• Spain has let Catalonia down, now it must let it go
  
  Catalonia demands a vote on self-determination.
  (tags: catalonia )
• Was Doctor Who’s Season Two Supposed to Be Like That?
  
  My copy of the book is on its way.
  (tags: doctor who )
• A Referendum for Catalonia
  
  The president explains.
  (tags: catalonia )
• Boulevard Charlemagne 1
  
  My office building.
  (tags: architecture )

• The EU’s Silent Revolution
  
  What’s really going on in the EU (not available in the UK press). With interesting comment also on Poland.
  (tags: eu )
• Bad writing
  
  "The carpet was embroiled…"
  (tags: writing )
• New York Review of Science Fiction #300
  
  Available to download for free!
  (tags: sf )
• 10 Reasons to vote NO to Seanad abolition
  
  Some of these may be satirical.
  (tags: ireland seanad )
• 100 years since anyone who took over as opposition leader after a change of government has gone on to become Prime Minister.
  
  Brilliantly obscure piece of electoral history.
  (tags: australia )

As the dust settles from this year’s Hugos, I thought it worth revisiting my two posts from earlier this year assessing how the nominees had been rated in different ways online.

The LibraryThing/Goodreads statistics proved a good guide this time round, with Redshirts, the Best Novel winner, pretty far ahead of the field on both sites. It has to be said that LibraryThing/Goodreads prognostication is not always so successful. LibraryThing called 2312 for the Nebula this year, and Goodreads was not far off; but the process failed completely for the BSFA Award and the Clarke Award – both winners, Jack Glass and Dark Eden respectively, were fourth on the Goodreads ranking and fifth on LibraryThing. Basically this is a good way of identifying books that have built up a wide audience, but won’t take you much further.

My survey of blog posts got two winners in the fiction categories right and failed to spot the other two. The overwhelming consensus from bloggers for “Mono no Aware” for Best Short Story, and the strong consensus for The Emperor’s Soul for Best Novella, were reflected in the voters’ choices. But only one blogger of my original survey went for “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi” for Best Novella, and none at all for Redshirts, though each of them drew support from two (different) commenters to my post.

This is not unusual. In my 2011 survey, the blogging consensus converged correctly on “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” for Best Novella. But the strike rate was unimpressive in other categories, with majority support for ultimately unsuccessful nominees in the other short fiction shortlists, and not a single blogger in my survey voting for the eventual Best Novel winner, Blackout/All Clear. Basically, blog surveys are a pretty blunt tool, covering only the articulate voter who posts in forums which I can see. If there is a strong consensus around a particular nominee, it is often right. If there is no strong consensus, it is certain that most people are wrong. (Using “right” and “wrong” as shorthand for “correct [bzw. incorrect] reflections of the outcome of the actual vote” rather than any judgement of individual choices here.)

Despite the demonstrably limited value of these surveys, I expect I shall continue doing them; it is interesting to identify front-runners, especially when it turns out that they do not win.

• Dr Rosi Sexton: ‘Fighting is a normal part of human nature’
  
  @RosiSexton "sometimes gets funny looks at parent-teacher evenings".
  (tags: )
• Who Lives? Who Dies?
  
  First two seasons of GoT summarised in three minutes!
  (tags: sf )
• Bad Bet: Why Republicans Can’t Win With Whites Alone
  
  Analysis of the flaws of a whites-only strategy.
  (tags: elections usa race )
• People despise politicians – but whose fault is that?
  
  Chris Huhne reflects on the role of the media.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• The Hugo Awards – An Apology
  
  @Paul_Cornell reflects.
  (tags: sf )

I think this was the first Neil Gaiman comic I bought, or possibly was given, strongly commended by Roger Zelazny's glowing introduction, written just a year or so before his death. Rereading it now, I realise that it's meant to be not only a Bildungsroman/Hero's Journey type story, but also a tour through the various magical and fantasy characters of the DC comics universe; I am now much more conscious of my own ignorance of that subject than I was twenty years ago. Gorgeously illustrated, with Gaiman's typical style, but I also noticed the lack of women characters this time round – not that they are absent, but the five central figures are all male.

Back in 2008 there was an exciting kerfuffle about the fact that Harry Potter, like Timothy Hunter, is also a boy wizard with a pet owl. I loved Neil Gaiman's robust response:

I doubted she'd read it and that it wouldn't matter if she had: I wasn't the first writer to create a young magician with potential, nor was Rowling the first to send one to school. It's not the ideas, it's what you do with them that matters.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

It will never satisfy some, of course, but at least he is on the record.

Out of the dull green light Mary’s voice came, breathless, hysterical.
“Oh, ma’am, oh, ma’am, there’s a body in the library!”
…
Mrs Bantry reflected a minute and then applied an urgent conjugal elbow to her sleeping spouse.

The second Miss Marple book, with a certain humour but, alas, relatively predictable, where it is simply a matter of working out how the obvious suspect(s) have constructed his/her/their alibis, and reflecting on whether or not to believe the absurdly convoluted plot. Miss Marple is consulted by no less than two Chief Constables and a former Metropolitan Commissioner, which shows that her reputation is spreading (there is reference to some of the short stories as well). We also travel from her village to a nearby seaside resort, not the first time Christie has used this venue (see Bexhill in The A.B.C. Murders). The climax is a little rushed though.

Poisoning count: one victim not poisoned, one drugged but done away with by other means, one attempted poisoning which fails.

She nearly collided with a man sitting on an unpowered vehicle. It had only two wheels, one in front and one behind, yet he seemed to have no difficulty balancing. Further on, a man was shouting at nobody while he pressed a small box against one side of his face, and an old woman on a nearby bench set fire to a white tube she was holding in her mouth.

This Past Doctor Adventure, with the Third Doctor and jo Grant, has a number of excellent concepts. Caresh itself is a planet which (slightly implausibly) orbits alternately around one of its two suns, with a threatened civilisation and an interfering Time Lord or two. A Careshi woman turns up in England of 1999, one of a number of symptoms of the chaos caused by her home world’s problems, and there are some very good cognitive dissonance passages like the one above. There’s some impressive writing of Tardis misbehaviour and body horror. But it didn’t quite hang together for me, and I found some of the colourful elements (Israeli archaeological site, for instance) confusing rather than illustrative. Still, worth reading for fans of the era.

…it is only the external evidence of the Papias tradition which supports the traditional view of authorship and this evidence is problematic. The internal evidence of the text, which is ultimately decisive, tilts strongly against it. Indeed without Papias’ testimony the Gospel itself would hardly have suggested it. When we consider, however, that it was the religious value of the Gospel which led the early church to assert its link with Peter and not vice versa, then the matter of its actual authorship is not decisive for the question of its theology.

A fairly digestible book on the shortest of the Gospels, though one which provided core material for two of the other three. Telford concentrates (as per his title) more on the internal message of what Mark is trying to say, but I found his discussion of sources and process of composition very interesting: basically he rejects the traditional view that the author was a confidant of St Peter, pointing out that the Gospel displays ignorance of Palestinian geography and Jewish customs, and is no more pro- or anti-Peter than any of the other three, and moves on from that to try and discern what particular spin the author put on each pericope as he included it in the final text, a very satisfying process of analysis.

I’d have liked a bit more reflection on the originality of the enterprise – the gospels were a new genre of writing, and this one was the first one to be written; what existing models might have been in the author’s mind? I think the abruptness of the ending at 16:8, ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ, (which Telford defends for other reasons) is excusable if one remembers that nobody had ever written the closing sentence of a gospel before. (However the fact that there are several different additional endings in circulation, two of which made it into the received text, may indicate that early readers found the 16:8 conclusion as unsatisfactory as some later critics.)

Telford does go into some detail about what Mark actually wanted to say theologically, and gives an account of other scholars’ proposals as well as offering his own. He buys into the idea that Mark is portraying a Jesus whose mission was secret, revealed through hints and parables; and that the author is trying to navigate a new concept of Jesus between [Jewish] Messiah and [Greek] divine man (theios aner). He ends with the uncomfortable observation that the gospel’s clear rejection and dismissal of the Jews is a fundamental element of later anti-Semitism. To be honest I found the theoretical discussions of meaning much less interesting than the process discussions of writing, but I am not the target audience.

…much of Europe took a long hiatus when it came to regular washing, roughly from the last Middle Ages to the eighteenth of nineteenth century, and non-Westerners who encountered Europeans in those centuries were often stunned by their abysmal hygiene.

A quite fascinating account of how the concept of cleanliness in Europe and later North America was basically a social construct, how the Roman habit of daily bathing was not resumed until as recently as a century ago. The two key images that stuck with me were, first, the concentration on clean clothes rather than a clean body for the days of the Enlightenment, with Casanova priding himself on his twelve shirts; and second, the role of military hygiene, with soldiers ordered to wash every day to prevent illness, as a catalyst for changing the wider habits of society. It may be a mere social construct but I still need my shower every morning.

This is quite extraordinary.

We election enthusiasts always watch Australia with interest. Not so much the lower house, which is just the rather dull electoral system rejected comprehensively by British voters in a referendum two years ago; but the Senate, where the states each elect twelve senators, six at a time (and the territories elect two), and where each party is allowed to promise its entire chunk of transferable votes to other parties.

As with many other countries, Australian politics is getting increasingly fragmented. Although the winning coalition will hold a crushing 89 of 150 lower house seats, proportionately the most thumping victory in 30 years, this is on foot of only 45.4% of the vote, a modest gain of 1.6% from the previous election which they narrowly lost. Independents and small parties have won four seats and may narrowly miss a fifth (in the state of Victoria).

Meanwhile in the Senate, the new government is likely to win only 17 of the 40 seats up for grabs, which added to the 16 they held of the 36 not being elected this time leaves them still six short of a majority. The outgoing government will have only 25. 10 of the remainder will be held by the Greens, and the other 8 – one sitting senator, and seven of those elected today – will be from minor parties.

The most stunning results of these is in Victoria, where the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party got a mere 11,232 first preferences, 0.52% of the total vote, 0.036 of a quota, less than twelve other parties contesting the election. But they appear to have risen from 13th place to 6th, picking up crucial votes from the Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) Party, the Shooters and Fishers Party, the Rise Up Australia Party, and on the final count the Sex Party. One of the other candidates for the Senate from Victoria was Julian Assange, who started with more than twice as many votes as the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party but proved rather less attractive for other parties' transfers (there was a little local difficulty as well).

Edited to add: kindly points out that I missed an even better one. In Western Australia, the Australian Sports Party, with 0.22% of first preferences and 21st in terms of party ranking, have actually won not the sixth seat but the fifth.

The Sydney Morning Herald's blogger, "Truthseeker", sees the result as an indictment of Australian democracy. I'm not so sure. 16.5% of Victorian voters (edited to add: in Western Australia, 24.6%) chose none of the larger parties (counting the Greens) to represent them. The Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party (edited to add: and the Sports Party) look frankly a bit loony, and I imagine that Senator Ricky Muir's political career (edited to add: and Senator Wayne Dropulich's) will last roughly the six years of his mandate as a Senator. But sometimes it's healthy for mainstream politicians to be reminded that "None of the above" is a real alternative.

I love it.

• Silly season top ten – and more – of misleading EU media stories
  
  More lies about Europe in the British press.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )

I was talking to a British MP this evening who told me that he/she had had 500 messages from constituents urging a “No” vote in last week’s debate on Syria, and not a single message in favour.

My interlocutor was in any case always going to vote against, but I still found it an interesting data point.

Current
Royal Assassin, by Robin Hobb
Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing, by Katherine Ashenburg
The Theology of the Gospel of Mark, by W. R. Telford
[Doctor Who] The Suns of Caresh, by Paul Saint
The Body in the Library, by Agatha Christie

Last books finished
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, by Bryan Talbot
The Murder at the Vicarage, by Agatha Christie

Next books
The Queen's Bastard, by C.E. Murphy
[Doctor Who] Just War, by Lance Parkin
The Subtle Knife, by Phil Pullman
The Moment of Eclipse, by Brian Aldiss

Books acquired in last week
The Body in the Library, by Agatha Christie

• Rebel with a Cause: An Interview with Carne Ross
  
  @LAReviewofBooks gets the message.
  (tags: carneross )

Headlines:

• Closest results of the night were for Best Related Work, the final margin for the Writing Excuses podcast being only 3 votes over The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy, after a tie-break on the penultimate count between the Cambridge Companion and Chicks Unravel Time. Second place was also decided by a mere five votes (Chicks Unravel Time this time ahead of the Cambridge Companion.)
• The Unwritten Vol 6 missed nomination for Best Graphic Story by five votes; 15 people nominated The Unwritten without specifying whether they were nominating Vol 5 or Vol 6.
• "The Waves" by Ken Liu (Novelette), The Writer and the Critic (Fancast), Abigail Nussbaum (Fan Writer) and Taral Wayne (Fan Artist) all missed nomination by one vote.
• If the threshold for nominations had been 4% instead of 5%, there would have been eight nominees for Best Short Story rather than three.
• Tansy Rayner Roberts won Best Fan Writer despite narrowly scraping into the fifth place in nominations. (Well done Tansy!) Mark Oshiro had more nominations for Best Fan Writer than the next two nominees combined, but still came only fourth in the actual award voting.
• SF Signal crushed all opposition in the Best Fanzine category.
• “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal got enough votes to qualify for nomination for Best Novelette, but was ruled ineligible due to being an audiobook.

Full results here.

Best Novel:

• A convincing win for Redshirts (which also had the most nominations) by 827 to 614 for Captain Vorpatril's Alliance on the final count. Captain Vorpatril's Alliance was behind 2312 on first preferences (though it got mine), but overtook the Robinson book on transfers from Blackout.
• Captain Vorpatril's Alliance again came from behind to take second place, 2312 came third, Throne of the Crescent Moon (which had lagged in previous counts) fourth, and Blackout fifth, all by decent margins.
• The nearest miss among nominations was Monster Hunter Legion by Larry Correia, which got 101 votes to Throne of the Crescent Moon's 118.

Best Novella:

• The Emperor's Soul (which also had the most nominations) won by 699 to 541 for "The Stars Do Not Lie" on the final count. One of those votes was mine.
• "The Stars Do Not Lie" lost second place also, by a smaller margin, to After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, but took third place over San Diego 2014 convincingly. San Diego 2014 then lost to On A Red Station, Drifting, for fourth place.
• “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns” by Elizabeth Bear missed nomination by 7 votes.

Best Novelette:

• "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi" won by 659 to 550 for "In Sea-Salt Tears" on the final count.
• The other places were also decided by substantial margins, "In Sea-Salt Tears" second, "Fade To White" (which had the most nominations and got my vote) third, "Rat-catcher" fourth and "The Boy Who Cast No Shadow" fifth.
• "The Waves" by Ken Liu missed nomination by 1 vote. "Astrophilia" by Carrie Vaughn missed by 2 votes. "Portrait of Lisanne de Patagnia" by Rachel Swirsky missed by 3.
• “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal got the third highest number of nominations but was ruled ineligible in this category due to being an audiobook.

Best Short Story:

• From a limited selection, one of the clearest results I can recall: "Mono no Aware" missed a first-count victory by 30 votes and won on the second with 671 to 439 for "Immersion" (which had by far the most nominations) and 180 for "Mantis Wives", which took second and third place respectively by substantial margins.
• The nearest miss among potential nominees was "No Place Like Home" by Seanan McGuire, with 30 votes to 34 for "Mantis Wives". Four other stories were tied on 28. If the threshold had been 4% rather than 5%, there would have been eight nominees in this category rather than three.

Best Related Work:

• The closest results of the night, with Writing Excuses winning by only 3 votes, 418 to 415 for the Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature on the final count – and that after an even narrower margin on the penultimate count when both the Cambridge Companion and Chicks Unravel Time were on the same total, the tie being broken by the number of first preferences. Chicks Dig Comics was also not too far behind. .
• For second place, Chicks Unravel Time beat the Cambridge Companion by a mere five votes, and the Cambridge Companion was again beaten by Chicks Dig Comics for third place, but secured fourth over I Have An Idea for a Book… by a big margin.
• Chicks Unravel Time had the most nominations, but Writing Excuses was very close (90 and 88 respectively). Hank Reinhardt's Book of Knives: A Practical, Illustrated Guide to Knife Fighting missed nomination by 3 votes. (Whew!)

Best Graphic Story

• Saga (which had the most nominations) won with 518 votes to 352 for Schlock Mercenary on the final count.
• Schlock Mercenary also lost second place to Locke and Key, but beat Saucer Country for third place. Saucer Country took fourth place by a margin of five votes from Grandville Bête Noire.
• The Unwritten, Vol 6: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words missed nomination by five votes, to my personal dismay. 15 people nominated The Unwritten without specifying whether they were supporting volume 5 or volume 6; if they had been more specific it probably would have been on the ballot.

Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form

• The Avengers (which had the most nominations) won convincingly, with 755 votes to 392 for The Hobbit and 345 for Looper on the final count.
• The Hobbit took second place, The Hunger Games third and Looper fourth, all over The Cabin In The Woods which seems to have been particularly transfer-repellent.
• The closest almost-nominated were John Carter, which missed by 24, then Brave and Wreck-It Ralph.

Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form

• Blackwater (which had the most nominations) won convincingly, by 754 to 466 for The Angels Take Manhattan on the final count.
• Letters of Transit was second on first preferences, but lost out for second place to The Angels Take Manhattan and for third place to Asylum of the Daleks before tying for fourth place with The Snowmen, the only tie of the evening.
• Nominations here were particularly consensual, the five on the shortlist getting between 89 and 95 votes, and the next down the list (Mark Oshiro's reading of John Scalzi's spoof nominee from last year) getting only 58.

Best Editor – Long Form

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden won by 385 to 330 for Sheila Gilbert on the final count.
• Toni Weisskopf, who had been second on first preferences, then took second place by nine votes over Gilbert, who then took third place also by nine votes ahead of Lou Anders (who had the most nominations). Anders took fourth place over Liz Gorinsky by a larger margin.
• Anne Lesley Groell missed nomination by five votes.

Best Editor – Short Form

• Stanley Schmidt won by 396 to 368 for Sheila Williams on the final count.
• Williams took second place by a good margin over John Joseph Adams (which had the most nominations). Adams then took third place over Jonathan Strahan. Strahan then lost fourth place to Neil Clarke by three votes.
• Ellen Datlow missed nomination by 20 votes.

Best Professional Artist

• John Picacio (who had the most nominations) won by 586 votes to 387 for Julie Dillon on the final count.
• Dillon then lost second place to Dan dos Santos by five votes; but won third, Chris McGrath coming fourth and Vincent Chong fifth.
• Stephan Martiniere missed nomination by eight votes.

Best Semiprozine

• Clarkesworld (which had the most nominations) won convincingly, with 403 three votes on the final count to 221 for Lightspeed and 178 for Strange Horizons. Beneath Ceaseless Skies had fewer first preferences than No Award.
• Lightspeed came second, Strange Horizons third, Apex fourth and Beneath Ceaseless Skies fifth, all by clear margins.
• Locus, which once had a lock on this category, along with the NYRSF and Interzone, missed nomination with votes in the 40s to 75 for Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Best Fanzine

• The clearest victory of the night, with SF Signal's 385 votes on the final count dwarfing 153 for Journey Planet, 129 for The Drink Tank and 98 for No Award. (SF Signal also had the most nominations.) Banana Wings and Elitist Book Reviews had fewer first preferences than No Award.
• The Drink Tank took second place by five votes from Journey Planet, which came third, Banana Wings coming fourth and Elitist Book Reviews fifth.
• The World SF Blog missed nomination by five votes, Argentus by eight and Challenger by nine.

Best Fancast

• SF Squeecast (which had the most nominations) won with 370 votes to 245 for SF Signal on the final count. StarShipSofa and Galactic Suburbia both got fewer first preferences than No Award.
• SF Signal took second place by a big margin over StarShipSofa, which got third place by 12 votes over Coode Street. Coode Street took fourth place over Galactic Suburbia, which came fifth.
• The Writer and the Critic missed nomination by one vote.

Best Fan Writer

• Tansy Rayner Roberts won by 285 to 267 for Steven H Silver on the final count, having led narrowly on the first two counts, slipped behind on transfer from No Award and Chris Garcia, and then climbed back with transfers from Mark Oshiro (who had by far the most nominations) . James Bacon got fewer first preferences than No Award.
• Second place went by a substantial margin to Steve Silver, and third to Chris Garcia. Mark Oshiro, who had by far the most nominations, took fourth place by three votes ahead of James Bacon.
• Abigail Nussbaum missed nomination by one vote; A Cracked Moon and Charles A Tan by seven, and Liz Bourke by nine.

Best Fan Artist

• Galen Dara won by 377 to 326 for Brad Foster (who had the most nominations) on the final count. Maurine Starkey got fewer first preferences than No Award.
• Second and third places went clearly to Brad Foster and Spring Schoenhuth, and Maurine Starkey caught up to take fourth place by seven votes from Steve Stiles.
• Taral Wayne missed nomination by one vote, Katy Shuttleworth by four and Kathleen Jennings by eight.

John W. Campbell Award For Best New Writer

• Mur Lafftery beat Stina Leicht by 409 votes to 364. (Leicht had the most nominations, but Lafferty was not far behind.)
• The other places were also fairly clear: Leicht second, Chuck Wendig third, Max Gladstone fourth and Zen Cho fifth.
• Madeline Ashby, who had the third highest number of nominations, withdrew "due to prior professional works".
• Brooke Bolander and Rachel Hartman both missed nomination by three votes, and Brit Mandelo and Jeff Salyards both missed by four.

Best Novel: Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, John Scalzi (Tor)

Best Novella: The Emperor’s Soul, Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)

Best Novelette: “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi”, Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)

Best Short Story: “Mono no Aware”, Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese, VIZ Media LLC)

Best Related Work: Writing Excuses Season Seven, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler and Jordan Sanderson

Best Graphic Story: Saga, Volume One, written by Brian K. Vaughn, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: The Avengers, Screenplay & Directed by Joss Whedon (Marvel Studios, Disney, Paramount)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Game of Thrones: Blackwater, Written by George R.R. Martin, Directed by Neil Marshall. Created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (HBO)

Best Editor, Short Form: Stanley Schmidt

Best Editor, Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Best Professional Artist: John Picacio

Best Semiprozine: Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Jason Heller, Sean Wallace and Kate Baker

Best Fanzine: SF Signal, edited by John DeNardo, JP Frantz, and Patrick Hester

Best Fancast: SF Squeecast, Elizabeth Bear, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Lynne M. Thomas, Catherynne M. Valente (Presenters) and David McHone-Chase (Technical Producer)

Best Fan Writer: Tansy Rayner Roberts

Best Fan Artist: Galen Dara

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Mur Lafferty

Special Committee Award: Stanley Schmidt

Forrest J. Ackerman Big Heart Award: Tom Veal

More later.

The first time I lived away from home was in October and November 1985, when I spent two months of my gap year working on an archaeological site near Raunds in Northamptonshire. The conditions were rather basic and we “volunteers” were accommodated in a large vacant house behind the Methodist church, which I am fairly sure had previously been the residence of the Methodist minister. Thirty years earlier, the Methodist minister had been one Dr Paradine Frost, whose son David played cricket for the local club before going on to greater things. I may well have inherited his bedroom.

It’s weird to think that this is over thirty years old, though not published in book form until some time later. It’s also a bit embarrassing that I hadn’t read it before, given its seminal importance to the comics genre in the UK. I liked a lot of things about it very much: the interplay between Royalist rebels and Cromwellian puritans, the latter still ruling Britain in the 1970s; the role of Arkwright, agent of order, but not necessarily of good; the fantastic detail in the art, and the intricacy of the plotting. Arkwright is clearly based on Jerry Cornelius, and Michael Moorcock returns the favour with a warm but also very political introduction to this edition. I am, however, a little relieved that the fan consensus is that the sequel, Heart of Empire, is easier to digest, to the point that some recommend starting with it instead. I shall try to get hold of it.

This is my seventh Agatha Christie novel, and the first Miss Marple book – both the first I have come to as I work through the Christie canon in order of LibraryThing popularity, and the first published of the twelve. Coming to it so soon after the first Poirot mystery, which was also Christie’s first novel, written fourteen years earlier, I felt that she was deliberately revisiting and reversing some of the elements from the previous book – the victim is the gentleman of the Big House, rather than its lady, and is shot, rather than poisoned; there is a similar gender reversal in the identities of the obvious suspects (victim’s unfaithful spouse, victim’s spouse’s lover); the detective is a long-term resident of the village who emerges almost from nowhere to put the solution together rather than a celebrity detective who happens to be on the scene and whose every move is tracked by the narrator. I don’t know if Christie always intended to make Miss Marple a long-term investment, but I do get the feeling that she was wanting to set up a new central character and do it better this time.

The above differences apart, the story is largely the same as Styles, only now much more polished and rounded, with a certain amount of humour – vicars and old ladies are intrinsically humorous, after all, yet it takes a fairly practised touch to merge them with the gruesome details of homicide as Christie does here. The narrator is the vicar, and there is a nice contrast between his well-meaning but not terribly effective efforts at pastoral care of his village (and indeed his own household) and the more knowledgeable guardians of the village, led by Miss Marple. The only flaw is that the climax is somewhat muffed, in that the perpetrators are whisked demurely off-stage, before one can get into such ungenteel topics as the justice system. But overall this was better than I had expected.

Non-fiction 9 (YTD 31)
Proportional Representation in Ireland, by James Creed Meredith
The Monsters and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, by Jeanette Winterson
The History of The Hobbit, vol 1: Mr Baggins, by John D. Rateliff
The Best of Tardis Eruditorum, by Philip Sandifer
Eleanor, Countess of Desmond, by Anne Chambers
Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston
Rebus's Scotland: A Personal Journey, by Ian Rankin
In Loco Parentis, by Ken Riley

Fiction (non-sf) 7 (YTD 30)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie
Standing In Another Man's Grave, by Ian Rankin
Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie
Resistance, by Anita Shreve
The Mysterious Affair At Styles, by Agatha Christie
The A.B.C. Murders, by Agatha Christie
The Murder at the Vicarage, by Agatha Christie

SF (non-Who) 7 (YTD 47)
Kraken, by China Miéville
The Gods of Pegāna, by Lord Dunsany
Shakespeare's Planet, by Clifford D. Simak
Far North, by Sara Maitland
Far North, by Marcel Theroux
The Tunnel at the End of the Light, by Stefan Petrucha
The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 42)
The Wages of Sin, by David A. McIntee
Shakedown, by Terrance Dicks
Eater of Wasps, by Trevor Baxendale
The Dalek Generation, by Nicholas Briggs
Spore, by Alex Scarrow

Comics 3 (YTD 22)
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, by Hergé
The Dalek Project, by Justin Richards, ill. Mike Collins
Luther Arkwright, by Bryan Talbot

~7,600 pages (YTD 44,700)
11/31 (YTD 49/172) by women (Winterson, Chambers, Shreve, Maitland, Jones, 6x Christie)
1/31 (YTD 8/172) by PoC (Hurston)

Rereads: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, The A.B.C. Murders, – 3 (YTD 10).
Acquired 2011 or before: 13 (YTD 59) – Eater of Wasps, Shakespeare's Planet, Rebus's Scotland, Resistance, The History of the Hobbit v. 1, 2x Far North, Shakedown, The Wages of Sin, Kraken, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Luther Arkwright, Eleanor, Countess of Desmond
Acquired 2012: 5 (YTD 25) – The Tunnel at the End of the Light, The Monsters and the Critics, The Crown of Dalemark, The Dalek Project, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Acquired 2013: 13 (YTD 88) – The Dalek Generation, Standing in Another Man's Grave, Tell My Horse, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Death on the Nile, Proportional representation in Ireland, The Gods of Pegāna, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The ABC Murders, The Murder at the Vicarage, Spore, The Best of TARDIS Eruditorum, In Loco Parentis

Reading now:
The Theology of the Gospel of Mark, by W. R. Telford
Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing, by Katherine Ashenburg
Royal Assassin, by Robin Hobb

Coming Next (perhaps):
The Queen's Bastard, by C.E. Murphy
The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman
The Moment of Eclipse, by Brian Aldiss
Home Truths, by Freya North
A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland
The Far Side Of The World, by Patrick O'Brian
Streetlethal, by Steven Barnes
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber
The Flood, by Ian Rankin
The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, by William Dalrymple
The History of the Hobbit: Return to Bag-End v. 2, by John Rateliff
The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, by Stephen Alford
Reading the Oxford English Dictionary: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, by Ammon Shea
Odd and the Frost Giants, by Neil Gaiman
Reamde, by Neal Stephenson
Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett
Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction, by Michael White
The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
[Doctor Who] The Suns of Caresh, by Paul Saint
[Doctor Who] Just War, by Lance Parkin
[Doctor Who] The Year of Intelligent Tigers, by Kate Orman
[Doctor Who] Shroud of Sorrow, by Tommy Donbavand
The Body In The Library, by Agatha Christie