Programmed reads: 12 books from 13 lists
b) Terre des Hommes (non-fiction by popularity on LT)
e) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (non-genre fiction by popularity on LT)
f) The Decameron (non-genre fiction by popularity on LJ poll)
l) Conundrum (New Adventures in sequence)
m) Revolution Man (Eighth Doctor Adventures in sequence)
n) Doctor Who: Aliens and Enemies, The Glamour Chase (New Who books by LT popularity)
o) State of Change (other Old Who by popularity)
p) The Lost Road (History of Middle Earth in sequence)
r) Faerie Queene essays (Tudors and Ireland)
s) Invisible Man (books by PoC in order of entry)
t) The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish (books on the shelves at end 2005, otherwise not accounted for, going backwards in LT entry order)
v) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (books I have already read but haven't reviewed on-line, ranked by LT popularity)

Coming next, possibly:
Full House, by Stephen Jay Gould (started)
Niccolo Rising, by Dorothy Dunnett (started)
Western Shore, by Juliet E. McKenna
Last Call, by Tim Powers
Timescape, by Gregory Benford
Tales of Shakespeare, by Charles Lamb
Old Goriot, by Honore Balzac
The Plot Against Pepys, by James and Ben Long
The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, by Bessie Head
The Naming Of The Dead, by Ian Rankin
Jewels of the Sun, by Nora Roberts
The Little Book of "Thunderbirds" (if I can find it)
2nd Interzone Anthology, ed. by John Clute
Primate Robinson: 1709-94, by A.P.W. Malcomson
A New History of Ireland, Volume III: Early Modern Ireland 1534-1691, ed. by T. W. Moody 
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
George Herbert, Priest and Poet, by Kenneth Mason
Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
Lords of the Storm, by David A. McIntee
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
No Future, by Paul Cornell
Dominion, by Nick Walters
The Return of the Shadow, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Nuclear Time, by Oli Smith

Must try harder on diversity.

Yeah, I know they happened three months ago; but I have now updated the summary page with full first preference votes, and also projected the local council votes onto the boundaries of each constituency.

I had not realised that both the UUP and SDLP did significantly better in the council elections than in the Assembly election held on the same day. One would normally expect it to be the other way round – there is often a bigger choice of candidates for the council elections, and in a second-order election voters may be more inclined to vote adventurously. But the UUP did two whole percentage points better, 15.2% rather than 13.2% at local level, and the Stoops got 15.0% rather than 14.2%.

The biggest anomalies for the UUP are:

East Londonderry – up 7.2% (15.6% in local elections, 8.4% in Assembly where they lost a seat)
Foyle – up 4.2% (4.2% in local election, no candidate in Assembly)
North Antrim – up 4.2% (15.9% in local elections, 11.7% in Assembly)
North Down – up 3.9% (14.3% in local elections, 10.4% in Assembly where they lost a seat)
Fermanagh and South Tyrone – up 3.8% (23.1% in local elections – more than the DUP! 19.3% in Assembly)
West Tyrone – up 3.6% (14.0% in local elections, 10.4% in Assembly though they did gain a seat)
East Belfast – up 2.9% (12.6% in local elections, 9.7% in Assembly)
South Down – up 2.7% (13.3% in local elections, 10.6% in Assembly)
South Antrim – up 2.5% (21.3% in local elections, 17.8% in Assembly)
Mid Ulster – up 2.4% (12.7% in local elections, 10.3% in Assembly)
Lagan Valley – up 1.9% (22.3% in local elections, 20.4% in Assembly)
North Belfast – up 1.1% (9.3% in local elections, 8.2% in Assembly where they lost a seat)

The first two of these are due to peculiar local circumstances, and the last two may be mistakes in my projection, but the others look pretty sound to me. It looks as if a significant number of voters were prepared to continue supporting UUP councillors and candidates at local level, but were put off by the poorly messaged and poorly managed Assembly campaign. It is noticeable that the party leader’s constituency is in the first half of the table.

For the SDLP, the pattern is less clear:

Fermanagh and South Tyrone – up 3.1% (12.7% in local election, 9.6% in Assembly where they lost a seat)
West Tyrone – up 3.0% (11.5% in local elections, 8.5% in Assembly where they too gained a seat)
Mid Ulster – up 2.0% (16.7% in local elections, 14.7% in Assembly)
South Antrim – up 1.5% (12.1% in local elections, 10.6% in Assembly where they lost a seat)
Foyle – up 1.4% (36.7% in local elections, 35.3% in Assembly)
Upper Bann – up 1.3% (12.7% in local elections, 11.4% in Assembly)
Strangford – up 1.2% (9.7% in local elections, 8.5% in Assembly where they failed to gain seat)
East Belfast – up 1.0% (1.8% in local elections, 0.8% in Assembly)
West Belfast – up 0.9% (14.1% in local elections, 13.2% in Assembly)
North Antrim – up 0.2% (9.3% in local elections, 9,1% in Assembly where they lost a seat)

For all the complaints against Margaret Ritchie, who apparently may face a leadership heave later in the year, this looks more like a problem of organisation west of the Bann (and there were mitigating circumstances in West Tyrone). The Strangford figure is suggestive but unreliable because of the boundaries. The lower three barely register (though note the loss of over half the SDLP’s core electorate, such as it is, in East Belfast). The one that I don’t have an explanation for is South Antrim.

It happened to the other parties too, but less systematically.

For Alliance:

East Belfast – up 3.4% (29.7% in local elections, 26.3% in Assembly) – Dawn Purvis effect, perhaps?
North Belfast – up 1.8% (8.1% in local elections, 6.3% in Assembly)
Strangford – up 1.6% (16.0% in local elections, 14.4% in Assembly)
South Belfast – up 0.7% (20.5% in local elections, 19.8% in Assembly)

For the DUP

Upper Bann – up 2.3% (29.4% in local elections, 27.1% in Assembly)
West Belfast – 1.1% (8.6% in local elections, 7.5% in Assembly where UUP actually had a candidate)

And for other parties:

PUP in East Belfast up 1.3% (5.9% in local elections, 4.6% in Assembly where they lost a seat) – the Dawn Purvis effect again

SF in Lagan Valley up 1.6% (5.0% in local elections, 3.4% in Assembly where they lost a seat) – again I put this down to specific local circumstances regarding the Assembly campaign, and given the difficulty of making the projection of the Dunmurry Cross vote it may not be all that real anyway.

No doubt there are other local circumstances that I’m not aware of.

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It is here at last – the fifth volume in Martin’s epic Song of Ice and Fire series, taking the dynastic struggles around the realm of Westeros on, with yet more journeys of destiny, hidden heirs appearing, viewpoint characters meeting untimely and painful ends, and horrible violence of every variety. And the end of the book does seem to be setting us up for a climax in the next volume, though don’t read this one expecting a lot of resolution. Spoilers below the cut, but see also ‘s spoiler-free review in The Independent which pretty much nails what’s good about the series.

S

P

O

I

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My biggest problem with A Dance With Dragons was the sudden appearance of Aegon out of nowhere. Did I miss all previous references to him and to Jon Connington’s continuing career in previous volumes? Or is my suspicion correct that there weren’t any, and he is a new element? If so I feel it is a big narrative weakness, when so much else has been ominously foreshadowed, to suddenly discover that Daenerys’ nephew, who has a superior claim to hers, has been alive all along. (And it’s a bit of a coincidence that Tyrion and Quentyn just happen to end up in the same boat.)

So, two viewpoint characters get multiply stabbed to death in the closing chapters. Kevan Lannister is the fourth Hand in King’s Landing to be killed since the start of the story (counting Jon Arryn) – I think only Tyrion has survived, so a messy death more or less goes with the job. But do we take it that Varys has been plotting all along (with Littlefinger?) to put Daenerys on the throne? This is fairly explicit in the TV series, but I don’t remember it being so clear in earlier books. It seems to me rather uncharacteristically daring of Varys to invest so heavily in a young woman who he can never have met (and he would have had to have been investing in Viserys until he died) unless he has motives and resources that we don’t know about.

And poor Jon! Often when Martin leaves us with his viewpoint characters apparently about to die, there is a chance that they may reappear (most obviously Brienne and Catelyn). However, it looks like it’s all over for Jon Snow. And it seemed shocking but fair to me; he turns out to have been an unreliable narrator, but the clues that his command of the Watch had terminally slipped away were all there.

But what of the battle outside Winterfell? Did it even happen, or was Bolton lying in his message to Jon? I was partly hoping for Stannis to pull off yet another surprising and undeserved military victory, but I was hoping even more that we would actually see what was happening, rather than move from Asha’s reunion with Theon (and how would Stannis deal with Jeyne/”Arya”?) to a reported but unseen battle. I hope there turns out to be a good narrative justification for leaving us hanging, though I worry we may be left like Brienne in A Feast for Crows.

Having said all that, I still love the series. I lost patience with Robert Jordan after one of the volumes where the central characters did little more than pointless epic voyaging. There’s a lot of epic voyaging here, too, but it all seems fairly pointful – Daenerys, Tyrion, Asha, even Jon Connington, all are closer to a conclusion by the end of the book. Kevan and Jon don’t go anywhere and consequently snuff it. (Though the Stark sisters survive despite relative immobility, and Quentyn dies at the end of his own very foolish errand.) And part of the joy of the journeys is the scenery: at first I was a bit miffed that so little of the book is set in Westeros itself, but it’s entirely fair to explore the neighbouring continent in more detail.

And I am speculating wildly about how it will all end. I had wondered if Jon and Daenerys would eventually get together, but that seems a bit unlikely now. (Daenerys and Tyrion for the future, perhaps?) I had thought that Arya as trained killer would return to King’s Landing to wreak vengeful havoc, but it looks like that will happen without her. (Maybe she will hook up with Jaime at the end?) Maybe I’m completely wrong, and rather than a happy ending, Martin is going to leave us at the end of the series with a devastated and chaotic Westeros and no resolution other than death. It would certainly be consistent with what we have seen so far…

Back in the days when the internet was less than half its present size, ie the mid-noughties, I did an annual survey linking to online reviews of all the Hugo nominees in the written fiction categories (see my efforts for 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006). It would be very difficult to repeat such an exercise now; a lot of online material is difficult to search, locked behind the walls of Facebook or indeed in podcasts.

However, it is still feasible to survey how bloggers have announced their intentions of voting, and therefore I have done so. This is of course not a scientific poll: it’s a snapshot of the preferences of a few individuals who have bothered to broadcast their thoughts. There may be grassroots majorities in favour of “Ponies”, “”The Jaguar House, In Shadow”, “The Maiden Flight of McCarthy’s Bellerophon” and (very probably) Blackout/All Clear who will vote for their preferred stories but don’t see the need to tell the internets all about it.

There are two or three times as many surveys of the short fiction categories this year than when I last did this exercise, five years ago. No doubt this is partly due to the excellent practice of making all the short fiction available in the Hugo Voter Packet. (Most are also available online separately, links here.) On the other hand, I had to scrabble a bit to find rankings of the novels this year (no doubt partly because of the awful length of one of the nominees), and in the end several of the lists I post in the category are more my reading between the lines of individual reviews of the novels than a formal ranking.

If any of those linked to below feel that I have mischaracterised them (or even worse, mis-identified them) in any way, please get in touch; I will attempt to alert all to this post by email and blog comments.

I have not tried to carry out this exercise for the other Hugo categories, and won’t, though I very much encourage others to try.

Short stories

Rankings

SF Strangelove: 1) The Things, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) Amaryllis, 4) Ponies
Steve the Bookstore Guy: 1) The Things, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) Ponies, 4) Amaryllis
Nick Bate: 1) The Things, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) Ponies, 4) Amaryllis
Matt Hilliard: 1) The Things, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) Ponies, 4) Amaryllis
Pete Miller: 1) The Things, 2) Amaryllis, 3) For Want of a Nail, 4) Ponies
Shawn, Steve the Bookstore Guy’s friend: 1) The Things, 2) Amaryllis, 3) For Want of a Nail, 4) Ponies
Abigail Nussbaum: 1) The Things; [my interpretation] 2) No Award, 3) For Want of a Nail, 4) Amaryllis, 5) Ponies]
Andrew Hickey: 1) The Things, 2) Ponies, 3) For Want Of A Nail, 4) Amaryllis
Me: 1) For Want of a Nail; 2) The Things; 3) Ponies; 4) Amaryllis
Stephanie S: 1) For Want of a Nail, 2) The Things, 3) Amaryllis, 4) Ponies
Pam Phillips: 1) For Want of a Nail, 2) The Things, 3) Amaryllis, 4) Ponies
“The Gregarious Loner”: 1) For Want of a Nail [no other preferences]
Ryan: 1) For Want of a Nail [no other preferences]
Alan Heuer: 1) Amaryllis, 2) The Things, 3) For Want of a Nail, 4) Ponies
Timo Pietilä: 1) Amaryllis, 2) The Things, 3) No Award, 4) For Want of a Nail, 5) Ponies
Boris Keylwerth: 1) Amaryllis, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) The Things, 4) Ponies

Comment

A fairly clear aggregate here: eight out of sixteen favour “The Things”, and five of the other eight put it second. In the middle, ten out of sixteen put “For Want of a Nail” ahead of “Amaryllis”, and on first preferences the score is five to three for Kowal. Nine out of sixteen put “Ponies” last, and four of the other seven put it second last. I’m in a minority in putting “For Want of a Nail” first, but “The Things” will be a decent winner.

Novelettes

Rankings

SF Strangelove: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) No Award [no other preferences]
Nick Bates: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) The Emperor of Mars [no other preferences]
Abigail Nussbaum: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) The Jaguar House, In Shadow, 3) Eight Miles, 4) The Emperor of Mars, 5) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made
Pam Philips: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) The Jaguar House, in Shadow, 3) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made, 4) The Emperor of Mars, 5) Eight Miles
Pete Miller: =1) Plus or Minus, =1) The Jaguar House, in Shadow [no other preferences]
Boris Keylwerth: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) Eight Miles, 3) The Emperor of Mars, 4) The Jaguar House, in Shadow, 5) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made
Alan Heuer: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made, 3) Eight Miles, 4) The Emperor of Mars, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow
“The Gregarious Loner”: 1) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made, 2) Eight Miles, 3) The Emperor of Mars [no other preferences]
Shawn Steve the Bookstore Guy’s Friend: 1) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made, 2) Eight Miles. 3) The Emperor of Mars, 4) Plus or Minus, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow
Stephanie S: 1) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made, =2) Eight Miles, =2) The Jaguar House, in Shadow. 4) The Emperor of Mars, 5) Plus or Minus
Timo Pietilä: 1) The Emperor of Mars, 2) Eight Miles, 3) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made, 4) Plus or Minus, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow
Ryan: 1) The Emperor of Mars, 2) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made, 3) Plus or Minus, 4) Eight Miles, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow
Andrew Wheeler: [I interpret slightly: 1) The Jaguar House, in Shadow, 2) Eight Miles, =3) The Emperor of Mars, =3) Plus or Minus, 5) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made]
Me: 1) Eight Miles, 2) The Emperor of Mars, 3) No Award, 4) Plus or Minus by James Patrick Kelly, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow, 6) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made

Comment

This is the most open of the short fiction categories. “Plus or Minus” is the front runner, ranked top or equal top by seven of the fourteen. “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made” gets first preferences from four, but is a polarising story with another four (myself included) ranking it last. Taking all preferences into account I think “Eight Miles” is probably in second place; it got only one first preferemce (cough) but second preferences from six. “The Emperor of Mars” is possibly also ahead of “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made”. “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” is definitely in the rearguard, ranked fourth or fifth by six of the ten who went that far down their ballot paper.

Novellas

Rankings

Ryan: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window [no other preferences]
The Gregarious Loner: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 2) The Sultan of the Clouds [no other preferences]
Timo Pietilä: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Sultan of the Clouds, 4) Troika, 5) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Nick Bates: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, 4) Troika, 5) The Sultan of the Clouds
Abigail Nussbaum: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, 4) The Sultan of the Clouds [no preference for Troika]
Boris Keylwerth: 1) Troika, 2) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 3) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 4) The Sultan of the Clouds, 5) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Stephanie S: 1) Troika, =2) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, =2) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, =4) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, =4) The Sultan of the Clouds
Alan Heuer: 1) Troika, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Sultan of the Clouds, 4) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, 5) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window
Me: 1) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 2) The Sultan of the Clouds, 3) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 4) Troika, 5) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Shawn, Steve the Bookshop Guy’s Friend: 1) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 2) The Sultan of the Clouds, 3) Troika, 4) The Lady Who Plucked Flowers from Beneath the Queen’s Window, 5) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Sf Strangelove: 1) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 4) Troika, 5) The Sultan of the Clouds

Comment

A clear front runner, with “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” ranked top by five out of eleven and second by another two. Second place fairly clear as well: The Lifecycle of Software Objects gets two first preferences and five second preferences. It’s more difficult to tell after that. “Troika”, a polarising story, is ranked top by three and second last by four. I think “The Sultan of the Clouds” nudges ahead of “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” at the end.

Novels

Rankings

Boris Keylwerth: 1) The Dervish House
Lavinia Shadows: 1) The Dervish House, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
SF Strangelove: 1) The Dervish House, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 3) No Award
Pete Miller: 1) The Dervish House, 2) Cryoburn
Timo Pietilä: 1) The Dervish House, 2) Feed, 3) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 4) Cryoburn, 5) No Award, 6) Blackout/All Clear
Me: 1) The Dervish House, 2) Cryoburn, 3) Feed, 4) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 5) No Award, 6) Blackout/All Clear
Alan Heuer: 1) The Dervish House, 2) Blackout/All Clear, 3) Cryoburn, 4) Feed, 5) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Andrew Wheeler: 1) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 2) Feed, 3) The Dervish House, 4) Cryoburn, 5) Blackout/All Clear
Rachel Neumeier: 1) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 2) Blackout / All Clear, 3) Feed, 4) Cryoburn, 5) The Dervish House
“Married, Four Cats”: 1) Feed, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The Gregarious Loner: 1) Feed, 2) Cryoburn, 3) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Stephanie S.: 1) Cryoburn, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms 3) Feed

Comment

The Dervish House is a clear winner, rated top by seven out of twelve (and two of the other five had not actually read it). The ordering of the rest is pretty clear too: The hundred Thousand Kingdoms in second place, Feed third, Cryoburn fourth and Blackout/All Clear ranked last by three of the five who ranked it at all.

I have found this an interesting exercise (and I hope you did too): it is surprising and sometimes enlightening to see how intelligent people can react completely differently to the same texts. All but three of the nineteen nominees found someone who was prepared to put them top of their ballot paper; all have their detractors as well. If you have time I encourage you to read some of these posts, particularly the ones you may disagree with.

One of the earlier spinoff books from New Who, this pulls together the monsters of the new series and some of the best remembered opponents from Old Who – the Axons, the Zarbi, and many in between including the Rani and Omega, but not the Master specifically, though he is given a sidebar under the Dæmons. It is an interesting example of firmly branding Old Who as part of New Who continuity, and is nicely put together, if rather short.

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A splendidly creepy story of the Doctor, Amy and Rory (set between the wedding and the opening of Season 6) at a Swiss sanatorium in the late 18th century where almost nothing is as it seems. James Goss varies from entertaining to excellent as a Who writer, and this is a particularly inventive novel, told from the points of view of various narrators, including the Doctor, Amy and Rory, all of whom turn out to be unreliable in one way or the other. As with any Who-related work by Goss, this is strongly recommended.

I started it by listening to the audio version read by Clare Corbett and then realised I had the paper copy of the book, so read the last two thirds in dead tree format, really because I am a quick reader and wanted to find out what happened; Corbett’s reading, and in particular her characterisation of the different first-person narrators with their varying accents, is excellent.

Getting to the end of the books about how the Silmarillion was (and wasn’t) written now, this volume includes several interesting insights into how Tolkien’s works reached us. At the core is the rather slim pickings of The Lost Road, the time travel novel which Tolkien began at around the same time C.S. Lewis began his Ransome trilogy. Tolkien abandoned it, and it wasn’t really going in the right direction; what we have here is too episodic to be coherent, and in particular, the framing narrative has a set of slightly odd father-son dynamics going on – Tolkien’s own parents were absent, largely through being dead, and the same is true of most of his more successful characters (Bilbo’s parents are never heard of, he in turn abandons Frodo in the first chapter of LotR, Húrin is a distant captive while his son and daughter fall in love with each other) though there are exceptions (mostly father-figures who are over-controlling – Théoden, Denethor, Thingol).

The importance of father-son dynamics extends also to the making of this book, and I was particularly interested in a passage on page 302 where Christopher Tolkien expresses his regrets that the Silmarillion as originally published was not better; he reflects on the role played by Guy Gavriel Kay in assembling the texts but in the end takes full responsibility for it himself. I was not surprised to read that the story he feels was worst served is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

There’s also a lot of meaty material on the languages – an essay called the Lhammas and a set of Elvish etymologies, which brought home to me that for Tolkien his invented structure was much more than just Quenya and Sindarin, it also included half a dozen other languages spoken by different branches of the Elves, barely mentioned in the stories. I have dabbled enough in
philology to sense the uniqueness of this achievement – very few sf or fantasy writers come anywhere near Tolkien’s level of detail in his invented names and words, and some (eg Robert Jordan) are so bad at it that it’s painful.

Apart from that, we have the Fall of Númenor, and yet another rehash of the main text of the Silmarillion. I am looking forward to the next volume which is about the early versions of LotR.

A former colleague just sent me a link to this Chinese television documentary about him and his parter operating a literary coffee-house in Beijing. A nice story (part of a series about foreigners making their homes and businesses in China today) and also rather salutary to see us Westerners treated as objects of curiosity. (Filip is my former colleague – fluent in about 15 languages, including Mandarin Chinese.)

Next in the series of BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures; Fitz, Sam and the Doctor find themselves caught up in a peculiar Chinese plot to subvert flower power and Take Overr The Wurld by use of a drug grown only by oppressed Tibetan monks. The plot is slightly better than I make it sound, but only slightly. But there are a lot of good character moments for both Sam and Fitz (who briefly gets brainwashed by Maoist cadres but recovers, lucky man), which redeems it a bit.

Once again I’m behind with writing these up, mainly because I found some of these stories rather difficult to watch or to care about writing them up once I had watched them. But things had got better by the end.

I started watching the Trial of a Time Lord season in a rather foul mood. But in fact, rather to my surprise, I found myself warming to The Mysterious Planet – in relative terms, of course; it’s definitely in the lower third of Robert Holmes’ stories, and has a number of plot elements recycled from his previous scripts when he did them better. But there is a sense that the show might be finding its feet again: back to the 25-minute format, and also embedding the season in a narrative arc (which was successful last time it was tried) in which Time Lords up to no good; the basics are actually there, and I think it is the production values that let it down as much as anything. (Though I should admit that the plot is also a bit confusing and over-filled.) The Mysterious Planet is a little dull but it’s not actively bad, unlike most of the previous season.

I hold the unfashionable view that Mindwarp is much the best Sixth Doctor story. Unlike The Mysterious Planet, it is perhaps a little padded rather than crammed, but the performances make up for it – particularly Nabil Shaban and Chris Ryan, with Brian Blessed doing some excellent shouting. Also the framing narrative comes into its own here, with the Doctor as puzzled as we viewers are in some cases.

I was able to forgive many of the flaws of Earthshock because of the killing off of Adric. The destruction of Peri’s brain is a great shock moment which lifts Mindwarp from merely being good to being classic. We are building up to something shocking throughout the story, and it actually delivers; dramatically, this is not just the high point of the season, it’s the high point of the Colin Baker era.

So farewell to poor Peri. Having been listening to her excellent extended adventures courtesy of Big Finish over the last few years (where Nicola Bryant has now started directing stories as well as appearing in them), it’s rather a shock to return to how poorly she was served in the original scripts. The Peri/Six dynamic never comes quite right, and she bears all the hallmarks of being trapped in an abusive bullying relationship. Nicola Bryant is very pleasant to watch, but the same cannot be said for what is done to her character. (Apart, as stated above, from her dramatic demise. Up until the start of this year, my personal fanon was that Peri actually does die, and the story with King Hyrcanos is made up to make the Doctor feel better; but Big Finish’s Peri and the Piscon Paradox has persuaded me that there is more than one satisfactory way to answer that question.)

Apart from the Vervoids themselves, Terror of the Vervoids isn’t all that bad. There are good guest appearances (Honor Blackman being the most remarkable), Mel is a welcome change of tone if somewhat abruptly added to the show, and the plot is a decent claustrophobia / paranoia / base under siege combination. The Vervoids are unfortunately dull, obviously zipped into their suits and not very plant-like, but again they are not the worst of the monsters of Who. Where the story goes off the rails is the framing narrative, where it simply becomes confusing as to how the Doctor has access to future adventures, why he should be on trial now for something he hasn’t done yet, and why we should be particularly outraged if the Matrix has been hacked.

And then The Ultimate Foe is a poor farewell to a misused Doctor. There is little good to be said of it – Eric Saward’s original script for the second episode makes more sense than Pip and Jane Baker’s version as broadcast, but that is not saying much. The Valeyard’s role does become clear, and actually interesting, but the back-story of Time Lord politics simply becomes confusing and the means and motivation of the Master, crucial to what passes for a plot, are even less comprehensible than usual. (And we have the cop-out of Peri’s faked death, which kills the drama of the only interesting development of the entire season.)

When I started this rewatch, Colin Baker was firmly at the bottom of my list of favourite Doctors; I’m afraid he is still there, at least as far as his TV performance goes. The character is simply an unattractive one, and Baker is not able to invest him with sufficient heroism to overcome this (cf Pertwee, who for similar reasons is second last in my ranking, but was able to turn on the charm a bit more often). It’s far from being all Baker’s fault; the decision to have him assault Peri in his very first episode is a disastrous one which taints that story and most subsequent ones for me; the bizarre way in which the camera habitually zooms in on him pulling a funny face as the closing music rolls becomes very tedious very fast; and even what we thought we knew about the Doctor’s background in Time Lord continuity is undermined for no terribly good reason (I think Six has proportionally more stories with fellow time lords than any other Doctor, including One and Four who actually had Gallifreyan companions). Part of this is the mis-writing of the Peri/Doctor dynamic, but then things actually deteriorate in terms of production values and coherence once she has been killed off.

Having said that, Baker does rather well in the Big Finish audios – it’s a cliche, I know, but I do recommend Peri and the Piscon Paradox, Bloodtide, The Doomwood Curse, Brotherhood of the Daleks, Paper Cuts, Jubilee, and The Wormery. I also recommend, if you can find it, Colin Baker’s continuation of Peri’s story, The Age of Chaos.

And suddenly we have a new Doctor, as well as a new companion. Time and the Rani is widely excoriated as the worst of the Seventh Doctor era (coming bottom of the poll I ran a few years back and third last in the DWM Mighty 200 poll) but I don’t quite see that (granted, I have a couple of other heterodox views on this period of the programme). It’s a bit unexciting – the Rani’s evil plan consists more of exposition than action, and the Tetraps are not well executed – but at least one can understand what is going on, and most of the cast seem to want to do it well.

And McCoy’s Doctor is rather a breath of fresh air – once again I find I am watching the show because I want to see what he will do or say next, a feeling I haven’t really had since Tom Baker’s departure. I still don’t think that Time and the Rani is terribly good, but it seems to me unfarily underrated.

And suddenly we seem to have a complete step change with Paradise Towers, a glorious story which merges comedy and horror – Richard Briers dressed up as a Hitler-like bureaucrat; girl gangs with extraordinary slogans; cannibalistic little old ladies; a hero who isn’t terribly heroic; an evil architect and a swimming pool. I don’t know what it is, but there is a sudden injection of energy and confidence into the show at this point that, in my view, lasts for most of the rest of Old Who’s run. The Doctor may not have much of a clue as to what is going on, but we are urging him to work it out and we get there at much the same time as he does. My daily watching of the old episodes has become a pleasure again, rather than a chore.

So, farewell to Six, but ending on a more optimistic note than I have done for a while. Also feeling slightly elegiac in that I know there will be only two more of these posts.

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

Last chapter of the original fifth volume. The Turks emerge from Central Asia, spend some time in India, and then start to conquer the East and advance westwards into Asia Minor. Also my notes on Gibbon’s geography, Anna Comnena, Jerusalem, the Druzes, the Georgians and the run-up to the Crusades.

I spent (some of) the day off on Thursday and more time today updating the elections site, which is now up to date for all 18 Northern Ireland constituencies (East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, East Antrim, North Antrim, South Antrim, North Down, South Down, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Foyle, Lagan Valley, East Londonderry, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh, Strangford, West Tyrone, and Upper Bann).

OK, that just leaves the 101 local government electoral areas, and then projecting those results onto the parliamentary/Assembly seats; and then the whole thing will start again when the new constituency boundaries are announced…

Consolidated:

Best Novel

1) The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
2) Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold
3) Feed by Mira Grant
4) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
5) No Award
6) Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

Best Novella

1) The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
2) "The Sultan of the Clouds" by Geoffrey A. Landis
3) "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window" by Rachel Swirsky
4) "Troika" by Alastair Reynolds
5) "The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand
6) No Award

Best Novelette

1) "Eight Miles" by Sean McMullen
2) "The Emperor of Mars" by Allen M. Steele
3) No Award
4) "Plus or Minus" by James Patrick Kelly
5) "The Jaguar House, in Shadow" by Aliette de Bodard
6) "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" by Eric James Stone

Best Short Story

1) "For Want of a Nail" by Mary Robinette Kowal
2) "The Things" by Peter Watts
3) "Ponies" by Kij Johnson
4) "Amaryllis" by Carrie Vaughn
5) No Award

Best Related Work

1) Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea
2) The Business of Science Fiction: Two Insiders Discuss Writing and Publishing, by Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg
3) No Award
4) Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 1: (1907–1948): Learning Curve, by William H. Patterson, Jr.
• Bearings: Reviews 1997-2001, by Gary K. Wolfe
• Writing Excuses, Season 4, by Brandon Sanderson, Jordan Sanderson, Howard Tayler, Dan Wells

Best Graphic Story

1) The Unwritten, Volume 2: Inside Man, written by Mike Carey
2) Fables: Witches, written by Bill Willingham
3) Grandville Mon Amour, by Bryan Talbot
4) No Award
5) Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio
6) Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, written and illustrated by Howard Tayler

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

1) Inception
2) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
3) No Award
4) How to Train Your Dragon
5) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
6) Toy Story 3

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

1) Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor 
2) The Lost Thing
3) Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang 
4) Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol 
5) Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury
6) No Award

[…other categories…]

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

1) Lauren Beukes
2) Saladin Ahmed
3) Lev Grossman
4) Dan Wells
5) No Award
6) Larry Correia

I haven’t actually finished this, but I’ve simply lost interest; despite having read the two previous volumes in the series (this is the tenth) I can’t remember why I was supposed to care about any of the characters, and I’m going to do something else with my time.

Which concludes my reading for the Best Graphic Story category of this year’s Hugo Awards. My votes will be as follows:

6) Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, written and illustrated by Howard Tayler
5) Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio
4) No Award
3) Grandville Mon Amour, by Bryan Talbot
2) Fables: Witches, written by Bill Willingham
1) The Unwritten, Volume 2: Inside Man, written by Mike Carey

Previous Hugo category write-ups (though the Campbell Award is Not A Hugo): Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form, Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer 2011 (Not A Hugo)

Delighted though I am to see the ongoing humiliation of Rupert Murdoch, I fear that the story is not going to end well.

There are two big issues: the disgusting journalistic techniques of the tabloid press, and Murdoch’s stifling control of the media (analysed with gloom by none other than Charles Moore in his piece this morning, “I’m starting to think that the Left might actually be right“).

The closure of the News of the World solves neither problem. It deprives Murdoch of some of his share of the overall media scene, but he remains dominant; and while of course it is good that he has been prevented from expanding his satellite TV holdings further, that actually is not a defeat, it is a potential victory which may have been only deferred rather than thwarted. Any response short of dismantling Murdoch’s control of the media is a failure.

As for the hacking itself, the NotW was unfortunate in that they got caught, but they were certainly not the only guilty newspaper and equally certainly not the worst – it’s pretty obvious from any reasonable analysis of the UK media scene that the NotW is far exceeded in malevolence and gutter journalism by the Daily Mail. Any fix to this situation that does not have the Daily Mail (and the others) screaming is a failure.

One part of the answer became clear to me in the fuss over superinjunctions a few months ago. As a non-UK resident I had no qualms whatever about researching the details of some of the superinjunctions. And I came away thinking that in fact all the ones I could find details on were entirely reasonable; the injustice was that these measures were available only to the rich, and not also to the average person subjected to tabloid abuse. There is no public interest in revealing anyone’s sex life, rich or poor, as far as I can see. Any response which does not give privacy rights to all citizens is a failure.

What chance of success? You tell me.

• The Bujold Nexus – A Civil Campaign Companion
  CONTENTS
  Editors' Introduction ; References and AbbreviationsPart I: The Major Intertexts
  – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
  – Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
  – Georgette Heyer, A Civil Contract
  – Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
  – William Shakespeare
  Part II: 'A comedy of biology and manners'
  Part III: Annotations, by chapter
  Afterword: LMB's continuing romance with romance

  (Hope this is better than the Bujold Companion which came out a few years back.)

  (tags: sf)
• Eccleston explains why he left Doctor Who | Bad Wilf
  Why Christopher Eccestone left: "My face didn’t fit and I’m sure they were glad to see the back of me. The important thing is that I succeeded. It was a great part. I loved playing him. I loved connecting with that audience. "
  (tags: doctorwho)

Good lord.

• Google+: It May Have 10 Million Users, But They're Not Visiting Very Often
  I must say I've signed up but am barely using it.
  (tags: internet)
• An Eye-Opening Adventure in Socialized Medicine | NeuroTribes
  "Riding the Underground back to Great Portland Street, I felt an unexpected sense of exhilaration. I had experienced not just a visit to a new clinic, but an unfamiliar paradigm of medicine — one in which health care is abundant, easily available, and affordable, rather than scarce, expensive, and a hassle for both the patient and the doctor."
  (tags: ushealth)
• Belgium bans 'burqa' | openDemocracy
  "Belgium’s law banning the face-veil and other forms of face covering is badly drafted, unnecessary, and counter-productive" – I am proud to have voted for one of the authors of this piece in last year's election.
  (tags: belgium)

Steve Lyons is always interesting if not always completely successful, and this Seventh Doctor novel is a great idea which is not perfectly executed. The Tardis, with Benny and Ace, lands in an English village where mysterious things are afoot, but what appears at first to be a murder mystery turns out to be a return to a situation from the Doctor’s past. This was Lyons’ first Who novel (indeed, I think his first published work), and his prose style is still a tad unpolished in places with too many characters jostling for attention. But the core idea is audacious enough to make this one well worth reading.

Announcement here.

I extracted these stats from the Eurostat site:

(the numbers are births registered in each month of 2009, taken as a percentage of all births in 2009, divided by the number of days in the month)

September is just ahead of July as the top month for average daily birthrate in the EU, though July is top in more member states (16 to 8). November is just below December for the EU as a whole, though there is a lot more variation. Fascinating that most countries show a dip in August as compared to the two neighbouring months. The outliers are not surprisingly those with low birth rates combined with unusual climates (for the EU); Cyprus in light blue goes up and down more than any other, Malta the light orange which dips below the others in August and above the others in November, and Latvia is high in March and June.

Just idle curiosity really.

• The parliamentary fists of the majority – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
  "The Boycott Law is a double-edged sword that threatens to harm Israel’s international standing, and to play into the hands of those criticizing the quality of the country’s democracy."  – says the Speaker of the Knesset.
  (tags: middleeast humanrights)

The Hugo Voter Package includes five novels and five short stories by this year’s nominees for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. I don’t think I had ever cast a vote for this award before, so I found this tremendously helpful. I am a little uneasy that there is not a really equal basis of comparison – two novels, vs a novel and a short story, vs a novel, vs another novel, vs four short stories – but it’s difficult to imagine another way of doing it. I’m therefore listing the works on which I base my judgement along with, indeed before, the writers who are getting my votes (as usual, in reverse order).

6) Monster Hunter International, by Larry Correia. I do have little hesitation in putting Monster Hunter International last. It is relentlessly single-tone, derivative and predictable, and I can’t see how anyone could rank it above any of the other works included in the package. To an extent the John W. Campbell Award is about the future of the genre; books like this take us way back to the past, with the incidentals slightly jazzed up for the twenty-first century, and I think it would be embarrassing for the genre if Correia won on the basis of this.

5) No Award. I wavered about putting it higher, but there is enough originality in all the other four nominees to make me feel that, while I might be surprised, I would not be embarrassed if any of them won.

4) I Am Not A Serial Killer, by Dan Wells. Of the novels supplied, this is the furthest out of the mainstream of the genre, a YA novel about a boy obsessed with serial killers who discovers that the mild-mannered next door neighbour is in fact a man-eating demon. There is some unevenness in the execution, but I can see that there is a vibrant and suitably weird imagination behind it.

3) The Magicians and “Endgame” by Lev Grossman. A very ambitious project, picking up on the various wizard school stories and series (most obviously Rowling) and parallel world (most obviously Lewis) but with older and hornier students. Some readers complained that the protagonists were rather depressing characters; I don’t object to that myself, but I did think there were sufficient structural problems with The Magicians to keep it off either of my top two spots.

2) “Doctor Diablo Goes Through The Motions”, “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela”, “Mister Hadji’s Sunset Ride” and “The Faithful Soldier Prompted”, by Saladin Ahmed. If this were a prize for the best title, Ahmed would walk away with it. The four stories supplied are very interesting, lucid short tales which bring the perspective of a culturally Islamic background to the wider genre. (I was a bit annoyed by the gratuitously variable fonts of the fourth story, but I don’t hold it against the author.) Ahmed may well be a better and more promising writer than my top choice, and certainly I found his writing much better than Correia or Wells. In the end, though, I don’t quite have enough to go on; at novel length, he might not be quite as good as Grossman, or he might turn out to be better than Beukes. Somewhat hesitantly, I put him between the two.

1) Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. (Moxyland is also included in the Hugo Voter Package, but I doubt that I will read it in time.) Zoo City is the only one of these books I had already read, thanks to its BSFA shortlisting. I thought it an assured and accomplished piece of work then, and I think the same now; none of the other nominees convince me that they are more deserving of the award, so my top vote goes to Beukes.

Previous Hugo category write-ups (though the Campbell Award is Not A Hugo): Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form, Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form.

Hadzic arrested! (Reuters, BBC, Guardian).

• Out of the blue, into the black — Crooked Timber
  Labour Party adviser with extreme views on immigration dismissed as "over the top" and "simply not practicable" by leader of hard right Migration Watch thinktank.
  (tags: ukpolitics humanrights migration)

It’s a very long time since last I read this, though I had seen the most recent cinema adaptation – which was more faithful to the book than I remembered, at least as regards the lengthy period of time spent with the Beavers. It really takes a long time to get going, with much exposition from the Beavers and Mr Tumnus before we get to the main plot. As a seven-year-old I remember being baffled and also upset by Aslan’s death; now I perceive the heaviness of the allegory, but I am also impressed that Lewis makes the young reader care about a character whose first appearance is more than two thirds of the way into the book. And the style is good and clear: I just started reading Tolkien’s The Lost Road, and gosh, it’s clunky in comparison. Sure, the gender roles are rather traditional, and the Christianity rather blatant to the adult reader; but there is also a great sense of magic and of a deeper layer of lore and history to the Narnia universe, and you can see why it has lasted.

This book, published in June 1964, actually predates the first Doctor Who annuals and books, so I guess may be the very first Who spinoff literature evar. It is really not bad at all; alternating formats between comic strip and illustrated prose, and even a photonovel featuring the Doctor’s grand-daughter Susan, it tells the story of the Daleks’ attempt to invade and occupy Earth’s Solar System (a diagram showing Skaro swooshing past the orbits of the Sun’s other planets), opposed by the heroic efforts of Jeff, Andy and Mary Stone, good swash-buckling square-jawed heroes all three. Mary at one point is captured by the Daleks and persuades them to start taking better care of their prisoners, a story-line later used by Big finish for their character Susan Mendes in the Dalek Empire audios. On the one hand it’s very much related to the adventure comics of the day; on the other I liked the coherent narrative thread, which takes the format in a slightly different direction, and appreciated the expansion of Daleks-as-Nazis to Daleks-as-totalitarians, rewriting history at their convenience. This one is worth hunting down.