An enjoyable revisiting of The Wizard of Oz, interpreting the sad story of Elphaba, who is born with green skin and grows up through the complex political situation in Oz after the Wizard’s coup d’état, only to find that after her sister’s tragic death in a bizarre meteorological accident, the legacy she had always been promised (a pair of beautiful slippers) was casually given away to a stranger. Elphaba’s story ends with a tragic misunderstanding about a bucket of water. As a result of reading Rhetorics of Fantasy I have realised that immersive tales like this are not always for me, but this was fun.

Yesterday being a public holiday (and I’m doing the pont today) we did the trip I have long been wanting to do, to Wéris in the Ardennes, fêted among enthusiasts as Belgium’s answer to Stonehenge. Now that I’ve been and come back I find this guide to the site; on this trip we located only the Wéris I dolmen and the nearby menhir, but it was well worth the visit anyway.

As you can see, Wéris I has a fairly complex structure – the main monument has a sort of front garden of standing stones (here with F in front of the nearest and Anne and U at the next one).

This picture is looking back into the "front garden" from beside the main dolmen.

The main dolmen is too small for adults to explore properly, though better-suited for nine-year-olds:

U is sometimes shy in front of the camera:

But we got her on form a couple of times yesterday:

Finally, a rare portrait of myself, by the fine upstanding menhir about a km away from the first complex:

Now that I have a better idea of where to look, I’ll certainly go back.

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four different ways in which fantasy writers engage with their book (and their readers). First is the portal / quest fantasy, where the hero leaves his or her normality to enter a fantasy world on a heroic journey. Second, the immersive fantasy, which is entirely set within an imagined world. Third, the intrusive fantasy, where the abnormal intrudes into the characters’ reality. And fourth, the liminal fantasy, where we are not certain which is which.

These are not absolutes; many books combine writing in more than one of these rhetorical modes (eg The Lord of the Rings begins as a quest and becomes immersive, and I would say even intrusive in the closing section in the Shire; Perdido Street Station is an immersive fantasy into which there is also an intrusion from elsewhere). But Mendlesohn is convincing on the basic point that these are four very different ways of writing the fantastic, which call on writers (and readers) to approach the texts in specific ways. Four long chapters give specific examples for each of the four rhetorical modes; a fifth looks at exceptions to them.

I’m not acquainted with literary theory, and my academic training is in the rather different fields of hard science and history (where the words “polysemic” and “phatic” are not often used), so when I read books like this I am not really looking to participate in the intellectual debate that the author may want to have. I am looking for i) a better understanding of books I have already read and ii) for suggestions of books I might read in the future which may appeal to me, and Rhetorics of Fantasy supplied me with plenty of material on both counts (and I’m brewing a livejournal poll based on my reading of it). It is so far the only book in its Hugo category that I have read, but I’m already pretty certain that it will get my vote.

This is one of two Hugo nominees for Best Related Book available electronically in full from the WorldCon with your membership. (An extract from a third is also provided, which may or may not help as paper copies are not easy to acquire.) I would probably have bought and read it anyway at some point, what with knowing the author and being interested in the subject, but probably not until after the Hugo voting deadline. So the decision to make it available to WorldCon voters has gained a definite Hugo vote and a positive review from me now, as opposed to a possible sale (and a belated positive review) some time in the future. That’s probably a good deal.

Four quarters don’t quite make a whole, as I still have Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III to go. But I’ve got through 36 Shakespeare plays.

That last quarter included several of the best known ones, all of which I liked – The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Anthony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, King Lear. Of the less well known plays of this batch, the one that really grabbed me was Cymbeline, which I think deserves to be much better known. Coriolanus was not bad either, though the unpleasantness of the central character makes it tougher. Pericles is silly, and Timon of Athens simply not very good.

The Berlaymont is on fire. I just stepped out of my office for lunch only to find evacuated officials, fire engines, and clouds of evil-smelling smoke emanating from the top of the building. Wow.

Revealed here.

Since I completed my run through the complete BF series of Doctor Who plays a couple of months back, they have continued cranking them out. Here’s my thoughts on the latest (Seventh Doctor) audio from their main series, the almost latest (Second Doctor) of the Companion Chronicles, and the first three of the new Eighth Doctor plays.

Matthew Sweet wrote an earlier Doctor Who play, The Year of the Pig, which brought the Sixth Doctor face to face with Marcel Proust in Ostende. Thomas Mann doesn’t make as overt an appearance in The Magic Mousetrap, but by mooring his story in Mann’s Magic Mountain, Sweet has managed to take a lot of the things that tend to annoy me about Seventh Doctor plays – the Doctor as arch-manipulator, the pocket-universe-under-siege plots – and turned them into a rather good piece. The identity of the chief baddie came as a pleasant and well-executed surprise to me (I’d downloaded it without reading the blurb), and although it’s a rather silly concept it is executed well. Recommended, but not for the novice fan.

The second CD also includes the first installment of The Three Companions, an ongoing series featuring Anneke Wills as Polly, Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier and John Pickard as Thomas Brewster. Brewster is certainly my least favourite of the audio companions, but the other two are sheer delight, and I found I had something in my eye as Polly and the Brigadier exchanged notes on their time with the Doctor.

Anneke Wills had already returned to the role of Polly (as well as playing Charley Pollard’s mother, Lady Elspeth, in a number of Eighth Doctor Stories). In Resistance, she tells the story of landing with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Ben in France in early 1944, where to her mixed delight and dismay she meets the airman uncle who she never knew. It’s a very good Polly story – she is practically the first companion along the lines of Rose / Martha / Donna, coming from and rooted in contemporary England (poor Dodo doesn’ really count) and Resistance gives her a bit of New Who treatment, exploring her family background and her relationship with the Doctor. I can forgive a couple of plot holes.

I’m becoming less of a fan of the Eighth Doctor audios, I’m afraid. Orbis has the Doctor suffering from amnesia yet again, and Andrew Sachs playing an evil invertebrate ruler for the second time in twelve months (OK, the first time he was playing Adric controlling the invertebrates). Sheridan Smith does well as Lucie, not having faced these situations before, but we the audience have and this didn’t seem very new.

Hothouse is almost a direct reprise of The Seeds of Doom, Krinoids and all, but done with great verve and double-crossing. Ex-Young One Nigel Planer doesn’t seem quite to know what he is doing, but the rest of the cast, regulars and guests, are great.

This is a story where Miriam Margolyes (on top form) invents the Black Forest gateau. It seems at first as if The Beat of Orlok is going to be a straight Frankenstein pastiche, but then goes in an unexpected direction. The plot is great and so is Margolyes but I was not so impressed with the rest of the team.

So, of this lot I think Hothouse is the most accessible for the general listener. Both The Magic Mousetrap and Resistance have their strengths too.

A hat-tip to my blogging neighbour, ex-US diplomat Gerry Loftus, for linking me to this horrifying article from this monthy’s Harper’s about the infiltration of Christian evangelicals into the US military. Joe Haldeman’s near-future novel Forever Peace has this scenario leading almost to the destruction of the planet Earth. (Heinlein, typically, has this the other way round.)

Normally I’m disinclined to weigh in on atheists vs believers, other than telling people to get a grip, but this is really very disturbing indeed…

…only seven counties out of 42 have voted so far, and Norway already look unstoppable!

I missed the first ten entries, and can’t really be bothered to liveblog as assiduously as I did last year, but I recommend that you follow here and here, presumably from opposite ends of their sofa. And watch it here, of course!

Back in 2003 when the BBC did their Big Read project, four books by Jacqueline Wilson turned up on the Top 100 list (these three and Girls in Love, which is for slightly older readers). I had never heard of her; I made a mental note that she represented one of those odd corners of literature I might someday catch up with.

Well, that was six years ago. Since then, young F became aware of the BBC television series based on The Story of Tracy Beaker, so I mooched it and the other two in the same age bracket for him, and took the morning off my other reading (Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn, and Wicked by Gregory Maguire, having just reached the point where the former references the latter) to read them myself.

They are very good.

The Story of Tracy Beaker is about a girl who has been abandoned by her mother to the care of the state. She tells us in her own voice about her relations with the other children and staff in her home, with her former foster parents, and with a grownup writer who she befriends. It is heartbreaking and also funny: the humour is that Tracy is a delightfully unreliable narrator, who insists that she doesn’t cry, that she didn’t break the Mickey Mouse clock, that her mother is coming to visit, etc. I can see why it scored well in the BBC poll, though the TV series must have helped.

Double Act is actually a rather happy story, of twins whose world is turned upside down when their widowed father moves them to the countryside to start a second-hand bookshop with his new girlfriend. One of Wilson’s great narrative techniques is to have her first-person characters unwittingly show us what other people think of them; here, she does that as usual but has the extra wrinkle of the twins (Ruby, the bossy one, and Garnet, the quiet one) each telling her slightly different side of the story, and (a lovely touch) with illustrations by two different artists depending on whose voice we are reading.

Vicky Angel is a well-told story about grief. Jade’s best friend Vicky is fatally injured in a car accident in the first chapter. Jade gradually and somewhat painfully moves away from seeing the world through Vicky’s eyes, and working out how to relate to her own parent and her surviving schoolmates without her, despite her continued presence in ghostly form. In this story it is the dead Vicky, rather than Jade the narrator, who we particularly start to see through other people’s eyes.

These three books all deal with difficult Issues – being abandoned by your own family (and wishful thinking about a new mother); getting used to a stepmother (and establishing your own identity); the death of a friend (and facing up to the problems of your parents’ marriage). But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that this is all they are about, let alone that they are tough to read. Wilson’s particular gift is to show her readers that there is more than one side of the story, and that even a sympathetic first-person narrator can be completely wrong-headed at times. It is an important lesson for life, and she does it with skill and humour.

One point that struck me when reading The Wizard of Oz was the resonance between the origin stories of the Tin Woodman and the Cybermen. Here is what the Tin Woodman tells us of his story:

"I was born the son of a woodman who chopped down trees in the forest and sold the wood for a living. When I grew up, I too became a woodchopper, and after my father died I took care of my old mother as long as she lived. Then I made up my mind that instead of living alone I would marry, so that I might not become lonely.

"There was one of the Munchkin girls who was so beautiful that I soon grew to love her with all my heart. She, on her part, promised to marry me as soon as I could earn enough money to build a better house for her; so I set to work harder than ever. But the girl lived with an old woman who did not want her to marry anyone, for she was so lazy she wished the girl to remain with her and do the cooking and the housework. So the old woman went to the Wicked Witch of the East, and promised her two sheep and a cow if she would prevent the marriage. Thereupon the Wicked Witch enchanted my axe, and when I was chopping away at my best one day, for I was anxious to get the new house and my wife as soon as possible, the axe slipped all at once and cut off my left leg.

"This at first seemed a great misfortune, for I knew a one-legged man could not do very well as a wood-chopper. So I went to a tinsmith and had him make me a new leg out of tin. The leg worked very well, once I was used to it. But my action angered the Wicked Witch of the East, for she had promised the old woman I should not marry the pretty Munchkin girl. When I began chopping again, my axe slipped and cut off my right leg. Again I went to the tinsmith, and again he made me a leg out of tin. After this the enchanted axe cut off my arms, one after the other; but, nothing daunted, I had them replaced with tin ones. The Wicked Witch then made the axe slip and cut off my head, and at first I thought that was the end of me. But the tinsmith happened to come along, and he made me a new head out of tin.

"I thought I had beaten the Wicked Witch then, and I worked harder than ever; but I little knew how cruel my enemy could be. She thought of a new way to kill my love for the beautiful Munchkin maiden, and made my axe slip again, so that it cut right through my body, splitting me into two halves. Once more the tinsmith came to my help and made me a body of tin, fastening my tin arms and legs and head to it, by means of joints, so that I could move around as well as ever. But, alas! I had now no heart, so that I lost all my love for the Munchkin girl, and did not care whether I married her or not. I suppose she is still living with the old woman, waiting for me to come after her.

"My body shone so brightly in the sun that I felt very proud of it and it did not matter now if my axe slipped, for it could not cut me. There was only one danger–that my joints would rust; but I kept an oil-can in my cottage and took care to oil myself whenever I needed it. However, there came a day when I forgot to do this, and, being caught in a rainstorm, before I thought of the danger my joints had rusted, and I was left to stand in the woods until you came to help me. It was a terrible thing to undergo, but during the year I stood there I had time to think that the greatest loss I had known was the loss of my heart. While I was in love I was the happiest man on earth; but no one can love who has not a heart, and so I am resolved to ask Oz to give me one. If he does, I will go back to the Munchkin maiden and marry her."

This is the original dialogue introducing the Cybermen from Episode 2 of The Tenth Planet:

CYBERMAN 1: We are called Cybermen.
BARCLAY: Cybermen?
CYBERMAN 1: Yes, Cybermen. We were exactly like you once but our cybernetic scientists realised that our race was getting weak.
BARCLAY: Weak, how?
CYBERMAN 1: Our life span was getting shorter so our scientists and doctors devised spare parts for our bodies until we could be almost completely replaced.
POLLY: But… that means you’re not like us. You’re robots!
CYBERMAN 1: Our brains are just like yours except that certain weaknesses have been removed.
BARCLAY: Weaknesses? What weaknesses?
CYBERMAN 1: You call them emotions, do you not?
POLLY: But… that’s terrible! You… you mean you wouldn’t care about someone in pain?
CYBERMAN 1: There would be no need. We do not feel pain.

This is the introduction of Gerry Davis’ Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, slightly revised and improved from the earlier novel Doctor Who and the Cybermen:

The Creation of the Cybermen

Centuries ago by our Earth time, a race of men on the far-distant planet of Telos sought immortality. They perfected the art of cybernetics — the reproduction of machine functions in human beings. As bodies became old and diseased, they were replaced limb by limb, with plastic and steel.

Finally, even the human circulation and nervous system were recreated, and brains replaced by computers. The first cybermen [sic] were born.

Their metal limbs gave them the strength of ten men, and their in-built respiratory system allowed them to live in the airless vacuum of space. They were immune to cold and heat, and immensely intelligent and resourceful. Their large, silver bodies became practically indestructible.

Their main impediment was one that only flesh and blood men would have recognised: they had no heart, no emotions, no feelings. They lived by the inexorable laws of pure logic. Love, hate, anger, even fear, were eliminated from their lives when the last flesh was replaced by plastic.

They achieved their immortality at a terrible price. They became dehumanized monsters. And, like human monsters down through all the ages of Earth, they became aware of the lack of love and feeling in their lives and substituted another goal — power!

It’s fascinating that both (well, all three) have the gradual replacement of original human body parts with artificial substitutes; with the side-effect of this being that emotions are lost too. The Tin Woodman sees it as a Bad Thing, and the Cybermen see it as a Good Thing, but in both cases it’s the driving force of their narratives.

I’m sure I am not the first person to notice this, but it rather leapt out at me!

One of those fantasy classics which I had never actually read, though of course I’ve seen the 1939 film numerous times. Naturally the first thing that strikes me is the number of differences between the two:

1. Dorothy is much younger in the book – the original Denslow illustrations show her as a very little girl, Alice-size or smaller.
2. She is also more passive than in the film (which gives the scarecrow, lion and woodman a bit more character development).
3. Oz is a distant part of our world, not a dream (so Uncle Henry and Auntie Em have to rebuild their house after the cyclone removes it).
4. The Kansas section at the start of the book is very short, and the section at the end even shorter (half a page).
5. The Wizard interviews the four travellers separately, when they arrive in the Emerald City, and appears different to each of them.
6. The Emerald City isn’t all that green – residents and visitors are forced to wear green-tinted spectacles.
7. The magic shoes are silver rather than red.
8. Dorothy and friends encounter a country populated by living china figurines and another populated by sinister “Hammerheads”.
9. There are no songs.

It is generally pleasantly and confidently well-written, and I’ll pass it on to nine-year-old F with a strong recommendation; I think he will enjoy it, and I can see why it is a classic.

For some reason, almost certainly because of my recent posts on their referndum, a dozen Twitter accounts purporting to advertise jobs in British Columbia have added me. (All my lj entries get reflected to nwbrux.) Well, I hope they enjoy my thoughts on Philip K. Dick and (coming up soon) the Wizard of Oz.

This is very far from being a typical PKD novel, yet it was the only one to win a Hugo award, in 1963. The other nominees were The Sword of Aldones, by Marion Zimmer Bradley; A Fall of Moondust, by Arthur C. Clarke; Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper; and Sylva, by Jean Bruller. The only one of these I have read is the Clarke, which is good solid stuff from one of the greats, but I think the Hugo voters got it right. (Have any translated novels other than Sylva ever been shortlisted for the Hugo?)

Alternate history as a sub-genre often gets a bit consumed with its own cleverness, but The Man in the High Castle takes quite a different approach. The plot, as far as it matters, is about two German plots, one to attack Japan, the other to assassinate the author of a novel where Germany and Japan lost the war, and the attempts of Japanese and Americans (and one dissident German) to thwart them. Dick almost instructs us in how to read his alternate history, by having his characters read and talk about their alternate history, and with other incidents probing the links between reality and authenticity. There are a couple of “normal” Dickian moments, when one character somehow finds himself in our world, and when others discover that their world is also fictional; but the flaws in reality are much more subtly done here than in many of Dick’s books, and for that reason more effective.

It is a peculiarly subdued novel. Dick’s writing is often manic: this isn’t, except perhaps just a little towards the end of Juliana’s journey. She and Frank never get back together. Mr Tagomi triumphs morally but is damaged physically. The man in the high castle actually lives in a fairly normal house and isn’t really very nice. But it lingers in the memory.

Tá mé ag foghlaim GaeilgeTá mé = "I am", ag foghlaim = "at the learning", more or less). I understand that the Welsh dw i’n dysgu Gwyddeleg is a similar construction.

Other languages that I know would just use the simple present – j’apprends l’irlandaisich lerne Irischik leer Iers. It’s quite difficult to think of a situation where you would say "I learn Irish" in English, or foghlaimím Gaeilge in Irish. (Or dysgaf Gwyddeleg in Welsh?)

There is a Dutch form which is almost identical in wording to the Irish version – ik ben iers aan het leren – but this is closer in meaning to the French je suis en train d’apprendre l’irlandais, roughly "I am in the middle of learning Irish", so is correct in fewer circumstances. It’s also rather colloquial.

It’s striking that the languages of the archipelago have developed such similar formations for this set of meanings. A (rather minimal) amount of googling indicates that some linguists think this is just coincidence. I am not convinced. I am reminded of the way that Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Romanian all put the definite article as a suffix to the noun, although they come from three different language groups.

Just a thought.

The voters of British columbia reject STV. Oh well.

(, you were right!)

This being the quickest category to read, there are already a number of summaries of the entire ballot out there – Matt Hilliard, Ian Sales, Abigail Nussbaum, Steven Klotz, Rich Horton and Coderyder. There is considerable consensus about which is the best story on the list; there is universal consensus about the worst. My preferences, in reverse order, are as follows:

5) Article of Faith, by Mike Resnick. This is just awful. Comedy caricature clergyman has a cute robot butler who decides to become a Christian. It was so bad I couldn’t finish it. It is embarrassing that this even made the shortlist.

4) Evil Robot Monkey, by Mary Robinette Kowal. This isn’t even a thousand words, and it’s not bad but the idea could have done with a bit more ventilation to do it justice. It feels like a scene from a longer story – possibly a deleted scene at that.

3) 26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss, by Kij Johnson. This is a whimsical piece about Aimee and her 26 monkeys, which are somehow in control of their stage act. It is nicely written but didn’t quite seem to me to amount to anything substantial.

2) From Babel’s Fallen Glory We Fled, by Michael Swanwick. In any year that there wasn’t a Ted Chiang story on the ballot, this would win. It’s a fantastic bit of world-building, two different alien races and a sentient body-suit crossing a hostile wilderness together. Great stuff.

1) Exhalation, by Ted Chiang. Chiang’s particular skill is to take a premise (the sky is a stone vault full of water; angels exist; DNA is written in Hebrew) and make it vivid and believable. This time it is a race of robots who depend for their lives on differential pressure in their argon atmosphere and whose brains operate on slivers of gold leaf. As an article of faith, I hate cute robots; but these robots are not cute, they are serious, determined and possibly facing extinction. Also this is a story about brain surgery which did not make me feel sick, which is rather amazing. Four of the six reviewers who I linked to up top put this top of their ballot; make that five out of seven, including me.

I’m cranking up my reading of this series of graphic novels about fairy-tale characters surviving in modern America. This third volume, unlike the first two, is not a single narrative but several stories bound together, one of which does take the central plot a lot further with two major characters apparently getting killed. Granted it is rather monocultural, but still enjoyable.

Five – well, four – decent stories in this line-up. For further opinions see Rich Horton, Abigail Nussbaum, and the readers of Vector (with links to other reviews, here, here, here, here and here). [ETA: also Ian Sales.] As before I’ll list them in reverse order of preference:

5) Alistair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders, by Mike Resnick: two old men rediscover the magic shop of their youth. One accepts a new life, the other doesn’t; not really much happening, and rather sentimental. (One of the old men is called Nate Silver, but this is probably a coincidence.)

4) Pride and Prometheus, by John Kessel. Jane Austen meets Mary Shelley, as Mary Bennett of Pride and Prejudice has a brief flirtation with Victor Frankenstein. It’s a lovely idea of crossover fanfic, but the idiom isn’t quite there and the ending a bit weak. Somewhat surprised that this won the Nebula.

3) Shoggoths in Bloom, by Elizabeth Bear. Bear won a Hugo last year for another story featuring monsters on a beach, and this will no doubt do well. An African-American biologist visits the shoggoths living on the coast of Maine, while war brews in Germany across the ocean. The setting – human and natural – is well realised; again I was a little disappointed with the ending.

2) The Gambler, by Paolo Bacigalupi. This is a great near-future fairy-tale story contrasting the central character’s youthful experience of escaping a monarchist coup in Laos with his difficulties operating as a journalist in an online media company. Bacigalupi skewers celebrity culture rather well, with a slightly laboured but worthy point about how the real news gets lost. (But he can’t spell Aung San Suu Kyi’s name.)

1) The Ray-Gun: A Love Story, by James Alan Gardner. Sometime I’m just a soppy romantic, and while this is possibly not as good literature as some of the above, I enjoyed it more than any of the others and so it gets my vote. A young boy discovers an alien ray-gun and it comes close to ruining his life. You don’t have to be a literary genius to interpret the ray-gun as any juvenile obsession, potentially even sf itself as a fandom. But it tugged at my heartstrings and won my affection.

So, once again my vote actually goes to the one story which was not included in the e-book package from the WorldCon. (But Ian McDonald tells me that his The Tear is now included in the pack.)

The writer responds.

In years gone by I used to do a mega-meta-review of all the Hugo nominees in the written fiction categories for that year. well, I have decided that life is too short to repeat the exercise again, but I have now read all the shortlisted novels and novellas. (The novellas, except for one, are available in electronic form from the WorldCon.) If you want some wildly diverging views on the list, read Tinkoo here, Coderyder here and Ian Sales (as yet unfinished) here. However, I mostly agree with Richard Horton here. (See also Abigali Nussbaum.) My ranking, in reverse order, is:

5) The Erdmann Nexus, by Nancy Kress: magic in old people’s home, which turns out to be related to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, only not quite as good.

4) True Names by Cory Doctorow and Ben Rosenbaum: post-singularity stuff which made it rather difficult for me to care about the characters. Also dubious measurements.

3) The Political Prisoner by Charles Coleman Finlay: nasty story about nasty people (with surprisingly few sfnal elements), but very solid and coherent world-building, both in terms of human and physical geography.

2) The Truth by Robert Reed: also a nasty story about nasty people, but very well worked out procedural of US agents interrogating a suspected time-traveller who has been involved with horrible terrorist atrocities.

1) The Tear by Ian McDonald: takes a premise which is quite similar to the Doctorow/Rosenbaum True Names but does it much better: believable characters (several of them inhabiting the same body) and wonderful descriptive language of a richly imagine future very different from ours. Solidly gets my vote.

Interesting that my two first choices so far (The Tear and Anathem are the only nominees in their respective categories which aren’t in the WorldCon ebook package. No doubt we shall be chewing over the impact this has on the results come September…

I have changed my mind; this is the best of the Harry Potter books (and of course also won the Hugo in 2001). I could forgive it a lot of flaws for the single chapter about the Yule Ball, which is full of nicely observed adolescent angst; but in fact the rest of it is pretty good as well; the testing of our hero in a series of mystical quests is an old theme, but here it is transplanted rather successfully into the context of a magical boarding school. I had also completely forgotten the excellent twist at the end as we discover who among the teaching staff is really on the side of the baddies. I must have read it too quickly first time round; the denouement made more sense than I remembered it doing.

My pet peeve of the first three books, that we don’t get much sense of what is going on behind the scenes in the Ministry of Magic, is well answered here as we get a lot of insight into the past and present bureaucratic infighting. One other point of irritation when I first read it – that it is much longer than any of the first three books in the series – has been undermined by the last three books being of similar or greater length. And by bringing Voldemort back to physical life, and in various other ways, the scene is established for the conflicts of the second half of the series. I think I would recommend the two people in the English-speaking world who haven’t tried Rowling and aren’t sure if they would like Harry Potter to start here.

< Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | The Tales of Beedle the Bard >

I was reviewing the Norwegian list of the best 100 books recently, and realised that I could get some of them from BookMooch; this was the first to arrive, from Singapore.

It’s really good. This is a play dating from about 430 BC, and we all know the story in advance, so I wondered how fresh it could possibly seem, but I really enjoyed reading it and would love to see it on stage. (I have seen Pasolini’s film, but that’s not quite the same.)

The interest is the interplay between the three main characters, Oedipus himself, Jocasta and her brother Cleon, as the story is unfolded to them by a succession of walk-ons (Tiresias, the messenger, the shepherd, etc) – although the plot covers the whole of Oedipus’ life, the setting of the play respects the unities and takes place over a few hours or possibly days.

Sophocles uses the plot as a framework to meditate on fate and predestination (where his argument if largely of historical interest) and also to speculate on different kinds of sight and blindness (and here I think his thoughts are timeless; we can substitute all kinds of dogmas about planning and professionalism for the way he writes about prophecy).

I was reading the 1909 translation by Sir George Young, which is decent enough, though I can imagine it being done more fluently in today’s idiom.

Read this passage, lightly redacted from one of this year’s Hugo nominees, and tell me if you think “lightsecond” is being used (correctly) as a unit of distance or (incorrectly) as a unit of time.

A docking-mouth opened, a whirlpool of matter spinning out and away, and the comet plunged into this vast funnel. For the first lightsecond, magnetic fields induced its braking, absorbing a fraction of its massive kinetic energy. Then a web of lasers met it…

See what I mean? One doesn’t normally talk of, say, the first ten metres of braking; rather of the first half-second or so. And if the extruded funnel is really meant to be more than 300,000 km in size, that raises all kinds of problems about just how quickly this can be happening. Let’s be charitable and assume it is a misprint for “millisecond”; “lightsecond” really makes no sense here.

(PS: two posts I made by email yesterday turned up on LJ with time-stamps eight hours into the future. I’m emailing this at about 0840 local time.)

I’m still looking for the perfect book about The Prisoner, but this is not bad at all: originally published in French (but translated fairly smoothly) it includes the usual episode guide, but lavishly illustrated and recounting each plot in great detail; it has one thing I really did want, a narrative of the production history (which puts script editor George Marksteiner’s side of the story as well as McGoohan’s version of events); and also a fascinating interview with McGoohan, where he says that actually he would have been happy if only seven episodes had been made; there are only seven that he finds true to the concept and the rest are padding. (We may now try and identify which they were.) Recommended.

An odd little book which must have belonged to someone of my grandparents’ generation (published by the London Catholic firm Sheed & Ward in 1940). Belloc insists that Chesterton is the greatest English writer of his own lifetime, and weaves into the argument many of the assertions common to the English Catholic intelligentsia of his day. The only point that I found new or interesting was his contrast between Chesterton, as an explicitly English writer, and Kipling, as an Imperial writer, including this striking statement:

All of us who have travelled can witness to the effect of Kipling upon the reputation of England abroad. Kipling’s ignorance of Europe, his vulgarity and its accompanying fear of superiors (which modern people call an inferiority-complex) have profoundly affected and affected adversely the reputation of England and the Englishman throughout the world.

I’m not well enough read in either writer to take a firm position; I certainly enjoy Chesterton more than Kipling (he is funnier and not quite as politically awful), but Belloc’s reasons for finding Kipling’s success rather unjust are that he is less English and therefore more accessible in America, and happened to have a good French translator. I shall check what Margaret Drabble thinks of them all, and then try to get hold of The Light That Failed.

The test itself is here. I was rather shocked at how few of the questions I actually care much about, especially the ones about Antwerp. (NB though that question 8 out of 36 is about recognising English as an official language in Brussels.)