- Russian Lawmaker Casts 31 ‘Aye’ Votes, Despite Being Dead
Good to see that even the deceased can expect active representation…
Monthly Archives: December 2012
The Doctor Who webcasts
I resolved some time back that if I ever did a rewatch of New Who, i should start with The Curse of Fatal Death and should include all the dramatic presentations, to choose a potentially wideranging term, that fit into the general sequence. Before the glorious return of Doctor Who to the screens in the person of Christopher Eccleston, the BBC experimented with bringing it back as a webcast animation series. Four such stories were produced in 2001-2003, three of them featuring the last three established Doctors – Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann – and a fourth with Richard E. Grant as a new incarnation of the Doctor. My impressions of them at an episode a day are below.
See for yourself, starting here.
See for yourself, starting here.
See for yourself, starting here.
See for yourself, starting here.
The webcasts tend to be forgotten these days. They started as a lure to get Who fans to explore the BBC website, and even now are only to be found in obscure corners of the Internet. But at the same time a lot of the people involved with the webcasts remained engaged with New Who, including particularly James Goss, who was involved with production of all four of these and has written some of the best New Who and Torchwood fiction. The webcasts may not have been a howling success, but they paved the way for the BBC Wales revival, and possibly demonstrated that there was still some life in the old franchise yet.
And tomorrow, I will watch Rose.
< The Curse of Fatal Death | The Webcasts | Rose – Dalek | The Long Game – The Parting of the Ways | Comic Relief 2006 – The Girl In The Fireplace | Rise of the Cybermen – Doomsday | Everything Changes – They Keep Killing Suzie | Random Shoes – End of Days | Smith and Jones – 42 | Human Nature / The Family of Blood – Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords & The Infinite Quest | Revenge of the Slitheen – The Lost Boy & Time Crash | Voyage of the Damned – Adam | Reset – Exit Wounds
Links I found interesting for 19-12-2012
- Six Stories to Watch in Europe in 2013
@jan_techau looks into his crystal ball.
- A League of Our Own
Gun culture: Why Switzerland and Israel are quite unlike the US.
- Bermudians vote for change
Opposition wins deciding seat by just four votes.
- Seven Productivity Myths, Debunked by Science (and Common Sense)
Very reassuring!
December non-genre fiction
The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink
White Eagles over Serbia, by Lawrence Durrell
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
Perfume, by Patrick Süskind
Crooked Little Heart, by Anne Lamott
Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad
Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming
2007
Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust
2008
The History of Henry the Fifth, by William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare
As You Like It, by William Shakespeare
2009
The Secret Garden, by Francis Hodgson Burnett
Mr Singh Has Disappeared: A Concussed Novel, by Horst Prillinger
Wild Sweet Love, by Beverly Jenkins
2010
The Falls, by Ian Rankin
Fair Play, by Tove Jansson
2011
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson
Het Boek Van Alle Dingen / The Book of Everything, by Guus Kuijer
December seems to have been a rather sparse month for my non-sf fiction readings in years past. December 2006 was unusually good, but I can’t remember a lot about the novels I read that month – I do seem to have enjoyed them all apart from The Crying of Lot 49.
So I am picking only two novels in particular of the 19 above, but with a particularly numerous field of honourable mentions.
The Secret Garden, by Francis Hodgson Burnett – this was as good as I had hoped it might be, a story of healing from psychological and physical trauma through friendship and gardening.
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson – this is for the whole trilogy which was excellent, compelling, absorbing reading for me last year, if not quite Great Literature.
Honourable mentions to Tove Jansson, Marcel Proust and six of the seven from December 2006.
All four of the Shakespeare plays I listened to in December 2008 are excellent, and actually I think in future postings of my past non-genre reads I will omit Shakespeare from this category; it is too much like comparing apples and oranges.
Links I found interesting for 18-12-2012
- The European Union and the Habsburg Monarchy
Robert Cooper draws comparisons.
- Gun control: The gun control that works: no guns
David Rennie, lucid as ever.
- The Role of Sanctions in EU Foreign Policy
Stefan Lehne: “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail… Sanctions are a powerful tool for the EU, but they cannot be the union’s only tool.”
- ‘Tough line’ on fisheries reform can secure better future
Too little too late, I fear.
- Bankrupting our oceans: ministers ignoring scientific advice
The shocking facts about political decisions which defy scientific evidence.
- What now? | Rosi’s Blog
A farewell to cagefighting.
- Scotland and the EU
“all that is certain is that EU law would require all parties to negotiate in good faith and in a spirit of cooperation”
- Despite all this, my daughter wants to be a teacher
A teacher is the one who gets shot first.
- The Straight Dope: What is déjà vu?
“I could have sworn I’d answered this question before. “
- Vastra Investigates
“Heartbreak is a burden to us all. Pity the man with two.”
- Hard to tell unionist parties apart
Alex Kane: “the UUP is now closer to the DUP than it has ever been. Indeed, I can’t actually point to one area or issue in which there is now any significant difference between the two parties.”
December books 4) Sanctuary, by David McIntee
A New Adventure novel, with the Seventh Doctor and Benny ending up at the awful end of the Albigensian crusade; a rare case of a purely historical story, with the Tardis crew’s presence the only sfnal element.
I rather enjoyed it. I am a Benny fan, and the fact that she gets a decent, if doomed, romance was cause for cheer. (Apparently there are two other McIntee stories featuring her love interest – one audio, one novel. I shall look out for them.) There is a decent effort at gritty and vivid historical detail, and the Doctor gets to solve a locked-room murder mystery. Benny is surprisingly up-to-date with late twentieth-century Earth culture, but she is a woman of many talents after all. And as a partial reboot of the range, after the departure of Ace, who constituted half of the NAs’ continuity with Old Who, it did the job for me.
Links I found interesting for 17-12-2012
- Six myths about the Progressive Democrats.
Reports of their rightwingery were exaggerated.
- The Web We Lost – Anil Dash
“In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company’s site.”
- E-Christmas card? No thanks
I think I agree -a line of salutation is sufficient!
- I am Adam Lanza’s Mother
A gut-wrenching piece about mental illness and parenthood.
- Chang’E 2 imaging of Toutatis succeeded beyond my expectations!
The asteroid and the Chinese probe
- On Being, Or Not Being, Adam Lanza’s Mother
A third-party defence of the piece I linked to above.
Getting all three to look at the camera
A tough assignment. But successful in the end.
Links I found interesting for 16-12-2012
- Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns
Former Australian PM on his proudest achievement.
- After twenty years of preparation, it is time to convene the Minsk Conference.¬es=
The Nagorno-Karabakh peace process: named after a conference that never happened.
- Gotovina: Unlikely Hero of Croat-Serb Dialogue
Unfreezing the legacy of war.
- 12 Letters That Didn’t Make the Alphabet
Þ, Ƿ, Ȝ, Æ, Ð, &, ᵹ, ꝥ, Œ, ⁊, ſ, and ŋ.
- Why the BBC’s boss had to go
Best analysis I have read of the BBC’s (and Entwhistle’s) Savile screwup.
My year on Twitter
This year is not over yet, of course, but I broke my personal record both for most retweets and for biggest potential readership of a retweet during 2012.
My most retweeted post, picked up by 33 others with a total potential readership of 25,100, was posted just after midnight on 3 December:
Leveson on the 'clear evidence of misreporting on European issues' With detailed examples of the UK media's mendacit…
This was one of my many Tweets which came from my Delicious feed via If This Then That. It's a little embarrassing that it is a) truncated and b) has almost no original content. As with so many such cases, it probably helped that it was picked up and retweeted by Jon Worth (@jonworth) at an early stage.
One other tweet beat my previous record of 20 RTs (set by my "What happened to the Doctor Who companions?" LJ post in November 2010). It was on 17 November, in the aftermath of the appalling Savita case:
Research examines the ‘abortionist saints’ of medieval Ireland "…the concept of abortionist saints is unique to Ir…
another truncated Delicious post which got 25 retweets and a total readership of 22,000, more than half of whom are accounted for by Charlie Stross (@cstross).
On the other axis, three of my tweets about BSFA winners from Eastercon were picked up by Cory Doctorow, who had 230,000 followers at the time (and now has 270,000). Marginally the best of the three, in that another 650 people might have seen it through two others retweeting, was this:
Cory's two other RTs are here and here.
Apart from those, two other tweets beat the previous record of 36,800 possible views, which had also been set by the "What happened to the Doctor Who companions" post in 2010. They were:
#cy2012eublogs "Citizen participation is at the heart of the European Union." Discuss.
from 26 July, which ironically picked up no replies at all but was RTed by people with a combined following of 206,000 – most of these, as with the BSFA tweets, coming from a single source, Alejandro Sanchez (@AlejandroSL) of whom I know nothing; and:
from 19 November, which was picked up by two journalists with the Economist, one of whom (@eaterofsun, Oliver Morton) has 4,000 followers and the other (@mattbish, Matthew Bishop) 38,000.
None of these figures, either for potential readership or for total retweets, takes account of modified versions of my tweets which are then transmitted by others, so the real winning tweets may be quite different.
According to Crowdbooster, which I think is more reliable than Twitter on this one, I also broke my personal record for most reples to a single tweet in 2012, with this bad-tempered intervention during the French Presidential debate:
Twitter itself doesn't record any replies at all, but I preserved some of them on Storify. Crowdbooster thinks that there were seven altogether.
What all this says to me is that Twitter has become much bigger for me this year as a focus of my online activity. I use Tweetdeck to read both Twitter and Facebook in a single column on my phone; and while a year or so ago, I guess I would see roughly equivalent numbers of posts to each, tweets now outnumber Facebook posts by a factor of at least five and maybe ten. It is increasingly the case that if you aren't on Twitter, you're not in the online conversation.
It has drawbacks as well. The sheer volume of information is such that one cannot read everything; I was always able to read my LJ friends feed, even back in the days when it was much bigger (and I have another post coming about that), but Twitter has too much and moves too fast. So you have to adapt to the fact that you will only be diiping in and out of the conversation as it suits you, and that you need to know how to retrieve posts that may be of interest. At least it is fairly straightforward to know when you are being addressed, quoted or otherwise invoked, and to then respond if you wish. But the lack of arhciving is a frustration (if not as bad as Facebook, and with promises that it will improve).
And if you aren't already, please do follow me at @nwbrux.
Links I found interesting for 15-12-2012
- You are not a scrounger: a letter to a disabled reader
What to say to someone driven to consider suicide by the British government’s policies.
- A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths – Atlantic Mobile
Compare and contrast.
- Newtown and the Madness of Guns : The New Yorker
Links I found interesting for 14-12-2012
- Gobsmacked in Cambridge
“While strictly speaking I had another hour and twenty-seven minutes allotted to book shopping, I found myself unable to go on. After you find the book at the top of your Life List just sitting there, what’s the point of trying to beat that in a second venue?”
- Lord of Film – an interview with Randal Plunkett
The current Lord Dunsany: “I think if I wasn’t a film maker, I would have to be a writer. The writer I would be, would have to be Philip K. Dick.”
- iOS Google Maps: If it’s great, thank Apple’s strategy.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it…
- Voting systems around the world
Neat map.
- The Shore part 1, Conleth Hill, Ciaran Hinds
Lovely Oscar-winning short film set in Northern Ireland. (First half.)
- The Shore part 2
Second half.
Small world
At a Northern Ireland event in Brussels, I get talking to a fellow attendee, who eventually reveals her unusual surname.
Me (not thinking it through quite quickly enough): That’s an unusual surname. Are you by any chance related to X?
Her: Yes, he is my cousin. Why, do you know him?
Me (with some reserve): Er, yes.
Her: He’s a total gobshite, isn’t he!
Me (with relief): Er, yes!
Links I found interesting for 10-12-2012
- Sir Patrick Moore interviews Neil Armstrong in 1970
Armstrong predicts permanent moonbases in their lifetime; alas, it was not to be.
- The Truth About Wi-Fi [Pic]
So true.
- Lice in the Locks of Literature
Christopher Priest on Robert McCrum.
The late great Sir Patrick Moore
When I was in my late teens, I was very active in the Irish Astronomical Association, which despite its name was largely a Northern Ireland body based in Belfast and Armagh (it had split from the all-Ireland Irish Astronomical Society in the mid-1970s). Most of the years of my involvement featured a ceremonial visit from Patrick Moore, who had been the founding director of the Armagh Planetarium fifteen years before; most of the older members of the IAA had worked with him in the mid-1960s, or in other capacities later, and Moore genuinely seemed to enjoy coming back and speaking to the public.
I had of course read all of the books by him available in the Belfast library system, including the Scott Saunders Space Adventures series and Bureaucrats and how to annoy them, written under the pseudonym of "R.T. Fishall", and I suppose this was my first real encounter with a genuine celebrity. He was true to his public persona of being a bit eccentric and grouchy, but the fact that I usually saw him in the company of his old friends no doubt made him both more comfortable and also more able to play up to an awestruck youthful audience (ie me). He was sardonic about the situation in Northern Ireland, from which he had departed before the Troubles started: "When I went to the golf club, they asked me if I was a Catholic or a Protestant. I said, 'I'm a Druid. Good-bye!'"
Towards the end of my involvement with the IAA (quite possibly the last time I saw him, probably in early 1986), I mentioned to him that I had got a place at Clare College, Cambridge, and this caught his interest; he too had been awarded a place at Clare in 1939 but joined the RAF instead. (Famous drop-outs from Clare include Richard Stilgoe, Thomas Merton and Siegfried Sassoon, but Patrick Moore was the only one I know of who turned them down.) I must also credit him, I think, for my enduring love of the music of Sibelius, who composed the theme for The Sky at Night as part of the incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande, a play by Belgium's only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you want to remember him for five minutes, have a listen.
December Books 3) Ōoku: the Inner Chambers, vol 6, by Fumi Yoshinaga
Yet another in the alternate history series where most Japanese men are wiped out by a mysterious plague, and a chosen few are secluded in the Ōoku as personal attendants and occasional lovers of the shōgun, who in this version of history is a woman, women having taken over all leadership positions in society.
This volume crystallised some of the problems I have with the series for me. Because it is set in the Inner Chambers, we basically have a continuing repetition of new shōgun takes power, some internal politicking in the harem, a disputed process for producing and recognising an heir, a dead child or two, then the shōgun dies and we go back to the start of the cycle. It is getting a bit repetitive.
Also, it is now clear that this is actually meant to be not an alternate history but our own timeline, a secret history of the real reason why Japan chose centuries of isolation. All the history of Japan in the early modern period which we think we know, in other words, is actually about women rather than men. That will create problems when we reach the nineteenth century, but I guess one can go with the flow for now.
But I think you do need a better knowledge than I have of the “real” course of Japanese history to appreciate this; I suspect that some of the charm of the series must be to see how the author manages to gender-flip some of the dynastic dynamics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which are presumably well known to those who know anything about that period of Japanese history. Unfortunately I am not among their number, so it leaves me rather baffled. This volume concludes by promising that in the next, we will read of “the greatest scandal of the mid-Edo period, the Ejima-Ikushima affair”. I am afraid these are not words likely to entice me to get volume 7. So, unless someone persuades me otherwise, my exploration of Yoshinaga’s world will stop here.
December non-fiction
The Myth of Greater Albania, by Paulin Kola
The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics, by Marcus du Sautoy
Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
2004
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, by the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
The Uncyclopedia, by Gideon Haigh
2005
‘with all faults’, by David Low
Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, by Ann Wroe
The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia, by Darra Goldstein
2006
This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, by Swanee Hunt
The Great English Pilgrimage, by Christopher Donaldson
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown
The Elusive Quest: Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, by Norman Porter
Ockham’s Razor: A Search for Wonder In An Age of Doubt, by Wade Rowland
Notes from a Small Island, by Bill Bryson
An Intimate History of Humanity, by Theodore Zeldin
Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, by Marina Warner
2007
About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1980-1984, by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood
Who’s Next: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, by Mark Clapham, Eddie Robson and Jim Smith
Back in Time: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who, by Steve Couch, Tony Watkins and Peter S. Williams
Time And Relative Dissertations In Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who, edited by David Butler
Latin Palaeography: Antiquity & the Middle Ages, by Bernhard Bischoff, translated by Dáibhí Ó Cróinín & David Ganz
Slide Rule: An Autobiography, by Neville Shute
2008
The Diary of a Young Girl: The Defintive Edition, by Anne Frank
Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture, by Patrick E. McGowan
Daughters of Britannia: the Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives, by Katie Hickman
If I Had Been…: Ten Historical Fantasies, edited by Daniel Snowman
The Cecils: Privilege and power behind the throne, by David Loades
The Genius of Shakespeare, by Jonathan Bate
2009
The Jesuits, by Jonathan Wright
Don’t Mention the Wars: A Journey Through European Stereotypes, by Tony Connelly
Geschiedenis van het Nederlands, by Marijke van der Wal and Cor van Bree
Memoirs Of My Life, by Edward Gibbon
2010
Tintin and the Secret of Literature, by Tom McCarthy
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science, by Mary Roach
I, Who: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who Novels, by Lars Pearson
I, Who 2: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who Novels and Audios, by Lars Pearson
I, Who 3: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who Novels and Audios, by Lars Pearson
The Space Race, by Deborah Cadbury
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, by John McWhorter
2011
Interpreting Irish History, edited by Ciaran Brady
Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography
Unrecognised States, by Nina Caspersen
Gulistān, by Sheikh Muṣleḥ-ʾiddin Saʿdī
Būstān, by Sheikh Muṣleḥ-ʾiddin Saʿdī
The Dalek Handbook, by Steve Tribe and James Goss
The John Nathan-Turner Memoirs
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vols 5 and 6, by Edward Gibbon
Vanished Kingdoms, by Norman Davies
My top five, in chronological order of reading them:
Time And Relative Dissertations In Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who, edited by David Butler – of the various books about Doctor Who as a phenomenon which I have read, this is the best collection of essays from an academic perspective, though almost entirely concentrating on Old Who.
The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank – the extraordinary tale of a teenager in hiding from the Nazis, frankly describing her own arrival at adulthood in appalling circumstances.
Tintin and the Secret of Literature, by Tom McCarthy – for us fans of Hergé, it has always been clear that there is some deep meaning behind the best of the Tintin comics. McCarthy attempts to work out what that is, with some success.
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science, by Mary Roach – sex, of course, will never go out of fashion; and Roach reports on scientists’ desperate attempts to research it, with hilarious consequences.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vols 5 and 6, by Edward Gibbon – pars pro toto here. Gibbon is wrong on many things, including his own basic theory (as far as he ever explains it), but always eloquently so, and the book is a delight to read. I did it over a two-year period, taking it a chapter a week, with frequent breaks.
Honourable mentions to:
The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia, by Darra Goldstein
Slide Rule: An Autobiography, by Neville Shute
The Genius of Shakespeare, by Jonathan Bate
Memoirs Of My Life, by Edward Gibbon
Vanished Kingdoms, by Norman Davies
Gosh
When I look back on the various interns who have worked for me over the last decade, there was one in particular who I thought was not a howling success; she was from a wealthy background in a former Soviet republic, not very political or interested in the Balkans which I mainly worked on at the time, rude to the secretarial and administrative staff, and wasn’t in the office as often as I would have liked. I tend to use her as the example of what not to look for when hiring (in particular, the fact that I put too much credence in a warm recommendation from a trusted colleague, who was friends with her very rich American husband but of course had no idea of her skills and interests).
To my surprise she got in touch with me from the USA this week, saying, “Those years in Brussels are among my fondest memories and working for you was one of the highlights.” It just goes to show that a particular incident can look very different from the other side of the equation, and also makes me feel that perhaps my mentoring efforts weren’t being completely wasted.
Links I found interesting for 08-12-2012
- The Protestant Cheese of Belvoir Castle
presented by the Duke of York to Mary Isabella, wife of the fourth Duke of Rutland, in 1825.
- Kafka letter up for auction
“What I feel towards mice is naked fear.”
- A consultant speaks out on the donor economy in Cyprus – Interview with Kate Flynn
Ignored by the people who need to know, of course.
- Chalkida, a once fine city
The remains of Venice’s Negropont.
Links I found interesting for 07-12-2012
- Technology giants at war: Another game of thrones
The battle between Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.
My BBC piece about Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh
For Disability History Month, the BBC asked me to do a short profile of the 19th century Irish adventurer and politician Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh, who had no arms or legs. Here it is. (Based on my earlier pieces about him, here, here and here.)
Links I found interesting for 06-12-2012
- Paul Krugman: Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics
#fb “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation. OK, economics is a pretty poor substitute; I don’t expect to be making recorded appearances in the Time Vault a century or two from now. But I tried.”
- 11 sounds that your kids have probably never heard
Ah, old tech.
- An alternative source of the UK’s EU-scepticism: politico-scepticism
@jonworth puts it down to general suspicion of institutions.
- Towards A Grand Unified Theory Of Time-Travel In Doctor Who
@stealthmunchkin is working on it.
- America’s 50 Worst State Legislatures
*shakes head in despair*
Dave Brubeck’s Unsquare Dance
Links I found interesting for 05-12-2012
- The Real and Unreal: Ursula K. Le Guin, American Novelist
Julie Philips (Tiptree biographer) on UKLG.
- The rise of UKIP: what does it all mean?
Not necessarily success!
- The days the #EUCO hashtag was born (and starting the #eu14 hashtag)
@ronpatz reveals all.
- Despite Bob Dole’s Wish, Republicans Reject Disabilities Treaty
Harry Reid: “It is a sad day when we cannot pass a treaty that simply brings the world up to the American standard for protecting people with disabilities because the Republican Party is in thrall to extremists and ideologues.”
- Theresa Christy of Otis Elevator: Making Elevators Go
The world expert on elevator mathematics. “I feel like I get paid to play videogames. I watch the simulation, and I see what happens, and I try to improve the score I am getting.”
Links I found interesting for 04-12-2012
- Reenergizing Democracy Promotion
Thomas Carothers reflects on the post-election situation.“Finding ways to encourage autocratic allies to respond more productively to impulses for positive political change in their own societies is not easy given the varied interests at stake, but it is not impossible.”
- Read it in books
@quarsan praises libraries. And reading.
- Jim Hinch on The Swerve: Why Stephen Greenblatt Is Wrong — And Why It Matters
“The Swerve’s primary achievement is to flatter like-minded readers with a tall tale of enlightened modern values triumphing over a benighted pre-modern past. It’s no accident, I think, that The Swerve’s imagined Middle Ages bears a strong resemblance to America’s present era of superstitious know-nothing-ism… The Swerve presents itself as a work of literary history. But really it is a salvo in the culture wars; an effort to lend an aura of historical inevitability to the idea that religious faith has no place in a modern democratic society.”
- A map of non-existent European countries (and how to create your own)
Because 27 EU members is not enough!
December Books 2) Non-Stop, by Brian Aldiss
It must be around thirty years since I first (and last) read Non-Stop. There are still lots of things to like about it.
The gender perspective of the book is a little regrettable. The book starts with an argument between Roy Complain, the protagonist, and his lover; their relationship is pretty abusive, and when she is kidnapped we never hear of her again. We do a little better with Roy’s other lover, Vyann, who he first encounters as a security official from a more socially advanced group. I feel she rather loses agency as their relationship prospers and Roy gets to save her once of twice, but she does get the last word in the book:
‘Now they’ll have no alternative but to take us back to Earth,’ Vyann said in a tiny voice. She looked at Complain; she tried, woman-like, to guess at all the new interests that awaited them. She tried to guess at the exquisite pressures which would attend the adjustment of every ship-dweller to the sublimities of Earth. It was as if everyone was about to be born, she thought, smiling into Complain’s awakened face. He was her sort; neither of them had ever been really sure of what they wanted: so they would be most likely to find it.
Though that “woman-like” is rather jarring.
I was surprised to realise that there is quite a strong decolonisation metaphor at the core of the story. Complain and his fellow inhabitants of the ship turn out to have been denied agency by the rest of humanity, treated as subhumans – smaller, smellier and with much shorter lifespans – and in his climactic debate with Complain, the Earth agent Fermour actually invokes Albert Schweitzer as a good example. The ensuing conflict changed Complain’s world forever, and while it may not necessarily be for the better, it is from a position of superior understanding.
A final thought, on religion: the belief system of the starship turns out to be a set of completely invented and manipulated lies, but the priest Marapper is sincere. He also appears to die and return to life.
Non-Stop kicks off my reread of the BSFA, Clarke and Tiptree winners because it was given a retrospective award by the BSFA in 2008 as the best book of 1958. It beat The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Heinlein, A Case Of Conscience and A Clash of Cymbals/The Triumph of Time by James Blish and Who? by Algis Budrys. I have read all but the last if these and I reckon the BSFA got it right. (I don’t recall voting myself.) I loved both the Leiber and Heinlein when I was younger, and A Case Of Conscience is trying to say something very earnestly, but Non-Stop, the first of Aldiss’s many novels, is really breaking new ground and establishing a fresh way of doing things. It has dated but was worth going back to.
Links I found interesting for 03-12-2012
- How Two Presidents Helped Me Deal With Love, Guilt, and Fatherhood – NationalJournal.com
George W. Bush and Bill Clinton helping out on autism.
- Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook
I agree with most of this.
- 200km-long traffic jam paralyzes Russian freeway
Brrrrr!!!!!
- The Real Scandal Behind Benghazi
A lack of resources and skilled management at the State Dept. (At last, some sane commentary!)
- Dear journalists: grow up
‘stop saying “This will change the face of the press in the UK.” That is precisely the objective.’
- Leveson on the ‘clear evidence of misreporting on European issues’
With detailed examples of the UK media’s mendacity about Europe.
Strange maps – where are these places?
My son's geography homework included these two satellite photographs of interesting landscapes. I eventually identified the second one, once I realised it had been strategically cropped, but am still scratching my head about the first. Thoughts?
Leveson on Europe
I had missed this, but am grateful to @dicknieuwenhuis on Twitter for flagging up a piece by Conor Brennan on the Business New Europe blog (which I had not previously heard of) quoting the Leveson report. The relevant paragraphs, in full:
9.53 Articles relating to the European Union, and Britain’s role within it, accounted for a further category of story where parts of the press appeared to prioritise the title’s agenda over factual accuracy. On Europe, Mr Campbell said: “Several of our national daily titIes – The Sun, The Express, The Star, The Mail, The Telegraph in particular – are broadly anti-European. At various times, readers of these and other newspapers may have read that ’Europe’ or ’Brussels” or ’the EU superstate’ has banned, or is intending to ban kilts, curries, mushy peas, paper rounds, Caerphilly cheese, charity shops, bulldogs, bent sausages and cucumbers, the British Army, lollipop ladies, British loaves, British made lavatories, the passport crest, lorry drivers who wear glasses, and many more. In addition, if the Eurosceptic press is to be believed, Britain is going to be forced to unite as a single country with France, Church schools are being forced to hire atheist teachers, Scotch whisky is being-classified as an inflammable liquid, British soldiers must take orders in French, the price of chips is being raised by Brussels, Europe is insisting on one size fits all condoms, new laws are being proposed on how to climb, a ladder, it will be a criminal offence to criticise Europe, Number 10 must fly the European flag, and finally, Europe is brainwashing our children with pro-European propaganda! Of the UK press and the European institutions – I speak as something of a Eurosceptic by Blairite standards – it is clear who does more brainwashing. Some of the examples, may appear trivial, comic even. But there is a serious point: that once some of our newspapers decide to campaign on a certain issue, they do so with scant regard for fact. These stories are written by reporters, rewritten by subs, and edited by editors who frankly must know them to be untrue. This goes beyond the fusion of news and comment, to the area of invention.”
9.54 Although Mr Campbell’s evidence may have been exaggerated for effect, there is certainly clear evidence of misreporting on European issues. Mr Campbell drew attention to a Daily Mail story claiming that “the EU” was going to ban grocers from selling eggs by the dozen, followed by a story that there had been a U-turn and the ban would no longer take place. The reality is that there had never been a ban proposed and the original story was based on a deliberate or careless misinterpretation of EU proposals.
Full Fact drew attention to a number of further ‘anti-EU’ stories which misrepresented facts, including a Daily Express report on EU plans to ‘ban’ plastic shopping bags, when the reality was that a consultation had been launched to explore a variety of options, including a potential ban, for reducing waste from plastic bags.
9.55 The factual errors in the examples above are, in certain respects, trivial. But the cumulative impact can have serious consequences. Mr Blair explained that the misinformation published about Europe by some parts of the press made it difficult for him to adopt particular policies or achieve certain political ends in Europe that he might otherwise have done. He said:
“My distinction is between that and how you actually report the story as a piece of journalism. So if you take the issue to do with Europe, what I would say is that those papers who are Eurosceptic are perfectly entitled to be Eurosceptic. They’re perfectly entitled to highlight things in Europe that are wrong. What they shouldn’t do is, frankly, make up a whole lot of nonsense about Europe and dish that up to the readers, because that’s – I mean, how does the reader know that’s not correct?”
9.56 That, ultimately, is the foundation of the criticism made in this section: there can be no objection to agenda journalism (which necessarily involves the fusion of fact and comment), but that cannot trump a requirement to report stories accurately. Clause 1 of the Editors’ Code explicitly, and in my view rightly, recognises the right of a free press to be partisan; strong, even very strong, opinions can legitimately influence the choice of story, placement of story and angle from which a story is reported. But that must not lead to fabrication, or deliberate or careless misrepresentation of facts. Particularly in the context of reporting on issues of political interest, the press have a responsibility to ensure that the public are accurately informed so that they can engage in the democratic process. The evidence of inaccurate and misleading reporting on political issues is therefore of concern. The previous approach of the PCC to entertaining complaints only where they came from an affected individual may have allowed a degree of impunity in this area: in the context of misleading reporting on political issues, representative bodies are likely to be far better placed to monitor, and complain about, inaccuracies.
Leveson is, in fact, wrong about Alastair Campbell; he was not exaggerating at all.
December Books 1) The Colony of Lies, by Colin Brake
Took me much longer than usual to grind through this book, a tale of the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe on a frontier planet where various factions are in conflict with each other, and really little of much interest happens. There is a brief framing narrative with Ace and the Seventh Doctor, who intervenes at a crucial point to help his former self. Prose style starts off rather badly but settles down to reasonable standards with occasional info-dumps. Not really recommended except for completists like me.