8 April 1967: broadcast of first episode of The Faceless Ones. The Doctor, Ben, Polly, and Jamie land at Gatwick Airport to get mixed up in an affair of vanishing corpses; Polly is apparently brainwashed.
8 April 1972: broadcast of first episode of The Mutants. Geoffrey Palmer is the best thing in this story and he gets killed before the end of this episode; five more to go, folks…
I have now completed one of my reading projects – to have a write-up on-line, be it ever so humble, of every winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Some of them are mere one-para stubs awaiting expansion if I ever get back to my project of writing up all of the joint Hugo/Nebula winners in detail, but at least they are all there now.
Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein (Retro, 1951)
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (1953)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (Retro, 1954)
They’d Rather Be Right (aka: The Forever Machine) by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley (1955)
Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein (1956)
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (1958)
A Case of Conscience by James Blish (1959)
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (1960)
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1961)
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1962)
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1963)
Here Gather the Stars (aka: Way Station) by Clifford D. Simak (1964)
The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1965)
Dune by Frank Herbert (co-winner, 1966)
…And Call Me Conrad (aka: This Immortal) by Roger Zelazny (co-winner, 1966)
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1967)
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1968)
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (1969)
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1970)
Ringworld by Larry Niven (1971)
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer (1972)
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (1973)
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1974)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1975)
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1976)
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm (1977)
Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1978)
Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre (1979)
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke (1980)
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1981)
Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh (1982)
Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov (1983)
Startide Rising by David Brin (1984)
Neuromancer by William Gibson (1985)
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1986)
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (1987)
The Uplift War by David Brin (1988)
Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh (1989)
Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1990)
The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (1991)
Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold (1992)
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (co-winner, 1993)
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (co-winner, 1993)
Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1994)
Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold (1995)
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1996)
Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1997)
Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman (1998)
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (1999)
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (2000)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling (2001)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2002)
Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (2003)
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (2004)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2005)
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2006)
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007)
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (2008)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (2009)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (co-winner, 2010)
The City & the City by China Miéville (co-winner, 2010)
My favourites (at least, those I’ve given five stars on LibraryThing) in no particular order are Barrayar, Mirror Dance, Gateway, Green Mars, Blue Mars, Lord of Light, Doomsday Book, The Dispossessed, Rendezvous With Rama, Hyperion, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Left Hand of Darkness and Fahrenheit 451. If I had to pick one out of those as my all-time favourite Hugo winner, I think it would be A Canticle for Leibowitz.
My least favourite – those I’ve given fewer than three stars to on Librarything – are Neuromancer, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Cyteen, The Gods Themselves, The Uplift War, Downbelow Station, Hominids, and They’d Rather Be Right/The Forever Machine. I know that my failure to grok Cherryh or Gibson is not widely shared, but I think that the Farmer, the Asimov, the Sawyer and the Brin are genuinely awful books which should not have won in normal circumstances.
Right, Nebula winners next – I have read all but one (Powers) but there are another nine I haven’t written up on-line (Man Plus, Timescape, Falling Free, Tehanu, Slow River, The Moon and the Sun, Parable of the Talents, The Quantum Rose and The Speed of Dark).
I actually rather like To Say Nothing of the Dog. I have found Willis’ recent work cloying, tedious, and not as funny as many readers seem to think it is, and the reviews I’ve seen of Blackout/All Clear make me feel that, when it inevitably makes this year’s Hugo shortlist, it may well be the first shortlisted work I skip in over a decade. But rereading To Say Nothing of the Dog has reminded me that there was a time when her writing did not seem so laboured and her humour much more successful.
The story of To Say Nothing of the Dog concerns time-travelling historians who have been commissioned to retrieve an ornamental flower vase from Coventry Cathedral before its destruction in 1940. The humour revolves around failures of communication, references to various light literature (Three Men in a Boat, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.Sayers), tyrannical mother figures, and culture shock regarding the Victorian era (for some reason the key to rescuing the vase is in 1888). The various time travel paradoxes are rather reminiscent of the end of last year’s season of Doctor Who, but actually slightly more satisfactory in the way they are worked out. It’s not deep or tragic in the same way as Willis’ previous novel in this series, Doomsday Book, but it is rather good fun.
This won the Hugo for Best Novel back in 1999, beating Mary Doria Russell’s Children of God, Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia, Bruce Sterling’s Distraction and Robert J. Sawyer’s Factoring Humanity. This is the most recent year for which I have not read all the Hugo novel nominees; I was very disappointed with Children of God, which I felt a poor follow-up to The Sparrow. I have read Distraction but don’t remember much about it. The Nebula that year went to Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler which is a truly great book.
7 April 1973: broadcast of first episode of Planet of the Daleks. Jo and the Doctor land on Spiridon and separately encounter a Thal expedition.
7 April 2007: broadcast of The Shakespeare Code. The Doctor and Martha, visiting 1599 London, foil a plot by the Carrionites to invade the Earth via Shakespeare’s plays.
6 April 1959: birth of Mark Strickson, who played the Fifth Doctor companion Turlough in 1983-4.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
6 April 1968: broadcast of fourth episode of Fury from the Deep. Van Lutyens, and then the Doctor and Jamie, descend to the base of the impeller shaft and find the Weed Creature gathering in strength.
6 April 1974: broadcast of third episode of The Monster of Peladon. Sarah raises Queen Thalira’s consciousness, and the Ice Warriors arrive.
Librarything says I own and/or have read ten or more books by these authors:
Roger Zelazny (63)
William Shakespeare (46)
Terry Pratchett (43)
Nicholas Briggs (35)
Justin Richards (35)
Brian Aldiss (33)
Neil Gaiman (29)
Ian Rankin (27)
Paul Magrs (24)
Lois McMaster Bujold (22)
Marc Platt (21)
Dr. Seuss (21)
J.R.R. Tolkien (21)
Steve Lyons (20)
Jacqueline Rayner (20)
BBC (19)
Eddie Robson (19)
Jonathan Morris (18)
Paul Cornell (17)
Ursula K. Le Guin (17)
Arthur Charles Clarke (16)
Roald Dahl (16)
Lance Parkin (16)
Gary Russell (16)
Robert Silverberg (16)
Stephen Cole (15)
Simon Guerrier (15)
Bill Willingham (15)
Alan Barnes (14)
Lindsey Davis (14)
David G. Hartwell (14)
Ian McDonald (14)
David A. McIntee (14)
Sheri S. Tepper (14)
Isaac Asimov (13)
Ken MacLeod (13)
Gareth Roberts (13)
Trevor Baxendale (12)
David Bishop (12)
Enid Blyton (12)
Gardner Dozois (12)
Charles Stross (12)
Christopher Bulis (11)
J. K. Rowling (11)
Dave Stone (11)
Iain M. Banks (10)
Colin Brake (10)
Arthur Conan Doyle (10)
Herge (10)
Fritz Leiber (10)
Joseph Lidster (10)
Ian Marter (10)
Lawrence Miles (10)
Kate Orman (10)
Dav Pilkey (10)
Neal Stephenson (10)
Joanna Trollope (10)
Mike Tucker (10)
Many, but not all, of these are Doctor Who writers.
(Including for these purposes the BBC.)
A decent little book on the origins of the alphabet, the first half being about the global question of how the Latin script developed from hieroglyphics via cuneiform, Phoenician, Greek and etruscan, and the second half taking each letter individually. I’ve read several books on this topic so not much was new to me; the information is very much presented for the non-specialist, and readers may well wonder what the sounds were precisely that were represented by the Semitic letters aleph and ayin ( and ); Davies makes no attempt to bring in the details of phonetics. It’s also a bit of a shame that he misses out any discussion of the lost letters of the English alphabet – he does at least meantion yogh and wynn (ȝ and ƿ) but not thorn or edh (þ or ð), which is an educationaal opportunity missed – or of any other Latin-based languages. One would get the impression from the book that the English version of the Latin alphabet is the only one currently in use.
Not Three Mile Island but Chalk River in Canada; a fascinating historical note from the Economist:
Three weeks after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant, spewing radiation as far as Iceland, clean-up crews have been working around the clock to bring the reactor under control and contain the leakage. Their life is a nightmare…
The fear and danger is beyond comprehension for most people, and in particular the political leaders who must order men in to danger. But interestingly, it is not unfamiliar to former American president Jimmy Carter. Nearly half a century ago, as a young naval officer, he led a 23-man team to dismantle a reactor that, like Fukushima, had partially melted down…
“The radiation intensity meant that each person could spend only about ninety seconds at the hot core location,” wrote Mr Carter in “Why Not the Best?”, an autobiography published in 1975 when he was campaigning for the presidency.
I may try and get hold of that book. I see it’s going for $0.01 second-hand.
5 April 1946: birth of Jane Asher, who played Susan Foreman in Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? (1994) and Andrea Yates in Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (2007), and has thus played alternative
5 April 1991: death of Gerald Blake, who directed The Abominable Snowmen (1967) and The Invasion of Time (1978).
5 April 1999: death of John Wiles, innovative producer who succeeded Verity Lambert but did not last long in 1965-66.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
5 April 1969: broadcast of fifth episode of The Space Pirates. The Doctor and friends find they have been imprisoned with the terrified Dom Issigri; Clancey and Dom escape, but the Doctor, looking for Jamie and Zoe, is caught in the take-off blast.
5 April 1975: broadcast of fifth episode of Genesis of the Daleks. The Doctor almost gets Davros to destroy the Daleks; Gharman leads a revolt against Davros; the Doctor prepares to blow up the incubation tanks.
5 April 2002: webcast of “No Child of Earth”, part 2, the sixth episode of Death Comes to Time.
5 April 2008: broadcast of Partners in Crime, first episode of Season Four of New Who; first regular appearance of Catherine Tate as Donna Noble. The Doctor and Donna foil a plan to turn large numbers of people into food for the infant Adipose.
The other of the two Torchwood audiobooks released last month, written by the reliable James Goss and read by the excellent Kai Owen. It’s a decent enough urban fantasy/horror tale, set in what is effectively a haunted department store, featuring also a rival capitalist version of Torchwood called Firestone. I was not as blown away by it as I was by the companion story Ghost Train, but it’s an honourable addition to the Torchwood range.
4 April 1964: broadcast of “Assassin at Peking”, seventh episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. The Khan wins the Tardis from the Doctor at backgammon, but releases the Tardis crew and allows Marco Polo to return to Venice when they prevent Tegana’s assassination attempt.
4 April 1970: broadcast of third episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor and Liz realise that the astronauts are absorbing so much radiation that they must be aliens; but Carrington’s men are in pursuit.
4 April 2008: broadcast of Exit Wounds, last episode of the second season of Torchwoodii) date specified in canon
4 April ?2010: setting of Planet of the Dead (2009).
This is the collected Fifth Doctor comic strips from Doctor Who Monthly #61-87, all written by Steve Parkhouse and with the best art done by Dave Gibbons (Mick Austin and Steve Dillon also contributing). It’s a very impressive effort – Big Finish fans will have heard Peter Davison a year or so ago admit that he had had no idea these existed, and then more recently saying how much he had enjoyed them once he finally got hold of them. What DWM and Parkhouse managed to do here was to establish a completely different Fifth Doctor continuity, where he has two spiritual bases – the quaint late twentieth-century English village of Stockbridge, and a high-tech, sinister, somewhat mystical Gallifrey – and has adventures being dragged between the two, and to other places. I remember now thinking at the time that one of the disappointments of Arc of Infinity was that the TV Gallifrey was so much less awe-inspiring than the Gallifrey that Parkhouse and Gibbons had summoned into being in the pages of the magazine. The whole sequence of stories has more unity of style and spirit than the TV series was managing at this point, and is all the better for it; and I may now go back and listen again to the recent Big Finish stories set in Stockbridge with the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa (which were all rather good – the “Autumn” segment of Circular Time, and the Castle of Fear / The Eternal Summer / Plague of the Daleks sequence).
In a later story here we also have the Meddling Monk returning, in alliance with the Ice Warriors, not so different from his alliance with the Daleks in the recent Big Finish audios (though obviously played by Peter Butterworth rather than Graeme Garden). Otherwise the Fifth Doctor has various male hangers-on – two warriors of different time periods (Sir Justin and Angus Goodman), übergeek Maxwell Edison, and the sinister Time Lord construct Shayde, with brief appearances from the mysterious psycho-military group SAG 3; almost no female characters at all here. (Someone who looks a bit like Zoe makes an appearance but doesn’t speak.)
NB also a short sequence at the end featuring the Fourth Doctor regressing to the First Doctor, originally published in 1980 in Doctor Who Weekly #17-18, presumably having escaped from the earlier collected volumes, and also rather good.
3 April 1924: birth of Peter Hawkins, the original voice of the Daleks and Cybermen.
3 April 1929: birth of Michael Hayes, who directed The Androids of Tara (1978), The Armageddon Factor (1979), and City of Death (1979).
3 April 2008: death of Johnny Byrne, who wrote The Keeper of Traken (1981), Arc of Infinity (1983), and Warriors of the Deep (1984).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
3 April 1965: broadcast of “The Knight of Jaffa”, second episode of the story we now call The Crusade. King Richard asks the Doctor and Vicki to join his court, and sends Ian to rescue Barbara, who meantime has been handed over to the evil El Akir.
3 April 1971: broadcast of fourth episode of The Claws of Axos. The Doctor sends Axos – and the Master? – into a perpetual timeloop, but is himself unable to leave Earth.
3 April 2010: broadcast of The Eleventh Hour, first story in Season Five of New Who; first full episode for Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, first appearances of Karen Gillan as Amy Pond and Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams.
I can’t quite believe that I managed to reach the age of nearly 44 without having read this brilliant children’s fantasy, though I had fond if vague memories of Dorothea Brooking’s 1974 BBC adaptation. Tom, sent to stay with his aunt and uncle after his brother develops measles, discovers that when the clock in the hall strikes thirteen in the middle of the night he is able to visit the garden as it was in the past, and makes friends with Hattie who lives in that past time, though they argue about which of them is a ghost. For the adult reader the story is actually Hattie’s, Tom being the not completely reliable viewpoint character, and the ending, which I remembered as cutely satisfying when I watched it on TV aged seven, carries a stupendous emotional punch now that I am old enough to really appreciate it. A fantastic book; read it with your children, or borrow someone else’s to read it with.
I had previously read the first volume of Cyril Falls’ Military Operations Macedonia, with its forensic and detailed account of every action fought by British troops in the Macedonia campaign of the First World War (the Great War, as he thought of it in 1933), in which my grandfather was involved. I turned to this book also for family history reasons, though concerning a much more distant ancestor, and expected it to be a similarly detailed and map-heavy account of the major engagements of the period – Kinsale, the Battle of the Yellow Ford, the Battle of the Biscuits, etc; I was braced for detail but not a lot of enlightenment.
But it is far far better than I expected. I should have realised that since the detailed records are not there in the same way as they were for the First World War, Falls would have to take a different approach, and so indeed he does. The book starts with an account of how government functioned in Ireland, including the most lucid explanation of the roled of the Lord Deputy/Lord Lieitenant/Lords Justices and the Irish Council that I have read. He goes on to examine the weaknesses of the systems of recruitment/conscription and supply for the English (and Irish) military forces. From a slightly different perspective to Haigh, he explores Elizabeth’s relative lack of control over military matters. He also looks at Essex’s failures rather more sympathetically than I would (or the Queen did).
The extent to which violence, including the slaughter of captured enemy forces (600, including 400 civilians, killed by Sir Francis Drake on Rathlin Island in 1575; another 600 captured at Smerwick in 1580; hundreds, maybe even a couple of thousand, Spanish sailors shipwrecked after the failure of the Armada in 1588) was taken as a normal state of affairs is sadly reminiscent of many much more recent conflicts. Indeed, I found a lot of resonances between the Nine Years’ War and the Sudanese conflict – the cattle-centred agricultural economy, the attempts by government forces to split the opposition and fight on the ground through local proxies (Falls displays outrage at the extent to which the English were prepared to abandon former Irish allies when they had outlived their usefulness), the religious dimension which led the rebels to appeal to fellow-believers outside the country; there is the obvious difference that John Garang was more intelligent, more determined and more ruthless than Hugh O’Neill, with the result that he managed to deliver independence for his people, though he did not live to see it.
Sir Nicholas White isn’t mentioned explicitly in the text, but again I found Falls’ contextualisation of two incidents in which he was involved, the peculiarly named cess controversy of 1577 and the 1580 expedition to Dingle and points west, very enlightening and helpful. Even more useful, from my own point of view, was Falls’ account of the career of the Earl of Ormonde, who was White’s patron in the early days and who was himself the most senior (and successful) Irish-born military commander on Elizabeth’s side, as well as being the largest landowner in Ireland and the man who would have run the country if the earlier Tudor policy of appointing locals rather than English officials to run the executive arm had been maintained. In the administrative records he is more of a shadowy figure, I guess because having his own local base he had less to prove in Dublin Castle.
Anyway, an excellent read and an unexpected pleasure.
2 April 1934: birth of the great Robert Holmes, script editor from Robot (1974-75) to Image of the Fendahl (1977), and author of The Krotons (1968-69), The Space Pirates (1969), Spearhead from Space (1970), Terror of the Autons (1971), Carnival of Monsters (1973), The Time Warrior (1973-74), The Ark in Space (1975), Pyramids of Mars (1975), The Brain of Morbius (co-author, 1976), The Deadly Assassin (1976), The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), The Sun Makers (1977), The Ribos Operation (1978), The Power of Kroll (1978-79), The Caves of Androzani (1984), The Two Doctors (1985), The Mysterious Planet (1986), and the first episode of The Ultimate Foe (1986).
2 April 1940: birth of Peter Haining, who wrote reference books Doctor Who: A Celebration (1983), The Key to Time (1984), The Doctor Who File (1986), The Time-Travellers’ Guide (1987) and Doctor Who: 25 Glorious Years (1988)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
2 April 1966: broadcast of “The Celestial Toyroom”, first episode of the story we now call The Celestial Toymaker. The (invisible) Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive in the realm of the sinister Toymaker, who forces them to play a deadly form of Blind Man’s Bluff.
2 April 1977: broadcast of sixth episode of The Talons of Weng-Chiang, ending Season 14. The Doctor and Leela, with allies Jago and Litefoot, destroy Weng-Chiang and Mr Sin in a massive fire-fight in the laundry.
2 April 2005: broadcast of The End of the World. The Doctor and Rose arrive on Platform One to watch the Sun expanding to destroy the Earth, and are embroiled in a murder plot.
2 April 2007: broadcast of first show of Totally Doctor Who including first epsiode of The Infinite Quest.
Someone has obviously pointed out my review of Shapiro’s Contested Will to the deniers. *points and laughs*
1 April 1917: birth of Sydney Newman, without whom etc etc.
1 April 1926: birth of John Scott Martin, Dalek operator and rubber-suited monster extraordinaire.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
1 April 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of The Macra Terror. The Doctor floods the mines with oxygen and then blows them up, killing the Macra.
1 April 1972: broadcast of sixth episode of The Sea Devils. The Doctor sabotages the Sea Devils’ base and it explodes killing them all; he and the Master escape.
iii) date specified in canon
1 April 1963: setting of First Doctor novella Time and Relative (2001), by Kim Newman.