When I was a Cambridge undergraduate, I was in the same yeargroup and at the same college as this guy. Mind you, in the year below us at Clare there were two Andrew Smiths.
Samuel Pepys finds himself in a slightly more extreme situation, having dinner with no less than four Richard Brownes, three of whom were knighted and thus Sir Richard Browne.
Tell me, does this ever happen to you?
21) A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani (with afterword by Malise Ruthven)
I’ve been working through my backlog of unread history books this year. This one is a bit unusual in that I am not and never have been professionally engaged on the areas in question (actually not quite true – Hourani has a half page on the Western Sahara, but it is marred by inaccuracy). It’s an interesting survey – I have been reading a bit about the origins of Islam (both Rogerson’s books and this piece by Patricia Crone) but Hourani’s book starts from there and takes the narrative up to the late 80s. (The 2002 afterword, by someone else, suffers from not saying enough about Iraq.)
What I most liked about the book was the emphasis on social and economic as well as political history – and that is a big admission for me, because normally I only like the political history bits. Hourani modestly claims that in this he is following the example of the great Ibn Khaldūn, but I’m sure he brings an extra six centuries of historiography to bear as well (I am sorry to say that I have read only extracts of Ibn Khaldūn; I see the Muqaddimah is on-line here though.) By concentrating on philosophy and culture he makes a good implicit case that currents of Islamic thought had a greater direct impact on local politics than perhaps the equivalents for Christianity.
Which links neatly to my only grounds of dissatisfaction with the book; which are (rather unreasonably of me, since he covers a pretty large chunk of the world) that it doesn’t look widely enough. Iran and Persia are barely mentioned; likewise India, the Balkans and Cyprus, all of which are important interfaces between Islam and other faiths. Turkey proper, because of the longevity of the Ottoman Empire, gets a bit more coverage, as does Al-Andalus, but sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, Central Asia and Afghanistan are basically invisible. OK, the book is technically about Arabs rather than Muslims, but it concentrates so much on Islam (and correspondingly less on Arab Christians, except in Lebanon) that I felt the non-Arab Muslims got rather short shrift.
Anyway, well worth reading.
I’ve been in my current office since starting in my current job at the start of last year. We decided six months ago to move from serviced to unfurnished offices, and the decisive point has now been reached: I signed the new lease today for a new place in the International Press Centre on boulevard Charlemagne, behind the Berlaymont and just as conveniently located for most purposes.
Modern communication raised its head rather amusingly today, when a bloke who is thinking of renting my current office called me up by Skype, and I gave him a virtual tour of the place via webcam. (I should add that this was arranged via the agent, though it was my idea.) He seemed happy enough with it. It is rather extraordinary to sit in Belgium and have a conversation like that with someone who is in Brazil. But that is the 21st century, I guess.
I wrote up both Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin and the Leela novelisations some time back, and Doctor Who and the Ribos Operation is one of the Ian Marter novels, so that brings me to the rest of the Season 16 Key To Time sequence. The first of these is an unofficial fan novelisation; the other four are by the inevitable Terrance Dicks. None of them, I’m afraid, is particularly outstanding.
This is one book you won’t have to buy; it is available on-line here, the first (in internal chronology) of the five “missing novelisations” provided by the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, and the first of David Bishop’s contributions to the extended canon (see also Who Killed Kennedy and the second series of Sarah Jane audios).
Bishop has added a few original touches to the Douglas Adams script, but unfortunately his own writing style was still pretty rough at this stage of his career. He certainly has improved since, but this was a wobbly start.
A standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment, somewhat flattening a rather good story.
Another standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment.
The Dicks/Holmes combination is a rather uneven predictor of quality, so it is worth noting that while this is generally considered the weakest of this season’s televised stories, it is possibly the best of the Key to Time books, with the background to the Swampies, Rohm-Dutt and the refinery staff filled out a bit. Basically the only one of this season that I would recommend to the casual collector as opposed to the completist.
Again, Dicks doesn’t add much to what we saw on screen (with of course the added constraint of cutting six episodes down to Target size) and the weaknesses of the plot are consequently more visible.
The biggest disappointment of this run is that Mary Tamm’s elegant, smart Romana doesn’t come across as especially interesting on the printed page. This is no doubt due to a combination of factors – the general phenomenon where the brainy companions seem to come across less well in novelisations than the screamy ones, the fact that we’re now in the period when Terrance Dicks was churning the books out at a rate of one a month or so, and perhaps the very visual presence of Mary Tamm – it seems to me a bigger contrast between impact on screen and on paper than for any character since the First Doctor.
Anyway, on to Romana II now. (And I am past the two-thirds mark for this insane project.)
The Bertelsmann Stiftung are first off the mark of the major European think-tanks to publish an analysis of what happens next after the Irish referendum result. (Here, in German only though they say they will have an English version available on Monday.) They describe the possible options for the EU as four in number:
They also describe as unthinkable the possibility of Ireland being kicked out of the EU, or out of any new Treaty arrangements, which I guess is a relief.
Myself, I think that it is important to distinguish between two different “what next?” questions. I see the logic of proceeding with the ratification process elsewhere – if nothing else, it will reveal what other flaws there are in the Lisbon Treaty as currently on the table. The constitutional court cases pending in Germany and the Czech Republic may be as crucial in this as the Irish referendum.
The immediate “what next?” is how to proceed with the institutional appointments after 2009, when the current arrangements for the European Commission expire and when Croatia is due to finish its membership negotiations, with a view to joining in early 2011. It’s pretty clear that the loss of the Irish Commissioner was indeed a factor in the ‘No’ vote, so I imagine that that, plus perhaps some fairly minimal re-jigging of the voting weights, may be factored into the Croatian accession treaty (since accession treaties do not require referenda). The permanent President of the Council and the new-look EU foreign minister are both now impossible to see happening as soon as next year. (In other words, I agree with option 3 as put forward by Bertelsmann.)
The less immediate “what next” is to ask what people actually want from the EU, rather than what the EU wants its people to vote for (in other words, I also agree with Bertelsmann’s option 2, except that they do not go far enough). I nailed my colours to the mast here two years ago, proposing that a consultative assembly be convened with a certain amount of jury-type random selection of EU citizens, to decide (in paraphrase of Douglas Adams) what the question actually is. (I explain a bit more here and here.) Of course there’s no guarantee that even the outcome of such a process would be able to gain popular support at referendum; but perhaps the outcome would be of a nature that did not need to go through such a process. One can never tell.
A shout out to Iain Weaver who has listed previous examples of British MP’s resigning their seats on points of principle – or, more strictly speaking, MPs who resigned their seats in order to fight the subsequent forced by-election. He leaves out the interesting case also of George Lansbury in 1912.
There is almost no history of this for the Dáil – nine TDs resigned in sympathy with the so-called “army mutiny” in 1924, but none of them fought the seven subsequent by-elections. Kevin Boland also resigned from the Dáil in 1970 in the wake of the arms crisis, but did not fight the subsequent by-election either (he did have a go in the next general election but lost). Purist Republican theorists of course insist that the entire 1918 election in Ireland should be retrospectively given the status of a plebiscite, but nobody seems to have argued this at the time.
I have to say that it doesn’t impress me all that much as a political move. Referendums, as we are seeing in Ireland at the moment, are referendums, and elections are elections; and if Parliament takes a decision that people disagree with, a by-election result in one seat won’t change that (and historically did not do so in 1986 or in 1912). The fact that I happen to agree with Davis on the substance (as I would have done in 1912, but did not in 1986) doesn’t change the fact that this is essentially a stunt which will do nothing to change the legislation (which may yet be blocked in the House of Lords or in the courts); the only winner will be Davis personally. Sure, he’ll get some nice publicity for embarrassing the government; but I would much rather have the focus on their coalition with the DUP.
According to the Irish Times, anyway.
But RTÉ has a different nuance.
Why is anyone even slightly surprised that the DUP a) likes the idea of locking people up for six weeks without telling them why and b) appoints homophobes to ministerial positions?
A fairly experimental set of recipes last night, with friends M and E coming over for dinner, and my mother-in-law staying, so it was cooking for five.
500 g asparagus, cut into 2cm pieces
1.2l boiling water
2 onions, finely chopped
30g butter
salt
pepper
2 eggs, beaten together
bunch of chopped herbs (recipe says parsley, coriander and dill; I used basil and tarragon instead)
Simmer the asparagus in the water for 5-8 minutes.
Meanwhile, sauté the chopped onions in the butter.
When the asparagus is done, stir in the onions, salt and pepper.
Stir a bit of the broth into the eggs, then whisk the eggs into the soup (they should cook slightly)
Stir in the herbs and then simmer for a few more minutes before serving.
Total time: about 20 mins, starting with cutting up the asparagus.
Comment: Tasty, though I should have put in more salt and pepper (fortunately you can add that after it is served).
500g minced beef (or lamb)
1 slice bread
400ml milk
15 ml oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
½ teaspoon chili powder
seeds from 2 cardamom pods
1-2 teaspoons crushed coriander seed
2 bay leaves
1 clove
60g almonds
2 teaspoons turmeric
1 egg
1 teaspoon mustard
½ teaspoon grated lemon peel
1 small apple, grated
50g dried apricots
50g raisins
2 tablespoons /30 ml red wine vinegar (for beef) or lemon juice (for lamb)
2 tablespoons /30 ml dry white wine or orange juice
salt
Heat oven to 160°C/325°F
Put the bread soaking in the milk in a medium-sized bowl for half an hour
Heat the oil and soften the onion and garlic. Then add the chili powder, cardamom, coriander, bay leaves, clove and almonds. Cook for 5-10 mins, stirring to prevent sticking. Then remove from the heat.
Remove the bread from the milk and squeeze it, keeping the milk in the bowl. Add the turmeric, the egg and a little salt; beat until the mixture is an even light yellow colour.
Get a large bowl and put in the bread, the meat, the mustard, the lemon peel, the grated apple, the dried apricots, the raisins, the vinegar/lemon juice, the wine/orange juice, the onion and spice mixture, and half of the yellow milky stuff. Mix it well by hand to the point where it is even and smooth.
Put it into a deep greased oven dish and smooth the top. Pour on the rest of the yellow milky stuff, add a few dots of butter and then bake in the oven for an hour or until the top is golden brown.
The book says serve with chutney, bananas, shredded coconut and tomatoes, but I chose a different route (see below).
Total time: 45 mins preparing, then an hour in the oven. (You could probably skimp a bit on the amount of time the bread spends soaking.)
Comment: I saw this ages ago in the recipe book and was really intrigued by it, because I had no idea what it would come out like. It ends up a bit like shepherd’s pie, but the meat bit is smoother and the topping is a savoury custard rather than potato. It tasted really nice. Rather than serve it with the recommended savouries I did two cold salads as described below (but did also offer tomatoes).
My mother-in-law speculates that a vegetarian version with nuts and/or lentils might be worth exploring; I look forward to hearing her reports.
1 large cucumber
120 ml vinegar (white wine or cider)
1 teaspoon sesame seeds
2 tablespoons /30ml sesame oil
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 teaspoon turmeric
2 teaspoons sugar
salt
Peel the cucumber; cut into 5 cm pieces; cut these again into lengthwise sticks. Put them in a pan with the vinegar and salt; add a little water to cover; heat and simmer for a few mins until the cucumber is tender and transparent. Drain, keeping the liquid, and put both liquid and cucumber aside to cool separately.
Toast the sesame seeds in a pan with a little oil until they begin to jump and turn golden. Then set them aside. (Comment: this needs very little oil indeed. It doesn’t take long at all to get to the required stage – the seeds are almost like popcorn.)
Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil and cook the onion and garlic until they are golden. Remove from the pan.
Pour into the same pan the other tablespoon of oil, the turmeric, the sugar, and a judicious amount of the vinegar liquid (the recipe says half but that seems to me way too much). Stir over a gentle heat until the sugar has dissolved. Add the onion and garlic and let them heat through.
Mix in the cucumber pieces and arrange in a bowl. Decorate with the sesame seeds. Serve (it says here) warm or cold.
Total time: 20 mins, if you are fairly hasty with your interpretation of letting the cucumber and the vinegar mixture cool.
Comment: This had a lovely exotic taste to it. Certainly had a sense of south-east Asia; whether Cambodia in particular I cannot judge.
500g young beans
1 garlic clove, crushed
½ cup chopped fresh herbs (it says coriander but I used tarragon)
3 tablespoons /50 ml olive oil
2 tablespoons /30 ml red wine vinegar
Trim the beans; cook them for about 8 minutes; drain thoroughly and mix with the other ingredients; chill.
Total time: 15 mins. (Plus of course a couple of hours cooling in the fridge.)
Comment: Again, yummy, and very straightforward. Perhaps one could go easy on the vinegar, esp since the cucumber recipe uses it too.
500g rhubarb
150g sugar
75g butter
150g flour
50g chopped nuts
Grated peel of ½ a lemon
Set the oven for 220°C/425°F
Chop the rhubarb into 2 cm sections, and put into a greased oven dish.
Scatter 100g of the sugar on top.
Mix all the rest together, and sprinkle it on top too.
Bake in the oven for 40 mins.
Serve with custard or cream.
Total time: 20 mins (plus the baking).
Comment: As recipes go, this is absurdly easy. It still ended up a bit overdone; I am not sure if this is because our oven is hotter than it claims to be, or perhaps I used too much sugar. I will certainly try again.
This is the end (at least, for three decades) for Sarah Jane Smith as a regular character in Doctor Who. There is only one really bad one out of these eight, and it is the one which is not based on a televised story.
This is fairly standard stuff, with (as so often) the advantage of the printed page being that it spares us the embarrassing special effects and occasional wobbly acting of the original version.
A good novelisation of one of the great stories. Dicks has topped and tailed the narrative with an explanation of the Osirians, and a nice vignette of Sarah going back to see what the local newspapers said about it all at the time. Again, some of the effects work better on the page than on the screen. (Though the written word can never give us the excellent performances of the guest cast here.)
Alas, this was a case where the novelisation exposes the flaws of the original story a bit more; no longer distracted by the visuals of working out who is who, the incoherency of the Kraals’ plan to Konkwer Erth is much more difficult to ignore.
For once, Dicks rises to the challenge of adapting one of his own scripts for the printed page (perhaps because it had been substantially rewritten in the meantime). One of the few flaws of the original TV version is that Karn does look every now and then like a TV studio with funny lighting; of course, on the printed page you can depict whole landscapes rather less expensively. The whole thing seemed to me to work rather well.
Hinchcliffe was the producer of Doctor Who in arguably its greatest days, and his two novelisations of stories from that time give us an insight into what he thought he was doing. His Fourth Doctor is much closer to the Tom Baker screen version than the somewhat more overtly clownish character of the Dicks books; he sticks closely to the script but concentrates perhaps a bit more on the horror elements of the story, and the villainous Harrison Chase is memorably evil.
I read this book here because continuity experts suggest this is where it goes – Doctor and Sarah fighting off fish creatures in London. (Actually it probably belongs better before The Seeds of Doom, since the story begins with them arriving in contemporary England in the Tardis.) On the one hand, it scores over the audio version on which it is based by having a larger number of active characters and a wider view of the action. On the other hand, Pemberton’s writing style is absolutely dire, with a cringeworthy phrase on almost every page. In addition, he seems unsure which Doctor he is writing for, with the appearance of a flute (ie recorder) at the end, and a confusion about whether we are in the 1960s or 1970s. Not quite the worst novelisation or spinoff fiction I’ve read, but really one for completists only.
As with Hinchcliffe’s treatment of The Seeds of Doom, we have a much less clownish, dark Doctor, and much more horrific elements in the story – horrible frazzling of the Helix’s victims, also the Doctor casually slaying Count Federico’s guards. But the other thing that struck me was Sarah’s relationship with the Prince – much more romantically presented here than it was on screen, and basically her closest approach to romance in the entire canon, I think. Not an outstanding novelisation but not bad either.
A pretty standard retelling of the TV original, without much added or taken away. The story line seemed slightly clearer on paper, but maybe I just was not concentrating sufficiently when I watched it. On the other hand, Dicks does not quite do justice to Sarah Jane’s farewell scene.
What struck me almost for the first time as I read these books is that this is the period when the basic format of the show as we now know it was first tried – a single, female, companion, who has a life of her own (remember that Sarah first met the Doctor while impersonating her own aunt, and her journalistic career is mentioned in both The Android Invasion and The Seeds of Doom), and the Tardis travelling from adventure to adventure, without any real fixed base for the Doctor (the last proper UNIT story is just before this sequence, and the first proper Gallifrey story immediately after). Previous companions were either a larger ensemble (with minor male exceptions – Steven in The Massacre, Jamie in a few episodes but no complete story) or part of UNIT. Sarah Jane Smith (followed by Leela, Romana, Peri, Mel and Ace) is the first real predecessor of Rose, Martha and Donna. And unlike a lot of others, the printed page does her justice – perhaps because so many of her books were written by Terrance Dicks, who after all invented the character as script editor. All decent enough reads (apart from the Pescatons).
7) Another Life, by Peter Anghelides, read by John Barrowman
My commuting listening this week has been this Torchwood novel as read in the voice of Captain Jack. I don’t think I will do that very often in future, for reasons almost entirely unconnected with the quality of the story: the full thing extends over three full audio CDs of over an hour, with no other convenient episode breaks, and is therefore several times longer than an actual Torchwood episode. My routine is much better suited to narrative cut into chunks of around half an hour in length.
Having said that, the story is standard Torchwood – alien creature comes to Cardiff, possesses its human victims, the team deal with it despite gross personal danger – but well told, with nice personal vignettes for each of our favourite characters and good descriptive writing of the horrors of flood and drowning, with an excursion into second person narrative at one point which of course is all the more compelling when delivered via the spoken rather than written word. Barrowman slightly overacts in places and his pronunciation of one or two phrases jarred me, but that is of course part of his charm.
6) Shadowkings, by Michael Cobley
I got this way back in 2002 when the author was a guest at MeCon (my first evar sf con!) and it has sat on the shelves ever since. Well, I’ve started but I won’t finish; standard sword and sorcery stuff, the writing is competent but not compelling, and I have other books that I want to read more than this.
5) Lisbon: What the Reform Treaty Means, edited by Tony Brown
This volume of short analyses of the Lisbon Treaty, published for €20 by the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin, is obviously timed to coincide with next week’s referendum in Ireland. I’ve already given my views on the Treaty at some length, but I learnt a few things from this book. I had not realised that the Citizens’ Initiative proposal, where the EU must respond to a petition signed by a million citizens, had made it into the final text. And I had not appreciated quite how firmly Ireland’s neutrality has been ring-fenced both by current arrangements and in the Lisbon proposal.
Other chapters of the book give extra nuance to things I was already aware of. The Treaty’s effects on social legislation and climate change seem to me (despite the arguments made in those chapters) more rhetorical than real, though positive nonetheless. The provisions making it easier to change the EU’s rules in future are simply common sense (and these probably mean that although this is the fifth European referendum since 1986, it may also be the last for some time). Finally, I had not realised just how much Ireland is a prisoner of the UK’s policies in the area of Justice and Home Affairs, though that is a result of geography rather than of any positive policy choice by the Irish government (let alone the EU).
I’ve argued before that for the average citizen the Lisbon Treaty isn’t a big deal. The best reason I’ve seen for voting against it is from a friend who wants to bring down capitalism, and sees correctly that the Treaty will allow the EU to function more smoothly in making the market economy work; if you are opposed to capitalism in the first place, this is obviously not desirable.
Finally, Irish readers may be interested to see how their referendum debate is being explained to other audiences. Dominik Tierlemann and Christian Heydecker of the Munich-based Bertelsmann Stiftung have produced a nine-page, 580 kb PDF with the title “Green Light from the Emerald Isle? Ten Questions and Answers about Ireland”. And Hugo Brady of the London-based Centre for European Reform has written a three-page, 170kb PDF with the snappy title “Will the Irish Guillotine Lisbon?” Both give a slightly external perspective to the debate.
Anyone want to play Scrabble or Reversi/Othello?
I do occasionally get funny correspondence about my web page on US Presidential elections and facial hair. But over the last 48 hours I have hit the bigtime: Andrew Sullivan, whose “The Daily Dish” is one of the top US political blogs, linked to it under the flattering title The Ultimate Dish link. Seeing as he is so widely read, I’m not surprised to find others picking it up and linking to it, and reading things I never wrote into it. These guys think I am telling Obama and McCain to stay clean shaven. This guy is glad I cited one of his friends. This blogger expects that I am happy Hillary didn’t get the nomination (I am, but not for the reason he probably thinks). This person thinks we need more number-crunching. Thanks to all of that, I’ve had over 3000 extra hits – five times normal. The Internet is a small place sometimes…
4) The Phoenix Exultant, by John C. Wright
I read the first in this series, The Golden Age some time ago and quite enjoyed it. This second volume is also enjoyable – still the same dense writing, but our hero turns out to be pretty fallible on a human level and appears to learn and change as the book goes on, and Wright appears to be questioning the underside of his affluent networked society. Indeed at one point I almost hoped the book was going to turn into a series of vignettes of different groups functioning on the margins, but it turned out a bit different. Anyway, it was fun.
3) When Nietzsche Wept, by Irvin D. Yalom
I enjoyed this novel, even though I know very little about the philosophical or medical background to it. The year is 1882, the place Vienna; the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche seeks treatment from Josef Breuer, who with his young colleague Sigmund Freud is experimenting with a new “talking cure” for cases of mental illness. Yalom, himself a psychiatrist, is gently didactic about both the earliest days of his own profession and Nietzsche’s philosophy, and even manages to work the two into something resembling a plot. A helpful postscript explains which bits of the book are based on established historical fact and which are fictional. Rather a good read.
First few minutes of this features my colleague in our Washington office (who used to run Kosovo).
I have finally finished the Tom Baker TV stories, but will save my assessment of the Fourth Doctor until I’ve finished reading the books. Apologies to those of you reading by RSS, but here are my views on seven Fourth Doctor stories and one Fifth Doctor story for luck.
This may not be the greatest of stories – I rather missed UNIT being able to let the Doctor take control of the quarry and the nuclear plant – but it is still rather fun. In particular, it’s unusual for the Doctor to be so thoroughly hoodwinked by the bad guy (or gal in this case), and I rather liked the setting of Kastria. Of course, everyone remembers this for Sarah’s departure, but I could entirely sympathise with her fury at getting hypnotised yet again (I haven;t counted, but it must have been roughly the fourth time in five stories).
Almost all of The Androids of Tara is basically a lift from The Prisoner of Zenda – Romana actually finds the fourth segment of the Key to Time, the ostensible point of the plot, in the first episode while the Doctor is off fishing. But it is all great fun – Mary Tamm gorgeous as ever in all her parts (ie all her roles), the villainous count yelling “Next time, I shall not be so lenient!”
I noticed that Declan Mulholland, playing the Count’s sidekick Till, did so with a marked Ulster accent. I checked back on his one previous appearance in Doctor Who, in The Sea Devils, but his character is too busy dying in agony to really display much of an accent there.
The Power of Kroll is generally regarded as one of the lower points of the great Robert Holmes’ career, and it’s fair comment. In particular, the primitive natives vs capitalist exploiters narrative is not terribly sophisticated here; and the actual monster itself is, sadly, incredible and not in a good way. I concentrated hard on the gun-runner Rohm-Dutt’s accent, as he has been flagged up to me as another potentially Irish character in canonical Who, but I think he is trying to sound Australian.
Fannish opinion is a bit down on The Armageddon Factor alerted me a while back to his view that this is not entirely fair, and he’s quite right. Sure, it is several different stories crammed together; but it seems to me that Big Finish have done princess + lover + crazed military leader on wartorn planet several times, and never quite as well as this. Also, K9 developing his own sinister agenda is genuinely creepy. Also, Lalla Ward and Mary Tamm are a dynamite combination (one thing that Big Finish resurrected a quarter-century later and did very well). Also, Mary Tamm, in her last TV appearance, is wonderful – looks fantastic and her interaction with Baker is brilliant. And the denouement, while of course on the one hand it is a bit of a let-down – we had 26 episodes, only for the Doctor to decide it was a bad idea after all??? – is entirely in character with Baker’s performance, perhaps rather more so than taking the quest on in the first place. Shame about Drax who is the one element (with the Doctor’s past) that doesn’t really work for me, but apart from him I think this story is pretty solid. It was actually the last Fourth Doctor story I watched in this run, and a good note to finish on.
This, as we now know, was the beginning of the end: The Leisure Hive starts with K9 blowing up, episode 1 ends with the Doctor being pulled apart and episode 2 with him being changed almost out of all recognition. But with all that it is rather good – we actually have a believable alien culture, and factions within both the alien races represented, and a plot that more or less makes sense. David Fisher’s book is (as so often) slightly better, but the original is fun too.
Imagine if you were a 19-year-old fan and submitted your script idea to Doctor Who and it actually got accepted… again, I was surprised by how good Full Circle actually is, bar Matthew Waterhouse. Quite a sophisticated plot, both in terms of rebels vs establishment and in terms of the scientific hand-waving; and lots of nasty tension involving threats to Romana and the Tardis. The Gallifrey stuff at the beginning does seem a bit bolted on, and it’s one of the drawbacks of this season that it is dealt with a bit inconsistently.
Once more, I was surprised by how enjoyable State of Decay turned out to be. Terrance Dicks, as I’ve mentioned before, loved to go for the old horror tropes and adapt them for Who, and did them on the whole very well. Where The Power of Kroll didn’t quite seem able to transcend cliche, State of Decay manged to adapt it to the Whoniverse convincingly. (Still a shame about Matthew Waterhouse.)
I skipped ahead a bit (as even this takes me only half way through the Fifth Doctor stories), and found that now I had seen so many more Brigadier stories, and indeed listened to numerous audios featuring him, I enjoyed his resurrection in Mawdryn Undead much more than first time round when he was a vague childhood memory and a figure from the Target books. There are essentially two plots here, the Mawdryn plot which is good sf stuff, teleports, spaceships, time shifts and all, and the Turlough/Black Guardian stuff which seems to me as superfluous as Turlough himself. Really, if the Black Guardian wanted to kill the Doctor off, there might be better ways to do it than hiring an unreliable alien posing as a schoolboy! Nyssa and Tegan are good here though, and I really loved the Brigadier flashback which actually incorporates a clip of Hartnell as well as the other three.
In the topsy-turvy world of international relations, one can still sometimes be surprised by the stupidity of the international system.
The UN yesterday approved foreign warships patrolling Somalia’s waters in order to crack down on piracy, which is a very real problem. In general, of course, this is a Good Thing.
But it is irritating that the one area of the dysfunctional state which actually functions, Somaliland (the former British colony in the northwest) gets lumped in with the rest. As you can see from the UN’s own maps, there have been precisely two incidents of piracy off Somaliland in the last few years, compared to scores off the coast of Puntland and the territory nominally controlled by the internationally recognised government.
On the ground, the international naval Combined Task Force 150 has among its duties the fight against piracy, in collaboration with local forces – ie the Somaliland coastguard. However its duties also include enforcing the international arms embargo on all parties in Somalia – also including the Somaliland coastguard!
International diplomacy has its own peculiar logic… (Declaration of interest: I advise Somaliland.)
There is a one-day conference called “Space, Time, Machine and Monster: A Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Conference for the Valleys” on Saturday 21 June, from 10:00am – 4:30pm, at the University of Glamorgan’s Treforest campus (Tickets £5 / £3 concessions; available on the door only). Speakers include Jasper Fforde, Stephen Volk, Steve Lockley, Tim Lebbon, Dr Dimitra Fimi, Rev Neil Hook, Rhys Hughes, Louis Savy, Andrew Cartmel, Philip Gross, Terry Cooper, Catherine Fisher. More details here, brochure here.
“There is a long and lasting fascination with Fantasy and Science Fiction in the Valleys in Wales, dating back to the Mabinogion. This also includes a story about alien contact written by the Bishop of Llandaff in 1638 and continues with others including Lady Gwen written anonymously in 1891, Godwin‘s writings and more currently Peter George and Terry Nation, with the most current and successful writer to raise the profile of the genre being Russell T Davies with Dr Who.”
Apparently.
I wrote before about the Rathmore Chaos, a feature of Jupiter’s moon Europa which has been named after an ancient fort in County Antrim (and also shares its name with the grammar school I attended). The features of Europa take their names from: 1) places associated with the Europa legend, which is fair enough; 2) places from Celtic legend, which is OK though Welsh and Irish are rather mixed up, so is the orthography, and so are fact and fiction; and 3) “Celtic” (sic) stone rows and circles.
This last one bothers me a bit. It is certainly a fine thing to name features of another world after your favourite megalithic monuments, but most of those that have been commemorated in this way long pre-date the Celts! The list of places on Europa named in this way is as follows:
Butterdon Linea – after the stone circle and stone row on Butterdon Hill in Dartmoor
Callanish (large ringed feature) – after stone circle in the Hebrides
Corick Linea – after stone circle and stone row near Draperstown
Drizzlecomb Linea – after another Dartmoor stone circle and row
Drumskinny Linea – after stone circle near Fermanagh
Kennet Linea – I suspect after the West Kennet Avenue near Avebury
Mehen Linea – slightly baffles me; supposedly a “stone row in Brittany” but I don’t find any monument with that name; could be an error for “Menec”?
Merrivale Linea – after another set of stone circles and rows on Dartmoor
Sharpitor Linea – yet another Dartmoor alignment
Staldon Linea – Once again, Dartmoor, though usually spelt Stalldown
Tormsdale Linea – the explanation says this is after an Irish stone row, but in fact it is in Caithness
Yelland Linea – after a now buried stone alignment in North Devon (but, for once, not on Dartmoor)
I think the IAU might need to do a little more vigorous fact-checking. Apart from anything else, the geographical balance is a bit surprising – only one name taken from Brittany, and that apparently wrong!
2) Death in Holy Orders, by P.D. James
This is the first Dalgliesh novel I’ve read – I have a feeling I did once get through An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, so not quite my first P.D. James. (Interestingly, the two books share the theme of the detective being called in to investigate the possible suicide of a young man by his distant, rich, estranged father.) I very much enjoyed it, especially in contrast to Little, Big which I was slogging through at the same time. Of course, the whole thing depends rather a lot on hidden coincidences and secrets (the bit about the consecrated wafer seemed particularly unlikely to me), but it is entertaining and I found the resolution at least psychologically consistent with what we knew of the characters.
The book is set in an obscure High Church Anglican seminary, and there is a certain amount of reflection on the current state of the Church of England – though perhaps it’s more that she is doing a conscious (and at one point completely overt) riff on Trollope.
1) Little, Big, by John Crowley
I know this is a heretical view, given that this is such a popular and well-loved book, but I found it terrifically tough going. Some good paragraphs, some nice hints at what is going on behind the scenes, but I had to force myself to finish it. Maybe I am just too old to appreciate it properly.
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