At 18 pages this is one of the shortest chapters in the entire Decline and Fall – possibly even the shortest; I haven’t gone back and counted. Gibbon outlines the early history of the Paulician heresy in Anatolia in the ninth century, links them to the Albigensians (who we now tend to call the Cathars) in the thirteenth century, and then explores the benefits of the Reformation.

I was dismayed on my way home yesterday to realise that I had now listened to the last episode of Nebulous, a hilarious spoof sf show starring Mark Gatiss as Professor Nebulous, the leader of K.E.N.T. (the Key Environmental Non-Judgemental Taskforce) whose two secret shames are that his parents wanted him to be a clown and he accidentally destroyed the Isle of Wight. It’s not deep stuff, but it’s funny and affectionate towards its target (classic British sf, especially but not only Doctor Who).

It is surprising how much of the humour is based on that old stand-by, catch-phrases. I remember many years ago reading that Spike Milligan asserted that if you did it often enough, you could eventually get laughs from a character repeatedly opening a door and yelling “More Coal!” or something similar. Though I think the lines in Nebulous are genuinely funny. Whenever anyone says something to me in future that references a body part, I shall think of Harry complaining “Unlike you, professor, I no longer have the luxury of a nostril/nose/leg/arm!”

I heartily recommend it, and hope that there will be more (I see rumours of a TV series).

i) broadcast anniversaries

11 June 1966: broadcast of third episode of The Savages. Jano has absorbed the Doctor’s essence and starts to behave like him.

11 June 2005: broadcast of Bad Wolf. The Doctor, Rose and Jack find themselves participating in TV game shows, but the Daleks are behind it all.

ii) date specified in canon

11 June 1925: events of Black Orchid (1982)

The lady who lived next door to us when I was a child was a Mrs McHugh, and before I first saw her name written down I thought it must be spelt McQ, or possibly McQueue. Do people in other parts of the world have that problem, or does everyone else hear two distinct syllables, “Mc (pause) Hugh”? (Of course, few people outside my native land realise that the last two letters in “McGrath” should be silent.)

Which is a sideways approach to China Mountain Zhang, the story of a gay half-Chinese American in a world where the Chinese have taken over. McHugh takes the pulp sf convention of the heroic engineer and rather subverts it – Zhang is heroic in his private life, in the way he manages his sexuality and his ambigouous racial identity, but through his profession McHugh is able to explore his native New York, China, Mars and other places. (And we also get several short narratives of the lives of other characters: Martian farmers, nomenklatura daughters, networked kite-flyers (this last being topically cyberpunkish but reworked as an element of social separation.)

I normally try and write up books I read as soon as possible, but I am rather glad that (due to pressure of work as much as anything) I took several days to do this one; my first reaction when I had finished it was that it felt rather slight and episodic, but in fact I find images and themes from it coming back to me. It was the single most frequently recommended book in comments to my book poll post, and I can see why.

A combination of unexpectedly driving to work and an early start meant that I was able to take a small detour to a fascinating but grim place, the Enclos des fusillés / Erepark der gefusilleerden, which is a stone’s throw from the Brussels end of the E40 motorway as you come in from the east.

This was originally the Belgian state shooting range, but it is now a memorial for those who were shot by German firing squads here during the occupations of both world wars.

The park is on three levels – the green entry level, and then two steps of memorials. This is more or less from the entrance:

and this from the step between the memorials, looking back. Presumably the artificial hillface was where the actual targets were set up.

And this is from the lower level, looking back up at the middle level. Most memorials are marked with crosses, though there are a few stars of David. You can’t see it here, but the crosses two rows back are marke ‘Inconnu – Onbekend’. The slab on the left is a memorial erected by survivors of Nazi camps in the second world war.

All those who rest here were killed during the Second World War. 35 prisoners were executed here during the first world war, but they were returned to their families after the conflict. They are commemorated in the plaque visible in the middle of my second picture above:

The third name on the list is that of Edith Cavell, who was executed in 1915 for assisting Allied troops to escape to England from occupied Belgium. The Germans’ decision to have her shot, combined with the sinking of the Lusitania a few weeks before, helped harden sentiment against the Germans in America and was exploited ruthlessly by the Allies.

Her statue can be seen outside the National Portrait Gallery in London, and her grave is in Norwich Cathedral.

I wonder if she would have been all that pleased by the use of her image and fate as a propaganda tool. Her final statement was that "I know now that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred and no bitterness towards anyone." Words worth remembering. I also like to think she would have been amused at her depiction as a vulnerable and comely maiden; the photographs show her as exactly the sort of grittily determined senior nurse who would grimly take the consequences of doing what she thought was right.

To return to the park: it is a bit neglected, but it is still there. Rather like Belgium’s memory of the two World Wars, really. I can’t really recommend it to casual visitors to Brussels – it’s inconveniently located and not a lot to see there. But it was worth a detour after an early start on an overcast morning.

@Paul Maskey (SF) 16,211 (70.6%, -0.5%)
@Alex Attwood (SDLP) 3088 (13.5%, -2.9%)
Gerry Carroll (People Before Profit) 1751 (7.6%)
Brian Kingston (DUP) 1393 (6.1%, -1.5%)
Bill Manwaring (UUP) 386 (1.7%, -1.4%)
Aaron McIntyre (Alliance) 122 (0.5%, -1.4%)

@ member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Electorate 61,768; Total poll unknown (turnout 37.53%); Valid votes 22,951.

This was the first Westminster by-election in Northern Ireland since 2000 (South Antrim), the first caused by a resignation since the mass by-elections of 1986, and the first caused by a voluntary resignation where the incumbent did not seek re-election since the Armagh by-election of 1954, when Major Richard Harden decided to spend more time on his Welsh family estate.

Not a big surprise in SF’s strongest constituency (where Adams had the fourth highest majority in the UK). Interesting to note Gerry Carroll of People Before Profit posting an increase both in percentage and in votes in a greatly reduced turnout, the lowest ever seen in a Northern Ireland parliamentary election.

births and deaths

10 June 1904: birth of Geoffrey Orme, who wrote The Underwater Menace.

10 June 2008: death of David Brierly, who played the voice of K9 in 1979-80.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

10 June 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of The Evil of the Daleks. Jamie and Kemel join forces to rescue Victoria; but at the end of the quest they find a Dalek instead.

10 June 1972: broadcast of fourth episode of The Time Monster. The Doctor and the Master duel via Tardis in the vortex.

10 June 2006: broadcast of The Satan Pit. The Beast possesses the Ood and various of the human crew, making fearful predictions about the Doctor and Rose; but the Doctor traps it on the black hole.

• Morocco fishing deal ‘poor value for money' | European Voice
  "Study finds that deal is not cost-effective and that agreement could break international law."
  (tags: westernsahara eu)
• Issendai's Superhero Training Journal
  How to run things badly.
  (tags: work)

The new Companion Chronicle audio from Big Finish takes its title and a bit of its setting from Tom Godwin’s famous short story. Here we have First Doctor companions Steven Taylor, played by Peter Purves, and 1960s City trader Oliver Harper, played by Tom Allan, stuck in a piece of space junk as the air runs out. The point of the story is the two-hander between the two principal characters which takes up most of the second half, a very effective bit of character exploration; I got a bit impatient with the slowness of the first half moving the story to get there, but perhaps some of this will turn out to be a setup for the next (and I suppose last) of this sequence.

i) births and deaths

9 June 1950: birth of David Troughton, son of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton, who played Private Moor in The War Games (1969), King Peladon in The Curse of Peladon (1972) and Professor Hobbes in Midnight (2008) as well as the Black Guardian in Big Finish (2009).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

9 June 1973: broadcast of fourth episode of The Green Death. Mike Yates and the Doctor go undercover to penetrate Global Chemicals.

9 June 2007: broadcast of Blink. The Doctor and Martha try to escape the Weeping Angels by sending messages to Sally Sparrow in DVD Easter Eggs from 1969.

• Fishing pact loses EU millions in Morocco: report | Reuters
  "The EU has paid too high a price to support its fishing fleet," said the 112-page report for the EU Commission.
  (tags: eu westernsahara)
• Jason O Mahony » Blog Archive » Ciaran Toland Vs. The European Parliament.
  I know Ciarán Toland vaguely, from email conversations many years ago; I know Diana Wallis rather better. I like them both very much as people. But on this one Ciarán was right and Diana, of course doing her job, was wrong, and I'm glad that the ECJ found for Ciarán.
  (tags: eu)

i) births and deaths

8 June 1933: birth of Derek Newark, who played Za in An Unearthly Child (1963) and Greg Sutton Inferno (1970).

8 June 1940: birth of Carole Ann Ford, who played the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan from 1963 to 1965 and returned for The Five Doctors in 1983 and more recent Big Finish audios.

8 June 1942: birth of of Peter Grimwade, director of Full Circle (1980), Logopolis (1981), Kinda (1982) and Earthshock (1982) and writer of Time-Flight (1982), Mawdryn Undead (1983) and Planet of Fire (1984).

8 June 1943: birth of Colin Baker, who played the Sixth Doctor from 1984 to 1986.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

8 June 1974: broadcast of sixth episode of Planet of the Spiders, ending Season 11; last regular appearance of Jon Pertwee as the Doctor and last appearance on TV of Richard Franklin as Mike Yates. The Doctor defeats the Great One, but is poisoned by radiation and regenerates.

i) broadcast anniversaries

7 June 1969: broadcast of eighth episode of The War Games. The War Chief offers a deal to the Doctor, who allows the War Lords to capture the rebels.

7 June 2008: broadcast of Forest of the Dead. The Doctor defeats the Vashta Nerada, but at the cost of the lives of River Song and her team, who however are preserved within the Library.

ii) date specified in canon

7 June 1941: setting of earlier parts of Lost in Time (SJA, 2010).

broadcast anniversaries

6 June 1965: broadcast of “The Bride of Sacrifice”, third episode of the story we now call The Aztecs. The Doctor gets engaged to Cameca.

6 June 1970: broadcast of fifth episode of Inferno. Now that the parallel Earth’s crust has been penetrated, earthquakes are felt everywhere, and the Primords mass to attack.

6 June 2003: webcast of sixth episode of Shada. The Doctor and Romana defeat Skagra, and Romana pardons Professor Chronotis/Salyavin.

A mercifully shorter chapter at 44 pages, compared to the epic length of some recent ones, very largely drawn from the works of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, and describing in detail the functioning of the court and culture of the Byzantine empire of the ninth century.

It may have escaped your notice (it almost escaped mine), but there is a by-election in West Belfast on Thursday, due to Gerry Adams having left to represent County Louth in the Dáil.

The last time Sinn Féin got less than 50% of the vote here was in 1992, and the last time they got less than 60% of the vote here was in 1998. The result is therefore not in serious doubt. The candidates, and the votes each of their parties got in last month’s Assembly election and last year’s Westminster election, are as follows:

I am guessing that the votes will be counted during the day on Friday.

Again, thanks to the Hugo shortlist I have tried one of the great graphic novel writers for the first time, and while I was not as blown away by this as I was by the first two volumes of Mike Carey’s The Unwritten, I am realising that I should look out for more Talbot. Grandville Mon Amour is set in an alternate London and Paris, where all characters (apart from a couple of human muggers) are anthropomorphised animals: Inspector LeBrock, the central figure, has the head of a badger. England has recently regained independence and declared itself a socialist republic after a bloody occupation by France, and LeBrock finds himself investigating an escaped prisoner and a series of murders which take him to a top-level political conspiracy. To be honest the plot was not terribly surprising, and (unlike Spiegelmann’s Maus) we never get a good handle on why some people are badgers, others dogs and others again hippopotami, but the loving and colourful detail of the story’s bizarre background, combining familiar landmarks with inhuman faces and steampunk technology, is pretty memorable.

One of the first run of Torchwood novels, which I am just now getting into (just in time for Miracle Day). A fairly standard monster-of-the-week story, the monster in this case being an alien which poses as a lake creature and infects male humans with its offspring. I felt the writing style was a bit clunky at first but it seemed to get tightened up as we went on. The front cover and spine feature Burn Gorman as Owen, and he does get more exposure than the other four, but we get a fair bit of Jack and Toshiko as well. Will be looking out for more of these.

i) births and deaths

5 June 1908: birth of Bill Fraser, who played General Grugger in Meglos (1980) and Bill Pollock in K9 and Company (1981).

5 June 1919: birth of Lawrence Payne, who played Johnny Ringo in The Gunfighters (1966), Morix in The Leisure Hive (1980), and Dastari in The Two Doctors (1985).

5 June 1917: birth of Anne Tirard, who played Locusta in The Romans (1965) and the Seeker in The Ribos Operation (1978).

5 June 1921: birth of Bill Sellars, who directed The Celestial Toymaker (1966).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

5 June 1966: broadcast of “Flight Through Eternity”, third episode of the story we now call The Chase. First appearance of Peter Purves, though not as Steven Taylor. The Tardis, pursued by the Daleks, lands on the Empire State Building and the Mary celeste.

5 June 1971: broadcast of third episode of The Dæmons. The Doctor and the Brigadier try to penetrate the heat shield around the village.

5 June 2010: broadcast of Vincent and the Doctor. The Doctor investigates a mysterious creature in one of van Gogh’s paintings and gets entangled with the Krafayis.

date specified in canon

5 June 1994: birth of Clyde Langer (as in the Sarah Jane Adventures).

Really not difficult for me to rank these.

5) Blackout / All Clear, by Connie Willis. I have only read half of this but I find it hard to imagine that the second half will lift it off the end of my ballot – too padded and just not really very interesting. Alas, it will probably win the Hugo as it already (and inexplicably) has the Nebula.

4) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin. I note that I said I enjoyed this a lot when I read it over a year ago, and it has been widely praised. But I find I now cannot remember much about it, which is no doubt more my fault than the author’s, but means I can’t really give it a high vote.

3) Feed, by ‘Mira Grant’. A good book about the zombie apocalypse which slightly disappointed in that I hoped the plot would turn out more complex than it did.

2) Cryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Unlike the Connie Willis book, which retreads her old themes and characters at much greater length but to no greater effect, Bujold has taken her characters to new territory here, both in terms of planetary setting and in terms of emotional maturity. It’s not the greatest of the Vorkosigan books but it is a welcome return to form after the wobble of Diplomatic Immunity.

1) The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald. I really think this is Ian McDonald’s best book yet, his trademark lush prose intersecting with near-future nanoterrorism and much older mysteries in a richly imagined Istanbul. I know that I am probably biased by affinity with both the author and the setting, but I don’t have much hesitation in giving it my top spot.

Previous Hugo category write-ups: Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form, Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form.

Having raved about the first volume of this series yesterday, I am equally glad about the second volume today, a collection of seven issues (I think), the first four taking Tom Taylor to a French prison where the governor reads Tommy Taylor books to his children and the Song of Roland makes an appearance, the next two taking Tom and his allies Savoy and Lizzie Hexen to Stuttgart in 1940 and a confrontation with Goebbels over the film of Jud Süss, and the last being a horrifying side story of a thug trapped in the form of a fluffy bunny rabbit in a children’s book. The title of this volume at first appears to refer to a blog kept by one of Tom Taylor’s fellow prisoners, but expands in meaning to ask what is inside any of us.

The Stuttgart section has bravely included several quotations from Hitler in the original German, without translation. My German is good enough to get the meaning (and spot a few transcription errors) but I wonder how this will go down with the average reader?

But basically I liked it a lot, and unless Bryan Talbot surprises me it will get my Hugo vote.

• LRB · Ross McKibbin · Can Clegg be forgiven?
  The first anniversary of the coalition government has been and gone, and – like its members, no doubt – we have no clear idea of what its future will be. The various elections that accompanied the anniversary didn’t help. By general consent the Lib Dems had most to worry about after . . .
  (tags: ukpolitics)

First half of the two-volume novel which won the Nebula last month and has been nominated for the Hugo. We are back in the time travel world of Fire Watch, Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, where near-future historians at Oxford send graduate students back to key points of British history (though their research methodology is never adequately explained).

The portrayal of wartime Britain is relentless and in the end wearyingly sentimentalised, the history students too busy being caught up in the moment to reflect on what they are doing there and what they might learn. There is an awful lot of running around and missed communication, and then the book ends in mid-story, without even the dignity of a decent cliffhanger, the publisher expecting you to buy the next volume to see how it ends. I will, but will wait until it is available as a second-hand paperback.

I was interested to note however that some of the errors of detail mercilessly catalogued by here and here seem to have been fixed – in particular, I was looking out for references to the Victoria and Jubilee lines and didn't spot either. The version I have is the free ebook supplied to Hugo voters, so perhaps it has been revised in the year or so since his notes.

Of the time travel stories, this doesn't annoy me as much as Fire Watch, whose errors of setting make it almost unreadable for me, but it is much less enjoyable than To Say Nothing of the Dog and a far less good novel (at least so far) than Doomsday Book. I shall do a post ranking the Hugo nominated novels tomorrow but you can safely assume that this will not be top of my list.

I just realised, thanks to the wonders of Facebook, that both my oldest first cousin and my youngest first cousin have birthdays today. The one is about 40 and the other about 20. My mother is the oldest of nine children, and I am the oldest of my grandfather’s grandchildren (he was married twice). Altogether there are 22 of us, with I think about 17 in the next generation so far (my own three children, my two nieces, and a dozen offspring of our other cousins). I don’t think we have ever all been in the same place at the same time, and there’s at least one I haven’t seen in twenty-five years.

My father, on the other hand, had only one sister who had no children. Funny how families vary.

Volume 2 of this series has been nominated for the Hugo this year, but I though I should start at the beginning; I must say if Volume 2 is half as good as this it will probably be getting my vote. Four of the five issues compiled here are the story of Tommy Taylor, son of the vanished writer Wilson Taylor who has immortalised him as the hero of a series of Harry Potter-like books; a series of revelations leads to a confrontation at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, interrogating the boundaries between genres and between literature and real life. I thought it was witty and horrific, and really enjoyed it. The fifth issue is a secret history of Rudyard Kipling’s life as an unwilling tool of the secret masters of world literature. I hadn’t read anything by Mike Carey before, as far as I remember, and I’ve obviously been missing out.

Nineteen adventures into the Eighth Doctor series, and he finally gets a new companion in the shape of Fitz Kreiner (I have seen a claim somewhere that there are more stories with Fitz than for any other companion), picked up on a visit to 1963 in which his mother is killed by the gruesomely horrible Taine, leech-like internal parasites feeding on brainwaves. The writing is decent enough; I was a bit startled by Fitz’s unreconstructed early Sixties predatory masculinity directed to Sam, having only read later stories in the range; presumably he mellows out in the course of the series.

It must be around thirty years since I read this book, which came towards the end of Dickens’ career (followed only by Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood). For today’s reader, the portrayal of the poor as either comic or villainous grates somewhat, redeemed a bit by Magwitch’s personal history when we eventually find out about it; and few of the middle-class characters are very nice people either (particularly the women). It seems a somehow mean-spirited book, holding a slightly distorting mirror up to society without really digging into the wider causes of human misery. Wikipedia has the original ending, where it is clear that Pip has lost Estrella for ever, and that seems actually a rather more appropriate send-off than the revised version’s reunion.

i) births and deaths

4 June 1927: birth of Geoffrey Palmer, who played Masters in Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970), the Administrator in The Mutants (1972), and Hardaker in Voyage of the Damned (2007). His son Charles Palmer directed four episodes of Doctor Who in 2007.

4 June 1933: birth of Ric Felgate, who played Roy Stone in The War Machines (1966), Brent in The Seeds of Death (1969), and Charles Van Lyden in The Ambassadors of Death (1970).

4 June 1940: birth of David Collings, who played Vorus in Revenge of the Cybermen (1975), Poul in The Robots of Death (1978), and Mawdryn in Mawdryn Undead (1983). He also played an alternate Doctor in the 2003 Big Finish audio Full Fathom Five, by Gary Russell.

4 June 1969: birth of Julie Gardner, Executive Producer of New Who from 2005 to 2008.

4 June 1980: birth of Philip Olivier, who plays the Seventh Doctor’s companion Hex in Big Finish audios.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

4 June 1966: broadcast of second episode of The Savages. The Doctor works out what the Elders have been doing, but his life energy is drained by Jano.

4 June 2005: broadcast of Boom Town. The Doctor and Rose discover that a Slitheen is mayor of Cardiff and has sinister plans for the Blaidd Drwg nuclear power station.

4 June 2011: broadcast of A Good Man Goes To War.

iii) date specified in canon

4 June 1926: The crew of the SS Bernice vanishes from the Indian Ocean, becoming an exhibit in Vorg’s Miniscope, as seen in Carnival of Monsters (1973).

• Humanitarianism in Crisis | United States Institute of Peace
  Money quote: "Without a vigorous restatement of the principles of humanitarianism, humanitarian action will remain in a state of crisis and continue to be a selective tool for the powerful and hence fail in its global mission of protecting and restoring the dignity of human life."
  (tags: war politics)

i) births and deaths

3 June 1927: birth of Kit Pedler, who co-wrote The Tenth Planet (1966), The Moonbase (1967) and The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967).

3 June 1946: birth of Penelope Wilton, who played Prime Minister Harriet Jones in several stories between 2005 and 2008.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

3 June 1967: broadcast of third episode of Evil of the Daleks. The Doctor agrees to test Jamie in order to isolate the ‘huma factor’.

3 June 1971: broadcast of third episode of The Time Monster. The Master, having summoned Krasis via the time crystal, launches a series of time-crossing attacks on UNIT.

3 June 2006: broadcast of The Impossible Planet. The Doctor and Rose arrive on a base investigating a mysterious world impossibly in orbit around a black hole, where the human staff are assisted by the enigmatic Ood.