers of floor or sofa space very gratefully received!</small voice>

I promise I’m going to let this go, eventually, but some of you will be amused by Valleywag’s series of articles about RapLeaf’s founder Auren Hoffman, including the tale of how he tried to improve his own WikiPedia entry before it was deleted because he is not interesting enough.

Incidentally their information page about my main email address has been “selected for deletion”, which is not the same as “been deleted”.

OK, I’m going to do something else now.

This is the kind of thing Google Maps is really for:

View Larger Map
The Permanent Representations of the 27 member states to the European Union.

As you would expect, they are all fairly tightly clustered, with two very peculiar outliers to the south east: Poland and the Netherlands. The outlier in the other direction is France. My office is on the floor above Sweden.

(And though I’ve marked where they are now, the satellite pictures were taken when the German and Belgian missions were still being built.)

PS: So who’s going to work out an answer to the Travelling Salesman’s Problem for me?

3) The Nero Prediction, by Humphry Knipe

A couple of weeks ago Humphry Knipe got in touch to put me right about an astrological incident of the early Roman empire. He kindly sent me a copy of his novel, which concerns another Roman incident, the death of Nero and the involvement of his freedman Epaphroditus, in the context of an almost universal belief in astrology.

Knipe has done the technical research well; by use of the astrological techniques of the day he has worked out what precisely Nero and his contemporaries would have been concerned about, while making it clear (through Epaphroditus, the narrator) that he doesn’t believe a word of it himself. I’m particularly interested, because of my own long-ago researches around Eleanor of Aquitaine, that Knipe believes two horoscopes provided by the second-century astrologer Vettius Valens are in fact those cast for the times of Nero’s birth and death.

My knowledge of classical times, other than astrology, is sufficiently sketchy that I did not notice any errors of detail, and the scene-setting (starting in Alexandria, then mostly in and around Rome) is convincing. The characterisation of Nero and his mother Agrippina is pretty vivid. Though I was left a bit unsure about the role in events played by early Christians (Saints Peter and Mark make several personal appearances).

Anyway, if you want a bit more ancient science with your Roman fiction than you get from Lindsey Davis, Robert Graves or Suetonius, you’ll find it here.

Having calmed down a little, I did email RapLeaf several times, demanding that they remove everyone in my address book from their server. You will not be surprised to learn that they declined to do so, saying that they could only remove information about a person if that person requested it themselves. After all, having stolen the data from me, why should they be expected to do anything about it?

The flip side is that I reckon they are doomed. It’s not just the negative publicity from the last few days (just type in “Rapleaf” into Icerocket, Technorati or Google Blogsearch), it’s that the whole concept is flawed. Way back in April, Ian McAllister presciently predicted that RapLeaf would run into two problems: the fact that it’s not itself involved with transactions where users will rate each other based on their reputation, and the fact that it will not have a lot of users on its books to start with.

The theft of data from me and others obviously helps them with the second problem, but the first is still pretty insuperable. Valleywag’s article, The rap on Rapleaf, the “trust meter” you can’t trust has an article about RapLeaf’s inevitable descent into being a sleazy people-search site and a resource for internet marketers.

Anyway, the concept is even more flawed than that; it will never work. My reputation, and yours, are not going to be reducible to a number (or a set of numbers) in general, and RapLeaf’s ambition of doing precisely that for everyone on the Internet is impossible to achieve (and they can only approach it by resorting to dubious practices). The eBay seller reputation system works because at the time you are deciding whether or not to make a business transaction with someone you’ve never met, you really want to know the probability that they will come through on their side of the deal. But you don’t care about whether or not they are faithful to their partner, or have a tendency to tell obscene jokes in front of children, or have outrageous political views; and those things anyway are not reducible to numbers, and will be of varying importance to different people in terms of forming an idea of your reputation. Edited to add: Same point is made by Matt Blumberg.

In certain places and with certain people my reputation is, to put it mildly, very negative, because of my political views and activities. The RapLeaf model would enable those who disapprove of my politics to destroy my reputation for everything else simply by logging in and giving me a low rating for everything. It has no safeguards against that kind of victimisation.

Anyway, my hope and expectation is that the investors will spot this pretty soon and pull the plug.

2) Eminent Churchillians, by Andrew Roberts

Picked this up remaindered in Belfast last month; Roberts is of course a famous rightwing historian so I wanted to sample him without spending too much!

It’s a book of essays blaming “Britain’s postwar decline” [sic] on foolish decisions made by Conservatives themselves. Except it isn’t really; most of the essays are attacks on sacred cows. The first piece looks at the character flaws and foolish political views, including thorough-going anti-semitism, of King George VI, and while the evidence is marshalled very skilfully it feels like a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut; it’s not like the king ever actually did very much.

The second piece was on the King’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten, a lengthy and total attack on his reputation. While it’s difficult to prove that George VI was ever directly responsible for people dying, the death toll in Mountbatten’s biography just mounts: from the thousands who died in the Dieppe raid and other comprehensively botched operations in the second world war, for which he bore sole command responsibility, to the hundreds of thousands killed at the partition of India and Pakistan, with the evidence being pretty clear that Mountbatten ignored every chance he had to prevent or alleviate the looming catastrophe, and indeed made a some key decisions which made things worse. This habit of recklessness and irresponsibility with other people’s safety goes right to the end of his life, when he wilfully ignored security warnings from the Gardaí and duly got blown up by the IRA along with several members of his family and friends. As well as looking at the actual facts, Roberts is good at explaining why and how the myth of Mountbatten as a great man was constructed. The book was worth the £2.99 I paid for it for this essay alone.

The other rather good essay is on the difficulties Churchill had in consolidating support inside the Conservative Party in the months after he became Prime Minister in 1940, a reminder that the myth of the country uniting behind him is indeed a myth.

There’s a rather schizophrenic piece proving a) that Churchill was himself a racist and b) that he and the Conservative government did not know what they were doing when they started letting emigrants in from the Commonwealth. I was convinced on the first point but rather less so on the second.

And finally two shorter pieces on minor figures; Sir Walter Monckton, apparently, was single-handedly responsible for ensuring the strangle-hold of the unions on the post-war, pre-Thatcher British economy, and noted historian Sir Arthur Bryant was a fascist and a plagiarist. Convinced on the second point, not that it really matters, but less so on the first.

So, generally an interesting read, but as a non-reader of either the Daily Mail or the Daily Telegraph I am not the intended audience.

A few weeks ago I heard about this website called “UpScoop” (Won’t give the link, but you can find it easily enough) which offered to check your address book and see what social networking sites your contacts are using. I hesitated about trying it for several reasons: the sites I use most (LinkedIn and Facebook) have pretty decent lookup services of their own, and I was not especially interested in extending this sort of drain on my time.

But I was convinced to give it a try, mainly because their assurances on the privacy of my data appeared pretty watertight. At that time, the following statements, dated 10 April, still appeared on their website privacy statement (scraped from a Google cache as the original page has disappeared):

We will not email or contact any email address obtained from address books.

Upscoop does not email, contact, or spam any friends from an email address book.

Upscoop does not sell, rent, or lease email addresses to partners, clients, third-party marketers, or other third parties.

That all seemed to me pretty watertight, though I did a bit more due diligence by checking around its reputation in the blogosphere and it seemed to be OK. So I let it run through my address book, which found actually very little that I didn’t already know (I think two people who are on Livejournal, and that’s it; also it introduced me to the rather useless Hi5.com social networking site).

NB however that for a lot of you, my address book includes your real name along with your normal address. There was nothing in UpScoop to suggest that they were scraping real names as well as email addresses, let along that they were retaining that data to set up their own new service.

Boy, was I wrong.

Given the fact that almost everyone I know seems to have received an email from UpScoop’s parent company RapLeaf this week, and that the UpScoop privacy policy has now been scrapped along with all of the above crucial reassuring sentences, I can only assume that a) they retained all my address book details, certainly including personal names, for their own use and b) they then themselves ran it through their system as part of setting up the new RapLeaf service earlier this week (since I haven’t been near it for weeks).

This is extraordinarily scummy behavior.

Having got hold of my address book on false pretences, they have then used it to market their own business, in the course of which they have intimidated and harassed my friends.

I am sorry to all of you for having believed their lies, and thus being indirectly responsible for them spamming you earlier this week.

I would be very interested to hear from American lawyer types as to whether I have any case against them.

I am posting a reference to this entry to every recent blog entry on RapLeaf I can find.

Edited to add: I see that RapLeaf have now posted a public apology, which includes hat-tips to and . Good for them. I’m still hopping mad, though; it doesn’t explain their apparent retention of data from my address book for their own commercial purposes.

I got two, both to addresses which I don’t use any more. Looks like someone in RapLeaf has badly screwed up.

Gratified to see a number of new people have added me to their friendslists recently. Feel free to introduce yourselves!

has been tracking a number of the recent posts about the future of Belgium, including this one at Crooked Timber – though I have to say I don’t really agree with the other article he links to which blames the euro!!! I am inclined to expect that this current political crisis will be resolved. It’s a classic political question: you have the mathematics for a coalition government, but the coalition partners have irreconcilable negotiating positions. One of them will back down, and it will probably be Leterme (the hardline but flaky Flemish Christian Democrat leader) who appears to be being gradually abandoned by the elders of his own party. Though if you want to have a go at forming your own Belgian government, the Gazet van Antwerpen has a little pacman-style game to help your imagination. The slang for the likely coalition, referring to the traditional colours of the Liberals and Christian Democrats, is the “Blue-Orange”, which also evokes one of the less-known adventures of one of Belgium’s best-known heroes:

(Picture from Wikipedia, which suggests that the original concept appears to be a poem by French surrealist Paul Éluard.)

Belgium will survive this year, but I was talking with a friend during the week, a former Belgian government official who resigned a couple of years back, and he reckons the writing is on the wall. Two things in particular emerged from our discussion. First of all, the mediation structures for Belgians to resolve their differences do not work well, and are reaching their sell-by date. The crisis of the last few weeks have seen the personal engagement of the King (who is not unpopular, but is not rated by anyone as a great intellect) and old men from former governments before the country had become as federalised as it now is. In ten or fifteen years time, none of them will be around any more for the next big crisis. International mediation in the Balkans has often been very successful by the way in which it has created an external locus of dialogue; parties to the dispute have been forced to explain their positions to outsiders who know nothing of their country, not just to their own electorate, and the result I think has been a certain amount of internal reflection on the limits of what is achievable. There is no such process for Belgian leaders; the Dutch and French are not very interested in the incomprehensible squabbles of people with funny accents (rather in the same way as the Northern Ireland issue leaves most people in Great Britain and the Republic cold).

Second, the role of the media is particularly serious. What is striking is that francophone Belgian and Flemish media don’t appear to be reporting adequately on each other’s perceptions. Checking teletext the other night we discovered completely different versions of the latest steps in the government crisis being told to the viewers on either side of the linguistic divide. (Which, officially at least, lies about 5 km from here; though it is in reality more porous.) was the first source I saw for the infamous Leterme interview, in which he was doorstepped on his way into the cathedral in Brussels and failed to sing the national anthem. What strikes me about the clip, watching it, is that actually this is really dumbed-down, crap journalism from RTBF. If you want to know Leterme’s views on the future of Belgium, you sit him down in the TV studio and ask him detailed questions. The fact that he performed badly when doorstepped does say something of his ability for office (poor reflexes when faced with journalists, among other things) but asking a senior politician to sing a song on his way into church is not really a fair test of anything. RTBF had an opportunity to explore the fears that many Francophone Belgians have that Leterme really wants to break up the country, and they just ran a cheap stunt instead. (Leterme, of course, is not innocent in all this; but he’ll be gone in a few weeks, and RTBF will still be there.) Unless the media acquire some maturity, and start to explore their own societies’ neuroses rather than exploiting them, the country probably is doomed. On the whole the Northern Irish media, while far from perfect, have performed much better in this respect; the fact that everyone speaks the same language back home helps but I think (based on what I’ve seen elsewhere) is not crucial.

Having said all that, we as a family are likely to nail our colours to the mast of the sinking ship of state. Young F was saying a few weeks ago that his mummy was from England, his daddy from Ireland, and he is from Belgium; and of course he’s right. You can get Belgian citizenship fairly easily by some standards (and once we’ve been here for nine years, which will be early next year, it is practically automatic, without loss of any other nationalities you may have); and given that we depend so heavily on the Belgian state for helping with our family situation, it seems only reasonable to put our loyalties in the mechanism that is helping us. (Plus, of course, if there should at some stage be a more comprehensive re-jigging of citizenships in this part of the world, it will put us in a stronger position.)

…to nobody in particular (koff, koff):

Can you actually read livejournal entries (or anything else) which are in pale letters on a pale (or even dark) background? I simply can’t.

To anybody who has the same problem I do with this:

Fortunately you can make anyone else’s lj, or individual entries, look readable by the simple expedient of attaching “?style=mine” to the end of the URL. So, when you’re looking at ‘s livejournal, you look not at http://user.livejournal.com but at http://user.livejournal.com?style=mine and for individual entries it’s http://user.livejournal.com/123456.html?style=mine .

Thank you.

1) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1970-1974, by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood

Though third in chronological sequence, this was the first of the About Time series published, covering precisely the years of Jon Pertwee as the third Doctor, and almost as precisely the years of Barry Letts as producer and Terrance Dicks as script editor. It’s a huge change of setting for the show with almost two thirds of the 24 stories – including the whole of the first Pertwee season – set on contemporary Earth with the UNIT team. (Compare precisely one contemporary adventure, plus some odd bits and pieces [including the first ever episode], of the 29 Hartnell stories, and a fairly steady rate of 10-20% for the remainder of the classic series; compare, of course, also 100% of the eighth Doctor’s on-screen adventures, and a third of the stories since the 2005 revival.)

Miles and Wood have done a very good job of identifying the roots of each story, literary, political and televisual. It’s not yet at the levels of genius that their Volume 2 reached, but there are some glorious moments, including the frightening similarities between Jon Pertwee, Jimmy Saville and Bruce Forsythe. They have also yet to give in to the unfortunate enthusiasm for endnotes which is one of the few really annoying things about later volumes. (The five fairly restrained end-notes here concern Enoch Powell, Oswald Mosley, Sooty and Sweep, the aforementioned Bruce Forsythe, and Catweazle.) There are the usual discursive essays, of which the two best are probably on the importance of the incidental music and on the implied history of UK politics in Doctor Who.

Anyway, I’ve ordered the more cerebral-looking Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who, which Amazon seems to think will be available this coming week, but it has a tough act to follow.

Closest result: Dave Langford wins his 21st Hugo for Best Fan Writer, beating John Scalzi by 1 vote – 128 to 127. He was seven behind on the first count, but picked up crucial transfers from and Chris Garcia. This is also the category where the “No Award” test came closest to coming into force, 50-188 (21%-79%).

Second closest result and closest second result: beat Jim Baen for the new Best Editor award by 2 votes, 156 to 154. Baen was actually 26 votes ahead on the first count, but Patrick picked up more transfers from everyone else.

In the count for second place, David Hartwell beat Baen by 1 vote, 151 to 150, again despite being behind (though not as far behind) on the first count.

Closest fiction result: Neil Gaiman’s much tipped story, “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, was ahead of Pratt’s “Impossible Dreams” on the first count and only nine votes behind (201-192) at the end.

Most one-sided result: Naomi Novik got a clear majority for the Campbell Award on the first count, beating all four other nominees and No Award, with almost four times as many votes as the runner-up, Sarah Monette.

The Campbell Award is of course Not A Hugo. The most one-sided Hugo result was the win for Julie Phillips’ Tiptree biography, comfortably ahead of both the Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches and the book about Heinlein’s Juveniles.

My obsession with age: Tim Pratt is by some way the most recently born person to have won a Hugo; he is seven years younger than Kelly Link.

The Gender Question: Rankings of works by women writers as nominated in the various fiction categories:
Best Novel: His Majesty’s Dragon (Naomi Novik) 4th; Farthing (Jo Walton) joint 6th; The Privilege of the Sword (Ellen Kushner) 14th.
Best Novella: “Where the Golden Apples Grow” (Kage Baker) 12th; “JQ211F and Holding” (Nancy Kress) 15th; “Map of Dreams” (M. Rickert) joint 16th
Best Novelette: “Journey into the Kingdom” (M. Rickert) 8th; “In the House of the Seven Librarians” (Ellen Klages) joint 13th; “A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange” (Beth Bernobich) joint 22nd; “Home Movies” (Mary Rosenblum) joint 22nd; “Except the Music” (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) joint 30th
Best Short Story: “Nano Comes to Clifford Falls” (Nancy Kress) 6th; “Under Hell, Over Heaven” (Margo Lanagan) joint 13th; “Mahmoud’s Wives” (Janis Ian) 17th; “The Saffron Gatherers” (Elizabeth Hand) joint 19th; “Age of Ice” (Liz Williams) joint 19th; “World of No Return” (Carol Emshwiller) joint 21st.

The Asimov’s Question: Proportion of short fiction categories won by stories first published in Asimov’s: 100%.

…to and on their Hugo Awards. (And to everyone else, of course, but Ian and Patrick are the two who I know.)

This news is almost a month old; I missed it while I was away. But La Petite Anglaise finally won her case for unlawful dismissal against the accountants who fired her for blogging when her employers declined to appeal the judgement against them. Those of you who read French and have time to enjoy are encouraged to read Eolas’ dissection of the judgement. One choice excerpt:

Je précise que la traduction de twunt par “enculé” a été proposée par [the ex-employers]. On ne saurait les blâmer : ce sont des comptables, pas des littéraires.

(Previous posts on this here and here.

I don’t think I’ve written about it here before, but we’ve been gradually working through the West Wing this year, and are nearly finished season 3. Last night we watched The U.S. Poet Laureate which I really loved for a number of reasons. I sympathised with Josh, understandably feeling that he must respond to the on-line crap being written, and unwisely giving in to the temptation to respond. I loved Toby being starstruck by the Poet Laureate herself. C.J. and the president together insulting their opponent’s intelligence was pretty glorious.

It tied in also with one real-world issue that resonates with me: the worldwide ban on landmines. It wasn’t until I’d personally had the experience of driving along a road with the occasional orange warning flag barely visible in the undergrowth, not being able to be sure if they have all been identified, that I really took it seriously. The arguments made by the poet about why landmines are militarily counter-productive and morally indefensible are all totally valid, and Toby’s Pentagon-produced rebuttal is crap (and he knows it).

Then, of course, the story came really close to home, with the poet recounting how, on a visit to Banja Luka, she had witnessed a little boy on a fishing trip being blown up by a landmine which had washed into the river Sava. It’s a part of the world I know very well, and while purists will argue that Banja Luka is actually on the Vrbas rather than the Sava, I would respond that the Sava is only an hour’s drive from Banja Luka and has better fishing than the Vrbas (as well as a higher risk of landmines washing into it in the rain, partlicularly from the Croatian side of the river). We even had the occasional American poet pass through.

I remember my colleague from central Bosnia, a tall blond Muslim who’d been his village’s skiing champion before the war, whose leg was wrecked by a mine planted by his Croat neighbours (who, to do them credit, rushed him to hospital and probably saved his limb). That was a case where it had, in fact, been washed into a stream by rainfall. In the two years we lived in the Balkans, 1997 and 1998, the war was still recent enough that we were inculcated with advice against pulling over onto a grass verge in case it had not been adequately cleared, something that still makes me twitchy even today.

You’ll occasionally see reminders of this even in the comfortable West. In Geneva there is a stunning giant sculpture of a chair with one of its legs blown off. The Rond Point Schuman had a big though temporary statue making a point about the issue a couple of years back. I’m very pleased on the rare occasions when I help produce a minor bit of progress in the real world on mine clearance. Well done to the Ottawa Treaty activists for getting the issue the prominence it enjoys, and boo to those countries (the usual suspects) who haven’t signed it.

Edited to add: Googling produces this rather good briefing about landmines in the Banja Luka area (1 MB PDF), from about 2003. Notice how the fatalities each year tend to peak with the spring rains.

I admit I substituted my favourite BBC quizzes for where it asked about “Jeopardy”.