Well, I was rather impressed by this Doctor Who novel in the New Adventures series. The Seventh Doctor and Ace get caught up in the nasty machinations of a near-future biotech firm, variously in the US, London and a small island near Istanbul. Cartmel is a very good descriptive writer, both in terms of establishing the physical setting and in terms of getting inside the heads of Ace and the other characters. The Istanbul chapters in particular had some memorable set-pieces. As often happens, it wasn’t clear that the bad guys’ conspiracy made sense (and even less clear how the Doctor had got involved in stopping it; or for that matter where the cat’s cradle of the title comes into it) but I very much enjoyed the ride. Possibly the first really adult Doctor Who novel.

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I think I am going to delete all of the book reviews I have posted at Amazon.

There are several reasons for this. First off, my primary book review log is here on Livejournal. I mirror everything here (and a few from elsewhere) to LibraryThing and most of the more recent book reviews are also on GoodReads and, via Facebook, LivingSocial. Both of the latter have their downsides and irritations, but it is pretty easy to copy the reviews across.

I’ve put several dozen of my reviews on Amazon, but find the interface annoying; no markups or hyperlinks allowed, and the extra bother of thinking of a title for the piece after you have written it. In addition, the social interaction of Amazon reviews is markedly nastier than anywhere else where I have been publishing them. I do not think of myself as a particularly delicate flower, and have no objection to robust debate, but I am struck by the preponderance of negativity in the few comments my reviews there have attracted (a small symptom of a wider problem; there have been several much more dramatic and well-publicised instances of Amazon review meltdown). It’s not a pleasant space for debate, and I don’t really want my words adding to the vicious spiral.

On top of that is Amazon’s unpleasant corporate behaviour. I have hinted it before, but I will say it directly now: I think the Kindle is a swindle. There are already cheaper and better electronic book readers out there, and in particular there are readers with a sane and sensible approach to digital rights management, which I translate into layman’s terms as meaning that you actually own the book that you pay for. The recent spat between Amazon and MacMillan did no favours for either side, reputationally, but Amazon were the more obviously evil of the two companies.

I shall probably continue using Amazon, for purchases, because living where I do and reading what I do I have little option (and they do get very good marks for delivery). But I simply do not want my words on their site adding value to what they are doing, so I shall spend some time over the next few days clicking “delete” on my reviews – which will of course remain visible here and elsewhere, as described above.

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For the last couple of years I feel I have been rather neglecting the latest sf, so I decided to start catching up by getting through the shortlist for this year’s BSFA award. Yellow Blue Tibia carries the subtitle Konstantin Skvorecky’s memoir of the alien invasion of 1986, and is about a Soviet science fiction writer who becomes entangled in a complex conspiracy possibly involving aliens, Scientologists, the KGB and the Chernobyl nuclear power station in early 1986. The point of the book is at least as much the style as the substance, and I thought I recognised homages to Zamyatin and Bulgakov, as well as to the intersection between the writing of pulp sf and the Cold War as experienced on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The absurdism and surrealism extends also to one character with Asperger’s syndrome, who is himself something of a metaphor for the Soviet system. I winced when I worked out what the title meant, about halfway through.

The first book in Carey’s second trilogy, set in an alternate magical Europe. Our narrator now is Imriel de la Courcel, much-abused son of the treacherous princess Melisande, who was adopted by Phédre nò Delaunay, the central character of the previous trilogy, at the end of the last book. Imri spends the first half of this book growing to maturity between his adoptive parents’ country estate and the royal court [in what we would know as southern France], and the second half as a student in “Tiberium” [Rome] and then as a defender in the besieged city of Lucca (whose name for some reason is not changed), dealing withhis own personal demons as well as with the mysterious entanglements of his birth mother. As with Carey’s other books, I loved the lush psychological and political landscapes she has created, and am glad I have the next two books waiting for me on the shelves. It may not be Great Literature but it is very enjoyable, even though (perhaps even because) it is less kinky than the first trilogy.

Top LibraryThing Unsugegstion: Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

I have been listening to the massive 5-CD audiobook of this Tenth Doctor novel, as read by Nicholas Briggs, and enjoyed it very much. I think I saw another review somewhere pointing out that we have not really had a good Tenth Doctor story with Daleks on TV (bar perhaps Doomsday which they shared with the Cybermen; the New York two-parter was possibly the weakest of all Tenth Doctor stories, and the climax to Season Four certainly the most self-indulgent of all RTD’s finales). So I felt that Prisoner of the Daleks filled a void. Once again, we have Ten, post-Journey’s End, travelling still on his own, encountering Dalek bounty hunters in a separate time track (one of them comes from Gauda Prime, which made me smile). It’s an exotic crew, who first suspect and then cooperate with the Doctor; an early success against the Daleks turns into a debacle with the survivors captured (given the title of the book, this is hardly a spoiler) at the mercy of a particularly memorably nasty individual, nicknamed “Dalek X”. Baxendale captured the Tenth Doctor and the other characters well, and Briggs uses his talent for different voices to the maximum. Looking back at other work of Baxendale’s which I have read, I always felt he was pretty good but not always terribly even in execution; I think it comes together well in Prisoner of the Daleks.

I got to know the author ten years ago while he was the Bosnian ambassador to the EU and NATO, and he did one thing for me for which I will forever remain grateful: he introduced me to sushi. In 2000 he resigned his diplomatic position and returned to his career in banking, and most of the essays collected here were written after that, as opinion pieces for the WSJ Europe, European Voice, etc, drawing on Miles’ experience as an adviser to the wartime Croatian, Bosnian and Bosnian Croat leadership.

The two best sections were at the beginning and the end. The first couple of essays are the two title pieces – “If There Had Been No ‘Storm’ [Da Nije Bilo Oluje]” and “Who Saved Bosnia?” which make the case that, whatever Croatia’s previous or subsequent errors, the ‘Storm’ offensive by the Croatian army of August 1995 effectively ended the war on terms that Bosnia could live with.

I was less grabbed by the middle sections, a large number of pieces attacking the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague and also arguing that Croatia ought to be given a free pass to EU and NATO integration. These issues will be of historical interest only very soon (as ICTY closes and as EU accession talks near completion), but the pieces rather demonstrate how little even the best-informed observers from the region grasped what was really going on with the international community’s strategy. There are also a couple of pieces about that perennial chestnut, Bosnian constitutional reform.

But the final essays are back on form, looking at trade integration for the Balkan states, both with each other and with the EU, and also proposing rather cheekily that the Kosovo diaspora should simply purchase their homeland from Serbia. The book won’t be on any best-seller lists but I’m glad to have it on my shelves.

January Books 30) Southern Sudan: Too Many Agreements Dishonoured, by Abel Alier

I have read a fair bit of conflict literature, but this is quite an unusual book of general interst in conflict resolution as well as being an important primary source on the history of Sudan between 1965 and 1989 (published 1990, 2nd edition 1992). Alier, who had managed to make himself the indispensible southerner to the government in Khartoum, successfully managed a peace process with the southern rebels which ended the first Sudanese civil war of 1955-72 and set up an autonomous government in Southern Sudan for the south, which Alier himself then ran for more than half of its life. Without using any jargon, Alier goes into considerable detail of how the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement was negotiated – particularly interesting with regard to the security guarantees; a tortuous and at times underhanded process, the delegations at one point appealing directly to the Emperor, Haile Selassie, to settle an important point of disagreement. He discusses the rest as well, but once you have settled on autonomy within the state as the solution, and identified the negotiating parties in the dispute – though neither of those processes was straightforward – security was the key outstanding problem.

Alier then describes the successes and problems of the southern government between 1972 and its abolition in 1983, with a depressed coda on the failure of the following years to reach a peace settlement and the elements which he (correctly) predicts such a settlement must contain. He also includes the primary documents from the pre-1972 process.

February Books 1) War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan, by Francis M. Deng

Deng is more of an academic than Alier, though he too is also a practitioner. In this 1995 book he covers a lot more ground in time and space than Alier, though generally in less detail; and he pulls in evidence from anthropology, cultural studies, and political science in support of his thesis that the Sudan conflict should be understood as a struggle between identities, not all of them Sudanese. I was impressed by his lucidity in explaining the various perspectives; I am more used to the discourse of nationalisms around Europe, and there are rather different nuances in both the Arab world and Africa (which of course intersect in Sudan). Deng, like Alier, was writing long before the 2005 peace agreement but, also like Alier, he expresses doubt that Sudan can be held together.

The most useful section for me was on the district of Abyei, the “crossroads of the conflict” as Deng puts it, where local dynamics between the Dinka and Arabs (to simplify the identities rather drastically) escalated over the 1970s and 1980s to the point where it became a significant factor in the destabilisation of the whole country. Alier says nothing at all about Abyei, but it is of course subject to a whole separate set of provisions in the 2005 Agreement.

The big mystery remaining for me is why Nimeiri, the Sudanese leader from 1969 to 1985, first allowed the Addis Ababa agreement to happen in 1972 and then reneged on his commitments in 1983. Alier and Deng have very different views on this. Alier sees Nimeiri as guided by popular dissatisfaction with the long war and taking his (Alier’s) advice on how to end it; and then later undergoing a personal religious re-commitment to Islamism from which it followed that the powers of the non-Muslim south must be removed. Deng believes that the Addis Ababa agreement was never more than a tactical ploy by Nimeiri, who shared the general northern prejudice against southerners but spotted a way of using the south as a supportive factor in northern politics. On this interpretation, when Nimeiri found that he could cut a deal with the northern Islamists, the southern settlement, to which he was never really committed, became dispensable. Both writers knew Nimeiri well and worked with him at the time; Deng also cites private conversations with him after his overthrow. No doubt the truth lies somewhere in between; Alier of course naturally believes in the importance of his own earlier work, but Deng could perhaps have been more sceptical of Nimeiri’s retrospective imagining of his earlier actions.

Anyway, both strongly recommended for Sudanists, and Alier I think is of more general interest for its case-study of peace-making with a popular insurgency.

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An appointment with yet another dentist – an exotic endodontist this time – to try and pin down my continuing left upper molar problems. Root canal surgery booked for later this month. Ooogh.