5) The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

Another of this year’s Hugo nominees, and another good read. The setting is an alternate present where a large chunk of Alaska was colonised by Jewish refugees after the Second World War, and the Israelis lost in 1948 – there are other differences too, but those are the major ones. Now, sixty years on from those events, the Alaskan territory is within weeks of reverting to US control and its inhabitants face displacement again.

Chabon’s viewpoint character is a memorably seedy and depressed detective, trying to solve a murder which appears to be linked to chess and a Messianic Jewish sect, and at the same time dealing with his own professional and family dilemmas. The tenuous society of Sitka is well depicted at all its levels. In places it’s terrifically sad. I was a bit dubious about the portrayal of conspiratorial politics at the highest political level, but perhaps that was part of the point.

However, it’s not going at the top of my Hugo list; I don’t think it is sfnal enough. Apart from the ahistorical setting, there is no sfnal content (well, a couple of miracles are hinted at, but I’m not sure that counts). The genre of this novel is detective, not sf; the setting is not much more counterfactual than Agatha Christie’s country houses, or Lindsey Davis’ richly imagined and researched Rome, or Ellis Peters’ medieval Shrewsbury (which also gets the very occasional miracle, but that doesn’t make it fantasy).

Don’t get me wrong: I liked the book enormously. The setting seemed to me a very thought-provoking response to the history of Jews, in America in particular, since 1940, far better than the other attempts I’ve read recently. I’ll probably end up ranking it ahead of the other two nominees which I haven’t yet read and of which I don’t have huge expectations. But, while in a lot of ways it may be the best novel of the three I’ve read so far, it lacks the sensawunda that I got in spades from both Halting State and Brasyl, so loses my vote on that account.

Well, I enjoyed it. There’s no harm in being funny; I enjoyed the Doctor and Donna constantly missing each other and then their silent dialogue. But I was especially impressed with Donna’s character’s perception that the Doctor has changed – one of Tom Baker’s insights into his time on the programme was that his Doctor couldn’t really change or develop, and RTD has modified that a bit. I didn’t see the plot (as some have) as an attack on fat people. I did like the appearance of That Blonde Girl at the end.

From my friends list, mostly with spoilers: Generally positive to enthusiastic notes from here, here, (succinctly) here, here, and (I think) here. A moderate view from here. Rather less enthusiasm from here (also spoilers for last night’s Torchwood), here, here, and especially here.

I see that the hand of history has fallen on Brian Cowen’s shoulder. He has been seen in dubious company before now!

Right, now for Doctor Who…

Various sources are reporting the death of Johnny Byrne, who wrote much of the hit series All Creatures Great and Small (based on the pseudonymous reminiscences of Yorkshire vet “James Herriot“, and starring among others a youthful Peter Davison) and also wrote three Doctor Who stories, The Keeper of Traken, Arc of Infinity and Warriors of the Deep (two of which also starred an only slightly less youthful Peter Davison).

Mercifully, few Who fans will be aware of Byrne’s peculiar participation on Usenet newsgroups discussing the break-up of Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s. He was determined to demonstrate the evils of the 1941-45 Croatian regime, which were indeed manifest and horrible, but went too far in appearing to argue that the deeds of the Croats fifty years before excused or exonerated the activities of the Serbs in the more recent conflict. The archives are all there on Google

Well, that was an improvement over last year’s finale. In End of Days, we had a really silly demon monster and the utterly unconvincing temporary deaths of Rhys and Jack; we knew they were going to come back to life again, so any dramatic tension was lost. But this time round we lose both Toshiko and Owen, apparently permanently – and for the sake of dramatic integrity, I rather hope it is permanent; it would be OK to bring them back as flashbacks or ghosts, but not to revive them – you can do that once successfully (as TW did this season with Owen) but no more often than that. The worst bit of this episode was the dismal acting of Lachlan Nieboer as Jack’s brother; and there was a lot else that could have gone wrong, and didn’t.

It’s interesting to reflect that the original run of Doctor Who killed off two regular characters in its third season, and then of course changed the lead actor in the fourth; there may be a natural time limit to these things (unless you are Tom Baker). It’s been a grim old time all round in Who and its spinoffs, what with Kylie being killed off in Voyage of the Damned as well.

This has been a much better season than the first one. The writing has been better, the central concepts better, the actors seemed more in their roles (again, a huge contrast between tonight’s episode and End of Days). The only episode that didn’t work especially well for me was Out of the Rain, the one with the circus troup materialising from ancient film records. (And my second least favourite was Fragments, which had the same director, Jonathan Fox Bassett.) I enjoyed pretty much all of the others.

Both Adam and Something Borrowed leant to an extent on Buffy episodes (obviously, Superstar and Hell’s BellsA Day In The Death was fantastic.

Adrift, for obvious reasons, was the episode that hit closest to home for me emotionally. Apart from that, I really liked the fact that a bit more care seemed to have gone into constructing the Owen/Tosh, Gwen/Rhys[/Andy], Jack/Ianto[/John][/Gray] character arcs; particularly the first of these, where there were several episodes showing this relationship as one which was changing and developing (Adam, Dead Man Walking, and of course Exit Wounds). A fan who had only seen the second series would find it rather difficult to believe that Gwen had ever had a fling with Owen; let alone that Ianto had his girlfriend hidden in the basement.

Anyway, I liked most of the first series of Torchwood (apart from the very last episode), yet felt the need to be apologetic about it at the time; I don’t feel anything like as apologetic about liking the second series.

(Various other people have done their reaction posts while I’ve been writing this. I would particularly recommend , here. Though the comment threads here get amusing too.)

Anyway, roll on tomorrow at 1920 our time, 1820 for you in the UK and Ireland!

3) Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton
4) Doctor Who and the Crusaders, by David Whitaker

These were the other two Doctor Who books published in the 1960s, after the initial success of Whitaker’s Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. Both feature Hartnell’s First Doctor with original companions Ian and Barbara, and relatively new girl Vicki.

Doctor Who and the Zarbi was based on the story now generally called The Web Planet, which crashes and burns spectacularly awfully on screen because today’s viewers cannot take the production values seriously. The book is a bit better, because the printed page and the reader’s imagination, rather than the unforgiving camera, supplies the details of the various non-human races in conflict on the planet Vortis. In principle it makes a good sf story, perhaps the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era.

The book does suffer from a couple of weaknesses. Most bizarrely, and uniquely, the central character is referred to as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor” throughout, and the Tardis loses the definite article, as if Tardis was just the name of the vessel. Also, in places the book feels uncomfortably like what it is, a TV script cast in different format, and one feels that Strutton is just writing what appeared to the viewer on the screen. Having said that, though, the book is still better than the original TV story.

Doctor Who and the Crusaders is the only one of the 1960s Who novels to have been drawn from a four-part rather than seven-part story, and Whitaker makes full use of the extra space this gives him to expand on his own original material. His opening paragraph is pretty memorable:

As swiftly and as silently as a shadow, Doctor Who’s Space and Time ship, Tardis, appeared on a succession of planets each as different as the pebbles on a beach, stayed awhile and then vanished, as mysteriously as it had come. And whatever alien world it was that received him and his fellow travellers, and however well or badly they were treated, the Doctor always set things to rights, put down injustice, encouraged dignity, fair treatment and respect.

Despite the solecisms of “Doctor Who” and “the Tardis” (which are fortunately not repeated later in the text), it’s a good start, and the whole story fees more embedded in an ongoing narrative than does Doctor Who and the Zarbi. This is partly because Whitaker makes the Ian/Barbara relationship even more explicitly romantic than in his previous book. But it’s also because there is a good sense of geography, of this Palestine, despite its rather implausible woodlands, being a place with real towns filled with merchants, robbers and warlords.

The biggest loss from the TV version is the rhythmic, indeed iambic, structure of some of the set pieces; but I guess that would not read as well as it sounded. However, Ian’s humanistic discussion with Saladin, and the decency and chivalry of the Saracen leaders, remain high points of the story. Well worth hunting down if you can find it.

TIME magazine has a short feature about us (mainly about the boss) this week.

(I was trying desperately to think of some appropriate play on words involving the phrase “in time”, but, alas, inspiration failed.)

2) Brasyl, by Ian McDonald

My reading of this year’s Hugo nominees continues with another good ‘un, Ian McDonald’s latest. The setting of Brazil fits his lush, dense writing style so well that it is remarkable that he’s never set a novel in real South America before (his two books set on Mars portray a rather Patagonian version of the planet, but it’s not quite the same). We have three interleaving narratives, from the mid-18th century, the present day, and the near future (2030); we have peculiar variations of reality; and we have the jungle, both urban and literal, with its various hostile inhabitants. In some ways it’s deliberately less ambitious than River of Gods, which juggled ten different viewpoint characters against the background of India forty years hence, but the intermeshing of the different characters from their different time periods in the end comes across rather pleasingly. On to Michael Chabon next, but I’m going to find it difficult to rank this relative to Halting State. 

1) Doctor Who – The Romans, by Donald Cotton

I had been looking forward to this one, famed as one of the best Doctor Who novelisations, and I was not disappointed. Cotton has recast the narrative of Dennis Spooner’s TV script into epistolary/diary form: letters from Ian Chesterton to his headmaster, the Doctor’s own diary, letters from Ascalis the assassin and Locusta the poisoner, and contributions also from Barbara, the Emperor Nero, and Nero’s wife Poppæa (but not Vicki); the whole thing framed in a covering note by Tacitus (obviously written several decades later). Eye of Heaven, the best of the spinoff novels featuring Leela, also featured multiple first-person viewpoints, and I’ve read first-person narratives in other First Doctor stories (here, here, and partly here), but this is the only case of the whole thing being ostensibly done from written records (the Doctor having compiled everything and then left it behind in the villa for the archivists to discover).

Admittedly, as an actual story it’s no great shakes, and purists will be disappointed that we lose a lot of the funny lines from the TV version and one of its major comic elements (the two pairs of time travellers not actually meeting each other in their wanderings). But the whole thing is done for language and laughs; it’s meant to be fun, and it is fun, and that’s all you can really ask.

I discovered last night that one of my ex-intern’s ex-interns now has interns.

It’s not quite the same as grandparenthood, but still…

Sleep somewhat disrupted, but for those of you who saw me in Dublin at the weekend, the explanation of what I was doing there (and why I wasn’t there for very long) is this: I was giving the keynote speech at this event in Limerick on Saturday morning.

Limerick is a long way from Dublin, and funding restrictions meant I made the mistake of flying Ryanair, which I won’t do again if I can help it. Indeed, it took me longer to get from here to Limerick than it normally does to get from here to Macedonia, a point I made in my speech. It was miserable wet weather, but I had a decent Indian meal here on the Friday night.

Of course, part of the reason I accepted the gig was that it coincided with P-Con, which was very good fun – Hi to all who I saw there, too tired now to name-check you all but you know who you are. I was pretty tired by this point which is my excuse for totally blanking and failing to recognise the Guest of Honour.

Sunday night brought another tedious journey home from Charleroi airport, though as you will have noticed I used the travel time to do a lot of reading. Still pretty exhausted though even last night, and a small child has woken me up rather early this morning. Will be taking it easier for the rest of the week, if I can.

Just received an exciting message from WAYN.com (“the worlds’ largest travel and lifestyle community”, WAYN standing for “Where Are You Now”). Apparently no fewer than nine of its members have added me as a friend.

Only problem is that I don’t think I know any of the nine members in question. A couple of the names looked familiar but on checking they are fairly common Irish names and the WAYN profiles don’t appear to match the people I know.

WAYN is not quite as sinister and crap as Rapleaf, but unless and until some people I actually know start using it and recommending it to me, I’m not touching it. It looks just like Bebo, Hi5 or Myspace, with a little Dopplr added in; but I get all of that and more from Facebook anyway.

Edited to add: Ah, I see someone else has had invites from most of the same people!