• The World Decrypted: Mali, and the banks
  
  Carne digs into the background.
  (tags: carneross waronterror )

The authorities, returning, would find the prison empty. He couldn’t rid the place of all traces, of course; there was a lot of blood, on the walls and in the tunnel, and it would be a simple matter for the Police to DNA it and determine from whom it had come. But it was as much misdirection as Jac could manage.

I was at a conference the day that the BSFA nominations were announced, and as speakers around the table opined on the future of the European Union, I was utilising the hotel wifi to download copies of the books to my iPad and iPhone, which in itself was a delightfully futuristic experience. I’m working through the shortlist, as I like to do, in reverse order of popularity on LibraryThing, so will follow with Dark Eden, Empty Space, Intrusion and finally 2312 (which is owned by twice as many LibraryThing users, and almost four times as many GoodReads users, as the other four combined).

Jack Glass is not in fact about the famous bigot, but about a master criminal in the far future, in a solar system dominated by a few rich families. The novel is divided into three parts: in the first, our legless hero escapes from an apparently escape-proof cell; in the second, he helps spoiled rich girl Diana Argent solve a murder on her own estate; and in the third, he and Diana together work out how they were rescued from capture by her enemies. There’s a lot of clever stuff; there’s a lot of entertaining writing; there’s a lot of interesting speculation about how a future society will divide between the ultra-rich and the poor, in what is recognisably a world related to last year’s By Light Alone. I felt that the solution to the third of the three mysteries was a bit too clever, and I also would have liked a bit more of a sense of place from the passages set in the Eastern Mediterranean, but basically I enjoyed it and my BSFA reading is off to a good start – as usual.

Bechdel pass: Diana and her sister discuss faster than light travel.

   Varney took a step back: a mistake. There was a knife at his temple, the point of the blade next to his eye.
   "Further movements are not recommended," said Mr. Croup, helpfully. "Mister Vandemar might have a little accident with his old toad-sticker. Most accidents do occur in the home. Is that not so, Mister Vandemar?"
   "I don't trust statistics," said Mr. Vandemar's blank voice.

I first read Neverwhere around the time that the TV series was broadcast in 1996, though it was years before I actually saw it. I am eagerly anticipating the star-studded radio version which apparently will be out in the next few weeks. (The contrast in star level between the 1996 and 2013 broadcasts is an indicator of just how much Gaiman's profile has risen in the meantime.)

The basic concept is superb, that there is a parallel London where there is a real Angel Islington, where the sinister Black Friars guard a secret, where Old Bailey and the Earl of Earl's Court and Night's Bridge all have their realities. London is a city which exercises a strong fascination, with its layers of history, architecture and literature, and Gaiman – who is very comfortable writing about slipping between our world and Elsewhere – is on a winner by exploring that. The descriptive passages are excellent, both in terms of attention to detail and atmosphere; one can practically smell Earl's Court in its decrepit nightmare Tube carriage.

However, this is minor Gaiman. It was his first solo novel – and novels are not his forte. It is an adaptation of quite a visual script. The plot, a basic quest runaround complete with a sudden yet inevitable betrayal, doesn't really match the excellence of the setting. And I found the most memorable characters to be the sinister Croup and Vandemar, themselves based presumably on Oak and Quill from the Doctor Who story Fury from the Deep, but realised much better as a concept in the single character of the Man Jack in The Graveyard Book. Of the good guys, the most interesting is the Marquis de Carabas (memorably played by Paterson Joseph in the original TV series) and the nominal protagonists are rather flat on the page. It is entertaining enough, but not the top rank.

Scrapes through the Bechdel test with a conversation between Door, Hunter and Serpentine on pages 167-168 where they all ignore Richard and talk about each other.

    Finishing his drink, the Doctor placed his mug on the table with a grim look.
    ‘So,’ he said at last, ‘the question is, Constable Briggs, who do you think is responsible for all these strange happenings?’
    Briggs gave him his most serious look. That trench today had clinched it for him. Those footprints disappearing into nowhere like that. No sign of mud on the road. Although he was facing a man from the Ministry and obviously a learned man as well, without a trace of embarrassment Briggs told the Doctor exactly what he thought.
    ‘I think,’ he said, ‘it’s ghosts.’

An Eighth Doctor book which is set during the First World War, with the amnesiac Doctor now investigating mysterious happenings in a hospital for convalescent soldiers. For what is basically a zombie story, it is done rather well, with a particularly good one-off companion (Mary, the village midwife) whose emotional path is similar to many of the New Who companions, and other nicely depicted supporting characters. Would appeal to non-Who fans more than most.

I am still way behind with writing up January’s books; expect a few more catchup posts this weekend.

Bechdel pass, as Mary and two other women discuss the weather in Chapter Four, though they go on to discuss the Doctor.

• Could the Next Doctor Who Showrunner Already Be Chosen?
  
  I hope this isn’t wishful thinking!
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Twitter Search Gets Big Upgrade, Archiving Of Tweets Continues
  
  Good news.
  (tags: Twitter )
• Amnesty: Azerbaijan opposition candidate arrested
  
  My former colleague İlgar, imprisoned by Әliyev’s goons on bogus charges.
  (tags: Azerbaijan )

• Northern Ireland surrenders powers over Antarctica
  
  Just as well really.
  (tags: Northernireland )
• Grammar and punctuation test: take our quiz
  
  There is a trick question…
  (tags: Language )
• Pop culture quiz
  
  I had no idea!
  (tags: Films )

• The First Doctor
  
  BBC America documentary on William Hartnell’s time in the Tardis.
  (tags: Doctorwho )
• In The Future, All Space Marines Will Be Warhammer 40K Space Marines
  
  M.C.A. Hogarth’s problems with Fames Workshop.
  (tags: Sf copyright )
• Verified Facts
  
  Generate your own conspiracy theory!
  (tags: funny Wing nuts )
• Does Ireland need a “Borgen” government?
  
  Jason on parliamentary minorities.
  (tags: ireland poliics )

Continuing the New Who rewatch with the rest of Torchwood's first season and a couple of other Whoniverse stories first shown around the same time.

With Random Shoes we somehow seem to change gear for a couple of stories which are not so much about Torchwood as about other people being affected by Torchwood. It is a little odd to have this story and Love and Monsters so close to each other, and perhaps the two could have been brought into closer dialogue – there's a feeling of trying to pull off the same trick again in terms of the experimental double-banked format, though there are some very important differences: Eugene Jones dies and his mother and his romantic interest both live (whereas Elton Pope lives, but his mother dies and his romantic interest is turned into a paving slab), and where Love and Monsters is more about fandom as seen from the inside, Random Shoes is more the experience of fans in conflict both with the mundane world and with the objects of their own interest. Also I have to say that I find Random Shoes the more effective drama of the two; the mystery of Eugene's death has an unexpected, plausible and surprisingly mundane answer, and I confess I had something in my eye in the final moments. Good for Paul Chequer who carries it as Eugene.

Out of Time is my favourite Torchwood episode from this season. It's not just Louise Delamere's performance as Diane, though that certainly helps; it's also that this feels like a real sf story, for once, and the dilemmas of the three stranded travellers from 1952 – and their different solutions – are compelling, and throw a new light on Jack's character as time-travelling immortal and also on Owen as he moves on from his implausible fling with Gwen to a much more believable entanglement with Diane. Mark Lewis Jones is also good as John Ellis, and his choice devastatingly plausible. Not so sure about Emma, though it gives Eve Myles some nice "am-I-turning-into-my-mother" moments as Gwen and also tells us more about her relationship with Rhys. Once again I found I had something in my eye at the end.

There's a trivia question that starts by listing Victor Pemberton, Glyn Jones, Mark Gatiss… And then someone buzzes in to say that Noel Clarke has both appeared in Doctor Who and written a TV story for the franchise, the only regular cast member to do so (though of course Colin Baker has written several short stories and a comic, Ian Marter wrote novelisations and a spinoff novel, and Big Finish allows us to invoke others such as Nick Briggs, Barnaby Edwards, and rather surprisingly Ingrid Pitt).Combat is a solid enough piece about Owen exploring his masculinity and taking out his grief at losing Diane (and I suppose at ending his fling with Gwen) by beating up weevils. I wasn't completely sure about Alex Hassell who had to carry a lot of the story as Mark, but he seemed to acquire some depth before the end, and the whole thing is directed well and looks appropriately good or sordid, depending. It's not a terribly advanced topic, but this is Torchwood after all.

And, because we are doing these in original broadcast order, we suddenly switch from Torchwood to a couple of episodes from the two other main BBC Whovian shows. Luckily for my schedule, these two hour-long stories fitted into my weekend, rather than having to be chopped into different parts of the commute.

As it happens I wrote a very long piece about The Runaway Bride shortly after it was broadcast, and I stand by most of what I said there. In particular, I am pleased that I spotted Donna as one of the great Doctor Who creations; watching again, there are many moments from Catherine Tate that shine, whether she is being jilted bride, kidnap victim, or fellow adventurer. And it is good that she spots the Doctor's darker side and calls him on it, up to and including her detecting his lie when he says he will come for Christmas dinner just as soon as he's checked something in the Tardis. (I also love the way that she is the first companion to see the inside of the Ship before the outside.) We did not know when first watching that this was to be the first of many single-episode stories with one-off companions. That format will never be where Who's heart is, but this is a good first attempt. (And of course Donna turned out not to be a one-shot after all.)

Three Whoniverse stories were broadcast for the first time on 1 January 2007, which is a record. 1 January is also the anniversary of the last appearance of the Meddling Monk (1966), the first TV Daleks in colour (1972), the first appearance of Leela (1977), and the regeneration of David Tennant into Matt Smith (2010). But none of the three broadcast on 1/1/7 were Doctor Who per se; we were treated to the first of The Sarah Jane Adventures in the afternoon and then the two final parts of the first Torchwood season late at night. This time I took three days over it. I think I would recommend dedicated rewatchers to do it all in one go; that way one is sufficiently worn down to be less perturbed by the awfulness of the closing episode of the three.

The first episode of the Sarah Jane Adventures, Invasion of the Bane, gets 2007 off to an excellent start. Yasmin Paige is excellent as the audience identification figure, getting to know the neighbour who gets such weird visitors; it's nice to see Elisabeth Sladen back, and to hear John Leeson (again) and Alexander Armstrong (for the first time); the CGI monster is absolutely superb, one of the best realised aliens in the whole of the Whoniverse, and the scene of it clambering all over the domestic cosines of Sarah's house is a brilliant illustration of Jon Pertwee's line about the effectiveness of a Yeti on a loo in Tooting Bec. Kelsey was clearly being written out from quite an early stage of scripting; she's actually quite an unpleasant character. More on Luke when I get to the first season. It's a much stronger start than Torchwood had.

I know that Captain Jack Harkness as an episode is a fan favourite. I think a lot of it is well done – in particular Murray Melvin as Bilis Manger, and the spectacle of Toshiko trying to send Blink-like messages through the decades. The cast do emotional intensity well as ever. But the romance of the Jack Harknesses is treated with extraordinary gravity for what is basically a one-night stand, and Owen's breach of the Rift is painfully contrived in  execution (and in plot terms both makes a mockery of Tosh's heroic communication efforts and provides a partial excuse for the nonsense which is to follow). It looks good, and sounds good, but I find it a bit lacking. (Note the "Vote Saxon" posters.)

Doing these write-ups, I often find myself noting that stories are not as bad as I remembered, End of Days is far far worse than I remembered, and it is no exaggeration to say that the high point of the episode is Rhys's arse, less than 90 seconds in. It is generally well acted (with a couple of slips – I am sure Eve Myles is on the edge of giggles in several scenes, and there are some breathing corpses) and generally well directed (with a couple of slips – Bilis's rather obviously collapsible knife, Rhys's horizontal viewpoint the wrong way round) but it doesn't compensate for the awfulness of the script and the incoherence of the plot. This really is terrible stuff, from the Torchwood team's sensitive and professional approach to human resources management, to the mispronounced Latin of the shouty time travelling soldier, to Gwen's disturbing treatment of Rhys, to the ludicrous CGI monster, to the arbitrary killing off of Rhys and Jack with no emotional impact on us viewers because we just know they'll be resurrected, to Jack being brought to life by Gwen's wuv… I am trying to think of a worse written story in the whole of Who. The Twin Dilemma, perhaps, or The Dominators, or The Celestial Toymaker, or the misogynist stories never made for TV (but unwisely produced by Big Finish in recent years). And where I can partially forgive Cyberwoman and Countrycide because they have at least got comprehensible plots and are interesting to look at, End of Days lacks even those redeeming features. RTD-era Who habitually fumbled its grand finales, and – with some hefty competition – this is the worst case of that phenomenon.

Well, the first season of Torchwood has its ups and downs, but most of the latter stories (with one crashing exception) are actually decent efforts, with the peaks good enough to show that it had potential for more. It is notable that most of the better episodes were written by women. (Audience ratings were consistently more positive than the fannish consensus, or even my more charitable views, which indicates that the show was delivering on some metrics anyway.) The rewatch mix is greatly improved by the Donna Noble and Sarah Jane episodes.

OK, it's the Doctor and Martha next. That will be fun.

< 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

• ATOS declare Richard III fit for work
  
  “The dead monarch, Richard Plantagenet, was called for a reassessment of his fitness for work by ATOS – which carries out disability assessments on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – after it was discovered the deposed King had spent years lying in a Leicester City Council car park doing absolutely nothing.”
  (tags: ukpolitics death funny disability )
• Peter Sellers: A Hard Day’s Night
  
  …in the style of Lawrence Olivier as Richard III.
  (tags: funny Shakespeare )

• Richard III: unveiling day arrives for skeleton that would be king
  
  Announcement due Monday morning!
  (tags: archaeology )

Way behind with bookblogging as with other things. Still weight out of 16 to write up for January.Anyway here is the snapshot as of last Thursday.

Non-fiction 5
The Doctor’s Monsters, by Graham Sleight
Making Ireland English, by Jane Ohlmeyer
Challenges for EU foreign policy in 2013, ed. Giovanni Grevi and Daniel Keohane
TARDIS Eruditorum – An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who, Volume 2: Patrick Troughton by Philip Sandifer
Chicks Unravel Time, ed. Deborah Stanish and L.M. Myles

fiction (non-sf) 1
Faces in the Pool, by Jonathan Gash

sf (non-Who) 3
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts

Doctor Who 6
The Indestructible Man, by Simon Messingham
Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Casualties of War by Steve Emmerson
Step Back in Time: Extra Time, by Richard Dungworth
Step Back in Time: The Water Thief, by Jacqueline Rayner
A Big Hand for the Doctor, by Eoin Colfer

Comics 1
The Hive, by Charles Burns

~4,200 pages
4/16 by women (Ohlmeyer, Stanish/Myles, Collins, Rayner)
0/16 by PoC
Bechdel pass 7/11
Bechdel fail 4/11 – 2 at first step, 1 at second step, 1 at third.

Rereads: 2 (Neverwhere, Human Nature)
Acquired 2011 or before: 4 (Neverwhere, Human Nature, Casualties of War, The Indestructible Man)
Acquired 2012: 7 (Step Back in Time x2, Faces in the Pool, The Hive, The Hunger Games, Making Ireland English, The Doctor’s Monsters)
Acquired 2013: 5 (Chicks Unravel Time, TARDIS Eruditorum 2, Jack Glass, Challenges for European Foreign Policy in 2013, A Big Hand For The Doctor)

2013 reading project: up to chapter 11 of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Also started:
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
London Falling by Paul Cornell
Slaapkoppen by Randall.C

Coming next (perhaps):
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier
Swallows And Amazons by Arthur Ransome
1632 by Eric Flint
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
Doors Open by Ian Rankin
The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple
A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
The Peoples of Middle-Earth by Christopher Tolkien
Toward the End of Time by John Updike
Daystar and Shadow by James Weldon Johnson
The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century by Brendan Bradshaw
Starship Fall by Eric Brown
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Menagerie by Martin Day
Original Sin by Andy Lane
The Turing Test by Paul Leonard
Fugitive by Tony Lee
Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
The Unfree French by Richard Vinen
Empty Space: A Haunting by M. John Harrison

• Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age
  
  Argument framed in an odd climate change way, but interesting evidence.
  (tags: disease )
• Paperman
  
  #fb Lovely short film with romantic enchanted paper aeroplanes.
  (tags: Films )
• Interactive 360° Video From A Helicopter Flying Over Four Erupting Volcanoes
  
  Amazing. #fb
  (tags: geology Films )
• Live Thog’s Masterclass (2004)
  
  It will be twenty years this Easter since Thog emerged.
  (tags: funny sf )
• Applebee’s Overnight Social Media Meltdown: A Photo Essay « R.L. Stollar, Journalist.
  
  How to lose the argument, in a few easy steps.
  (tags: Socialmedia )

• Mercator Puzzle!
  
  Fantastic – there was one country at the end that took me a while to get!
  (tags: maps )
• My Big Study
  
  Francis tells us about his PhD, in Up-Goer Five.
  (tags: Philosophy )

• The hour and manner of my death
  
  (tags: Death )