Non-fiction 5 (YTD 9)
Double Down, by Mark Halperin and John Heileman
Jane Austen, by Claire Tomalin
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, by Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo
The Kindness of Strangers, by Kate Adie
The Unfolding Of Language, by Guy Deutscher
    

Fiction (non-sf) 2 (YTD 6)
Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard
The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø
 

SF (non-Who) 6 (YTD 12)
Crowe’s Requiem, by Mike McCormack
God’s War, by Kameron Hurley
The Shining, by Stephen King
Evening’s Empires, by Paul McAuley
Ack-Ack Macaque, by Gareth L. Powell
The Adjacent, by Christopher Priest
     

Doctor Who 6 (YTD 11)
Speed of Flight, by Paul Leonard
GodEngine, by Craig Hinton
The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, by Lawrence Miles
The Forever Trap, by Dan Abnett
Into the Nowhere, by Jenny Colgan
Keeping Up With the Joneses, by Nick Harkaway
     

Comics 0 (YTD 2)

6,300 pages (YTD 12,800)
4/19 (YTD 13/40) by women (Tomalin, Adie, Hurley, Colgan)
0/19 (YTD 1/40)  by PoC

Reread: 0 (YTD 0)

Reading now:
Dominion, by C. J. Sansom
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
The Other Hand, by Chris Cleave

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Essays on Time-based Linguistic Analysis, by Charles-James N. Bailey
Brick Lane, by Monica Ali
Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
Any Given Doomsday, by Lori Handeland
Inverted World, by Christopher Priest
Revelation, by C. J. Sansom
Anglicizing the Government of Ireland, by Jon G. Crawford
Assassin’s Quest, by Robin Hobb
Rupert Bear Annual: No. 72
Deathless, by Catherynne M. Valente
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
Cyberabad Days, by Ian McDonald
Need for Certainty, by Robert Towler
Goodbye To Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
The Road to Middle-Earth, by Tom Shippey
Doctor Who – Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts
[Doctor Who] Christmas on a Rational Planet, by Lawrence Miles
[Doctor Who] Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs

• Сьогоднішнє – Національний склад Сімферополя + району у 2001 р
  
  Russians and Tatars in Crimea.
  (tags: ukraine )
• Statue of Hungarian war leader forces Jews to live in the dark shadow of history
  
  The return of Admiral Horthy.
  (tags: hungary )
• Merkel in London: a case study in political tweeting
  
  The social media view. (I was on the fringes of this event myself, but have nothing to report.)
  (tags: ukpolitics germany twitter )
• Why is the coalition making a public spectacle of picking on the poor? | Lola Okolosie | Comment is free | theguardian.com
  
  Charging people to fight unjust decisions!
  (tags: ukpolitics disability )

• The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia
  
  Extraordinary.
  (tags: space )
• Lovecraft’s hand-written Mountains of Madness sketch
  
  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
  (tags: sf )
• The $20 Million Case for Morocco
  
  The Kingdom’s costly Washington outreach.
  (tags: westernsahara )

The last time there were eight novels on the final ballot was in 2001, when the award was won by The Quantum Rose (Of which I am not a fan).

For once, the two sites rank all the books in the same order, though with a significant variation in the relative sizes of the steps between them.

Current
Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie
The Other Hand (aka Little Bee), by Chris Cleave
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick

Last books finished
The Adjacent, by Christopher Priest
The Unfolding Of Language, by Guy Deutscher

Last week's audios
The Brood of Erys, by Andrew Smith
Current: The Sleeping City, by Ian Potter

Next books
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Sigrid and Gudrun, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Doctor Who – The Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts

Books acquired in last week
Divorcing Jack, by Bateman (2011)
The Prisoner of Brenda, by (Colin) Bateman
How To Train Your Dragon: The Day of the Dreader, by Cressida Cowell
[Doctor Who] Search for the Doctor, by Dave Martin
[Doctor Who] Crisis in Space, by Michael Holt
[Doctor Who] The Garden of Evil, by David Martin
[Doctor Who] Mission to Venus, by William Emms
[Doctor Who] Invasion of the Ormazoids, by Philip Martin
[Doctor Who] Race Against Time. by Pip and Jane Baker

• As Scotland Mulls Independence, A Stupid London Plays It Dirty
  
  Forbes Magazine on London’s overreach.
  (tags: scotland )
• A moving account of an adoptee identifying his birth mother…
  
  …and finding that she had recently died.
  (tags: )
• Atos crisis: Fit-to-work checks shelved amid government contractor firm shambles
  
  So, it seems the system collapsed over a month ago!
  (tags: ukpolitics disability )
• Could you launch a rocket by striking golf balls in the opposite direction?
  
  Er, no.
  (tags: science )
• My Night in Solitary
  
  Colorado’s prison director writes.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• maintaining non-parenting interests
  
  Kate’s coping strategies.
  (tags: family )

• Samuel Anderson joins Who series 8
  
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Why Apple’s Huge Security Flaw Is So Scary
  
  *gulp*
  (tags: security )
• 26 things found in Yanukovych’s compound that make him look even worse
  
  Abandoned in place.
  (tags: ukraine )
• Romania and Bulgaria fail to invade UK
  
  Quelle surprise.
  (tags: ukpolitics migration romania bulgaria )
• Goodbye to All That – Why I Left the Academic Life
  
  Been there, done that.
  (tags: careersadvice )
• What the West Must Do for Ukraine
  
  Ulrich Speck is right: a clear EU membership offer is needed.
  (tags: ukraine eu )

• The Islands of Chaldea by Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Jones
  
  DWJ’s posthumous novel.
  (tags: sf )
• Haunting Photos of the Abandoned 1984 Winter Olympics Facilities
  
  30 years on…
  (tags: bosnia photos )
• 25 Things You Didn’t Know About Belgium
  
  I did know one or two of these…
  (tags: belgium )
• 15 More Things You Didn’t Know About Belgium
  
  Likewise.
  (tags: belgium )

Second of the BSFA nominees for me; I loved the way it started, with an asteroid escape similar to that of Adam Roberts’ Jack Glass last year (though with less sex and violence); it’s apparently the fourth of a series, but I didn’t feel I’d lost out by missing the first three. Our protagonist, having escaped the destruction of his family, preserving the severed head of a scientist with various secrets preserved in its brain, treks across the outer solar system, finding allies, betrayal, lost relatives, and precious secrets. It’s an excellent hard sf / space opera tale – we don’t get so many of those these days – and each section of the book is named after an sf classic of the past – Childhood’s End, “Marooned off Vesta”, The Caves of Steel, Pirates of the Asteroids, “The Cold Equations” and Downward to the Earth. I’d have liked perhaps a little more insight into our central character, but it is a front-runner for my ballot (two down, three to go).

The third of the Companion Chronicle plays featuring Terry Molloy as lost Time Lord Quadrigger Stoyn, this time with two Romanas – Lalla Ward once again reprising her TV role, and Juliet Landau, who we remember well as Drusilla from Buffy and Angel, playing not only the future incarnation of Romana from last year’s Gallifrey VI series, but also retelling a Key to Time diversion to Ancient Rome which presumably was first envisaged for the late Mary Tamm.

My classicist!Whovian friends should take note: the Roman sections of the play feature a pretty close engagement with the playwright Plautus, and Terry Molloy doing a fantastic job of doing several different versions of the unfortunate Stoyn who have all got sucked into the theatre. I always enjoy Lalla Ward too, but I found the Juliet Landau bits of the script more interesting, and the tribute to Mary Tamm’s performance very moving.

• Mystery Voynich manuscript gets preliminary alphabet
  
  Very interesting!!!!
  (tags: languages )
• The full Voynich Manuscript paper
  
  (62 pages, 2.6 MB, PDF)
  (tags: languages )
• Doctor Who Minisode – Rain Gods (by Neil Gaiman)
  
  Featuring Matt Smith and Alex Kingston.
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Doctor Who – Clara and the Tardis minisode
  
  With Jenna Coleman.
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Doctor Who – The Inforarium minisode
  
  With Matt Smith and AN Other.
  (tags: doctorwho )

I’ve only read two other Stephen King books, Hearts in Atlantis, which I very much enjoyed, and The Stand, which though deeply flawed is King’s most popular book on LibraryThing (interestingly, The Shining is far ahead on GoodReads). I was, however, familiar with MAD Magazine’s parody of the movie version of The Shining, published in March 1981 when I was 13, and still landing some excellent blows – “You have to remember that he committed some AWFUL CRIMES… like murder… and over-acting!”

Anyway, the novel is a bit long but really very good. I thought it was much more disciplined than The Stand, and perhaps the focus on a single instance of evil and horror, rather than nation-wide catastrophe, helps to keep the writing firmly engaged. There are a lot of things that don’t quite get explained – was there really a body in the bath? did the hedge sculptures really come to life? – but that maybe misses the point; in an environment like the haunted hotel, what does “really” really mean?

The three main adult characters – Jack and Wendy Torrance, and Dick Hallorann – are a particular joy in this book. the story of the Torrances’ marriage, Jack’s disintegration, and his attempts to pick himself up, destroyed by the environment of the hotel, are done with a certain compassion which I can’t really remember from, say, Lovecraft (I confess I haven’t read a lot of horror but I suspect this is a general critique). The one point that niggled at me a bit was whether we are meant to think that the awful events would have happened with or without young Danny’s psychic abilities; I guess the fact that Hallorann didn’t trigger the dark forces in the same way leads us to the conclusion that it’s Jack’s personality which is the precipitating factor, and Danny’s “shining” allows for a more vivid account but is actually incidental to the unfolding of the story.

Anyway, a classic that well deserves its reputation.

A really enjoyable Seventh Doctor story, as the Doctor, Chris and Ros appear on twenty-second century Mars in the midst of the Dalek Invasion of Earth, with the politics of Ice Warrior appropriation of left-behind Osirian technology putting all at risk. Simply excellent stuff, missing only Bernice Summerfield for whom this is the world of her expertise.

• Testing firm Atos wants to quit £500 million government contract EARLY
  
  Even @ATOS doesn’t believe in its own tests any more.
  (tags: ukpolitics disability )
• Georgia: Trying to Contain Drivers’ Inner Mad Max
  
  Locating the brake pedal!
  (tags: georgia )
• The Hitlers of Maryland
  
  (Not related.)
  (tags: history )
• Survey points to major shift in opposition to gay marriage
  
  Northern Ireland turning a corner.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality northernireland )

• Sherlock and the European catastrophe
  
  @HugoBrady looks ahead to 2017. @CER_London
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• Global warming: Old Arctic ice is melting away.
  
  *gulp*
  (tags: climatechange )

Current
Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
The Adjacent, by Christopher Priest
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick

Last books finished
Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard
[Doctor Who] The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, by Lawrence Miles
[Doctor Who] The Forever Trap, by Dan Abnett
[Doctor Who] Into the Nowhere, by Jenny Colgan
[Doctor Who] Keeping Up With the Joneses, by Nick Harkaway
Ack-Ack Macaque, by Gareth L. Powell
The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø
The Kindness of Strangers, by Kate Adie

Next books
The Unfolding Of Language, by Guy Deutscher
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie

• Suzanne Vega’s lyrical New York
  
  In case you wondered where Tom’s Diner was.
  (tags: music maps )
• “Don’t Buy Shirts in Herat”: the Lost World of the Hippie Trail
  
  Alas, I am about eight years too young for this.
  (tags: maps Afghanistan )
• Billionaire Wilbur Ross Declares ‘The 1 Percent Is Being Picked On’
  
  Diddums.
  (tags: uspolitics )

• Vivienne Faull: a pioneer tipped to be the first female bishop
  
  Go, Viv, go!
  (tags: religion )
• In Kansas, Right Joins Left to Halt Bill on Gays
  
  Hooray!
  (tags: uspolitics sexandgenderandsexuality )
• The Wakhan Valley and Eastern Pamir
  
  Peter in Central Asia.
  (tags: travel )

• Mary Beard · The Public Voice of Women
  
  μῦθος δ’ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει / πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ’ ἐμοί: τοῦ γὰρ κράτος ἔστ’ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• York man refused benefits due to new immigration rules
  
  Punishing migration – fighting the poor rather than povertry!
  (tags: ukpolitics migration )
• The Rebirth of Seriously Good Georgian Wines
  
  Can’t hit Belgium soon enough!
  (tags: wine georgia )
• Climate change is here now and it could lead to global conflict
  
  Stern: “the risks are even bigger than I realised”.
  (tags: climatechange )

• Peter Schmies’s Vocabulary Test
  
  I got 182/200. What about you?
  (tags: english words )
• Five frontrunners to be the Church of England’s first female bishop
  
  Go, Viv, go!!!
  (tags: religion sexandgenderandsexuality )
• The map of Ganymede
  
  Cool!
  (tags: astronomy )
• Global warming ‘pause’ due to unusual trade winds in Pacific ocean
  
  Must all come out eventually…
  (tags: climatechange )
• What the hell, Kansas?
  
  An attempt to legalise homophobia.
  (tags: uspolitics sexandgenderandsexuality )
• Kansas Senate likely to reject bill denying services to gay couples
  
  Good.
  (tags: uspolitics sexandgenderandsexuality )

Next in the series of Big Finish audios featuring Quadrigger Stoyn, accidentally removed from Gallifrey with the Tardis by the First Doctor and here encountering the Second Doctor and Zoe. Unfortunately a story that didn’t quite fulfill its promise – it’s almost all Frazer Hines as Jamie v Terry Molloy as Stoyn, with Wendy Padbury as Zoe being allowed a few lines here and there; also I would have liked a bit more to be made of Stoyn’s threat to reveal the Doctor to the Time Lords, since the story is set just before The War Games when the Doctor actually did reveal himself. But the central performances are delightful.

My cold/flu bug was more or less under control for most of this week, but this morning I couldn’t get out of bed – or rather, I tried and then subsided back into it again, emerging briefly in the early evening for some scrambled egg. I generally enjoy food, and look forward to eating some again some time soon.

To a happier subject: the excellent Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Jane Austen. My point of comparison was her previous biography of Samuel Pepys, which is I think a slightly better book because its subject had a more interesting and better chronicled life. But Tomalin has achieved wonders here with the slender material available, a writer who barely left southern England in her 41 years, most of whose correspondence was destroyed, and whose legacy is a set of six and a half novels which have caught the imagination of the English-speaking world.

Austen’s family background had two points of particular interest for me. One is that her brother (like her uncle) had severe learning disabilities. There were ways of dealing with this two hundred years ago: a separate house was found for him in the village, and a local couple were paid (from the ever uncertain family funds) to look after him. It’s one of those aspects of family life that I guess I am personally quite sensitive about. We’re awfully lucky to live in a country with a real welfare state, where our own girls have easy and cheap access to the care that they need and we cannot possibly provide. It’s worth being reminded that these issues are not new to our time.

The second point is the modest Austen family’s connection with high politics. In particular, the Austens were closely connected with Warren Hastings. Jane’s favourite cousin, Eliza (who later married her brother and literary agent, Henry) was supposedly Warren Hasting’s biological daughter, and certainly his god-daughter; Hastings’ only son, George, actually died in the care of the then newly-married Austen parents in 1764 (eleven years before she was born). Looking west rather than east (and not quite as far), Jane’s one serious teenage crush ended up (long after her death) as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. It was quite a small world, conscious of status and potential scandal.

One really regrets that Austen did not live longer or travel more while she lived. She achieved wonders from a very constrained existence. On the day of my grandmother’s funeral in 1979 we visited Chawton, which is convenient to Brookwood (my grandmother is one of the quarter-million resting there). I was only 12 at the time, and had barely heard of Jane Austen (weird to note that Sense and Sensibility was not published in paperback until after I was born) but I remember being struck by the ordinariness of the place; how could somewhere so small generate literature so well-known? Yet it happened; and from the scant traces that remain, Tomalin has written another very good book.

• Currency Reflections: The Legal Issues
  
  My old friend Christine Bell enters the debate.
  (tags: scotland )
• New Kid on the Block
  
  The European Endowment for Democracy
  (tags: eu democratization )
• 5 ‘Doctor Who’ companions who left for love
  
  From Susan to Amy.
  (tags: doctorwho )

I bought this at Philcon in 2012, really because it was there; I’m not sure that it quite worked for me. For each book, the co-authors give a blurb of two pages or so explaining why it is good and why it is important in the trajectory both of the individual author and of the genre. But one thing I missed was snark: I’d much rather that they had included twenty bad books – or twenty books which they were prepared to admit were bad books – to make it clear that the praise they were lavishing was deserved in other cases. (This is why I’m fundamentally unsympathetic to the occasional efforts to set up sites that will only write positive reviews – you just can’t trust them if they won’t tell you what they don’t like.)

I was also not convinced that individual novels are the right building blocks to construct a chronology of a quarter century of the genre. Quite apart from the facts that many of the choices are individually questionable, and single volumes may fairly not represent longer series (Bujold, Banks, etc), sf also includes short stories and other media. Sure, it’s valid to look only at novels; but it’s also a huge constraint.

Anyway, I’ve read 49 of the 101 entries (in bold below, actually 52 of the 105 books listed). Which have you read? Which should I read (please tell me in comments?

It’s fairly obvious by now that I am not a huge Third Doctor fan, and still less a fan of the character Mike Yates. Yet here we have something rather good: just before The Green Death, the Doctor takes Jo on an excursion to a low-gravity planet where several richly realised cultures, which practice bodily resurrection in the most literal of senses, compete for control of their environment. I see that Speed of Flight has not picked up rave reviews in general, but I thought the world-building here was really something a bit special, both physically and anthropologically. It’s still a bit odd to plonk the wooden, conventional Yates into an alien environment, but if that’s the least impressive part of the book you’re doing OK by me.

• Parliament to sanction nine MEPs over Azeri mission
  
  Good.
  (tags: eu azerbaijan )
• New connected car standards put Europe into top gear
  
  Safer roads are coming.
  (tags: eu technology )
• Europe map quiz
  
  Not too difficult!
  (tags: maps eu )

Current
The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø
Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard
[Doctor Who] The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, by Lawrence Miles
[Doctor Who] The Forever Trap, by Dan Abnett
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick

Last books finished
God’s War, by Kameron Hurley
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, by Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo
[Doctor Who] GodEngine, by Craig Hinton
The Shining, by Stephen King
Evening’s Empires, by Paul McAuley

Last week’s audios
Luna Romana (Romana/4)
Trial of the Valeyard (6/Valeyard)

Next books
Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
The Kindness of Strangers, by Kate Adie
Ack-Ack Macaque, by Gareth L Powell
[Doctor Who] Into the Nowhere, by Jenny Colgan

Books acquired in last week
[Doctor Who] Keeping up with the Joneses, by Nick Harkaway

• Outdated, outmoded and increasingly inaccurate: is it time to say goodbye to “Miss”?
  
  Sense from @RTaylor_MEP.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• WH Auden advised Tolkien to drop romance
  
  Wanted Aragorn/Arwen taken out!
  (tags: sf Tolkien )
• Agloe, the Paper Town Stronger than Fiction
  
  Made up, yet real!
  (tags: maps )
• ‘Armchair Theatre: The Golden Road’ (1973): Representing lesbianism in the 1970s
  
  Starring Katy Manning.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality television )

Like a lot of people I have mixed feelings about Colin Baker's time as Doctor Who. But unlike a lot of people, I rate Mindwarp, with the return of the horrific Sil, and the brutal end (or is it?) to Peri's travels with the Doctor, as the best of the Sixth Doctor stories; I'm not a fan of Vengeance on Varos, where the violence and the absurd bird transformation kill the story for me; and Mission to Magnus is one of the worst Who stories never made, competing in the gutter with The Prison In Space.

Philip Martin has taken the bold step of writing another story for the Sixth Doctor, Peri and Sil which is a sequel to all three of these. I'm happy to report that it's closest in form and content to Mindwarp, with Baker, Briant and Shaban on excellent form, and a particularly impressive guest turn from Dawn Murphy as Cordelia Crozier, daughter of the scientist chap from the previous story. Martin often has a bit of a bitter satirical edge to his work, not always well deployed; maybe age has allowed him to tune his talent more forensically, but whatever the reason, I felt that he had updated Sil to the era of Cameron rather than Thatcher with brutal success, and that most of his rhetorical shots landed firmly on target. The plot is still a bit all over the pace, but this is firmly at the Mindwarp rather than Magnus end of the spectrum for me.

I still feel like I’m coughing my lungs out, but I struggled into work both yesterday and today, so I guess I am well enough to start catching up on book-blogging… Anyway, God’s War is the first of this year’s BSFA nominees for Best Novel that I have read. I’m taking the approach of reading them in increasing order of pagecount, which nicely orders the first three – God’s War (288), Evening’s Empires (384), and Ack-Ack Macaque (416), though I shall have to toss a coin between Ancillary Justice and The Adjacent (both 432).

These are 288 very intense pages. Our central character, Nyx, is a woman warrior and assassin in a war whose point seems to have been largely forgotten by the combatants, working her way across the battle-scarred landscapes and streetscapes of a ruined world. There’s lots of love, lust, betrayal, and horrible violence. It’s awfully well realised.

I found it in the end a bit one-note – concentrating on the vivid setting, at the expense of a real plot, and without quite explaining how this world got itself into such a mess. Perhaps this will be dealt with in future volumes. It’s a very good book, but I hope that there are better ones to come.