10) Naked to the Stars, by Gordon R. Dickson

Bought this at Beneluxcon on Ken MacLeod’s recommendation. A short book of the proto-military-sf sub-genre, but with rather a subversive message in that context, that the military solution is not enough and a political accommodation is necessary once the conflict is over (if, that is, you actually want the conflict to end). Published in 1961 so the almost-human aliens are either Japanese or Koreans (probably Japanese).

9) The Rediscovery of Man, by Cordwainer Smith

I can’t quite believe it, but I don’t think I had ever read anything by Cordwainer Smith before, though I knew of his reputation. I hadn’t realised that his writing career was so short – first published in 1950, died aged 54 in 1967 – and sparse. This volume pulls together a dozen of his short stories, all loosely connected through his future history based on the controlling Instrumentality and featuring the planet Norstrilia. I found the style on the whole almost incomprehensible in places and yet weirdly compelling; tales told with utterly unselfconscious conviction, of beings whose consciousness teeters on the edge of human understanding. I may try and find a reader’s guide somewhere to help me understand what was going on, and then go back to it. Fascinating stuff.

I’m off to Rome for a long weekend – back on Monday evening.

If you need more reading material, I suggest you follow Ian’s example and try Правда.

Like a lot of Who fans, I was sorry to learn of the death of Kevin Stoney who played both of the two greatest villains of the show before the arrival of Davros – Mavic Chen in The Daleks’ Master Plan, and Tobias Vaughn in The InvasionRevenge of the Cybermen. Alex Wilcock has written a brilliant tribute to him here. those of you who have spotted my activites in certain Doctor Who-related communities on Livejournal will be aware that I have already paid him a special tribute.

I’m a bit exhausted. Got home from Geneva last night at about midnight, and had to get up for a breakfast meeting this morning leaving the house at 0730. Of course, the trains screwed me over; the 0741 from our local station was just exactly five minutes late. As I watched the 0744 pass by in the other direction, I reflected that if I caught it I would be only fifteen minutes late for my breakfast rather than half an hour; but I would also be depending on not one but two tight connections, and I was not in a risky mood. I got the delayed 0741, thus missing the vital connection at Ottignies and delivering me to my breakfast meeting at 0900 instead of 0830. Luckily the people I was meeting are tolerant and had time to spare.

On the way back home this evening, my careful plan to arrive in Leuven at the top of the hour, and thus get the bus home which delivers me almost to our front door, was frustrated by a “technical fault” on the Brussels Metro; so another half-hour delay and the train rather than the bus from Leuven. I should get home at about ten to eight, almost twelve and a half hours after I walked out the door this morning.

On last night’s plane I recognised none other than José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, sitting in splendid isolation in business class. The Commission website is silent as to what he was doing in Geneva; though apparently he actually studied there, so maybe it was a private visit; or perhaps, like me, he was just there for the day to do a seminar.

(Though I managed to catch up with while I was there, which was great.)

The Masque of Mandragora was a Tom Baker story I hadn’t seen before, and yet it seemed strangely familiar: Welsh location filming pretending to be somewhere much more exotic, alien disembodied intelligence trying to take over the world via a local religious cult, Norman Jones playing a deranged cleric with a loony beard – yes, it is in fact The Abominable Snowmen, but set in Renaisance Italy rather than Tibet with the Yeti taken out and a great many more silly haircuts. Somehow despite the silly haircuts it just fails to look like Italy rather than a wet weekend in Wales, and I understand why this is not regarded as one of the high points of the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era. Having said which there are as always some lovely lines, and Elisabeth Sladen doing the Renaissance dancing at the masque in the last episode is a beautifully charming moment.

I remember being a bit underwhelmed by Image of the Fendahl when it was first broadcast, but I really liked it this time round. Having mourned the disruption of the Doctor/Leela partnership by K9’s arrival in my write-up of The Invisible Enemy, actually we’re back to business as before here as the tin dog is out of action for plot purposes. Odd to think that this was the first story with a contemporary setting since The Hand of Fear a year previously (they averaged about one a season in those days). Yet again I find reinforcement for my view that the Leela/Four pairing is the Best Evar, with the contrast between the two quirky regulars sharpened by the crazy Earthlings they are dealing with; Louise Jameson is so expressive even without saying anything. Also my memories of first time round are tempered by the attempt to do much the same thing again a few years later but far less successfully in K9 and Company. Having said that, there are some surprising lapses of direction: the prolonged scenes of the Fendahl manifesting in the cellar lack a certain something, and there is a peculiar shot in episode 3 where we are treated to a prolonged close-up of the Tardis console. But in general it was rather good fun.

8) The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross

I read this in the wrong order, in a sense, in that it was a couple of years ago that I read the sequel, The Jennifer Morgue (in which I even get a small credit in the acknowledgements). And I had read the second, shorter, section of this book, “The Concrete Jungle”, in the run-up to the 2005 Hugo voting (which of course it won). But the first 250 pages, plus Ken MacLeod’s introduction, plus Charlie’s afterword on the common features of spy and horror fiction, were all new to me.

Having said that, I still like “The Concrete Jungle” best of the Laundry stories. If I had to choose a single word to describe Charlie’s writing, I think that word would be “unrestrained”. It’s not easy to balance that instinctive narrative style with the bathos required to tell stories of civil servants tasked with fighting eldritch horrors from another dimension, and “The Concrete Jungle” is where he succeeds best. Which is not to say that the main chunk of “The Atrocity Archives” is bad, far from it – there are some memorably creepy moments, such as the death of Fred from the accounts department and the exploration of a frozen parallel Earth – it’s just that the Hugo voters got it right, as they sometimes do.

And the Ken MacLeod intro and Stross postscript are worth reading too; indeed, the postscript was the only point where I really regretted not having read this before The Jennifer Morgue, as the epilogue to that book seems like a continuation of the same conversation between author and reader. Having said which, this author is one with whom this reader has little difficulty in conversing.

I’ve been fascinated to read of the latest research on the origins of blue eyes, carried out by Dr Hans Eiberg of Copenhagen. It seems that all people with blue eyes (including me, my parents, and my children; but not my wife, whose eyes are green) share a single identifiable mutation, descended from a single ancestor (or, as one Australian headline sensitively puts it, “Blue-eyed people ‘inbred mutants’All blue-eyed people related to Brad Pitt“). The original mutation likely occurred in near the Black Sea 8-10,000 years ago. Since it’s a recessive gene, the first blue-eyed people would not have been born until several generations after the original mutation, as his or her descendants began to intermarry.
 
The intriguing thing is why we blue-eyed folks became so prevalent in the northern European population – see this map of distribution of “light eyes”, taken from a 1960s textbook.
(various internet sources, but originally from from Beals et al., An Introduction to Anthropology, 1965)
 
There’s an assumption underlying a lot of the press coverage (also mentioned by Razib Khan in his blog here) that there was strong positive selection for blue eyes in the northern European population at some point shortly after the mutation happened. There is a linkage between blue eyes, blond hair and fair skin, which is supposedly of adaptive advantage in chilly northern latitudes; there also seems to be some kind of link with adult lactose tolerance.  I am struck by the way in which several media sources mention the role of sexual selection, mainly relying on quotes from other geneticists not themselves involved with the Danish research: see here or here. Surely both men and women play a role in this? It seems rather odd to say that blue eyes have persisted and spread because only one gender finds them attractive! (The media reports seem unable to agree as to whether the blue-eye-fancying gender are babes or dudes.)
 
Razib also rightly excoriates the “discovery” that all blue-eyed people are descended from the person with the original mutation. In fact, if that person lived as long ago as 10,000 years before the present, it’s very likely that all human beings alive today are descended from him or her one way or another; as I’ve written before, I’m convinced by the calculations that the most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived in historical times, and the original blue-eyed recessive lived much longer ago.

It’s easy (and it’s also fun) to mock the press coverage for attempting to sex up the Copenhagen research. All rather fascinating, though, and yet another reminder of how closely inter-related we all are.

I promised a post on the Treaty of Lisbon a couple of days ago, so here it is.

What is the Lisbon Treaty? The Treaty is the latest in a series of Treaties re-jigging the EU’s internal arrangements, both how it is organised and what it does. The EU has a sort of perpetual revolution in these matters, with a new major treaty roughly every five years starting in 1992; part of the deal this time is that they think they have nailed down enough in the Lisbon Treaty to keep things going on this basis for a bit longer.

Is it a big deal if it doesn’t get passed? Actually, not really. In my view, one of the mistakes made by both opponents and supporters of the Treaty is to over-sell its urgency. The changes it proposes are indeed mostly improvements, and certainly will make life easier for those who have to operate within European politics. But if it’s not passed, the EU will continue much as it has done since 2004, with one major wrinkle which I’ll mention in a moment. Voting against it doesn’t kill the EU, or globalisation, or anything like that; it just perpetuates the existing machinery.

How do we vote against it? The Treaty has to be ratified by the parliaments of all 27 member states, and by the European Parliament. In Ireland there has to be a popular referendum as well, but it is unlikely that there will be one anywhere else. This is because the Lisbon Treaty is the successor of another Treaty which was rather more ambitious in rhetoric (if not actually in effect) which failed in referenda in France and the Netherlands.

So most of us don’t get to vote on it. Isn’t that a swiz? No, not really; the swiz was the attempt to sell the failed Treaty of a couple of years ago as a grand new project, which would somehow lock in public commitment into the European Union, when in fact it didn’t do much more than rearrange the furniture.

What’s that wrinkle you mentioned? Ah yes. The wrinkle is that the current rules – the Nice Treaty – only set up the EU structures for 27 member states (as there have been since January last year) and until 2009 (which is now next year). Of course, if push comes to shove, and the Lisbon Treaty doesn’t pass, they will find a way of muddling through for the post-2009 institutions and for admitting the 28th and so on member states, but it will probably be a messy and hasty solution to a problem around which they have already negotiated twice.

What about foreign affairs? At present the European Commission (which is a separate body) does some foreign affairs stuff, and the European Council (which is the assembly of member states) also does some foreign affairs stuff; broadly speaking, the Commission has the money, and the Council Secretariat executes policy as agreed by the 27 members. The Lisbon Treaty puts both of these sets of activities under the supervision of the same person, who will also chair the regular meetings of foreign ministers. I was sceptical about this at first, since it seemed to me that if both the people currently doing two jobs are busy people, maybe combining the two workloads to a single job isn’t the best idea. But I’m in favour now – I think it will lead to better joined-up policy, and more visibility for the EU as the EU abroad in areas where it needs to be seen that way.

Doesn’t this mean the EU can over-ride our country’s foreign policy? No, not really; the national vetoes remain, and member states can’t be penalised for disagreeing with the EU; though once the policy decision has been unanimously taken, the implementation of that decision is no longer subject to unanimity (though in practice any sufficiently concerned member state will always find a way to block). On top of that the Lisbon Treaty actually introduces a mechanism where your country can withdraw from the EU if it doesn’t like it any more, which is probably an improvement. (So, by a bizarre flipping of the argument, Europhobes should probably vote in favour of it.)

What about the European army? Doesn’t exist, and won’t exist. The EU has a modest peace-keeping capability, but can’t do anything especially militarily vigorous – can’t even be as militarily aggressive as the UN let alone NATO. The Lisbon Treaty doesn’t make a lot of difference in this area anyway. There’s so much entrenchment of vital interests here – essentially, tension between the three poles of the British, the French and the traditional neutrals – that there is going to be no surprising development.

What’s this business about qualified majorities? In the EU, countries can sometimes find themselves voting on legislation; in some areas, but not all, there is a voting system of insane complexity, thrashed out at 3 am during the Nice negotiations in December 2000, to determine whether the legislation can pass or not. The Lisbon Treaty will replace this with the rule that 55% of the countries representing 65% of the EU’s population have to be in favour (subject to a few extra details), which has the merit of being simple to understand. Of course, most of the important decisions taken this way are also subjected to open debate in the European Parliament.

Is it more or less democratic? Hmm, a difficult one to call, which in the end depends on what you mean by democracy. There will be a new consultation mechanism for national parliaments to have their say on EU legislation, but even the Treaty’s most fervent supporters look rather shifty when asked directly if this will have much practical effect. It does shift a number of policy areas from unanimous agreement to qualified majority voting, which normally also means a more open procedure involving the European Parliament, but not a lot of these are important ones.

What about electing the President of the European Commission? A daft idea, if you ask me, which was rightly dropped at an early stage of deliberations. It’s not at all self-evident that the US presidential election system is a Good Thing, and even less self-evident that it should be imported anywhere else. Electing the Commission President will yet further muddy the waters of to whom he or she is accountable, and will give him or her a spuriously greater legitimacy than the heads of government of the member states, while at the same time creating a mechanism for vast amounts of money to be spent on an election whose outcome doesn’t really matter that much. The EU works so much as a system of grand coalitions that endowing one particular set of policy concerns with a popular mandate won’t actually make any improvement.

Does the Lisbon Treaty make the EU more powerful? Yes, though not a lot. Tax, social policy, defence, foreign policy and revision of the EU treaties themselves all remain with the national veto intact. The biggest area that is shifted from unanimity to qualified majority voting by Lisbon is police and judicial co-operation in criminal matters, though there the UK has an opt-out clause, ie doesn’t have to enforce EU legislation it doesn’t like. The treaty also makes three new policy areas formally shared competences between the member states and the EU: these are territorial cohesion (which is EU-speak for a combination of planning and regional development policy), energy, and space. The Treaty does allow for more policy areas to be shifted to qualified majority voting in the future, but there has to be unanimity to give up unanimity, if you see what I mean. The Treaty also entrenches the existing commitments of member states on climate change and fighting global warming.

What about this new Presidential position that Tony Blair is interested in? Mainly chrome, in my view. There will be a single person who acts as President of the European Council for a two and a half year term, chosen by the member states. This means chairing meetings and managing the agenda, but I am inclined to doubt that the member states will allow this person to become particularly powerful – certain the executive means at his or her disposal are dwarfed by the Commission, which is in turn dwarfed by any medium-size municipal council. I find this one of the least attractive parts of the Treaty, mainly because I think it will inject another personality into the political superstructure without really allowing that person to do much more than sit there and look pretty.

The noted historian Andrew Roberts forecasts Slovakian troops in Buckingham Palace, Gibraltar and the Falklands handed over, good men imprisoned for using Imperial measurements… Yawn. One of the most depressing things I’ve come to realise is how poisonous the EU debate has become in the UK, and how far removed from reality. In the run-up to the negotiations, Tony Blair made much of his determination to prevent the crossing of Britain’s “red lines”, none of which were ever in fact in danger of being crossed, not that you would have known that from the British press. The absurd level of vitriol directed at this Treaty, which as I hope I’ve made clear is a fairly modest bit of institional adaptation, makes me despair for British political culture.

These are four short, cheerful books, full of positivity, sticking pretty closely to the first four broadcast Sarah Jane Adventures. It’s interesting that the BBC have chosen to go back to the old approach of novelisation of the broadcast stories for Sarah Jane, while instead publishing original fiction featuring the Ninth and Tenth Doctors and Torchwood. I sense a didactic purpose, getting kids into the reading habit with these attractively covered volumes, each of them 119 pages of text in fairly large print (at a cost of £4.99 each, which, alas, is standard these days). I don’t think it took me as long as an hour to read any of them.

Terrance Dicks is back again. I’m just thinking about this: he did the first proper Target novelisation, thirty-five years ago; he wrote the first of the Virgin New Adventures; he wrote the first of the BBC’s Eighth Doctor Adventures; and now he’s written the first of this range, putting in print the pilot story, Invasion of the Bane. It’s a fairly standard Dicks novelisation, sticking closely to the show as broadcast with a certain undernuancing of the soon-to-be-axed Kelsey; he has a job to do and he does it well enough.

Revenge of the Slitheen impressed me least of the broadcast stories, but I think is actually the best of these four novels. Laight has taken Gareth Roberts’ script and added a certain amount of depth and context, and messed around a little with the story. There’s the occasional moment of unpolished style but it all works fairly well.

Eye of the Gorgon is the only one of the books to have been written by the same person as the TV script (in this case Phil Ford) and I felt that a fresh pair of eyes might have been a better idea: both here and in the original TV version, the story’s substantial and profound foundations are rather wasted on a flimsy plot resolution. Also Ford makes several irritating mistakes which used to afflict the less experienced Target writers, shifting uncomfortably from direct to indirect speech, mixing point-of-view narrative with the TV viewer’s perspective; and of course the page can’t capture guest star Phyllida Law’s performance.

With Warriors of Kudlak, Gary Russell has successfully taken liberties with the script, bulked out the role of some of the minor characters, and turned a decent story into a decent children’s novel: with my one reservation, and it is a serious one, being that it has not been well proof-read, which seems a rather shocking omission. Hopefully they will correct the mistakes in a later printing. Dedicated (inter alia) to my cousin.

Anyway, I’d recommend all of these for the younger Who fan, who might then be persuaded to lend them to older Who fans.

Sorry for much Who posting today, but this one brings me up to date with three stories from the Tom Baker era, indeed from two different parts of Graham Williams’ term as producer: his first two stories from 1977, and his second last from 1980.

Horror of Fang Rock is a very bleak and horrific story. Indeed, it made me reflect that for all his cuddly public personality, Terrance Dicks’ actual writing is often rooted in pretty horrific stuff – vampires, Frankenstein, King Kong, and his first ever story, co-written with Malcolm Hulke, was The War Games which surely has the bleakest ending of any classic Who.

This is the one with the Rutan, the electrical alien foe of the Sontarans which can change shape and indeed does so as it picks off the inhabitants of the light-house one by one. There is one actor of dubious talents, but fortunately his character is the first to die and the others all give it their best.

This is the last story in which we just have the Doctor/Leela Tardis crew, and it’s worth pausing to reflect that this was surely one of the greatest ever combinations, with a consistent run of four good stories (Face of Evil, Robots of Death, Talons of Weng-Chiang and this one). Leela could so easily have been a one-joke character, but in Louise Jameson’s portrayal she is completely credible, always earthed in her own identity, able to clash and spark with the Doctor, playing the dramatic role of a companion as the one who gets things explained to her not because she is stupid but because she is different. She is the one companion who we see the Doctor trying to change and educate, and that somehow makes it all work much better. After watching the Troughton stories over the last year or so I decided I was a huge fan of Wendy Padbury’s Zoe; but now I see things in Leela that passed me by as a ten-year-old. (Meaning the integrity of her performance, of course.)

The next story of the 1977-8 season unbalances the relationship by introducing a new companion. F insisted that we watch The Invisible Enemy together as like any sensible eight-year-old he loves the idea of K9. The first three episodes are actually rather brilliant: the sinister spread of the virus, including to the Doctor himself; the clones struggling to achieve their mission in their brief lifetime (though it should be said that they manage to spin out the 10 minutes they have for an entire 25-minute episode); stalwarts Michael Sheard and Frederick Jaeger give it their best; there is the lovely detail of peculiar spelling on the notices of the various space installations; and we have Leela back in her hunting skins apart from a couple of scenes in green PVC. K9 is cute and engaging on this first encounter, though it is odd how easy it is to inflict fatal wounds via the human knee. It is notable that he changes loyalty to the Doctor and Leela as soon as his creator has been taken over.

Unfortunately all this decent set-up is comprehensively destroyed in the fourth episode, or rather the cliff-hanger to the end of the third, by what is very nearly the worst designed monster ever – nothing will ever outdo the mushroom-creatures of The Chase for awfulness, but this comes close. After that we struggle to maintain interest with shootouts and narrow escapes, but it’s all for nothing; the story has been killed stone dead with one poorly designed costume. F lost interest and wandered off to fix his model K9, coming back only for the end, and he was right.

Unlike the other two, I hadn’t seen Nightmare of Eden before; I had heard it was pretty awful, but it was not quite as bad as that. It seemed to be a story in the wrong era, however; surely this would have worked better with the Third Doctor and Jo Grant rather than the Fourth Doctor and Romana? (Indeed, surely it did work better with them, and was called Carnival of Monsters?) There is a lot that doesn’t work; the central plot idea that there are two ships stuck together isn’t described or portrayed very well, and we just don’t get a sense of the spaces involved, on the ships or in the Eden of the projector. The Mandrells were actually all right until the moment when they started marching around the place, and then, sadly, it all falls apart again. Professor Trist made a good villain (one area where Season 17 seems to have done rather well in general).

So, one and three quarter excellent stories, the rest not so good.

This is just a brilliant sequence of audio plays – apparently now available with the set of BBC Davros DVDs, which does make that sound like an even more attractive purchase, and comes close to conferring the stamp of accepted canonicity on the stories. Davros is, of course, perhaps the only character for whom you could develop a detailed back-story like this; the Master is too closely linked with the Gallifrey mythology, and there are not really any other villains of serious depth (some might come close – I have a high regard for Mavic Chen, myself.) This could have turned into the most awful fanwank, but in fact we have a tight, taut set of plays depicting the rise of Davros through the ranks of the Kaled leadership on Skaro against the background of the “Forever War” against the Thals. Terry Molloy reprises the title role (apart from most of the first play), and in the last play we get Peter Miles as Nyder.

In Innocence, Rory Jennings becomes the fourth actor to portray Davros, but at the start rather than end of his career, as a callous little budding megalomaniac scientist – we completely understand how the youth becomes the Davros we know. An excellent depiction of a troubled family background in an intricate and violent political situation; of all the stories, this shows the most obvious homage to Robert Graves, and that’s not a bad thing.

Terry Molloy comes back in Purity, to tell the story of young Davros’ entry to the military elite and the continuation of the story of his calculating mother, Calcula. Lots of glorious references to canonical Skaro lore, including not just the Mutos from Genesis of the Daleks but also the Varga plants from Mission to the Unknown/The Daleks’ Master Plan; and the political leader of the Kaleds is the Kaled Supremo, a very nice touch. The plot is perhaps the least original of the four stories – Davros and friends sent on a mission which is fore-ordained to failure – but it’s very enjoyable.

Corruption reprises quite a lot of the material from the earlier BF Davros play, but in my view (and I may be in a minority) does it much better, going through the court politics around Davros’s increasing hold over the Kaled Supremo, and of course what he finally does to his mother, a crucial bit of psychology, at the end of which he adopts her “children”, the Kaled Youth movement, at the same time as preparing the inevitable future for the Kaleds’ children as a whole.

Guilt is the only true prequel of the four stories, in that it deliberately takes us just up to the point before Genesis of the Daleks, with Davros overcoming disability and captivity to join forces with Nyder (Peter Miles brilliantly reprising the role) and develop the elements which are to be united in the form of the Daleks. Even though the trajectory is pretty much pre-set, it is again an excellent ride.

In summary, a brilliant set of four plays, which I suspect would stand on their own as dramas even for a non-Who fan.

Actually I’ve listened to five since my last big write-up but already did The Harvest here.

The Axis of Insanity: I felt this one was a bit average, really. Peter Davison gets some very good moments, both as the baddy pretending to be the Doctor and as the Doctor reflecting on what it’s like to be a Time Lord, but apart from that it didn’t do a lot for me.

Arrangements for War was much more engaging, a story of the Doctor trying to get Evelyn’s mind off recent tragic events and ending up getting over-involved in a local political situation. Indeed, really rather too involved for my reading of how both the Doctor and Evelyn normally operate. But the whole thing hung together well, with a grim and tragic story which yet found some redemption at the end.

I actually rather liked The Roof of the World