Monthly Archives: January 2014

Links I found interesting for 20-01-2014

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January Books 7) Last of the Gaderene, by Mark Gatiss

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I am reaching the end of the Pertwee era, with only one more Jo Grant novel to go. This is a satisfying return to well-known themes of the Third Doctor’s era – the country village, the Master, the sinister scientific installation, the aliens taking over people’s bodies – updated for the audience of the year 2000, with the government being rather more obviously malicious rather than incompetent. Gatiss’s last Who novel (so far) as it turns out, after three earlier ones.

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January Books 6) The Secret River, by Kate Grenville

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A heartfelt novel about early convict settlers in New South Wales, which combines the intense personal drama of eking out a precarious existence on marginal cultivatable land with the brutality of the English settlers’ conflict with the indigenous Australians.  Apparently rooted fairly strongly in fact, though I don’t think that affects my judgement of it as a novel one way or the other.  Certainly made me realise how little I actually know about Australia.

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Links I found interesting for 19-01-2014

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2014’s literary anniversaries: including 27 books from 1964

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I have been thinking about the literary anniversaries of 2014; in previous years I’ve done a poll asking what others have read, but this year I decided to add a little more. (If there’s enough interest, I might do a poll as well.)

1764
Just one here, The Castle of Otranto by Robert Walpole1814
Again just one but it’s a biggie: Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen.  Other books published this year which I haven’t read but which do register on the radar screen: Waverley, by Walter Scott; Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, by Adelbert von Chamisso (wrongly listed as an 1813 publication by me last yearThe Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, by Frances Burney.

1864
Several well-known books published this year but the only one I have actually read is A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, by Jules Verne – I remember finding this splendidly atmospheric, if a little implausible in the light of subsequent geological discovery, when I read it as a teenager.  Well-known books which I haven’t read from that year include Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell; Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu; Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; The Small House at Allington, by Anthony Trollope; and in non-fiction, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, by John Henry Newman.

1914
Goodreads has a list of 199 books from 1914 popular among its users, which isn’t entirely accurate (several James Joyce short stories are listed separately; Hesse’s Demian was not published until 1919) but a good starting point.  You may want to cross-reference with Wikipedia here and here.

I don’t appear to have read a single novel from 1914.  I have read three short story collections, and love them all – Dubliners by James Joyce,  The Wisdom of Father Brown, by G.K. Chesterton, and Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki (online here).  As for non-fiction, this was the year that the authoritative but badly timed Report of the International Commission on the Balkan Wars was published by by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The top novel on Goodreads from 1914 is Kokoro, by Sōseki Natsume.  There’s also a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, including the first book publication of Tarzan of the Apes, and the first Pellucidar story, At the Earth’s Core.  The only other ones I’d really heard of are The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell, The Flying Inn, by G.K. Chesterton, and The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells. The bestselling novel of the year in the USA was the forgotten The Eyes of the World by Harold Bell Wright; second place was taken by Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna, published in 1913.

1964
I’ve read a lot more of the books on the Goodreads list of 199 books from 1964. (Some of these are ringers, unfortunately; Asterix and the Big Fight is from 1967, for instance, and none of Vance’s Dying Earth books dates from 1964.) Those that I have read, or that we have on the shelves, are:

  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl – my memory was that this was from a decade later, but clearly my memory was wrong.
  • The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander – enjoyed when I was 13, wonder how well it would stand up now?
  • Games People Play, by Eric Berne – read it as a teenager, when it was largely wasted on me.
  • A Caribbean Mystery, by Agatha Christie – I remember good description of the scenery, but a rather cut-and-paste plot.
  • Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert A. Heinlein – moving swiftly on…
  • Flat Stanley, by Jeff Brown – one I haven’t actually read but that is on the shelves.
  • A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe – a tough read for me, but very much worth it.
  • Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, by Ian Fleming – gorgeously illustrated book which was of course the basis for the film, published just after the author’s death.
  • Martian Time-Slip, by Philip K. Dick – years since I’ve read it, but I remember it as especially surreal and downbeat.
  • Asterix the Gladiator, by René Goscinny – fond memories of this one, where Goscinny and Uderzo were starting to hit their stride.
  • Tree and Leaf, by J.R.R. Tolkien – this is the first edition, which includes only “On Fairy Stories” and “Leaf By Niggle”.
  • The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, by Robert Arthur – surely one of the best Three Investigators stories, on the trail of a stolen painting located by interrogating a series of parrots.
  • Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken – hasn’t lingered in my mind as much as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but this is the one where Simon’s art studies are interrupted by a plot to overthrow King James III.
  • The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber – an early Hugo winner, which I quite liked.
  • The Pushcart War, by Jean Merrill – I remember this vaguely; hadn’t realised it was set in the future (1976).
  • Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, by Harry Kemelman – the only one of this series I have read, but I remember it having a well-depicted protagonist and a particularly ingenious resolution.
  • Galahad at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse – they all blend into one, but I recall this one as particularly good, bringing the two brothers together.
  • Soldier, Ask Not (original novella), by Gordon R. Dickson – I know I’ve read it, can’t recall anything at all about it.
  • The Dalkey Archive, by Flann O’Brien – the last book published in his lifetime, pulling together elements from The Third Policeman, with added guest appearances from James Joyce and St Augustine, into a mostly successful contemporary comedy.
  • Greybeard, by Brian W. Aldiss – I don’t remember much about this except that it was pretty gloomy.
  • The Whitsun Weddings, by Philip Larkin – the other 1964 book on the shelves which I have yet to read.
  • Doctor Who And The Daleks, by David Whitaker – the first, and absolutely my favourite, of the Doctor Who novelisations.
  • An Enemy at Green Knowe, by L.M. Boston – this is the one where Tolly and Ping join forces against an evil occult professor.
My browsing has located four more 1964 books which I have read:
  • Connoisseur’s SF, by Tom Boardman – a rather good anthology from Penguin.
  • Uncle, by J.P.Martin, the first in the series about the philanthropic elephant, which I suspect would not hold up well to rereading.
  • Astrology, by Louis MacNeice – non-fiction study written by the poet while he was dying; his heart wasn’t in it.
  • The Year of the Angry Rabbit, by Russell Braddon – sorry not to see this one better known; to quote Wikipedia, “giant mutant rabbits run amok in Australia while the Prime Minister uses a new superweapon to dominate the planet” – what’s not to love?  The basis for the film Night of the Lepus, which suffers from the fact that it is very difficult to make giant rabbits look at all threatening.
Wikipedia lists At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels as a 1964 publication, but all of its Lovecraft components had already been published elsewhere, so I don’t think it counts.

The top book from 1964 that I haven’t read is The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein, a popular American kids’ book, though I must say it looks a bit unappealing to me. The bestselling novel of the year in the USA was The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, published in 1963.  Wikipedia has various lists, somewhat inconsistent with each other, here, here, here and here.

I did think of going through books from 1989 as well here, but it’s strange to realise that Guards! Guards!, Pyramids and the second volume of Sandman are all a quarter-century old. And anyway, this is enough.

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Jago and Litefoot, series 6

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It's over a year since I last wrote up any Big Finish audios, but I have been listening to them faithfully all the way through. In retrospect, I crashed and burned with keeping a contemporary at about the time that a) I started the complete New Who rewatch (which I also didn't fully record) and b) Loncon 3 started to eat into my thinking time. Anyway, it's a new year, and I may not catch up immediately with the backlog, but I can at least start logging the audios I listen to in 2014.

The Jago and Litefoot series are tremendously successful. The two central characters featured in only one Old Who story, The Talons of Weng Chiang, which brought Tom Baker and Louise Jameson to Victorian London as the Fourth Doctor and Leela; Jago, a theatre manager, and Litefoot, a pathologist, got swept into the plot (which these days we recognise as racist despite its great moments). Apparently Robert Holmes, the then script editor of Doctor Who, was sufficiently taken with the performances of Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter that he considered a spinoff series in which they would have become a sort of Victorian X-Files, but he never got around to it.

Back in 2009, Big Finish did, as they thought, a one-off audio featuring Benjamin and Baxter in the characters of Jago and Lightfoot, The Mahogany Murderersloved it when it first came out, and so did many other fans, enough to justify BF making Series 1, Series 2, Series 3, Series 4, and another series and two specials which I failed to write up at the time.

Now here we are, with Series 6, and Jago and Litefoot back in Victorian London, after, as Douglas Adams put it, a remarkable and unwieldy series of adventures which took them away from home base. Looking back on previous seasons, I note that I have tended to rate the first two stories ahead of the second two, and it is the same here. All four have our two heroes and their sidekick Ellie Higson (played by Lisa Bowerman, who also incidentally directs all four plays) dealing with a sinister Colonel (played by veteran Geoffrey Whitehead) with a variety of other colourful characters.

The Skeleton Quay, by Jonathan Morris, is a jolly good ghost story set in an isolated coastal village, with a striking guest performance by Francesca Hunt, who sounded so much like India Fisher that I had to check the credits to see who it was (and it turns out they are sisters). Return of the Repressed, by Matthew Sweet, is i some ways even better; the plot is a bit incoherent, but bringing Adrian Lukis's Sigmund Freud (quite ahistorically) to London to analyse Jago and deal with peculiar bestial manifestations is a brilliant idea, and great fun to listen to.

Then we step down a gear, I'm afraid. It's no great secret that George Mann isn't my favourite writer, and his Military Intelligence didn't change my view; what is actually a rather promising set-up id then let down by an incoherent ending. I listened to it three times and still wasn't sure what was supposed to have happened. I can't blame Mann entirely; he was presumably given a brief to write to, and the implausibilities of our heroes' travails are therefore not to be laid at his door. The final story, The Trial of George Litefoot by Justin Richards, spends most of its time digging its way out of the plot hole that the previous story left our characters in, but does have a gloriously steampunk climactic scene.

Not to worry. It's very nearly worth it for the first two plays alone, and the good bits of the second half (which very much include the core team's performances) almost make up for the deficiencies. But I wish they had finessed the narrative hook between the third and fourth stories better, and perhaps thought out the details of an admittedly improbable situation with more care.

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Links I found interesting for 16-01-2014

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Wednesday reading

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Current
With The Light vol 6, by Keiko Tobe
Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner
The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick

Last books finished
Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett
Walk to the End of the World, by Suzy McKee Charnas
Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas
[Doctor Who] Happy Endings, by Paul Cornell

Next books
British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, eds Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer
[Doctor Who] Grimm Reality by Simon Bucher-Jones
Do Elephants Ever Forget?, by Guy Campbell
The Rabbi’s Cat v2, by Joann Sfarr

Books acquired in last week
With The Light vol 6, by Keiko Tobe

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Links I found interesting for 15-01-2014

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January Books 5) Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, by Russell Shorto

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I didn’t mention it at the time, but A, F, and I went up to Amsterdam for the long weekend at the start of November. It’s only two and a half hours’ drive from here. We got in by mid-afternoon on the Friday, and wandered around the city for the evening; then on Saturday morning we got up very early to see the Anne Frank House, and finished up with the Nemo Science Centre before trailing home on Saturday evening. Parking is pretty horrible, but there are workarounds.

It was the first time I had been there for over 20 years – A and I had visited briefly in 1992, and before that I guess we had gone the odd time during the year my family lived in the Netherlands in 1979-80. But you can’t live in this corner of Europe and be unaware of it – the year we first moved to Belgium, I remember hosting an American friend who had just been there for a week and spent two days lying on our spare bed detoxing, and occasionally emerging for water and toast; and work quite often takes me to The Hague, which is always somehow in the shadow of its brash sibling (cousin? parent?) up the road. And I’ve passed through Schiphol airport several times, but that really doesn’t count.

Even in my jaded middle years, it’s still a pretty exciting city, with a diverse vibrancy combined with a strong aroma of marijuana that you just don’t get elsewhere. I’d have liked longer to browse in the bookshops, but was satisfied enough with introducing A and F to Indonesian food (we don’t get that here, the south-east Asian cuisine round here is Vietnamese or sometimes Thai or Chinese) and our other cultural excursions already mentioned. I won’t leave it another 20 years before I go back. (Apart from anything else, I really want to go to the Van Gogh Museum.)

Russell Shorto has followed on from his fantastic book on Nieuw Amsterdam, The Island at the Centre of the World, which I hugely enjoyed back in 2005, with a history of the original from which New York took its template. There was lots of stuff here I didn’t know, like Amsterdam’s medieval significance as a cult centre, and the importance of the East India Company as a financial instrument and as a means of enriching the average citizen. It’s also interesting to see bits and pieces put together – the marginal position of Amsterdam allowed it to develop a spirit of tolerance and freedom out of sight of local warlords, until the entire city suddenly became rich (I summarise brutally but fairly).

Shorto doesn’t quite prove his main argument (expressed in his subtitle), which is that Amsterdam functioned as a beacon of tolerance which nurtured the creation of liberalism and modern civilisation; it was certainly important enough in that process, but there are sadly many examples of intolerance in the city’s history. He also doesn’t really situate Amsterdam in its wider Dutch, Low Countries, North-West Continental Europe context after the first few chapters; the forest is out of focus for the sake of a particularly large and interesting tree.

But he redeems this by going even smaller and following some of the personal histories of people who have built the historical image of Amsterdam, done much more briefly and humanely than Simon Schama. Three of them particularly stick with me – Spinoza, Rembrandt, and Anne Frank. The first two of these are of course world figures anyway, but it’s interesting and indeed important to go through how Amsterdam as a city shaped their work. Spinoza in particular comes across as a vital link in the story of civilisation. The third is a more intricate and intimate tale.

I’m old enough to remember Otto Frank appearing on Blue Peter the year before he died (the caption to that video wrongly says 1976, but it was 1979), and I vaguely remember reading the book and visiting the achterhuis in 1980. It’s a really big thing now. The House opens at 9 am; we joined the queue at 0850, and there were nearly 200 people in front of us; by the time we got in at 0940, the queue was easily three times as long as when we had arrived. Get there early, folks; or pre-buy tickets (it was a holiday weekend so we didn’t have that option).

And it’s a gut-wrenching experience. You know what the story is; I wrote about it a few years back. The moments in the house that really turned me inside out were the pictures cut out from magazines that Anne had stuck on the walls of the tiny room she shared with the dentist, as colour from the outside world to lighten the appalling situation that they were in; and the post-war interviews with Otto Frank, a man who had lost everything but somehow turned his daughter’s account into a triumph of the human spirit. I bought the Dutch original of the diary, and will read it soon. (One point that occurs to me now: the Frank girls, who moved to Amsterdam when they were 8 and 4, probably spoke Dutch with that very distinct Holland accent which I have begun to notice much more since I moved to Belgium. Their parents of course were German.)

Shorto starts and ends his book by interviewing Frieda Menco, a childhood friend of Anne Frank’s, whose family went into hiding the same week as the Franks, but were betrayed at the same time, and who then unbelievably met up with the Franks again in Auschwitz. He follows through the history of the city in the late twentieth century, when the student protests broke out in the 1960s (against a mayor whose record in the Resistance was impeccable but forgotten). These are important stories too, particularly for gay rights (as that set of issues first became known) and integration of immigrants. But it feels like a slightly adolescent and oblivious footnote to the deadly drama of the Holocaust.

The book is paced slightly oddly as a result of Shorto’s particular concentrations. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are not well served. But I think the average reader will forgive this; it’s a history of the manifestation of a political idea, not a blow by blow chronology. (After all, Gibbon skipped most of the Byzantine Empire.) It’s not quite as excellent a book as The Island at the Centre of the World, but it’s still very very good.

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Links I found interesting for 13-01-2014

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Links I found interesting for 10-01-2014

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Links I found interesting for 09-01-2014

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Wednesday reading meme

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Current
Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett
Walk to the End of the World, by Suzy McKee Charnas
The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell
[Doctor Who] Happy Endings, by Paul Cornell (1996)
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick

Last books finished
The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
[Doctor Who] Last of the Gaderene, by Mark Gatiss
Amsterdam, by Russell Shorto
Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin
About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006; Series 1 & 2, by Tat Wood
The Next Generation, vol ii and vol iii, by John Francis Maguire (?)

Next books
Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner
Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas
[Doctor Who] Grimm Reality by Simon Bucher-Jones
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler

Books acquired in last week
Een Geweer in het Water, by Hermann
Dodger, by Terry Pratchett
The World of Poo, by Terry Pratchett
La Galère d’Obélix by Albert Uderzo
Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett
Dominion, by C. J. Sansom

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January Books 4) Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin

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Now that Rebus has retired, but is finding ways back into police work, Rankin seems to be hitting a new consistency of excellence. Here, Rebus and colleagues get tangled in a dodgy car accident whose ostensible only victim’s boyfriend is the son of Scotland’s Justice Minister, with links into both the 2014 independence referendum campaign and the more robust and less ethical policing days of two decades ago. Then the bodies start turning up, and Rebus finds that he himself is closer to the source of the story than he would like to be. It’s all intricately woven and unwoven, with nobody completely admirable in their behaviour and some pretty awful. There is a comedy relief scrapyard, which is a nice touch. Long may this continue.

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January Books 3) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006, by Tat Wood

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This has been my insomnia book since September, far more successful than my previous efforts at choosing insomnia books (note for self and other insomniacs – mystery stories actually not such a great way of getting to sleep; thoughtful books about material which you are already very familiar with are a much better idea).

That's not at all to say that it's boring – just that the 28 chapters, and the 28 accompanying essays, are actually meaty and self-contained enough that you can shut the book at the end of each and every one of them and drift off happily. Indeed, now that I have finished it, I wonder what I can turn to next? (Furtive glance at two volumes of the Big Finish Companion on the shelves…)

Anyway. As I had hoped, this is an in depth and critical look at the first two years of New Who, the time of Rose Tyler as a regular companion. It's the seventh volume of the superlative About Time series, and it's difficult to imagine anyone producing a better survey of the period. (Phil Sandifer's book on this, when it comes out, will also be on the must-have shelf, but he is pursuing a different intellectual project and anyway his chapters are usually shorter.)

For each episode, as before, there are substantial sections on continuity (fitting in what we are told into what we know from other Who stories and 'real' history), analysis and the production process. This last is the biggest improvement from previous volumes; About Time 7 has practically a day-by-day breakdown of production (Eccleston's first scene, filmed on 18 July 2004, was chasing the pig down the corridor in Aliens of LondonThe Parting of the Ways). The sections on guest stars are consistently more informative than in previous volumes as well, probably because there are a lot more of them. The sections on popular culture sources for the stories remain as interesting as ever.

Wood is consistently upbeat about the lead actors, particularly about Billie Piper, who of course was known mainly as a teen pop singer before 2005. His snark, however, is fully unleashed for the plotting and sometimes the directing of individual episodes – the "Things That Don't Make Sense" section, which has always been an attractive feature of the AboutTime series, reaches new lengths and depths here. As he points out, although Series Two was a huge hit at the time, there's an awful lot of plot nonsense in it, and the real difference is that the series had a bigger budget than it had ever had or would ever have again.

This volume doesn't have the strongest accompanying essays of the series (for those, you want the second edition of Volume 3), but they are still satisfactory enough. Probably the two most interesting are  "Was Series Two Meant To Be Like This?", which speculates about original plans for the 2006 episodes, including Stephen Fry's unmade story, and "Did He Fall Or Was He Pushed?", looking at the various accounts given of Eccleston's departure and tryng to find the overall picture – the evidence pointing to his not having firmly signed on for more than a year in the first place, and then a series of circumstances and incidents which all pushed against renewal of his contract.

Though this is Volume 7 of the ongoing About Time series of books about Doctor Who, those who started with New Who can jump in here. It is strongly hinted that Volume 8, which will cover the rest of the Tennant era, as well as Torchwood and Sarah Jane, is already written – at the rate this volume goes, about 16 pages for each episode, I suspect that may appear in two pieces – and that a projected Volume 9 will cover the Matt Smith era. Anyway, it's well worth getting, not just for Who fans but generally for fans of 21st century sf television.

Standard formatting gripe – 90 endnotes? Seriously? Why can't we have footnotes, which actually put the interesting nuggets next to the text they illuminate?

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Links I found interesting for 06-01-2014

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Oud-Heverlee, then and now

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Took advantage of the fine weather this morning to try and reproduce the settings of some vintage postcards round our village – slightly hampered by the sun (should have got up earlier).

The old town hall, now the village library, was completely renovated inside a year or so ago, but retains the utilitarian brick facade, though the village name has disappeared. The school buildings behind ave been altered quite a lot.

The position of the sun was a particular problem for this shot and I might try it again. The building facing us from he far corner of the junction was a cafe when we first moved here in 2001, but closed soon after and is just a private residence. (In the very short walk from the former cafe to our house, you pass a former bank branch and a former flower shop, both now private residence.)

The Church of St Anne, at the core of the village, has been cleaned up since the older picture was taken (from the back garned on the adjacent property; we were not able to get across the wall). Also there was a clock on the south face of the 11th-century bell tower in the older picture, just about visible between the two small windows – it has now been moved to the east face, above the front entrance.

Finally, the one shot that turned out to be impossible to reproduce adequately is probably the nicest of the old pictures. The church in those days was painted white; the two quaint old buildings in front of it are both still there, in slightly better shape, and still painted white; but tree growth in the meantime makes it impossible to see except with the eye of faith.

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The lost micro-continent of Avalonia

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I am always fascinated by vanished places and buried landscapes, and was delighted recently to discover that I inhabit the remnants of the lost continent of Avalonia, which existed as a small but separate entity between about 490 and 460 million years ago.


The (possible) extent of Avalonia

The Avalonian remnants include, from east to west, the northwest corner of Poland starting around Szczecin; the northern chunk of Germany; possibly a sliver of Denmark; all of the Netherlands; almost all of Belgium; the Calais/Dunkirk area of France; all of England and Wales (but almost none of Scotland); Ireland southeast of a line from Drogheda to the Shannon estuary; southeastern Newfoundland (including the Avalon peninsula which gives Avalonia its name), with St Pierre and Miquelon; Nova Scotia except the parts south of Halifax; Prince Edward Island; New Brunswick roughly south of Monckton and Fredericton; Maine southeast of the Norumbega Fault which runs southwest from the border to Bangor and then more SSW to Portland, possibly including also the coastal strip of New Hampshire; Massachusetts southeast of a line from the lower Merrimack river valley to Worcester, however excluding Cape Cod ; all of Rhode Island; and finally Connecticut east of Hartford and New Haven. (But not Long Island, just across the Sound.) It's a remarkable mythic assemblage, from Pomerania to Providemce, including both the Avalon Peninsula and the original Isle of Avalon.

The precise borders are debatable, because Avalonian sediments are found at many depths, and it consisted of a series of islands anyway; one map puts remnants in the Carpathians, and also straddling the Straits of Gibraltar. Wikipedia page offers several options, including these:


Avalonia in Europe (one version)


Avalonia in Europe (another version)


The end of Avalonia (one version)


The end of Avalonia (another version)

Avalonia, when it existed, started at the South Pole, an arc of volcanic islands on the rim of Gondwana, bordering land now in Mauretania/Gabon, South Carolina/Georgia/Alabama, and Venezuela/Colombia. When it split off about 490 million years ago, at the end of the Cambrian, it set sail into the Iapetus Ocean, opening up the Rheic Ocean behind it. About 450 million years ago, at the end of the Ordovician, Avalonia joined onto the slightly larger continent of Baltica as a peninsula, and during the Silurian period closed up the Iapetus Ocean, merging with the northern continent of Laurentia. The rest of Gondwana eventually caught up behind it, closing the Rheic Ocean and bringing most of what is now Europe together during the Devonian as the supercontinent of Pangaea formed.

There's a lovely iPad app which lets you assemble Pangaea at your leisure (and another which lets you dismantle it). These screenshots show the history of Avalonia, the red pin marking my Belgian home.

Anyway, greetings, fellow-citizens of the former Avalonia! I bet you never realised that we had that in common.

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Links I found interesting for 03-01-2014

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January Books 1-2) The Next Generation, by John Francis Maguire: Feminism and steampunk in 1871

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I have been on the lookout for this book for over ten years, since first coming across John Clute’s description of it in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. John Francis Maguire was an Irish Liberal MP of the mid-nineteenth century, representing the Munster constituencies of Dungarvan (1852-65) and Cork City (from 1865 till his death in 1872). He also founded the Cork Examiner, a daily newspaper which is still going strong (though recently rebranded the Irish Examiner in order to broaden its appeal). He also published several non-fiction books, on Pope Pius IX, the Irish in America, and Father Mathew; this is his only novel, published in 1871, the year before his death, in three volumes totalling slightly under a thousand pages. (Those pages are not long – here is a sample.)

The story is set in 1891 (with a discreet framing narrative in 1895). There is a railway tunnel between Dover and Calais, thought the beastly French are not honouring their obligations about the internal lighting. Privately owned steam-powered balloons are becoming a traffic problem in London’s skies. New weaponry includes artillery with a range of dozens of miles, and special bullets that explode inside Chinese people. Incidentally Britain has just conquered China. So far, so steampunky.

But at the core of the book, women have had the vote and access to the professions of law and medicine for almost twenty years (incidentally, the best women doctors are Jewish). By 1891 they make up over 20% of all MPs – by 1895, after the story ends, almost 25%. (By contrast, in our timeline, the first British election at which women won more than 20% of the seats in the House of Commons was the most recent one, in 2010.) Ireland has Home Rule, with a royal prince as viceroy – this in a book published four years before Parnell won his first election – and the Irish, and British Catholics generally, are loyal subjects of the Crown, gleefully joining in the conquest of China. The House of Commons also has a few elected representatives from India, though we never see any of them and none are named (and the viceroy of India is not royal). Maguire was an early adopter on both women’s suffrage and Home Rule.

This may sound rather promising, but I have to admit that The Next Generation doesn’t quite deliver on its promise. The core plot, such as it is, concerns the rather gentle romantic and political travails of Grace O’Donnell, a young, clever and beautiful Irish MP who is appointed as the (liberal) government’s Chief Whip in order to counteract the success of the young, clever and beautiful English MP who is the (mildly Tory) opposition Chief Whip. The description of new technology is almost entirely concentrated in some throwaway remarks at the start of the first chapter of volume III. The plot ignores all these technological advances for the sake of mild-mannered political machination, lengthy parliamentary debate, and romance. The most exciting moment is when the two Chief Whips, paired together for a rowing competition in the middle of volume II, save two children from drowning.

My father, who read this book in 1954 when he was 26, commented “This is certainly not a great novel – the plot is hardly more than a series of loosely connected episodes, the characters are nearly all unrelievedly good or irredeemably bad, and there is the usual Victorian archness about relations between the sexes.” I would add that it massively fails, as you would expect a well-meaning Victorian liberal politician’s novel to fail, on class and race. There is a particularly awful chapter featuring a parliamentary debate on weaning the Chinese off opium – breathtakingly arrogant in conception given the history of that particular issue; the arguments put forward are partly a cut-and-paste from the Irish temperance movement, combined with the White Man’s Burden in civilising our Chinese brethren. It’s all very instructive.

Well, I hear you ask, how can I get hold of this amazing book? As I said at the start, I had been looking for it for ages – the first two volumes are available on various free online and print-on-demand sites, but I could not find the third volume and anyway don’t much like on-line reading except for very short books. However, I was delighted to find that iTunes in its wisdom is offering all three, decently formatted, for quite a reasonable price – Vol I, Vol II and Vol III. Some smart publisher could do quite well by publishing an abridged version (the text is long since in the public domain) with up-to-date illustrations. Happy to advise on that; my consultancy rates are quite reasonable!

Links I found interesting for 02-01-2014

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Links I found interesting for 01-01-2014

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