A collection of four short graphic stories, each centred around a social misfit and showimg him or her both as they see themselves and as they are seen by others, with sometimes brutal clarity. Tomine’s ability to depict multiple viewpoints is pretty amazing. Few of his characters are particularly likeable but they are all fascinating.

The day the Wall fell, I split up with my girlfriend. She had moved to a different city, and the long-distance thing wasn’t working; I went to visit her that Thursday evening, and we had an intense conversation over drinks and pizza, vaguely aware that people were staring at the television screens but assuming it was some sports event. By the time we had worked out that we had both reached the same conclusion about the future of the relationship, I had missed the last train; we went back to her place, I slept on the couch and got up early to go home. And then I bought a newspaper and discovered that while one (short and mostly sweet) chapter of my life was ending, the world had changed forever.

I first went to Berlin in 1986, over the long weekend of German Unity Day which was then on June 17, hitch-hiking there with a friend who I was working with in Heilbronn way off in the southeast. In those days Berlin was a slightly hippyish enclave (the hostel we stayed in was very hippyish and slightly threatening) on the front line of the Cold War. The inner German border remains the most vigorously fortified frontier I have ever seen. We went east as well as west (by tram to Frieedrichstraße), and took pictures of the Brandenburg Gate from both sides which I guess I must still have somewhere; I went to an eastern bookshop and made the mistake of referring to "Ost-Berlin" (rather than "Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR"). At that point the Wall had been up for almost 25 years and looked like it would remain a lot longer.

I went back with Anne in 1992. It was utterly transformed, of course. I cried as we walked through the Brandenburg Gate, which had appeared so utterly blocked by historical circumstance and concrete fortification only a few years before. The west of the city had found a new security and confidence, a strong sense of liberation; the east was still shell-shocked by defeat. The transport system, now unified, charged considerably less to former easterners buying tickets. The frenzy of new build was just getting going but the momentum wasn’t yet there. Since then I’ve been back perhaps half a dozen times. Earlier this year I took an afternoon to retrace the Wall, helpfully marked out by bricks in the road. It remains a fascinating city for me, and every time I go I find something new.

The BBC has a handy list of walls that remain, including two of which I have direct experience (Belfast and the Green Line in Nicosia) and another which I work on (the Moroccan berm closing off the illegally occupied part of the Western Sahara). Just as the Berlin Wall disturbed me in 1986, any restriction like this disturbs me now. Robert Frost wrote "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall"; his New Hampshire boundary markers were threatened by natural forces, perhaps elves, built by old stone savages. The conflict-built walls of the world are also perpetually under threat from the erosive force of history. And a good thing too.

A totally fascinating book looking at how the human impact on the environment can cause societies to collapse or disappear. The particularly memorable chapters are on Easter Island and the Viking settlements on Greenland, both cases where the natural resources were exploited to the point of mass death. There are lots of other case studies as well, mostly dealing with larger societies or states, but none quite as dramatic or as detailed.

The final chapters are an excellent synthesis of the message of the book. Diamond has a not very profound but interesting take on the nature of political decision-making, and why it goes wrong; on business and the environment (I would like to know more about the Marine Stewardship Council, and why it has had so little impact in Europe), and finally on future prospects for saving the world, where he is cautiously optimistic but not complacent. He is clear that our current patterns of environmental exploitation are not sustainable, but hopes that a sufficiently conscious public will be able to pressurise its leaders into taking action. The book will certainly help.

This is the book which begins by describing its heroine as "blond [rather than blonde] and ovately willowy". Thanks to everone who has speculated on the meaning of the last two words there; I guess I am convinced that she is thin with wide, childbearing hips, but it is possible to imagine a more comprehensible description.

Anyway, Freda Caron is a botanist working on some strange flowers from a newly discovered planet. That's basically the plot. Boyd appears to be trying to say deep things about sexuality and sexual politics, and the nature of humanity, but it really doesn't work. I was surprised to discover that the book dates from as late as 1969; it feels of an earlier 60s vintage. The ending, whereFreda gives birth to a plant-human hybrid, is particularly silly.

The book I am reading right now begins by describing the heroine as “Blond and ovately willowy”.

If you think you know what the author meant by “ovately willowy”, please explain to me in comments. Extra points if you identify the novel in question.

(I am about to get on a twelve-hour transatlantic flight from Istanbul to New York so it will be a while before I can respond.)

No actual plot, just a series of very short vignettes of cities each of which embodies some aspect of human social interactions, told as a set of reminiscences by Marco Polo to his ruler / leader / captor, the Great Khan. Some of them are pretty vivid; they would have been more memorable if I weren’t on a red-eye flight reading them.

• Autism is not a dirty word
  Charlotte Moore talks sense.
  (tags: autism)

I’d read the same author’s Crescent City Rhapsody some time back and wasn’t overwhelmed. Same here; some nice descriptive passages, but I never quite grasped what was going on – setting too peculiar and characters not interesting enough to be worth following. I finished it because my plane was stuck with technical problems on an African runway so I had nothing else to do.

An excellent Rebus mystery: raking through the ashes of an Edinburgh hotel brings out all kinds of seamy connections between the business elite and Scotland’s criminal underworld, with Rebus and his colleagues bending rules slightly beyond my suspension of disbelief, but accepting the consequences when things go wrong. Rebus’ brother reappears as well. I worked out the significance of the gas being turned on before Rebus did, but there was a sufficiently satisfying series of twists before we reached the end. One of the better Rebuses I have read (of five so far).

Livejournal’s “detect location” thingy thinks I am at Calle del Caballero de Gracia 21, Madrid, Spain.

In fact I am at 4° 51′ 30.6″ N, 31° 35′ 54.1″ E.

Well, what’s a mere 3300 miles / 5300 km difference???

I found this an unexpectedly brilliant novel. As it starts it seems like simply a fairly plain tale of being black in Michigan. But it opens up into a fascinating voyage for the protagonist, Macon “Milkman” Dead, as he discovers the truth about his own family’s past, criss-crossing America to explore both geography and history in a process of self-emancipation. The title of the book is a beautiful piece of misdirection as well – several of the characters have bizarre biblical names (Milkman has a sister called First Corinthians), so I expected that we would encounter some similar reference to the Song of Solomon, but in fact the explanation is quite different and entirely satisfying. Barack Obama claims this is one of his favourite novels, and I can bring myself to believe it.

This is the first Torchwood book I have read, rather than listened to, and it was a good start. Set before the end of the first season (indeed before Gwen’s affair with Owen), the immediately striking thing is that the team has acquired a sixth member, James, who is rather too good a fit to be true. It’s fairly obvious from the first page what the problem is; Abnett supplies us with a decent chewy and often witty tale of suspense as to how he will get to the inevitable conclusion (and exactly what form that conclusion will take), along with the usual weird alien menaces. I’ve seen some fans complain that apart from Gwen and Jack the team are rather obscured by the rest of the story, but really this points more to a problem of having a large ensemble cast to begin with.

I am not surprised that Herman Van Rompuy, who has been prime minister of Belgium since the turn of the year, is the front-runner for the first EU presidency now that Vaclav Klaus has signed the Lisbon Treaty.

First of all, Tony Blair was never really a candidate. He got backing from people who hadn’t really thought about it much, including I suspect himself, but once it became clear that the centre right wanted one of their own, he was toast. In any case, the small states were always going to be unenthusiastic about a leader from a large state taking on the role. So, of the 27 member states, the heads of government of Austria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the UK are ruled out for being in the wrong political family. That leaves 13 countries. But we can also rule out France, Germany and Italy because the small states are unlikely to agree to an EU President from a large state (and anyway Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi are not interested). That leaves 10. But we can also rule out the newest member states, who are not sufficiently known quantities as yet; there will in due time be a Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish or Romanian candidate, but that time is not now.

That leaves only four countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Sweden. The Swedes’ stock is high, but they have the disadvantage that they hold the EU presidency at the moment and it looks really bad if you are chairing the meeting which selects you for promotion. That leaves the Benelux prime ministers, Balkenende, Juncker and Van Rompuy. Juncker is the longest serving PM in the EU (since 1995), and is personally well regarded, but his country is not; where France, Germany, Italy and the UK are too big, Luxembourg is really too small, at least for the first holder of the post. That leaves Balkenende and Van Rompuy.

Balkenende is the second-longest serving PM in the EU (since 2002), which has given him time to put a lot of people’s backs up; the then Belgian foreign minister, now European Commissioner, Karel De Gucht described him with brutal accuracy as “a mix between Harry Potter and a rigid bourgeois without charisma” (and this is not a linguistic problem as they share the same native language). Van Rompuy on the other hand is rather sweet and writes haikus on his personal website. More to the point, in his ten months as prime minister he has rescued Belgium from the point of institutional collapse which it reached under his disastrous predecessor, and thus has a proven record of getting people with different native languages and very different political perspectives to work together. He won’t be a tremendously high profile EU president, but he will be a consensus-building figure who will make his bits of the institutions work and not interfere with other people’s turf – be that member states or other senior EU officials.

I’m not a fan of his party, but I am rather a fan of Van Rompuy, and although most of the reasons why he will get the job are actually bad reasons – there is really no good justification for excluding non-Christian Democrats, or anyone from big, tiny or new member states – I think he will actually do it rather well, which is the best reason imaginable to give it to him. The downside is, of course, that Belgium will then need another prime minister, which raises the depressing prospect of Leterme coming back to screw things up again.

This also improves the chances of David Milliband getting the foreign policy job, whose fate matters much more to me. Again, most of the reasons why are bad – the Socialists get the foreign policy job if the Christian Democrats get the top spot, and then there is a real shortage of Socialist foreign ministers that a) anyone has heard of and b) would be personally and politically acceptable (Bernard Kouchner being the best example of someone who clears the first hurdle but not the second). However, while Milliband may have pulled his punches a bit in the current vicious Labour internal struggle, he is a credible at European level (and not tainted by Iraq to the extent that Blair would have been). The question really is does he want it?

(See also discussion here. And you’ll note that many of the above links go to the excellent blog of the Economist’s David Rennie, which is syndicated to Livejournal, though with technical difficulties, as .)

In fact The Sensorites isn’t a bad place to start phase 2 of this project – it begins with the Tardis crew reminiscing about the Story So Far (and includes reference to several unseen adventures, one of which inspired my only foray into fanfic to date), and has some promising character development for Susan as she stands up to the Doctor, reveals her telepathic abilities and reminisces about her home planet. Unfortunately, it also features the first spaceship on Doctor Who, which can’t have looked terribly convincing even by the standards of 1964, and, worse still, the first really poor performance from a guest actor, Lorne Cossette as Maitland. The Sensorites themselves have never considered investigating the mysterious noises in their water supply, or the imaginative possibilities of dressing up as each other. By the last episode everyone is fluffing their lines, which is a shame as the denouement is otherwise competently done. There is potentially a good sf story in here, of the Doctor and chums resolving conflict between the clueless earth folks and the paranoid isolated alien society, but it would need a lot of rewriting to bring it out.

But then we are back on track with The Reign of Terror. Actually even knowing the title of the story is a bit of a spoiler; we don’t find out when the story is set until halfway through the first episode, “The Land of Fear”. The incidental music, though it occasionally misfires in terms of mood, is really the best we have had so far (and it’s by that same bloke what wrote Cavatina as in The Deer Hunter). The story is history as entertainment rather than education, with the situation shown rather than told. Poor Carole Ann Ford, having just had some good character development in an otherwise lousy story, is back to screaming and whining here. William Russell’s holiday for eps 2 and 3 is well concealed. Barbara gets another romance, with a treacherous future renegade Time Lord. Hartnell is in his element, and must have particularly enjoyed the fabulous costume he got to wear as a revolutionary official.

Planet of Giants is rather underappreciated, I think. The plot is admittedly basic; although this is the first return to contemporary Earth since the very first episode, it is almost 50s rather than 60s in style. What really makes it is the model work: the sets for the miniaturised Tardis crew are totally convincing. All too often we Old Who fans have to excuse the special effects as being acceptable to the standards of the day, but no such excuse is needed here (though it is fortunate that the plot requires all the on-screen invertebrates to be dead). Barbara fans object to her getting poisoned but actually it’s only in the third and last episode that she is incapacitated. And this is a great Hartnell story – he really seems to be in his element, very much in command of his material and of the team as a whole.

After a couple of frankly ropey sf stories (The Keys of Marinus and The Sensorites) we have a very marked improvement with The Dalek Invasion of Earth. As with Planet of Giants, we are on familiar English territory, but this time warped by the passage of time rather than perspectives of scale. There are lots of brilliant moments here, and the whole is for once equal to the sum of its parts. The impact of the Dalek emerging from the Thames at the end of the first episode is slightly lost if we know what the name of the whole story is, but several people who saw it first time round in 1964 have picked this as the most memorable moment in all of Old Who. Myself, I just love the sequence of Barbara, Jenny and Dortmun dodging Daleks across London to Chagrin’s haunting tortured incidental music in the middle of episode 3; I could watch that again and again. And at long last, as she leaves, Carole Ann Ford is called upon to do some acting, and rises to the challenge. Susan’s departure scene is really rather moving, especially watching it (as I now have done, and as original viewers had to do) as the 51st episode in sequence rather than the last of a vintage 6-part DVD. One point lost on 1964’s viewers that strikes one forcibly today is Peter Fraser’s eerie resemblance, as David Campbell, to David Tennant (who of course was not born until 1971).

I was originally planning this as a set of reviews just of the stories, but it’s impossible to resist the temptation to reassess each of the regular characters as they depart. (Which is going to make the write-up after next rather fun…) Since her ancestry is so integral to the show’s mythology, it’s a shame that Susan on the whole gets rather little of interest during her time on the show. She is the original screamy girl character, getting decent material in less than half of her stories (her friendship with Ping-Cho in Marco Polo, her weird spacegirl vibe in The Sensorites, and her romance in The Dalek Invasion of Earth). Ford’s own favourite memory of the show was running amok with scissors in The Edge of Destruction. Her later TV appearance in The Five Doctors feels curiously unmoored, but she’s done some excellent work for Big Finish – a couple of alternate mythos plays where she is President of Gallifrey and her grandfather is played by Geoffrey “Catweazle” Bayldon. She returns as Susan later this year with her son being played by Jake McGann, whose father is Paul. The best written spinoff book with Susan which I have read is Kim Newman’s Telos novella, Time and Relative.

I had rewatched The Rescue quite recently. There’s not much to it. I think Vicki gets a very good introduction, just as Susan got a very good departure, in both cases because it was the first time this had happened. The two monsters – Koquillion and the Sand Beast – look pretty unconvincing (though in Koquillion’s case he actually does turn out to be a man in a suit), and Maureen O’Brien is clearly not as young as the character she is portraying. But Barbara gets to shoot a monster, and I think the appearance of the sinister surviving Didonians at the end lifts it a bit. One of the few stories where the novelisation (completed shortly before his death by Ian Marter) is far superior to the original.

I’ve watched The Romans a couple of times, which may be once or twice too many. There are a lot of good things about it – the costumes, sets and background sound are totally convincing; the Ian/Barbara relationship is at its sweetest and snuggliest; Maureen O’Brien is carving out a quite different Vicki persona to Carole Ann Ford’s Susan, less frightened and more curious. The plot of course takes in all the cliches – lecherous emperor, slavers, the threat of the arena, and even culminating in the Great Fire. The two interlocking plot strands are deftly contrived. The problem is, unusually, with Hartnell himself who is way over the top, smirking, chortling and giggling manically; it matches quite well with Derek Francis’ portrayal of Nero but is otherwise a bit much.

So, a rather weak start and end to this run (The Sensorites being the worst Hartnell story so far) but a sequence of decent efforts in the middle, in particular The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

I developed a mild interest in Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman Emperor, when I discovered that of the various celebrities who share my birthday (26 April), he is by far the most ancient. My interest intensified after reading the very positive account of his career and achievements in Gibbon, and there are a couple of editions of his Meditations available from Project Gutenberg. (Here, here and here.)

It is rather a remarkable book. It’s not totally clear that Marcus Aurelius wanted it to be published, or if this was basically his commonplace book (or books) for Deep Thoughts which his admirers circulated after his death. It’s a bit jumbled thematically, so I’m inclined to the latter – I think he was a good enough stylist that he’d have organised it a bit better if he was interested in publishing it, and also I don’t think he particularly was interested in publishing it. So we basically have the secret thoughts of the ruler of the Roman Empire at its height, which is really quite something. (Gibbon tells us, in footnote 47 to chapter III, that he actually gave public philosophy lectures, as Emperor, in Rome, Greece and Asia; presumably we have here some of the raw materials for those lectures.)

Marcus Aurelius was a believer in the Stoic philosophy: that one should accept one’s lot in life, not worry too much about what other people think or about death, and just get on with doing as much good as you can given your personal circumstances. Of course, if your lot in life happens to make you the Roman Emperor, you possibly have fewer grounds to complain about it, or to worry about issues of personal status, than most people. But we all worry about death, including emperors. And Marcus Aurelius is not obsessed with his own celebrity or achievements; the first section of the book is a series of thank-yous to the influential people in his life for their wisdom and intelligence.

Sufficiently edited and bracketed with explanations, this could make a rather successful if somewhat unusual self-help book. It is not in the usual paradigm: rather than helping the reader look at their insecurities and work through and past them, Marcus Aurelius urges the reader (who in the first instance is himself) to put it all aside, reflect on the immense infinity of space and time, and just get on with it. In some circumstances that actually is the right advice. Though I wonder if even he was really convinced – was his recording of different material covering the same themes a matter of finding several different beautiful thoughts which appealed to him? Or was he trying to persuade himself by repetition?

Marcus Aurelius’ biological legacy to the empire was his appalling son Commodus, whose reign Gibbon marks (in Chapter IV) as very much the crucial starting point of the decline of Rome. His intellectual legacy is rather more impressive, and certainly longer-lasting. I shall look out for a decent dead-trees edition of this; it is very much worth having on the shelves.

I finished this on Saturday, and was hoping to do the same write-up comparing its contents with the 2001 stories on the Hugo and Nebula shortlists, but won’t really have time to do that. Just to note, though, that this was a year when I think the shortlists were at least equal to if not better than Hartwell’s selection – there are only two overlaps, Michael Swanwick’s “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” and James Patrick Kelly’s “Undone”. Other stories I liked from Hartwell’s selection included Richard Chwedyk’s “The Measure of All Things” (to which the Nebula-winning “Bronte’s Egg” is a sequel) and Ursula Le Guin’s “The Building”.

(And of course I mean the father rather than the son, for those of you who have heard of the latter.)

Sit down for breakfast. Notice a badly bruised mango under a nearby chair. Wonder where it came from. Look up at nearby tree. Notice clumps of large fruit dangling from it. Stop wondering.