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I'm sure that if you're interested you've already seen this story of how Peter Davison got from London to this week's Gallifrey convention in California. But it is rather glorious.
Monthly Archives: February 2011
February Books 13) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
This is a tremendously important book, and I am surprised (but I suppose I should not be) that I have not read it before. It is a fairly straightforward narrative of life as a slave; Douglass was permanently separated from his mother soon after birth, his father being either her owner or one of his white household, in Maryland in about 1818; he endured the casual brutality – both the physical violence and the constant psychological degradation of enslavement – for about twenty-five years before escaping to the north with his (free black) wife. The narrative is brief but gripping, and basically speaks for itself; everyone should read it.
Two details particularly caught my eye. The first is that Douglass had a fascination with, of all people, Daniel O’Cornell, and drew direct parallels between the situation of American slaves and of the Irish. I guess the two causes shared the buzz-word of ’emancipation’. Looked at from 170 years on, now that O’Cornell (somewhat unfairly) is seen as a rather conservative revolutionary by Irish standards, it’s an interesting juxtaposition.
The second point is Douglass’ culture shock on moving to the free states of the North and discovering, to his amazement, that white people who did not themselves own slaves were not necessarily poor. He had expected Northern society to reflect the white working class lifestyle of Baltimore (where he had persuaded white kids to teach him to read by giving them the bread he got from his rich owner). It’s an interesting perspective both on how little slaves were allowed to know about the outside world, and on how slavery impoverished the whole society.
It is interesting to contrast this with Fanny Kemble’s account of life on a Georgian plantation, written at almost exactly the same time (though published 25 years later). The life of slaves in Georgia was certainly worse than in Maryland, which means that Kemble is more circumstantially dramatic, but of course Douglass’ account has the merits of being that of a participant rather than am observer. Still, the same subjects come up relentlessly in both: white men using slave women to bear their children, whipping them to a pulp when they did not comply, and denying their slaves any change of education. Both are essential reads.
Gibbon Chapter XLIII: Justinian, Part IV
This chapter is mostly a fairly straightforward military narrative, so the things that caught my eye were a couple of side details – apart from the last few pages, which deal with comets, earthquakes and plague.
Whoniversaries 20 February
20 February 1913: birth of Rex Tucker, who is credited formally as director of The Gunfighters (1966) but also played an important role in the genesis of the show in 1963.
20 February 1954: birth of Anthony Stewart Head, who played Mr Finch/Brother Lazar in School Reunion (2006), Grayvorn in the 2002 Big Finish Excelis audio plays, and voiced characters in Death Comes to Time (2001-02) and The Inifnite Quest (2007) as well as doing voiceovers for most Doctor Who Confidentials since 2006. (Also Giles in Buffy, not that you needed reminding.)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
20 February 1965: broadcast of “The Zarbi”, second episode of the story we now call The Web Planet. Barbara is captured first by the Menoptera and then by the Zarbi; the Zarbi get the Doctor and Ian too.
20 February 1971: broadcast of fourth episode of The Mind of Evil. The Master and his criminal helpers steal the Thunderbolt missile; meanwhile the alien inside the Keller machine is getting hungry…
20 February 2008: broadcast of Dead Man Walking (Torchwood), the one where Owen comes back to life.
Child development
Little U has started to talk.
I don’t want to exaggerate how much she says. She says her own name. She says “bye” sometimes. She will point to me and say “daddy”, and to her mother and say “mummy”, but won’t identify other relatives in that way. She can identify the characters from Winnie the Pooh, and from In the Night Garden…, and the Teletubbies, but not from the other programmes which she watches. And she says “go to s’eep” at bedtime.
She is eight years old. We have waited a long time to get this far, and who knows where her journey will take her, but we take pleasure in what we have got.
Votomatic.ie
Over at http://votomatic.ie/ you can test your views against those of the Irish political parties and see who you would vote for. Not being up on most of the current economic jargon I could not give clear answers in many cases, but none the less was astonished to find it rating me as a hard-line Green Party supporter (my complete ratings: Green +10, Labour +5, FF +4, SF -1, FG -3). However attractive their policies may be, the Green Party have completely failed the crucial test of their ability to actually implement them in their four years in government, and therefore their former voters will be looking to support parties which may have less satisfactory policies but may also turn out not to be completely spineless and ineffective; the Greens will deservedly be flushed down the toilet of history by the voters next week (and FF are heading for a colossal kicking too).
As I’ve said before, I would be voting Labour if I had a vote, based on their more convincing story on constitutional reform, but I am surprised that the system ranked me as fully 8 points more compatible with them than Fine Gael (my formative years were in Garret v Charlie days, when it was pretty clear who was good and who evil). My biggest difference with FG oddly was on transport, where I gave two answers (pro building Metro North, against bus privatisation, not that I feel very strongly on either) that aligned me strongly against them and with all the other parties. On the two issues I actually care most about, my support for Ireland participating in future EU defence initiatives is cancelled out by my support for Turkey’s EU membership in terms of agreement with FG, and together the two questions leave me positively aligned with only FF and Labour (and that only mildly).
For a laugh I went back and filled out the EU Profiler survey from 2009, which puts me much closer to Labour than to any of the others, which feels like a more accurate representation of my views, even though the questions (and policy positions) are almost two years old. So I must say I end up thinking that votomatic.ie has missed a few things, in particular the possibility of marking some issues as more and other as less important to the voter’s own strength of feeling.
The Perpetual Bond
Big Finish have played some brave tricks with continuity in the past (eg Peri’s two-year sojourn in fifteenth century England set in the gap between Planet of Fire and The Caves of Androzani), but it is particularly brave to invent a new First Doctor companion. But the potential gap is there, between The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Massacre, and Tom Allan (best known as a comedian) joins Peter Purves for an adventure of alien invasion of the City of London in the mid-1960s. The plot is fairly standard, but the story scores for a) the brilliant evocation of Hartnell’s Doctor (doing a turn as galactic legal expert, for a change) by Simon Guerrier’s script and Peter Purves’ performance, b) the Swinging Sixties soundscape, not overwhelming but decently scene-setting, and c) Tom Allan’s young commodities broker Oliver Harper, who has a secret of his own which we do not yet share. There’s also a slightly odd moment involving Purves and Allan trying to sing the Marseillaise as performed by the Beatles in All You Need is Love. We know that Oliver returns with Steven in another play scheduled for release in June, and Steven and a bunch of other companions will be back in August, so hopefully Big Finish are setting up for a decent story arc (an enterprise where they are generally quite succcessful).
February Books 12) Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them, by ‘Newt Scamander’ [J.K. Rowling]
I don’t think even diehard Harry Potter fans will find much to thrill at in this book, 100 pages of guff about monsters looked at from the perspective of the Ministry of Magic bureaucrats with hand-written annotations supposedly by Harry and Ron.
Whoniversaries 19 February
19 February 1966: broadcast of “Priest of Death”, third episode of the story we now call The Massacre. Admiral de Coligny is shot and wounded; the Abbot (or is it the Doctor???) is killed.
19 February 1972: broadcast of fourth episode of The Curse of Peladon. The Ice Warriors kill Arcturus who was behind it all; Aggedor kills Hepesh; and all ends happily.
19 February 1977: broadcast of fourth episode of The Robots of Death. The Doctor alters the voice of Dask/Taran Capel with helium, and he is killed by his own robots.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-18-2011
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The mind boggles. Sure, USIP is not immune from criticism, but this is sheer intellectual vandalism.
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"The very move towards more representative governance will raise huge popular hopes of socio-economic improvement, many of which will be impossible to fulfil. In addition, we see few (if any) circumstances in which an Israeli government of any conceivable stripe would seriously entertain a just settlement for the Palestinians."
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"our legislators seem to have no understanding of the principles of the rule of law and democracy that require that minorities should have judicial protection against the will of the majority as expressed through the legislature."
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"They have the country half destroyed, and I think if they got in for another term they would totally destroy it!"
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HËNJ
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'Can you believe that "in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt," private wealth translates into great political power and vice-versa? What is it like, wonders the curious and concerned [New York] Times reader, to live in a country like that? No wonder there's an uprising.'
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"The Ring of Steel", free with tomorrow's Observer, was one of the best Who audios I listened to last year. And I have been eagerly anticipating "The Hounds of Artemis", free with today's Guardian.
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This week's "Métro, Tram and Bus strike in Brussels was provoked by… a Métro driver punching a customer. Seriously."
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When the TARDIS materializes in a familiar junkyard in the 1960s, the Doctor and Steven are soon embroiled in a mystery in the City of London. Who are the mysterious bowler-hatted businessmen with their deadly umbrellas? And what secret is young Oliver Harper desperately trying to conceal?
Contracts have been signed. A deal is in place. And the Doctor discovers that perhaps not even he can stop a terrible business… -
Many years ago, the vast space parasite Axos attempted to suck the planet Earth of its energy. Now it’s all but forgotten – a dried-up husk, marooned in orbit, still stuck in the time loop it was placed in by Earth’s defender, the Doctor.
Forgotten, that is, except by space tourism billionaire Campbell Irons – who’s hatched a plan to solve the world’s energy crisis by reviving Axos, and transmitting its power back to Earth. But the crew of the spaceship Windermere aren’t alone aboard the parasite. The Doctor has returned, to correct an error of decades past…
And Axos is waiting.
Whoniversaries 18 February
18 February 1989: death of John Bailey, who played the Commander in The Sensorites (1964), Edward Waterfield in The Evil of the Daleks (1967), and Sezom in The Horns of Nimon (1979-80).
18 February 1993: death of Jacqueline Hill, who played the First Doctor’s companion Barbara Wright (and actually says the first audible line in the very first episode) from 1963-65, and returned in 1980 to play Lexa in Meglos.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
18 February 1967: broadcast of second episode of The Moonbase. The Doctor works out that the Cybermen have been poisoning the sugar.
18 February 1978: broadcast of third episode of The Invasion of Time. The Vardans take over; Leela and Rodan contact the Shobogans; Andred threatens to kill the Doctor.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-17-2011
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The freedom enjoyed by EU citizens to live and work in each others' countries is a unique liberty. It is the basis around which European governments have tried to build a single border, a compensatory system of co-operation between police, judges and immigration officers and a common refugee policy. But hardening attitudes towards immigration in many countries and widening policy disagreements between governments and the EU's institutions are exposing fault-lines in this structure. As the cracks threaten to widen over the coming months, policy-makers face some tricky dilemmas.
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I have covered this issue previously, but it is a good summary of the story of the fake Obama birth certificates.
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Now that the truth about this propaganda has been revealed, we can expect that those who constructed it – Tony Blair, Dick Cheney et al – will now amend their usual arguments to suggest that they were innocently misled by evidence such as Curveball's. After all, if a defector claimed that there was a substantial bio-weapons programme, as "Curveball" did, how could they know that he was lying? Again, we will be confronted with the "not my fault!" excuse from those who manufactured the case for an avoidable war.But once again, they are trying to mislead.
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large pluralities of the public in the surveyed Mediterranean countries of France, Italy, and Spain see increasing development aid to poorer countries as the most effective policy to reduce irregular immigration, more so than increasing national border controls… It’s time for the rest of Europe to listen to those on the front lines.
February Books 11) The Book of Lost Tales Part II, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The second of the History of Middle Earth series edited by Christopher Tolkien. Here we are looking at two of the core stories of The Silmarillion, and several other narratives which were largely or completely set aside as Tolkien’s work developed. I found the very first story, “The Tale of Tinúviel”, particularly interesting. For the first time I was struck that it is a tale of love between one character with a short name starting with B and another with a longer name starting with T, whose father opposes the romance just as Tolkien’s own guardian opposed his relationship with Edith Bratt. Beren goes off to prove himself in battle and returns maimed, as Tolkien returned with trench fever from the Great War (though after his marriage rather than before). And of course Tolkien was himself always explicit that Tinúviel’s dancing in the forest was inspired by Edith dancing for him one day in 1917 when they were out in the woods near his base. His personal identification with this particular story can be seen on his tombstone. I was always a bit disappointed that the version in The Silmarillion doesn’t convey much emotional freight, but The Book of Lost Tales is worth getting for this chapter alone.
(We also meet the earliest version of Sauron, as Tivaldo the evil king of cats and servant of Melko, a counterpart to Beren’s heroic dog.)
The other story treated in depth here is “Turambar and the Foalókë”, which however has since been published in a pretty definitive format as The Children of HúrinThe Silmarillion, a lost tale that underlies a fair bit of Middle Earth mythology but never seems to have found a definite written form; one almost senses Tolkien feeling more comfortable with it inside his head, so that Bilbo and Aragorn could make in-jokes about it in Rivendell, rather than spoiling it by putting too much down on paper.
(Also a shout out for “The Fall of Gondolin”, with its gripping account of hand-to-hand combat as the city is taken.)
Despite the density of the prose I have found both Lost Tales volumes fairly quick reading, Tolkien’s prose being as fluent in his twenties as it was later in his life, and Christopher Tolkien’s annotations being complete enough to satisfy curiosity without being overwhelming. I’m glad to have got back into this series of books.
< Book of Lost Tales I ¦ Book of Lost Tales II
Whoniversaries 17 February
17 February 1916: birth of David Blake Kelly, who played the captain of the Mary Celeste in The Chase (1965) and Jacob Kewper in The Smugglers (1966).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
17 February 1968: broadcast of third episode of The Web of Fear, introducing Nicholas Courtney as Colonel (later Brigadier) Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart. The Doctor reappears with a mysterious colonel; the Yeti attack the base to retrieve the model.
17 February 1973: broadcast of fourth episode of Carnival of Monsters. Kalik and Orum release the Drashigs, but Vorg is able to destroy them, and the Miniscope is deactivated.
17 February 1979: broadcast of fifth episode of The Armageddon Factor. The Doctor meets up with Drax; K9 is evil; Romana and Astra are still captives.
17 February 1996: broadcast of fifth episode of The Ghosts of N-Space on BBC Radio. The Doctor and Sarah return to 1818, where they unsuccessfully try to save Louise and Giuseppe.
February Books 10) Resurrection Men, by Ian Rankin
A particularly good novel in the Rebus series, and the only Rankin book to have won the Edgar Award. Rebus is put onto a training course as punishment for throwing a cup of tea at his boss, and the dead case resurrected for him and his fellow retrainees turns out to be intimately connected both with the case he has just been taken off, and with the real reason for his throwing the tea. A very intricate plot which actually made sense at the end (which is violent and shocking), with a detailed backdrop which includes many flawed human beings and bitter insights into Scotland’s history and society.
I have picked up on one stylistic trick of Rankin’s: when he starts going into lyrical descriptive prose about circumstantial detail, it always means that Something is about to Happen. However, one can never be sure of what that is; and anyway, it is a perfectly accurate representation of human experience, where suddenly we do become much more aware of details at moments of stress.
Despite its strong links to previous books in the series, Resurrection Men works well as a standalone novel and would probably be a good place to start Rankin if you want to try.
BSFA award 2010: non-fiction
The BSFA award for non-fiction is a peculiar pancake, as Sergeant Pluck might have said. Three of this year’s nominees are blog entries; to be precise, seventeen blog entries, one by Abigail Nussbaum, four by Paul Kincaid and twelve by Adam Roberts. One is a book, and one a series of podcasts. My final vote will have to wait until I have sampled (or decided not to sample) the Notes from Coode Street podcastbook earlier this evening, and I look at the blog nominees below, with some further reflections on the shortlist as a whole.
Adam Roberts’ series of posts on the eleven volumes of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan are most entertaining (summary here including index). I did try reading the books myself once, back in the very brief period of my life when my wife and I were living in a priest’s spare bedroom; some well-meaning worshipper had lent him the entire series as it then was, but I got fed up with it by volume 4 or 5, when I realised that nothing had actually happened in the entire vast book, and soundings taken from other sources indicated that this wouldn’t change any time soon if I persevered with the series, so I let then remain undisturbed on the parochial bookshelves. Unlike the books, Roberts’ pieces markedly improve toward the end, specifically with his write-up of Vol. VIII, and I must admit that his demolition of the prose of the final volume had me crying with laughter. If you can’t face reading all of his write-ups, I would strongly recommend just reading those last four. The Wheel of Time books are very bad, and it’s helpful as well as entertaining to have their flaws pointed out so forensically. (And I am baffled by the accusation from WoT fans that Roberts is motivated by jealousy that Jordan’s books sell better than his own.)
Abigail Nussbaum’s write-up of With Both Feet in the Clouds: Fantasy in Hebrew Literature, edited by Hagar Yanai and Danielle Gurevitch, is an excellent window into a culture with which I am unfamiliar. To my shame, I had not heard of a single one of the Israeli writers or scholars mentioned (I had at least heard of Isaac Bashevis Singer, but was not aware that he had made the conscious choice not to become an Israeli), and there are some points of wider interest thrown up – problems of vocabulary in Hebrew, for instance, given its peculiar history as a language. I would be interested in reading such an article about Dutch-language sf, or Belgian sf, or even just Flemish sf.
Paul Kincaid’s four blog posts about three of last year’s Hugo nominees – Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock, and the eventual co-winner, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl – are a discussion of the novels as examples of writing about America in decline, and also steampunk. They gave me food for thought about the cultural and political context of three books which I had read, and thus deepened my understanding and appreciation of these works in particular and of the genre in general. So of the three blogged nominees, Paul Kincaid will get my first preference vote, followed by Abigail Nussbaum and then Adam Roberts.
I shall not be voting for Red Plenty, even as a lower preference, although I want to be absolutely clear that I enjoyed it a lot and thought it was a very good book. The BSFA website states that “The Best Non-Fiction award is open to any written work about science fiction and/or fantasy which appeared in its current form in 2010.” Red Plenty may have appeared in its current form in 2010, but it is in no way non-fiction, despite the copious footnotes explaining the author’s workings, and it is in no way about science fiction and/or fantasy – it is about the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1968. I cannot therefore vote for it in this category, and its presence on the shortlist makes me feel that there must have been some conversation about its eligibility which reached what is patently the wrong conclusion. This frankly makes me feel alienated from the BSFA.
As a BSFA member, I do also feel partly responsible for and guilty about this situation. In the course of last year I read two excellent non-fiction books about SF published in 2010, both of which I would rate ahead of any of the blog entries shortlisted here (actually both are about Doctor Who – see here and here), and I failed to nominate either of them for the award (indeed, I failed to nominate anything in any category). I note also this post of potential nominees for the Hugo for Best Related Work, which includes one book (Thomas and O’Shea) on my to-read shelf, one (Roach) on my wish list and two (Wolfe, Gurney) which I had not otherwise heard of.
But I think it’s one matter to have worthy books failing to reach the final ballot, and another to have the final ballot include a book that, however excellent on its own merits, and however strongly supported by the selectorate, simply is not eligible by any reasonable interpretation of the rubric. I am open to persuasion, but can’t really see how an argument justifying the inclusion of Red Plenty on any BSFA award shortlist, fiction or non-fiction, can possibly be constructed.
February Books 9) Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford
This is a really interesting book, a light on an important period of history (the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1969) of which I knew much less than I had realised, looked at through the eyes of true believers in the economic system of Communism as it developed under Khrushchev, who were then bitterly disappointed as Brezhnev and Kosygin (and later Brezhnev alone) took over. I grew up at the tail end of the Brezhnev era, when the Soviet system seemed monolithic and permanent; subsequent events proved that in fact it was not nothing of the kind, and Spufford’s book reminds us that it was all actually rather recent anyway. It’s told as a series of short stories from the point of view of some of the key economic / cybernetic thinkers of the time, including Khrushchev himself, with some perspectives from ordinary middle-class Soviet life thrown in for good measure, all meticulously footnoted; also all very human, and all told with good humour, to the point where one can understand how otherwise intelligent people could have believed in the system and wanted to perpetuate it. Strongly recommended.
Apart, that is, from the front cover which spells the title ЯED PLENTY rather then RED PLENTY, because, y’know, Я makes it look Russian. Look, Faber, this is simply not good enough. Я in Cyrillic is a vowel, not a consonant, and sounds nothing like R. While I am on the subject, И is also a vowel and sounds nothing like N; and Д is a consonant which sounds nothing like A. Putting ЯED PLENTY on your front cover is not cute, it is ignorant, and will certainly deter anyone with any real knowledge about Russia from even picking the book up in the shop, let alone buying it. It’s up to you if you want to alienate your potential readership; I would have thought not, myself, but what do I know?
Whoniversaries 16 February
16 February 1945: birth of Jeremy Bulloch, who played Tor in The Space Museum (1965), Hal in The Time Warrior (1973-74), and is best known as Boba Fett in the first two Star Wars films.
16 February 1964: birth of Christopher Eccleston, who played the Ninth Doctor in 2005.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
16 February 1974: broadcast of sixth episode of Invasion of the DinosaursThe Visitation. The Doctor, Nyssa and Mace find cages full of rats; Adric and Tegan are captured by the Terileptils but Adric escapes; the Doctor is threatened with execution by the villagers.
16 February 1983: broadcast of second episode of Terminus. Tegan and Turlough are threatened by gas, the Doctor heads for Terminus, and Nyssa takes her skirt off.
16 February 1985: broadcast of first episode of The Two Doctors. The Second Doctor is captured by Sontarans and take to Spain; the Sixth Doctor senses a disturbance in the time stream and starts looking for him; Peri is attacked by a ragged Jamie.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-15-2011
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"The case concerns a child who was born in Denmark having, as well as his parents, only German nationality. The child was registered in Denmark – in accordance with Danish law – under the compound surname Grunkin-Paul combining the name of his father (Grunkin) and the name of his mother (Paul), who did not use a common married name. After moving to Germany, German authorities refused to recognise the surname of the child as it had been determined in Denmark" -> ECJ verdict against Germany and in favour of the child and parents!
Whoniversaries 15 February
15 February 1964: broadcast of “The Brink of Disaster”, second episode of the story we now call The Edge of Destruction. The Doctor works out that the Tardis was trying to warn them that it was heading for destruction, fixes the problem and apologises all round.
15 February 1969: broadcast of third episode of The Seeds of Death. The Doctor is captured by the Ice Warriors, who start transmitting their deadly seeds to Earth.
15 February 1975: broadcast of fourth epsiode of The Ark in Space. The Doctor manages to save the beacon by tricking the Wirrn onto the shuttle, which Noah then blows up in a last act of his human self.
15 February 1982: broadcast of first episode of The Visitation. The Tardis lands in England in 1666, where an alien ship has recently landed with fatal consequences for the local manor house.
15 February 1983: broadcast of first episode of Terminus. Turlough sabotages the Tardis and it lands on a ship full of people suffering Lazar’s disease.
15 February 1984: broadcast of second episode of Resurrection of the Daleks
As noted last week, this is the fourth of seven dates in the year when six episodes of Old Who were broadcast.
Whoniversaries 14 February
14 February 1942: birth of Michael E. Briant, who directed Colony in Space (1971), The Sea Devils (1972), The Green Death (1973), Death to the Daleks (1974), Revenge of the Cybermen (1975) and The Robots of Death (1977).
14 February 1970: birth of Simon Pegg, who played the Editor in The Long Game (2005) and narrated the first series of Doctor Who Confidential.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
14 February 1970: broadcast of third episode of Doctor Who and the Silurians. Quinn, who is shielding the wounded Silurian, is found dead by the Doctor.
14 February 1976: broadcast of third episode of The Seeds of Doom. The Doctor and Sarah return to England, and are captured by Harrison Chase as the second pod begins to open…
14 February 1981: broadcast of third episode of The Keeper of Traken. The Keeper dies, Kassia replaces him and is in her turn replaced by the Melkur.
14 February 2002: webcast of first part of “Planet of Blood”, the second episode of Death Comes to Time. Two London academics are killed by a vampire; meanwhile the Doctor is concerned at an increasing number of black holes.
iii) dates specified in canon
14 February 1929: the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, as witnessed by the Seventh Doctor, Benny and Ace in Terrance Dicks’ 1994 novel Blood Harvest.
14 February 1980: birth of Owen Harper, regular in the first two series of Torchwood. (NB that Burn Gorman who plays him was born in 1974, six years earlier!)
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-13-2011
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If the case that The Huffington Post were making to its bloggers were a little more frank, along the lines of the following:
"Sure, we’d love for you to post here. And there’s the chance that your post could do very well. But odds are that only a few hundred people will see it, and we’ll be lucky to sell enough ads on it to afford a slice of pizza."…there might be fewer complaints that it doesn’t pay its bloggers.
Demon Quest Parts 4 and 5
The fourth part of the Paul Magrs/BBC Fourth Doctor Demon Quest series of audios, Starfall, is set in 1970s New York and I think one of the better instalments in the series: it features good guest turns by Trevor White, whose character Buddy narrates most of the action, and Laurel Lefkow as his girlfriend Alice who slightly accidentally acquires super powers as part of the ongoing storyline. There is a very bizarre bit with a cult of people who dress up like the Doctor, which is obviously a wink at organised fandom but isn’t well resolved in the plot. But the overall tone is well done.
I was less happy about the final part, Sepulchre, which not only relies rather heavily on reference back to the previous Hornet’s Nest series, but also demands little of the actors, Tom Baker in particular doing much more Little Britain than Doctor Who; and the conclusion is very far from conclusive.
So in the end my recommendation is that this series is for completists only; the first and fourth parts are the best, the third and fifth least satisfactory.
Gibbon Chapter XLII: Justinian, Part III
Whereas the previous chapter had Belisarius’ military campaigns to the West, here we are looking East: first to the Danube plain (Lombards, Bulgarians, Sclavonians), then to Persia in general and the Colchis war in particular, and finally to East Africa and what we now call the Gulf of Aden.
STV point
An occasional correspondent has asked me about transfers in STV elections, and why plumpers’ votes don’t get taken into account when surpluses are dealt with. It’s an important point, if a little technical, so I expand on this below.
Some people find it odd that the 6 votes of the surplus are not split by the ratio of plumpers to non-plumpers. The argument is, if the surplus is 6, and I got 16 votes, then each of those should be worth 0.375 on later counts, including the ones that don’t transfer anywhere.
This argument is wrong. On that basis, each of the plumpers gets not only full value for the first preference vote cast for me, but also 0.375 of an extra vote when the surplus is transferred; while those who did cast lower preferences get only the 0.375 transferred votes and 0.25 of a vote for me.
The system as it usually operates give the plumpers full value for their vote for me, and then takes them out of tally, along with an appropriate fraction of the transferable votes cast for me. That’s why the value of each transferred vote is calculated as the surplus divided by the number of all transferring votes, not the total number of first preferences.
There’s a real life example of this in the 2007 election in South Antrim. Mitchell McLaughlin got 6313 first preferences; the quota was 5454, so his surplus was 859. But of those 6313 votes, 751 had no usable lower preference (either plumping for McLaughlin or, rather less likely, having a second preference for Willie McCrea who was also elected on the first count). So the 5562 transferring votes had a value of 0.15 (= 859/5562 rounded off) rather than 0.13 (= 859/6313 rounded off).
It makes sense really!
February Books 8) The Prodigal Troll, by Charles Coleman Finlay
Picked this one up shortly after first publication and have only now got round to reading it. The central character is a boy brought up by trolls, à la Tarzan or Mowgli, who then seeks his destiny among his own kind; he wanders into a human war between subsistence pastoralists and settled agriculturalists (Native Americans vs European feudal settlers seeming to be the paradigm) and eventually, in an ending that came rather abruptly though did at least fit with what we had seen before, chooses his own way.
I was a bit dubious about the sexual politics of the book. The story is all about how Maggot (né Claye) becomes a Man; the only thoroughly evil character is a eunuch who was born male and is addressed by female pronouns; and Maggot’s crucial decisions are about rejecting the women who might care for him. That may not have been what the author intended but that was what came across to me.
A more minor snark: “prodigal” does not mean “long-lost”, it means “wastefully extravagant”.
BSFA novels
So, my votes for the BSFA award for Best Novel this year:
5) Lightborn, by Tricia Sullivan, a story of cyber-warfare and devastation in a near-future California. Really failed to grab me. I note also that it has much the fewest owners on Librarything (10, to 35 for MacLeod, 65 for Beukes, 189 for McDonald and 1205 for Bacigalupi).
I very much like all the other four, and while I have special reasons for my first choice, would be delighted if any of the below wins.
4) The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. Another near-future story about catastrophes, this time set in Thailand, the girl of the title being an artificial woman who must trade her body for her life. Won the Nebula and joint winner of the Hugo.
3) Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes. An urban fantasy set in South Africa, with necromancy, organised crime and animal familiars. Brilliant stuff.
2) The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald. Set in Istanbul in the year 2027, involves nanotechnology, arcane secrets, and terrorism on the Nabucco pipeline, in McDonald’s trademark lush descriptive prose.
1) The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod. I have a personal stake here in that I gave some advice on the parts of the story set in the fictional South Caucasus territory of Krassnia (the rest is in Scotland and New Zealand, in the years leading up to 2007). That aside, it’s an excellent novel taking recent history, 70’s radicalism and computer games and merging to a brilliant twist at the end.
Previous write-ups of this year’s BSFA shortlist: short fiction.
February Books 7) Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes
This is the last of this year's shortlisted novels for the BSFA award for me to read. It's a remarkable story which picks up the urban fantasy sub-genre and takes it to a completely new place – specifically, Johannesburg, in a world very similar to ours except that in the last few years criminals have mysteriously acquired animal familiars similar to Philip Pullman's dæmons (Pullman is in fact referenced, with the suggestion that it's all his fault since the phenomenon only startedafter his books were published). The actual plot has our narrator, Zinzi December, involved with a missing persons enquiry because of her psychic location skills, which takes her deep into the criminal and somewhat necromantic underworld of South Africa; the environment is tremendously well realised, and the story and ideas mesh with total conviction. As I've said before, good on the BSFA selectorate for calling this one to my attention.
Whoniversaries 13 February
13 February 1933: birth of Patrick Godfrey, who played Tor in The Savages (1966) and Major Cosworth in The Mind of Evil (1971).
13 February 1943: birth of Donald Sumpter, who played Enrico Casali in The Wheel in Space (1968), Commander Ridgeway in The Sea Devils (1972) and Erasmus Darkening in The Eternity Trap (SJA, 2009).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
13 February 1965: broadcast of “The Web Planet”, first episode of the story we now call The Web Planet. The Tardis is pulled off course to the planet of Vortis; Ian and the Doctor explore, and a mysterious force controls Barbara through her bracelet.
13 February 1971: broadcast of third episode of The Mind of Evil. The Master takes over the prison with the help of the prisoners, captures the Doctor, and subjects him to ‘orrible visions.
13 February 2008: broadcast of Adam (Torchwood), the one with the alien ringer in the Torchwood team.
also 13 February 2008: broadcast of Reset (Torchwood), the one where Martha arrives and Owen is killed (for the first time).
February Books 6) How to Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ
A passionate, fairly concise polemic about the way in which women as writers are marginalised by academics, though also about the experience of minority erasure generally. Although towards the end it veered closer to micro-critiques of college course reading lists from over thirty years ago (I would be interested to know how much things have changed since), it’s mostly full of wisdom and rage simultaneously. Numerous very good lines, including:
The social invisibility of women’s experience is not “a failure of human communication”. It is a socially arranged bias persisted in long after the information about women’s experience is available (sometimes even publicly insisted on).
In other words, a book at least as much about society as a whole as it is about literature studies, its ostensible subject. Excellent.