Monday morning I woke up in excruciating pain at 0400, and phoned the office of the dentist who I had seen last Thursday. I was planning to just leave a “I NEED AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT PLEASE CALL ME BACK” message on his answering machine, but to my surprise a rather sleepy nurse answered and promised to book me in as soon as possible. She called back mid-morning and told me to go to the other partner’s other office at lunchtime, which was quite a long way away, but luckily I had the car. The partner looked at me somewhat askance when I arrived, and asked if I remembered meeting him before, because the nurse thought he had treated me? I confirmed his suspicion that we did not know each other.

Five minutes later, after fiddling around in my mouth for a bit he exclaimed “Ah! I remember now! My colleague brought me in last week to look at you! I didn’t recognise you, Mr Whyte, but I do recognise your tooth!” And he turned to his assistant and repeated in French, “C’est ça, je me souviens de sa dent!”

Rather sorely I returned to the office. I will have to go back for more on Thursday of this week. The words “root canal” have been mentioned. (Discussing this with colleagues today, one of them said that as far as he knew he didn’t have any root canals and hoped he would never find out.)

My mood on Monday was not improved by Belgacom, who cannot install a land-lines for the new office until 31 July. (Those of you – most of you, I think – who are in my address book will have received a note today of my new coordinates including a cryptic statement about this.) Since Belgacom have a monopoly on the crucial local loop part, we are trapped. In order to get internet access for the office at all, I went out and invested in a pair of wireless USB dongles – my assistant’s dongle works fine, but I had to do a lot of fiddling with my own dongle to get it to perform properly.

*snigger*

Meanwhile my nether regions are making a good recovery, thank you. My assistant has been performing miracles of IKEA furniture assembly while I’ve been fiddling with my dongle and taking it fairly easy with the heavy lifting. I probably should have been more careful last week – I suspect I did set myself back a couple of days. But it seems better now.

This made me laugh.

On Sunday morning I emailed 38 MEPs, the 14 who represent me as a resident of Flanders, and another 24 of various nationalities and political inclinations who I happen to know professionally or personally.

48 hours on, I have had replies from precisely three – the sole Flemish Green, and two German Greens. Silence from all the other political groups.

Perhaps the day before and the first day of the week of a plenary sitting in Strasbourg is not a fair test. Be that as it may, Mr Staes now has a pretty good chance of getting my vote next year.

Edited to add: Had a reply also from Chris Davies (Lib Dem, NW England) along the same lines as .

I won’t be doing my mega-meta-review this year – other things have been absorbing my energy. However, various people have been reminding me that it is time to cast my vote, so I can reveal that my preferences are as follows:

Best Novel (links to my earlier livejournal reviews)

5) Rollback, by Robert J Sawyer. While this is the best book I have read by this author, this should be understood as damning with faint praise. The prose somehow seems a bit less clunky: the tedious undergraduate-level discussions of philosophy and science are wisely constrained to the first half of the book; the two story lines – the central character’s unexpected rejuvenation, and the decoding of an alien message – come close to reinforcing each other.

Yet in the end, it doesn’t work. The biggest flaw is that while our central character is undergoing the dramatic changes of rejuvenation, and the consequent disruption of his life with his wife and family, we get very little sense of being inside his head. The second huge plot problem is that the alien messages come only once every 18.8 years (well, actually every 37.6 years): surely once contact has been established, one would set up continuous transmission in both directions, even knowing that there would be an 18.8 year lag?

4) The Last Colony, by John Scalzi. I have much more sympathy with the political message of this book than of the same author’s Old Man’s War: humanity is dragged into an unwinnable war with the rest of the galaxy by the lies of its own political leadership, and our hero ends up as the one man who can resolve matters. So no complaints on that score.

There are touches I liked – Charles Stross makes an appearance as a genetically engineered super-soldier, and I appreciated the subtle “Commodore Perry” riff at the end of the book. But the plot is both complex and reliant on fortunate accidents of timing. And I find Scalzi’s narrative style rather wearyingly unvarying; almost all the characters speak with identical voices.

3) The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. A great book, set in 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). 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 my top two preferences. Still, it won the Nebula and the Locus Awards. (Thanks, .)

2) Halting State, by Charles Stross. A glorious melding of genres, police procedural and cyberpunk, set in the Edinburgh of an independent Scotland in a few years’ time. The narrative voice is striking – three different viewpoint characters, but all told in the second person, as (quite deliberately) in a computer game. There are nods to all kinds of sf taproot texts, and an unnerving background theme of questioning reality. And Charlie’s prose seems somehow more under control than I can remember from any of his other books. Excellent stuff, and only just squeezed out of the top spot in my ballot paper.

1) Brasyl, by Ian McDonald. The setting of Brazil fits McDonald’s 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. Has already won the BSFA award.

What others say: Karen Burnham agrees with me except that she puts Halting State last. Joe Sherry is with me on the top choice. Alan Heuer reverses my top two and bottom two. This person reverses my third and fourth choices. Susan De Guardiola hasn’t finished them yet but her ballot is very different from mine.

Best Novella (links to stories on-line)

5) All Seated on the Ground, by Connie Willis. I am not a total hater of Willis’ work – I very much enjoyed both Doomsday Book and her short story “Even the Queen” – but I find her appeals to sentimentality a bit wearying, and this story combines that with another wearyingly familiar Willis theme, failure to communicate – both between a newly arrived group of aliens and between the earthwoman trying to communicate with them and her boss. No doubt a lot of people will vote for it because they think it is funny, but I didn’t laugh.

4) The Fountain of Age, by Nancy Kress. Oddly enough this is the nominee that comes closest to my professional interests, in that it is partly set on Cyprus (and then the rest of the story has the protagonist dealing with the consequences of what happened there). But it didn’t really do it for me; reflections on aging, lost loves, and new biotechnology which just didn’t gel satisfactorily for this reader.

3) Memorare by Gene Wolfe. A rather peculiar story of astronautical documentary makers in the moons of Jupiter, lost loves, grave-robbing and unpleasant brain-washing by alien intelligences. The science, such as it was, didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and I didn’t really get what the story was supposed to be about.

2) Stars Seen Through Stone, by Lucius Shepard. Certainly the least traditionally sfnal of these nominees (possibly of all the nominees). Spooky happenings in small-town Pennsylvania in the 1970s, well told and with a set of interesting characters and relationships navigating through the odd happenings. Very enjoyable.

1) Recovering Apollo 8 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Perhaps I am a crazy sentimentalist, but I loved this more than any of the other nominees in any category. The story is an alternate timeline where Apollo 8 was lost at Christmas 1968; and over the next several decades, the capsule and then the bodies of the three astronauts are recovered, one by one. I’m fascinated by this sort of thing, having dabbled in archaeology myself at one time; and Rusch takes an audacious concept and rus well with it. It won the Asimov’s readers’ poll in its category.

What others say: John DeNardo almost agrees with me but reverses the top two; likewise Karen Burnham. Alan Heuer and Abigail Nussbaum also almost agree with me, with the important exception of bumping Rusch down from first to third and fourth place respectively.

Best Novelette (links to stories on-line)

5) Dark Integers, by Greg Egan. Familiar territory for Egan of mathematics changing reality; but I was rather unconvinced by the idea of the three or four human mathematicians who are responsible for relations with the dangerous other universe. Just didn’t work for me. Won the Asimov’s readers’ poll though.

4) Glory, by Greg Egan. Egan has two stories on the ballot, but I didn’t really like either of them. This one is about a mission of enlightened investigators from a more developed situation doing guerilla archaeology on a more primitive world, and paying the price. Again, I wasn’t totally convinced by it.

3) Finisterra, by David Moles. Utterly superb worldbuilding, of a planet with living dirigible beasts, now being exploited by the humans who are colonising the world; the plot is fairly standard but the scenery amazing.

2) The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang. A lovely lovely story of time travel at the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, working up all those human themes of loss and love in a richly imagined fantastic environment that Chiang has done so well before. I expect this will win.

1) The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairytale of Economics, by Daniel Abraham. I thought this was superbly original. Like the Chiang story, it adopts a fantasy fairy-tale style of presentation; but I can’t remember any other story I have read about economics that was this much fun and avoided being preachy. Gets my vote.

What others say: Abigail Nussbaum and Joe Sherry put The Cambist… second, and John DeNardo bumps it down to third place but otherwise they agree with me; Karen Burnham and Alan Heuer agree with me apart from putting Finisterra fourth and fifth respectively.

Best Short Story (links to stories on-line)

5) Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?, by Ken MacLeod. Sadly didn’t really do anything for me; a rather dense space opera story whose point sailed over my head.

4) Distant Replay, by Mike Resnick. Another one of those sentimental stories, about one’s dead spouse coming back to life, that will do better than it deserves.

3) A Small Room in Koboldtown, by Michael Swanwick. Rather a fun detective story in an indutrialising fantasy setting. Won the Locus award.

2) Last Contact, by Stephen Baxter. A moving and ingenious story about the end of the world, let down just a little by Baxter’s prose, which has never quite worked for me (but came very close to doing so here).

1) Tideline, by Elizabeth Bear. I really hate stories about anthropomorphic robots which develop deep and meaningful relationships with human beings which we are supposed to find moving. Elizabeth Bear has scored big time by writing such a story about a decidedly non-anthropomorphic robot developing a friendship with a boy as it gradually breaks down on a beach. Really good stuff, which won the Asimov’s readers’ poll.

What others say: Abigail Nussbaum completely disagrees with me, putting Ken MacLeod first and Stephen Baxter fourth. John DeNardo swaps my top two, and also my third and fourth choices; Alan Heuer swaps my top two and my bottom two. Joe Sherry likes the Baxter but not the Bear. Karen Burnham has only read the top two but agrees with me on their ranking.

I should also add that for the relevant category I am voting for Blink, Human Nature/Family of Blood, and Captain Jack Harkness in that order.

In summary: I liked this set of nominations much more than last year’s. In each of the fiction categories, I feel that any of my top three nominations would be a credible winner. (Probably my feeling this won’t be enough to stop Connie Willis though.)

Edited to add: Apologies to John DeNardo for misidentifying him first time round!

On Monday, July 7, 2008 there will be an attempt to sneak through an EU law to clamp down on file-sharing. If it gets passed, you could end up being disconnected from the Net for ever if your ISP decides you’ve been file-sharing.

More information here. Worth bearing in mind that the two principal protagonists of this bad proposal are British Conservatives, Malcolm Harbour and Syed Kamall.

I have a certain amount of contact with MEPs, but perhaps not surprisingly very few of those who I know at all well seem to be directly involved with this.

Edited to add: Bart Staes, the sole MEP of the Flemish party Groen!, tells me that the Green/European Free Alliance group will vote against. Worth writing to them anyway to stiffen their resolve. More updates as I get responses.

ETA 2: Heide Rühle, the Green/EFA rapporteur, gives a somewhat different spin – she tells me that “most of [the rumours] are unjustified see my added explanation [which she attached, and I must say didn’t make a lot of sense to me]. But we’ll meet once more with the legal service on Monday to clarify that no wording can endanger the freedom of Internet.”

Funny how Daleks speak German with an English accent?

And NB “Whatever you say” translates as “Was Sie auch sagen”, not “Was immer Sie sagen”. Edited to add: This is not a fair criticism – see below – though I stand by my comment on the Daleks’ accents!

More later – I will do a second-half-of-season roundup post in due course.

3) Why I am not a Christian, and other essays on religion and related subjects, by Bertrand Russell

Although I knew from the title that I probably wouldn’t agree with a lot of this, I found it a very enjoyable read. It includes essays of varying lengths (the shortest is less than two pages, the longest 27), on the existence of God and ethical questions in general. On the more general questions, Russell is definitely a liberal, opposed to forced conformity and social hypocrisy, and his views are pretty close to mine. I particularly enjoyed a couple of historical pieces – a review of two books on medieval history and a sketch of the life of Thomas Paine.

On the existence of God, the most interesting of several pieces is a transcript of a radio debate between Russell and a Jesuit, where Russell clearly wins the argument about logical proofs, doesn’t make as convincing a case on ethics, and has no answer to the question of religious experience. (The Jesuit misses a chance to push Russell on what I have always seen as the weakest point of his side of the argument, that science and logic are not in fact able to explain the whole of human experience; and the anti-God response tends to be to pretend that things which don’t fall into the domain of science and logic don’t need to be explained, which is then a tautology.)

I still prefer Russell’s approach to that of, say, Richard Dawkins, because Russell seems to me to have a better grip of the problem: he quite rightly attacks dogmatic beliefs, be they Christian or Communist, held tyrannously by anyone, and advocates free thinking and debate; and one of his arguments against religion, in particular Christianity, is that it usually fosters and leads to this sort of tyranny. My own view is that it is a categorical error to blame this pattern of human behaviour, which is found and has been found among rulers of all religious backgrounds and of none, on religion per se. (There are also plenty of examples of states with a strong religious consciousness which none the less practice or practiced pluralism, but Russell discounts them as not being religious enough, which by his lights they aren’t.)

The book finishes with a long (40 pages) description by the editor, Paul Edwards, of an incident where Russell was barred from taking up a professorship at the City College of New York as a result of an outrageous court judgement, combined with political machinations by (ultimately) Mayor LaGuardia. It is a depressing story, and illustrates that the American system is not always all that it is cracked up to be; but this is perhaps less newsworthy in 2008 than it was in 1940.

“Maiden aunts are invariably nice, especially, of course, when they are rich; ministers of religion are nice, except those rare cases in which they elope to South Africa with a member of the choir after pretending to commit suicide.”

(Answer.)

2) Collected Short Stories, by E.M. Forster

I’m ashamed to say that the only one of Forster’s novels I have actually read is The Longest Journey, though I have seen film versions of A Passage to India, A Room With A View and Howard’s End, which all came out at a time in my life when I saw more films than I do now. I knew that one of these stories is “The Machine Stops”, a riposte to H.G. Wells’ visions of a mechanised future, but I expected the rest to be vignettes in Forster’s distinctive but generally naturalistic aesthetic style. I was therefore surprised to find that of the twelve stories, ten can be classified as fantasy (and “The Machine Stops” as science fiction) with only the last one, “The Eternal Moment” having no overtly unrealistic elements. And they are interesting stories, too, sometimes giving a wicked spin to traditional concepts of death and the afterlife, sometimes just being wicked. I hadn’t really considered Forster as a genre writer before, so it was quite a revelation.

One trick he does rather well is the unreliable narrator – a couple of his viewpoint characters are overconfident men who reveal enough of themselves that the reader can be sure that the writer does not sympathise with them. I hope this isn’t flogging a dead horse, but reminded me a couple of days ago of why I have found other uses of the “unreliable narrator” so unsatisfactory, if there is no discernible hint that (to adapt Achebe’s phrase about Conrad) the character enjoys anything less than the author’s complete confidence. Forster can drop those hints entirely discernibly without damaging the integrity (or readability) of his narrative; one of the things that makes him a great writer.

…Who said, “Although pain isn’t real,
If I sit on a pin
And it punctures my skin
I dislike what I fancy I feel!”

I’m sore.

The dentist had another go at my tooth this afternoon and prescribed me industrial strength Ibuprofen. And since last Friday, my groin has been very sore and sensitive indeed. Today is the first day for almost a week that I have been walking almost normally.

It’s been bad timing, because this was also the week that I moved our office (albeit only two blocks, from here to here, but still taxing) – thank heavens for my heroic assistant, and my family and friends, who helped with humping boxes, IKEA furniture purchases, etc.

But I also feel rather lucky. The last week has been grim for me in terms of physical discomfort – probably the worst I can remember in my life; other periods of ill health I have had have just involved lying in bed feeling crap rather than actually being in pain at both ends. But other people have it worse. My ground down molar will eventually heal; my groin will return to normal (minus one significant potential ability). My wife has been very gallant in not mentioning too loudly her experiences in delivering our three children. And other people – some reading this, I know – live in constant pain, from whatever reason. It’s something I have spent most of my life not having to think about; and the fact that I have spent much of the last week thinking about it has been a revelation of the extent of my own good fortune.

This is what the poll reveals as the Worst Who stories (listed in order of decreasing consensus by Doctor).

Fifth Doctor: (33 respondents, of whom 1 said that they were all fantastic) The run(a)way winner is Time Flight, voted the worst by 15 of you. The novelisation is no better. In second place, though a long way behind, is Black Orchid on four votes, followed by Kinda and Warriors of the Deep on three, Four to Doomsday and Snakedance on two, and Earthshock, Arc of Infinity and The King’s Demons on one each. The only one of these that I would be slightly defensive about is Snakedance.

Second Doctor: (28 respondents, of whom six think they are all fantastic) Far in front of the field here is The Underwater Menace, tagged as worst by 12 of you. The only other story to get more than one vote was The Krotons with four. Scattered votes went to The Highlanders, The Macra Terror, Fury from the Deep, The Dominators, The Space Pirates and The War Games. All of this is understandable enough, and I guess that the reason more people didn’t vote for, in particular, The Dominators and The Space Pirates is that not many have endured them.

Ninth Doctor: (54 votes, of whom 7 said they were all fantastic) Slightly surprised that the winner here by a convincing margin is The Long Game with 16 votes, followed some way behind by Aliens of London / World War Three (my own choice) and Father’s Day both on nine, Boom Town on 8, with The Unquiet Dead on 4 and a solitary (incomprehensible) vote for The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances. No votes at all for Rose, The End of the World, Dalek, or Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways. I’m more than a little surprised by the hate for The Long Game, which like a number of other Tenth Doctor episodes (Boom Town, Father’s Day) I enjoyed a lot more on re-watching, and which seems to me about as good as The End of the World.

Sixth Doctor: (32 votes, of whom six said they were all terrible and two diehards insist that they are all good) Quite close here, with Timelash beating out The Twin Dilemma (my own choice) by 9 votes to 8. The Mark of the Rani got two votes, with one each for Revelation of the Daleks and for each individual segment of Trial of a Time Lord. No specific votes, perhaps surprisingly, for Attack of the Cybermen, Vengeance on Varos or The Two Doctors, but they are covered by the six who disliked everything.

Seventh Doctor: (36 votes, including two each for “all great!” and “all terrible!”, and another two for the mistakenly included option of the whole of 1989’s Season 26) Three stories at the top here, Time and the Rani winning with nine votes, followed by Delta and the Bannermen with eight and The Happiness Patrol with seven. One each for Paradise Towers, Silver Nemesis, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Battlefield, The Curse of Fenric and SurvivalDragonfire, Remembrance of the Daleks or Ghost Light. I find this completely incomprehensible. I didn’t think much of either Time and the Rani or The Happiness Patrol, but I am obviously alone in finding them way ahead of either Battlefield (my own choice) or Remembrance of the Daleks.

Third Doctor: (33 votes, including a record 7 who liked them all) The clear winner here was my own pick, The Mutants, with eight votes, twice as many as its nearest rival, The Time Monster with four. The Claws of Axos and Carnival of Monsters each got three, Invasion of the Dinosaurs two, and one each for Doctor Who and the Silurians, Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, Colony in Space, Planet of the Daleks, and The Monster of Peladon. While I do agree that The Mutants is unusually awful, I don’t think it is that much worse than most of the other stories listed here, and indeed several which got no votes (The Dæmons, The Three Doctors, Planet of the Spiders).

Tenth Doctor: (58 votes, including one who likes them all and two who want to defer judgement until after next Saturday) A tie! Fourteen votes each went to the late Season Two stories Love & Monsters and Fear Her. This is way ahead of Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks which got six votes (including mine). 42 got four votes, Voyage of the Damned three, with two each for Tooth and Claw, The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, and The Doctor’s DaughterNew Earth, Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel, The Idiot’s Lantern, Army of Ghosts / Doomsday, Human Nature / The Family of Blood, Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky, and The Unicorn and the Wasp. Again, I’m surprised by the concentration of votes on two stories which I didn’t especially warm to either but which seem to me equal if not superior in quality to some of the others listed here.

Eighth Doctor: 48 votes, of whom 37 said this was an unfair question and 11 voted for Doctor Who – the TV movie. Which can be read in several different ways.

First Doctor: (28 votes, of whom 2 liked them all) Another tie, but in a much more closely contested field. The Chase and The Gunfighters both got four votes; The Sensorites (my own choice), The Web Planet and The Space Museum got three each; An Unearthly Child and The Smugglers two; and one each for The Daleks, The Edge of Destruction, Marco Polo, Planet of Giants and Galaxy 4. I’m sorry to see The Gunfighters do so badly; I think it is rather special. (Though I’m glad that the other stories from that run in Season 3 got very few votes.)

Fourth Doctor: (37 votes, of whom 4 liked them all) A close race, but The Horns of Nimon with five votes just beats my own choice, Underworld which got four. Two votes each went to Revenge of the Cybermen, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Invisible Enemy, The Sun Makers, The Creature from the Pit, and MeglosThe Sontaran Experiment, Terror of the Zygons, The Hand of Fear, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death, Image of the Fendahl, The Pirate Planet, The Androids of Tara, The Power of Kroll, The Armageddon Factor, Destiny of the Daleks, and State of Decay. I’m surprised some of those didn’t get more, and also surprised by some of the absences (eg The Invasion of Time). However it is difficult to dispute the top two, and while I voted for Underworld rather than The Horns of Nimon, I think this is something about which reasonable people can disagree.

Thus is revealed the accumulated weight of Livejournal. I am in line with the majority on only three of the nine where there is a serious contest; , whose debate with me sparked this, does rather better. So basically, Pete wins the argument.

When I saw Frank at P-Con a few months ago, I complimented him (sincerely) on how well he was looking, and said that I was very glad to see him there. He chuckled in that way he had, and said that he expected to be around for a while yet. Well, he was wrong; but we will remember him for more than just “a while”.

1) Children of the Atom, by Wilmar H. Shiras

On that list of the 100 most influential sf books that was going round a year or so ago, this was the only one whose author I simply had never heard of. It is set twenty years in the future (ie 1973), and revolves around the assembling of a group of children whose parents all died after a nuclear accident in 1959, and who all display exceptional intelligence. At the end of the book, the children decide that they must integrate into the mainstream of society.

It’s obviously at least in part a parable of fandom / geekdom, but a rather effective one. Definitely an under-rated classic.