21) Time and Relative, by Kim Newman

This was the first of the run of Doctor Who novellas published by Telos, set immediately before the events of the first TV series, in London in early 1963. It’s written in diary form, with Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, as the narrator. She and her grandfather are exiles from their home planet, and can’t quite remember why; as she tries to fit in at school, she comes top in Maths and Science, but loses out in Geography as she can’t remember what the various cities and countries are called this century.

As typical with Telos there is an irritatingly self-congratulatory blurb (this time by Justin Richards) detailing just how wonderful this particular novella is. However, in this case it is close to being justified. For one thing, Newman gives Susan her own voice – in the series, she was rather the archetype of the screaming girl companion, to the dismay of Carole Anne Ford who had taken the role believing that she would have alien kung-fu type skills and whose favourite memory is when she turned violent in The Edge of Destruction. Newman’s Susan isn’t Buffy – apart from lacking physical fighting skills, she is less lucky in her choice of friends – but she is her own person, plaing not just at being grownup like her friends but also at being human – and it all makes sense.

Newman’s other success is that his First Doctor comes closer than any other written version I have seen to capturing the essence of Hartnell’s performance. This is helped by the first-person narrative from Susan’s point of view: her grandfather is familiar but not central for most of the story. He catches the alienness of the Doctor’s motivation and manner very well.

The actual story hardly matters in all of this, but the plot of a monster based on Cold, awakened by drilling experiments and taking over the earth starting with London, is true to many a Who story and also to the horror tradition which Newman is rooted in, so he does it pretty confidently. There are of course pleasing nods to continuity: Ian and Barbara are glimpsed on a date at the cinema, there is a hint that Susan’s own people may be sending a man with a beard after her and her grandfather, and more subtly her friends at school are John and Gillian (probably most Telos readers are sufficiently up in obscure Who lore to get that particular in-joke).

Anyway, based on this, one would be encouraged to get the rest of the series of Telos novellas. Unfortunately, I have read two of the others and they don’t come up to the same mark (one of them is definitely the worst Who fiction I have read in hard copy). Still, it was a good start.

20) The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might, by Nancy Soderberg

Nancy Soderberg was a senior official in President Clinton’s national security council (with a similar role to the fictional Kate Harper in the West Wing, but a political appointee rather than a representative of the military) and then deputy US ambassador to the United Nations. She was then a colleague of mine for several years; I looked over a couple of draft chapters in this book for her and she has been kind enough to thank me in the introduction.

It is a combination of autobiographical memoir and analytical reflection on the differences between the Clinton and Bush administration approaches to foreign policy. She is admirably frank about the early mistakes made by the Clinton White House, a combination of inexperience (after being out of government for twelve years) and a failure to grasp the ways in which the world had changed. She is rightly excoriating about the delusions of superpowerdom which have fuelled the Bush White House’s bullying posture, and gives several case studies (most obviously Iraq, but also North Korea) detailing the mistakes made in both strategy and tactics. Although the book came out at the start of Bush’s second term, very little in it would need to be changed in the light of events in the last three years.

For me the most interesting insights are into the dynamics of the Washington foreign policy establishment. That the Pentagon were in general opposed to actually deploying troops I already knew; the role of the State Department as a dead hand delaying policy innovation was new to me. Having said that, the role of key personalities with their own individual styles and agendas remains paramount.

Her chapters on terrorism are surprisingly good – surprisingly because a relatively large amount of the material is recycled from other sources (Dick Clarke and the 9/11 report), the key events having happened only after she had left government; but she manages the synthesis with her own earlier experience of institutional working habits very well.

It doesn’t always work – for instance, the section on engaging the Arab world in the last chapter is rather weak, though probably right – but it’s a fairly digestible and well-informed read of a pretty heavy topic.

Andrew Tanenbaum, over at the excellent electoral-vote.com, has taken the same data I looked at here and made some nice graphic presentations of it. (hat-tip to John Scalzi.)

19) The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Person In The World, by A.J. Jacobs

I have no idea who recommended this to me or why – possibly one of the robots from Amazon or LibraryThing – but it was a good call. This is a great book, ostensibly about Jacobs’ resolution to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end, but in fact with a lot of reflection on what it means to be clever, on his own (mostly good-humoured) rivalry with his father, on his shifting of his work-life balance (he and his wife are trying to have a baby). Basically it is the narrative of someone who suspects (with some reason) that he and his career are superficial and shallow, and he reads the entire Britannica to try and inject some depth. And by the end of the book, he appears indeed to have acquired some depth, but from other sources. It also has some very funny moments.

As promised, Quarsan dropped round to my office today to borrow Mirrorshades. Oddly enough, the subject of his girlfriend’s blog came up in conversation with my assistant, who googled it up immediately. I hadn’t realised, but the cover of Z’s book has a charming cartoon of a nude Quarsan in bed. Most entertaining.

Have seen a couple of other people do this, linking to the relevant WikiPedia entries.

1. Finaghy, Belfast
2. Stoneham, Massachusetts
3. Wassenaar, Netherlands
4. Loughbrickland, Co Down
5. Raunds, Northamptonshire
6. Armagh, Co Armagh
7. Leingarten, Baden-Württemberg
8. Clare College, Cambridge
9. The so-called Queen’s Quarter, Belfast
10. Jordanstown, Co Antrim
11. Serpentine Parade, off Whitewell Rd, Belfast
12. Banja Luka, Bosnia
13. Zagreb, Croatia
14. Sint-Genesius-Rode, Belgium
15. Oud-Heverlee, Belgium

18) Transmetropolitan: Tales of Human Waste, by Warren Ellis

I got this because I had picked up recommendations for Ellis’ Transmetropolitan series from various sources, and this fairly slim volume was numbered #0 in the shop, so I guessed it might be important introductory or prefatory material. Well, if it is, I’m not sure I can be bothered to follow up with the rest of the series. The book starts with a short story about how much protagonist Spider Jerusalem hates Christmas and other people, and it’s then a series of several dozen single-shot images by different leading comics artists, each ostensibly illustrating a different instalment of Jerusalem’s misanthropic newspaper column. Some of the illustrations, as you would hope, are indeed striking, but the combined effort is neither thought-provoking nor funny, and I began wondering pretty soon why I was supposed to care about this unpleasant character or his unpleasant opinions. Perhaps if I’d read the rest of Transmetropolitan I’d know the answer, but based on this I am not going to rush to do so.

…but it was one of several things that didn’t happen due to the wi-fi card in my lap-top giving up the ghost.

I’m not sure who it was that linked to this (possibly one of our mutual friends in a locked entry) but ‘s deconstruction of The Secret Seven by Enid Blyton is a work of genius.

17) Berlitz Turkish Travel Pack

I haven’t really finished this, but I gave it enough of a try during last week’s trip to northern Nicosia via Istanbul to justify writing it up. It’s a combination of the standard Berlitz tourist phrase book with a CD of sample important phrases. To be honest it’s not really worth paying the extra for the CD; it’s not sufficiently well integrated with the phrase book to be really useful, and the phrases are often too long and spoken too rapidly to repeat easily. But I bought it before I had discovered BYKI.com, which is what I shall use to get my ear in next time. The phrase book is fine, and it’s not their fault that I forgot it the one evening I found myself eating on my own at a restaurant where none of the staff spoke English.

16) The Owl Service, by Alan Garner

I think I read almost all of Alan Garner’s works as a teenager, but gave up on this one part way in because it didn’t grab me at the time. Well, age brings increased ability to appreciate. It’s an incredible book, a masterpiece of showing rather than telling, about patterns from the past (of story, of earthenware, of painting) coming to haunt the present day. There is a lot left beneath the surface – we never find out exactly how old Alison, Roger and Gwyn are, though the implication is that they are all three in their mid-teens, Alison perhaps younger than the other two; we never even see Alison’s mother Margaret, though she remains a presence in the background; the mystery behind the owls and flowers and the pierced stone is never completely explained, which normally would annoy me, but just seems to work really well here. A really good book.

92

…I’ve syndicated http://rosisexton.wordpress.com/ to .

Well, after my disappointment with Again, Dangerous Visions, I’m glad that at least one classic sf anthology I’ve read this year has lived up to its reputation. I’m not a wild-eyed enthusiast for cyberpunk (and William Gibson’s story here, “The Gernsback Continuum”, which rather lacks an ending, reminded me why not) but I’m always ready to be convinced by a good story, and there are loads of them in here. I think the only one I’d read before was Sterling and Gibson’s “Red Star, Winter Orbit” which is actually rather moving and nostalgic, qualities one doesn’t really associate with cyberpunk (though perhaps it qualifies because of the note of libertarian triumphalism on which it ends). I was particularly gripped by James Patrick Kelly’s “Solstice”, which mixes Stonehenge with sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and father-daughter cloning. But apart from my doubts about the first story, there isn’t a dud in the book.

13) The River of Lost Footsteps, by Thant Myint-U
14) Freedom from Fear, and other writings, by Aung San Suu Kyi

A fascinating couple of books about the tragedy of Burma. Thant Myint-U sees the fundamental problems of the country as rooted in the disintegration of the structures of government immediately after the British conquest in 1885; from then on, the Burmese faced extraordinary hurdles in getting things together. The history of foreign involvement goes way back, of course, with for instance the Portuguese playing a very prominent role from much earlier than I had realised. But Myint-U really gets into his stride in the 20th century, and I found his account of the lessons the Burmese learnt from the Irish revolution of 1916-22 very interesting.

The story of Aung San is fascinating – imagine if the Germans had invaded Ireland in 1916, and the IRB, having been installed as a provisional government backed by Berlin, then did a deal with London to kick the Germans out in return for recognition as the rightful government; this is more or less what the Burmese did in 1941-48 with the Japanese. Aung San’s successful navigation of his country to independence was remarkable, and reminiscent of Michael Collins in rather different circumstances. Like Collins, of course, he was killed by his own fellow-countrymen before the transition was complete, still in his early 30s.

Burma’s history since the military coup of 1962 is a grim story of oppression and poverty. Thant Myint-U mingles Burma’s recent history with his own life story, growing up a Burmese emigré in New York as the grandson of the UN Secretary-General. U Thant’s funeral was the occasion of extraordinary displays of popular resistance, and of correspondingly awful repression. The River of Lost Footsteps takes the story up to the unmourned death of the dictator Ne Win, and hopes for increased international engagement in the issue.

Aung San’s daughter comes into Myint-U’s story only at the end. The first half of Freedom From Fear begins with two lengthy pieces by her on her father and on the country as a whole, and also includes two of her essays on Burmese literature. The next quarter of the book is taken up with her political statements from the brief period when she was free to make them at the end of the 1980s, and then the last section has some personal reminiscences by her friends, including to my surprise and to the editor’s credit a mildly critical piece by Josef Silverstein. It falls however to a fellow student from her days at St Hugh’s in Oxford to make a point in writing that is obvious when you look at the cover of the book: Aung San Suu Kyi is beautiful.

And also very brave. The editor of the book, published in 1990, was her late husband, Michael Aris, who writes with love and gratitude of the sixteen or so years they had together before she answered the call of destiny that they had both always known might some day come. She will be 63 this year; her father was 32 when he was killed (and she was only two). Her harassment and imprisonment by the Burmese state has lasted almost twenty years; her sons are now in their thirties. Politics is not an especially easy life anywhere; but this is something else. Freedom From Fear ends with Suu Kyi being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. It is an international disgrace that we seem no closer to resolving the situation in 2008.

4) Doctor Who and the Face of Evil, by Terrance Dicks
5) Doctor Who and the Robots of Death, by Terrance Dicks
6) Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Terrance Dicks
7) Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock, by Terrance Dicks
8) Doctor Who and the Invisible Enemy, by Terrance Dicks
9) Doctor Who and the Image of the Fendahl, by Terrance Dicks
10) Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, by Terrance Dicks
11) Doctor Who and the Underworld, by Terrance Dicks
12) Doctor Who and the Invasion of Time, by Terrance Dicks

Feeding my newly reacquired Leela fixation, I zoomed through the novelisations of all nine of the TV stories in which she features over the last few days. All nine are by Terrance Dicks, and there’s not a lot more to say than that; they stick pretty closely to the TV scripts.

Doctor Who and the Face of Evil has a couple of interesting differences: Leela is actually portrayed as young, vulnerable and, well, girly in a way that is inconsistent both with the TV story as shown and with the other books. Also, of course, we have the explanation of how the Doctor’s face became the Face of Evil, as the result of a solo adventure shortly after his regeneration.

Doctor Who and the Robots of Death loses in the transition to the written page; the TV version just looks so memorable, and I think hints better at the background setting of Kaldor City.

Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang also loses out in the visual stakes, but gains a bit with occasional tight-third narrative from Leela’s point of view, which accentuates one of the successful aspects of the story, the confrontation between her primitive experience and the Victorian era.

Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock is a case of Terrance Dicks adapting one of his own TV scripts, which gives him even more than his usual degree of confidence with the material, and he uses the opportunity to fill out the Edwardian background of the story rather satisfactorily.

Doctor Who and the Invisible Enemy is a case where the novel is basically written as if watching the TV story and writing down what happens on screen. Actually that’s not quite fair; the fact that we cannot see the embarrassingly awful monster in the last episode makes it easier to concentrate on the plot, which makes more sense and is a better sf story than I had realised.

Doctor Who and the Image of the Fendahl is again a stick-closely-to-the-script effort, which makes the holes in the story a bit less easy to ignore.

Doctor Who and the Sunmakers is probably the best of these nine books; Dicks clearly appreciated Robert Holmes’ script and seems to have really got into the spirit of it. There is an interesting scene in the book but not in the TV series where Leela encounters some elderly workers waiting for euthanasia. Various other minor details are tweaked and basically improved in Dicks’ telling of the story.

Doctor Who and the Underworld is a bit less embarrassing than the TV original, but this is not saying much. The fact that we are not distracted by the disastrous special effects means that we can see the inadequacies of the plot rather better.

Doctor Who and the Invasion of Time is standard stuff, neither particularly good nor particularly bad.

So, in summary, none of these very special apart from Doctor Who and the Sunmakers which is rather good.

Several Fourth Doctor stories to review, as watched in lengthy airport stopovers lately.

The Seeds of Doom was the last six-part story featuring Sarah Jane Smith, a rather good romp featuring two episodes set in Antarctica (a venue Sarah subsequently returned to in one of the audio plays), a very camp megalomaniac millionaire, and of course the giant plant monster, the Krynoid. The background music is good too, jarring and discordant. The oddest thing about the story is that it shows the Doctor as very much part of the British establishment, in a way almost remiscent of The War Machines rather than of the Third Doctor’s era. His comfort with the existing social order here is a startling contrast to what I generally consider as the Fourth Doctor’s instinctive liberal anarchism, culminating in wiping out the monster by the conventional fire-power of the RAF. The establishment figures themselves are nostalgic stereotypes of an earlier era, but it’s very much redeemed by the baddies, who actually undergo character development rare in any Who story.

I remembered The Sunmakers from its first broadcast in 1977, but had forgotten quite how good it is. In total contrast to The Seeds of Doom, here we have the Doctor fomenting a popular uprising against an oppressive regime. There are numerous classic sf tropes – the rag-tag rebels living in the bowels of the city, the drugs in the air supply – but also a couple of Robert Holmes touches, such as the repeated digs at the British tax system. The bad guys – Gatherer Hade and the Collector – are gratifyingly over the top, but at the same time the implied violence is pretty alarming – the Doctor almost gets his brains burnt out, Leela is almost executed by public steaming, both are threatened with ugly death by the suspicious rebels, and these seem like serious threats. Indeed I seem to remember reading somewhere that at one point there was a plan for Leela to be killed off in this story, which would certainly have been a more in-character departure than what actually happened (but would have deprived us of her in the much later Gallifrey audios). It is also, and this I think is very unusual, a good story for K9: he starts and ends by beating the Doctor at chess, and takes the initiative at several crucial points during proceedings. It seems almost churlish after all that to point out that the actual setting – humanity has been forcibly displaced to Pluto as a result of fiendish capitalist exploitation – is pretty implausible even for Who, and does great violence to any attempts to construct a future history of the Whoniverse.

I remember Underworld from its first broadcast as nothing special, an impression confirmed on re-watching. To get straight to the point: the awful, awful use of CSO to show our heroes wandering through the caverns kills the story stone dead in episode 2 (and is then surpassed in awfulness by the Doctor, Leela and Idas floating down the zero-gravity shaft in episode 3). In fact, apart from The Space Museum, I can’t think of another story whose promising first episode is let down so badly by what follows. My classics-minded friends will find some meat to pick off the bones of the references to the Argonauts, but even this is rather clumsily handled – one can almost imagine the character brief: “My name is Herick! I am the equivalent of Heracles/Hercules! I like to shout a lot and kill people!” The Time Lords are given yet more unconvincing back-story, this time as penitently unsuccessful liberal imperialists. The one bright spark in a dim and unconvincingly lit landscape is Louise Jameson as Leela, who gets a good dramatic range and even develops interesting chemistry with Idas – rather more so than with Andred.

Ah, the late 70s were different days! Back then, Mrs T had only just come to power, and the unions still revelled in their ability to topple governments and, er, stop Doctor Who stories from being completed. If Shada had been finished – the last six-part story ever attempted – I fear it would be counted more towards the Invasion of Time than the Genesis of the Daleks end of the spectrum. There are some good bits – Douglas Adams’ script is witty; the invisible spaceship is well done (unlike the mind-absorbing floaty ball thing); for a Cambridge graduate like myself, the scenes of Tom Baker cycling through the streets are terrific nostalgia – but the two key characters, Professor Chronotis and Skagra, seem horrendously miscast and unconvincing, and nobody quite seems to know what they are doing, which is not surprising as the story itself makes very little sense. Also I didn’t like the undergraduate humour of the college porter calling the police at the very end. The Big Finish remake with Paul McGann, especially the webcast version available on the BBC website, is far superior.

In summary: first two great, second two less so.

3) I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

A brilliant short novel: what would things be like if the vampires actually won? The horror of the situation, of the loneliness of the last remaining human, his desperation, his bitter disappointments, superbly well portrayed. I saw someone on my f-list recommend this a couple of weeks ago; I heartily endorse that recommendation.

…the Thunderbirds reference in this week’s Torchwood?
——————

Three more Big Finish audios, the last one slightly out of sequence:

Her Final Flight just about manages to do the it-was-all-a-dream genre of story and get away with it. The interaction between Peri and the Doctor is great, if a little inconsistent with The Age of Chaos (though only a little). The story is one that has been done in the audios a couple of times before, and works this time because it is signalled to us right from the beginning and is then done rather welll. Shouldn’t really have worked, but it does.

I knew a bit about The Juggernauts already from the extra material on the I Davros CDs. I was deeply unimpressed with the previous Six/Davros encounter. But I have to say this really grabbed me; it’s very much a story of Mel and Davros, with the Doctor in a less prominent role, and both Langford and Molloy really shine. I especially loved the development of Dr Vaso as a kinder, gentler Davros; and the origin story of the Mechanoids, who were among the few redeeming features of The Chase.

For technical reasons I had to skip ahead to Three’s A Crowd, which is also a decent play: on the one hand, Erimem is suffering angst about staying with the Tardis, which is a dangerous strategy for the writers which would not work with a less successful companion; on the other hand, our friends find themselves dealing with a culture whose members can’t really cope with being in groups of more than two people at a time (due, of course, to Fiendish Alien Manipulation). All seemed to me to work rather well.

In summary, three good ‘uns.
——————

2) Rogue Moon, by Algis Budrys

One of the classic works of sf I resolved to read at the start of the year. It would actually be good material for a study of gender politics in the late 1950s (published in 1960, when the author was 29). The sfnal part of the story – our heroes’ attempts to find a way through a mysterious alien artifact on the Moon, I guess foreshadowing both Clarke/Kubrick’s 2001 and the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic – plays second fiddle to the sexual tension among the alpha males of the research group, with the James Bond figure, the Scientist and the Manager; and the two woman characters are pretty obviously the Virgin and the Whore. At the same time as the men are fighting over the sexual pecking order, they have to confront the fact that the lunar exploration project is essentially a suicide mission many times over; sex and death are pretty closely linked here. A rather fascinating book, though not really an enjoyable one.

1) Summerland, by Michael Chabon

I really liked this book, even though it is mainly about baseball, a game which I know almost nothing about. Its parallel worlds and talking animals are close to Philip Pullman, and its fantastic imagining of America is not very far from American Gods, but I think it is better done than either – more confidently rooted in American folklore than Gaiman’s book, and less ideological than Pullman. Also, despite its 500 pages, I found it a surprisingly quick read.

The debate continues.

I read with great interest this review of Kate Fisher’s Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 – so much so that I didn’t even spot the name of the reviewer.