Non-fiction 4 (YTD 13)
The Assassination of the Prime Minister: John Bellingham and the Murder of Spencer Perceval, by David Hanrahan
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick
Essays on Time-based Linguistic Analysis, by Charles-James N. Bailey
Companions: 50 Years of Doctor Who Assistants, by Andy Frankham-Allen
  

Fiction (non-sf) 2 (YTD 8)
The Other Hand, by Chris Cleave
Brick Lane, by Monica Ali

SF (non-Who) 10 (YTD 22)
Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie
Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Sigrid and Gudrun, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Unearthed, eds. John J. Johnston and Jared Shurin
Spin, by Nina Allan
Anthem, by Ayn Rand
Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie
Tarzan and the Forbidden City, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
  

Doctor Who 11 (YTD 22)
Doctor Who – The Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts
Christmas on a Rational Planet, by Lawrence Miles
Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs
Tales of Trenzalore, by Justin Richards, George Mann, Paul Finch and Mark Morris
Salt of the Earth, by Trudi Canavan
Search for the Doctor, by David Martin
Crisis in Space, by Michael Holt
The Garden of Evil, by David Martin
Mission to Venus, by William Emms
Invasion of the OrmazoIds, by Philip Martin
Race Against Time, by Pip and Jane Baker 

~7,200 pages (YTD ~20,000)
6/25 (YTD 19/65) by women (Ali, Leckie, Allan, Rand, Canavan, J Baker)
1/25 (YTD 2/656) by PoC (Ali)

Reread: 2/25 (YTD 2/40) (Animal Farm, The Amber Spyglass)

Reading now:
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
Adventures with the Wife in Space, by Neil Perryman

Coming soon (perhaps):
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
Cheese, by Willem Elsschot
Understanding the Lord of the Rings, eds. Rose A. Zimbardo & Neil D. Isaacs
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler
Need for Certainty, by Robert Towler
The Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker
Cyberabad Days, by Ian McDonald
Goodbye To Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
The Road to Middle-Earth, by Tom Shippey
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
Green Living for Dummies, by Michael Grosvenor
The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
[Doctor Who] Amorality Tale, by David Bishop
[Doctor Who] Return of the Living Dad, by Kate Orman
[Doctor Who] Hope, by Mark Clapham

I caught a couple of episodes of The Incredible Spice Men last year, and while I haven’t yet tried any of their recipes per se, I’ve been thinking about how to make food more interesting.

I bought three chunks of haddock yesterday, and decided I’d fry them after dipping them in seasoned flour. And as I was stirring the salt and pepper in, it occurred to me that there was more that could be done. So I added a half teaspoon of cumin seed per person to the flour, as well as a dash of chili powder, and mixed it all in thoroughly before covering the haddock in it; and then fried the fish for five minutes a side in a very hot pan.

Wow. Even F, generally suspicious of culinary innovation, said he liked it. Definitely a success.

• How climate change will acidify the oceans
  
  Horrifying.
  (tags: climatechange )
• Time to Talk to the Russians
  
  A sensible suggestion.
  (tags: russia blogging )
• Missing in Inaction: Where is the African Peace and Security Architecture?
  
  How the EU is getting it wrong.
  (tags: eu africa )

• Cameron’s reality check on Europe
  
  Michael Emerson is upbeat that Cameron’s demands can be met.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• Why Cameron’s timing on EU reform is off
  
  Rem Korteweg thinks Cameron has a scheduling problem.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• Independence from Spain: Catalonia’s dream, Europe’s dilemma
  
  Good interview with President Mas.
  (tags: catalonia )
• Shakira Sings In Catalan, Stokes Political Unrest In Spain
  
  Cultural pluralism, eh?
  (tags: catalonia )
• How wide is a Higgs boson?
  
  Wider than we thought, but it’s uncertain!
  (tags: physics )
• The Books Quiz
  
  New from the Irish Times.
  (tags: books )

Current
Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie
Adventures with the Wife in Space, by Neil Perryman
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
Tarzan and the Forbidden City, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Last books finished
[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
Anthem, by Ayn Rand
Brick Lane, by Monica Ali

Last week’s audios
[Doctor Who] Scavenger, by William Gallagher
[Doctor Who] Starborn, by Jacqueline Rayner
[Doctor Who] The King of Sontar, by John Dorney
Current: [Doctor Who] White Ghosts, by Alan Barnes

Next books
Any Given Doomsday, by Lori Handeland
Inverted World, by Christopher Priest
[Doctor Who] Amorality Tale, by David Bishop

Books acquired in last week
Wonderbook, by Jeff Vandermeer

• 13 of 14 warmest years on record occurred in 21st century – UN
  
  Speaks for itself.
  (tags: climatechange )
• What is the first example of a story in which people travel in time to the past?
  
  Discuss.
  (tags: sf )
• “Stand Your Ground” laws examined
  
  As bad as you’d think.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• Inside the Belgeway
  
  Gareth Harding on Brussels.
  (tags: eu )
• Scottish “yes” vote at over 40% heralds likely end of UK
  
  Ian reckons a critical mass has been reached.
  (tags: scotland ukpolitics )

• Olli Rehn: in crisis, we also protected the weakest of society
  
  In his own words.
  (tags: eu )
• Groping our way towards Grouping
  
  Inside a local Conservative campaign (such as it is).
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Everest born when Asia was squeezed like toothpaste
  
  Louis Moresi’s new tectonic model.
  (tags: geology )
• Territorial referenda after World War I
  
  All flawed.
  (tags: eu history voting )
• Russian thugs attack St Patrick’s Day flashmob mistaking them for gay activists
  
  The stupid, it burns!
  (tags: russia ireland sexandgenderandsexuality )
• Suspected Gulnara Karimova letter smuggled to BBC
  
  The fall of the dictator’s daughter.
  (tags: uzbekistan )

Second paragraph of Chapter 3:

It is said. Now let us be lashed for it, if we must. The Council of Scholars has said that we all know the things which exist and therefore all the things which are not known by all do not exist. But we think that the Council of Scholars is blind. The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them. We know, for we have found a secret unknown to all our brothers.

I haven't really done my duty by the Retro-Hugo nominations, but thought I should sample one or two more sf books from 1938 than Out Of The Silent Planet and The Sword In The Stone. At this stage in the game, though, it's not easy to find them; browsing online I located only Anthem and Tarzan and the Forbidden City as being easily available. With slightly heavy heart, having previously digested The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, I breezed through it fairly fast. It's a lot better than I expected, partly because it's a lot shorter than I expected; the story is very simply of a worker in a totalitarian, low-tech society who commits an act of rebellion by falling in love and, in the last revolutionary chapter, switching to "I" rather than "we" for the first person pronoun. The revolt against dystopia has been done better elsewhere, including in We, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, but this does distil it down to its essence quite effectively. recommended it years ago, and he was right.

This is the climax to the current Big Finish trilogy of audios featuring Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor and Lisa Greenwood as new companion Flip, by William Gallagher (whose work has generally been pretty good, though I don't seem to have written it up here previously). I must say it is a real tour de force – the plot begins with a joint Indian-British space mission in the year 2071, but then takes a leap into Indian legend, with some excellent guest performances (including Ajli Mohindra, who was Rani Chandra in the Sarah Jane Adventures). My one complaint is that Kate McEwen, playing the evil British character, sounded a bit inconsistent with her accent, sliding from Scotland to Northern Ireland and back again. But otherwise, this has been a fine set of plays, with a stunning twist at the end of this one which I didn't see coming but which had been decently foreshadowed in the previous two (Antidote to Oblivion and The Brood of Erys).

Which EU member state is seventh (and last) in this sequence:

Slovakia
Luxembourg
Cyprus
Finland
Austria
Portugal
???

• Can Europe survive without Russian gas?
  
  Yes, if we start planning for the winter now, says @bruegel.
  (tags: eu russia )
• Catholic League president applies to march in Gay Pride parade
  
  Publicity stunt backfires.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• The maggots that changed my life (and the future of the Tory party)
  
  “Their pointless existence is being monetised.”
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Should I Stay or Should I Lo? Analysis of Lo’s united Ireland comments
  
  Do her own potential voters care all that much, I ask?
  (tags: northernireland )
• Management by Walking Out of the Room
  
  “Huggy Rao…counts how many questions a leader asks makes vs how many statements he or she makes.”
  (tags: management )
• Гимн Европы на одесском Привозе 22.03.2014
  
  A flash mob in Odessa performs the European anthem!!
  (tags: ukraine eu )
• 2584 Fibonacci
  
  The Fibonacci version of 2048.
  (tags: games mathematics )
• Anna Lo, and the myth that Northern Irish politics is about the border
  
  @gerrylynch deconstructs it all, quotes me.
  (tags: northernireland )

Last year I didn't actually vote for the BSFA Award for Non-Fiction; time was short, and I had read only one of the nominees; and though I very much liked it, I felt uncomfortable giving it a vote when I knew nothing about the competition. This year there are only three nominees, but this doesn't really make things easier: one is a big book about writing, one is the foreword to an anthology of stories about mummies, and one is a series of blog posts which started in mid-2012 and continues to this day. On top of that, I have read only one of the three in full – and I am putting it last. Yet I feel pretty confident in my vote, which will be as follows:

1) Wonderbook, by Jeff Vandermeer. I have not read this from start to finish, but I've read enough to be clear that it's a very serious, useful, friendly and engaging guide to creative writing, particularly of sf and fantasy. There are side essays by such as Neil Gaiman and Ursula Le Guin. There are gorgeous illustrations (some of which irritatingly break up the text, but not as badly as the last Vandermeer book I read). It will have a pretty long shelf-life, and indeed one member of my household who has stronger aspirations to creative writing than I do snatched it from me and became immediately engrossed in it (which is part of my reason for not having read it in full).

2) I am very happy that Liz Bourke has been nominated for this category. If I am not wrong, she is actually the first Irish nominee (this award was first made in 2002, and has skipped a few years in between). Tor.com has done a great thing in opening up its webspace to articulate commentators from different traditions, leaning to the progressive end of the political spectrum (though maybe I'm just ignoring the bits I disagree with). Liz Bourke has built up an impressive body of work, variable in subject but not in quality; as well as sub-genres (epic fantasy, urban fantsy, lesbian SFF) she writes about non-genre novels, games, museums, interviews particular authors, and takes on various topics succinctly yet in some depth. A good sample is her piece on her piece on older women as genre characters. Although… while I enjoy Liz Bourke's writing, I also am a bit surprised that this particular set of blog posts got chosen ahead of other possibilities by the BSFA selectorate; see further discussion below.

3) My bafflement at the BSFA nominations process mounts to a new peak with the inclusion on the shortlist of “Going Forth by Night”, John J. Johnston's introductory essay to Unearthed, an anthology of classic stories about mummies which he has co-edited with Jared Shurin. It's not that (as with one of the 2010 award nominees) I have any concerns about its eligibility. Clearly this is a "written work about science fiction and/or fantasy which appeared in its current form in 2013". My surprise is more that, well, it's not actually very impressive; a chronological listing – though sometimes repetitive and jumping about – of the theme of mummies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, carried through into the later film and TV tradition; with only a glancing reference to colonialism (some remarks by Conan Doyle, which are rightly disparaged but not analysed) and almost nothing about sexual symbolism. It also misses a couple of stories that I would have thought were relevant – The Story of the Amulet, by E. Nesbit, may not have a visible mummy per se, but does have a very visible mummy-case, and it is steeped in Egyptology, more so than Charles Bump's "The Lost Mummy" which is actually included in the collection. When I read articles about the genre, I want something that goes beyond mere indexing, and which – if it does index – includes the relevant things that I have read so that I can fit my own experience into the writer's argument; and this essay fails on both fronts. Also, considerable violence is done to the poor comma, over-used and abused on every single page of the piece.

Of course, if I want different things on the ballot paper, the responsiblity for nominating them falls to me, and I completely failed to do that this year. In terms of blog posts, I wish I had nominated Jo Walton's posts on Tor.com, or Abigail Nussbaum. From the Whovian perspective, I am regretting not having nominated Philip Sandifer's blog, or Tat Wood's latest About Time volume, or Neil and Sue Perryman's Adventures with the Wife in Space or The Eleventh Hour (essays on the Matt Smith era edited by Andrew O'Day) in time, though I also admit that would be on firmer ground had I actually read the last two of these. But, not for the first time, I find it quite difficult to understand how the BSFA Non-Fiction shortlist ended up looking like this, and wonder where the conversations that I must be missing are taking place.

Second paragraph of the third chapter:

During the rest of their travels with the Doctor, we learn very little about Ben & Polly, even though they continue with him for another six adventures. It is a curious thing that from the start, despite having witnessed the Doctor's 'renewal', Ben refuses to accept that the Doctor is indeed who he claims to be. Once again Polly is the voice of reason, willing to accept what she has seen, even if she cannot really understand it. Throughout their adventure on the human colony on Vulcan (The Power of the Daleks) Ben continues to be irritable and highly strung, while Polly opts for calmness. It is only when a Dalek recognises the Doctor that Ben finally accepts this strange man in the frock coat is the same old man he had come to trust.

A fannish guide to all the Who companions from Susan to Clara, up to the middle of 2013. Not really very deep, and the author has some very weird ideas about Rose Tyler. Benton and Yates, and later Chris and Roz, are simply omitted. Also, although the "Expanded Universe" (a term I've never previously seen applied to Who) is covered in some depth, publication details for the short stories are usually omitted and there is no bibliography. Graham Sleight was able to make bricks out of the straw of The Doctor's Monsters, and I should think it fairly easy to repeat that exercise interestingly for the companions; but this is not that book.

• Da li je BiH specijalan slučaj za EU? Nicholas Whyte misli da nije
  
  I am interviewed by Bosnian TV.
  (tags: eu bosnia )
• Can Fianna Fail resist temptation?
  
  @jasonomahony thinks they might; I am not so sure myself.
  (tags: ireland )
• How well would you do on University Challenge?
  
  19/20. Not terribly difficult!
  (tags: games )
• Generations0010
  
  @johnquiggin’s dissection of “boomers”, etc.
  (tags: economics history )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

There are two obvious reasons why minilectal approaches cannot explain or predict, why the fundamental concept of naturalness (see later) is so vague and shifting, and why linguistics faces something of a philosophical crisis. First, it is clear that explaining and predicting depend on the study of developments that produce structures: developments explain states, not vice versa. Of course, a given combination of existing structures is a conditional cause for what changes are possible, but the efficacious causes for linguistic changes must be sought elsewhere. This brings us to the second reason why static, or minilectal, approaches can never attain to the theoretical goals of explaining and predicting, namely, the fact that they are autonomous approaches: they prefer inert 'formal' explanations (if any) or economy metrics to developmental explanations – those based on how new languages get formed (from pidgins) and develop from then on – the sort of explanation made use of in cosmology and astrophysics. (Development is of course excluded from the purview of status approaches.)

I got this book because I knew Bailey briefly when I was much younger, and really admired his charm and his incomprehensible expertise in linguistics. He kindly taught me the rudiments of New Testament Greek. This book pulls together his own choice of his best academic pieces, which unfortunately means that they are pretty impenetrable to those not familiar with the internal arguments of linguists over the last forty years; it's clear though that he was a bit of an outlier (he's till alive, but long retired) and that his particular axe to grind is that linguists pay too little attention to language change as a dynamic, perpetual phenomenon, driven both by internal shifts and external stimuli.

The two most accessible chapters are fairly near the end. One sets out his argument that English should not be described as a Germanic language. He argues that all languages have more than one parent anyway, so the traditional "family tree" model is simply wrong. Much better, he says, to think of Middle English as a creole of Middle French and Anglo-Saxon. The vocabulary may be Germanic, but the grammar is much more Romance.

I find this a provocative and not completely convincing argument. I think there's a good reason why we instinctively tend to group languages together by vocabulary rather than grammatical structure, and it's not just oppressive Saussurian propaganda. I agree that there are indeed some intriguing underlying geographies – to take two examples that Bailey doesn't use, the definite article suffix which is shared by Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Romanian, but by none of their neighbours; and the English "-ing" and "do" constructions which appear to have come from Celtic. But Bulgarians and Macedonians still find it easier to communicate with article-less Serbs and Russians, while Romanians find it easier to communicate with article-before-noun Italians, and even English speakers will find more echoes of their own language in Dutch and German than in Irish or Welsh. So I'll happily concede that we need a more nuanced picture, but I think the traditional family structure does tell us something useful.

The next chapter, much more digestibly, argues simply that the Greek letter xi – uppercase Ξ, lowercase ξ – was sometimes pronounced "sh" /ʃ/ rather than "x" /ks/. Appreciating the evidence in depth would take more knowledge of ancient Greek than I have, but Bailey has me convinced at "Xerxes". The Persian ruler's name is spelt Ξέρξης in ancient Greek, but the Persian original was something like Xšaya-ṛšā, where that first X is a chi sound (as in "loch") rather than X as in "axe". The consonant after the "r" or "ṛ" is pronounced "sh" in Ancient Persian, also Modern Persian ش (both the second and second last letter in خشایارشا), also Hebrew שׁ (third and last in אֲחַשְׁוֵרוֹשׁ) and ς (usually "s" rather than "sh") in the Book of Esther (Ασουηρος) – not a hint of a "k" sound in any of them. NB also that in the Latin alphabet, "x" is routinely pronounced /ʃ/ in Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese and Maltese. Given the weight of the evidence I was left wondering if this was really controversial at all.

Anyway, I'm glad I read this even if I didn't understand as much as I would have liked.

Second paragraph of third section:

The man was dressed formally in a long-sleeved white shirt with frilly collar and cuffs. Though his hair was white and bushy, his slim frame moved with an energy that suggested he wasn’t as old as he first appeared . The woman was younger and shorter – and her face was red, either from sunburn or exertion or both. She was dressed in a miniskirt and blouse in a style of the last century, reminding Sunny of her own love affair with retro fashions, back when she had been a much younger woman.

Considering how much Doctor Who owes to Australia, it’s amazing how few Who stories are actually set there. In this latest of the series of short ebooks by well-known authors, Trudi Canavan takes the Third Doctor and Jo to a corner of the continent where people are slowly turning to salt. It’s a story which is basically about that single image, but it is very well told, and I felt I could hear the accents in my head as I read.

• Disaster at Xichang
  
  The worst space launch accident in history.
  (tags: space )
• Request for Blogs, Answered
  
  Alex Harrowell’s reading list.
  (tags: blogs )
• Microsoft just exposed email’s ugliest secret
  
  They’re reading your hotmail.
  (tags: internet privacy )
• Twitter usage SOARS in Turkey
  
  The ban that failed.
  (tags: twitter turkey )
• The definitive guide to winning 2048
  
  In case you were wondering.
  (tags: games mathematics )
• PVV collapse continues
  
  Ohdearwhatapitynevermind.
  (tags: netherlands eu )
• Water on…Vesta?
  
  Perhaps!
  (tags: astronomy asteroids )

An all-female shortlist for the BSFA Short Fiction Award this year, which is refreshing. I had little difficulty in raking the four nominees as follows:

1) March Books 14) Spin, by Nina Allan

Second para of third section of narrative:

“Oh my God, you’re here!” Macy cried. “Was the bus ride terrible? I bet it was. I told your father he should have made you come by skyway.”

I was hooked by Spin from practically the first page: our heroine, Layla, follows but does not completely recapitulate the story of Arachne across a recovering, slightly alternate-history but still contemporary Greece. Tremendously well realised, and I hope it wins the BSFA and that it gets a Hugo nomination. I’ll be voting for it both times.

2) “Selkie Stories Are for Losers”, by Sofia Samatar

I was not quite sure about this story’s eligibility, in that what actually happens to the protagonists in the framing narrative seems to lack any overt sfnal content. However, that framing narrative then refers back to various folk-tales about selkies, and since they are part of the story as it is presented to us, I guess it counts. Having got that out of the way, I found it a neat examination of what myths do to us – both the ones we get from our culture, and the ones we tell ourselves.

3) “Saga’s Children” by E.J. Swift

The story of three children of a famous Swedish-Chinese woman astronaut, who gather together on the dwarf planet Ceres to watch her final mission. There is some quite nice incidental detail, and the picture of the astronaut herself is clear, but I found the narrative a bit one-note and not very helpful about who is actually telling the story, and to whom; plus of course the actual spaceflight stuff doesn’t make a lot of sense, in a story where other details are nailed down quite hard.

4) “Boat in Shadows, Crossing”, by Tori Truslow

I’m sure this will be this year’s Marmite story, which some people will love to bits, while others (including me) just don’t get it. It’s a tale set in a city like New Orleans with lots of stuff going on in terms of symbolic fish and a gender-shifting protagonist; but I was not convinced by all of the parts, and still less by the way they fitted together. It’s a shame because the imagery was pretty vivid, but needed more connecting tissue.

Just a note on methodology: for a couple of years now I’ve been using Evernote for a lot of my general record-keeping: it isn’t as fiddly as Dropbox, and it means I can keep a lot of things synchronised across iPad, iPhone and all my various computers, with a web interface too if I need it. For the BSFA shorts this year (apart from Spin), I saved the original web publications to Evernote and was then able to edit out everything but the story text, leaving me three stories in a very readable format. It worked very nicely.

Second paragraph of the third chapter of the first story:

“If he’s so keen to find these fireballs,” Mattias grumbled, “Why isn’t the Doctor with us?”

Four stories from the Eleventh Doctor’s climactic centuries of battle against the bad guys on Trenzalore, each bringing back a classic era monster. The first one, where Justin Richards (who is excellent when, as here, he is on form) brings in the Ice Warriors, is the best; Paul Finch does well with a Krynoid too. Less convinced by George Mann’s Autons or Mark Morris’s Mara.

• The Book Smugglers The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
  
  Two reviewers give a harsh judgement.
  (tags: sf race sexandgenderandsexuality )
• Tomb of Doom?
  
  A *very* small exclave of Turkey in Syria.
  (tags: maps syria turkey )
• Aphra Behn meets The Blues Brothers
  
  Exactly what it says.
  (tags: literature theatre films )

Second paragraph from the third story:

“Seeds of some unknown Egyptian plant,” replied Forsyth, with a sudden shadow on his dark face, as he looked down at the three scarlet grains lying in the white hand lifted to him. [from “Lost in a Pyramid”, by Louisa May Alcott]

Well, who’d have thought that the author of Little Women was writing mummy stories in her spare time, eh? I got this because the opening essay has been nominated in the Best Non-Fiction category for the BSFA Awards, but more on that in due course. This is an anthology of mummy stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; basically once you’ve read one mummy story you’ve read them all. The two standouts here are Edgar Allan Poe’s “Some Words With a Mummy”, which punctures the pride of his own contemporaries, and “The Unseen Man’s Story” by Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel) which I felt added a little more conviction to the standard tropes. On the other hand the two stories by Arthur Conan Doyle are entirely in the same style as his Sherlock Holmes work without being nearly as good, and Charles Bump’s “The Vanished Mummy” is a tale of a modern student prank. On Steve Mollmann’s recommendation, I hope some day to read The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-second Century by Jane Webb (later Jane Loudon), which kicked the whole sub-genre off back in 1827.

Second paragraph of the third chapter:

Great age ought to have meant being greater and wiser than ever. It should have been about becoming the one to lead others on a wonderful quest.

This was hilarious. A group of Cambridge academics calling themselves the Smudgelings listen to each others’ writings, including the annoying Cleavis (who lives with his younger brother) and Reg Tyler, author of that great classic The True History of Planets, with its epic tales of “elves and trolls running about the place with nothing on their hairy feet.” But the Doctor gets involved via a visit to a planet ruled by dogs; sinister forces have intervened with Professor Tyler and his book is now about poodles instead, as are the trilogy of blockbuster movies based on them. It then turns out that Noël Coward and an old acquaintance of the Doctor’s are involved with it all. If you are not in a mood to take things too seriously, this is great fun.

Current
Brick Lane, by Monica Ali
Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie

Last books finished
[Doctor Who] Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs
Unearthed, eds. John J. Johnston and Jared Shurin
[Doctor Who] Tales of Trenzalore, by Justin Richards, George Mann, Paul Finch and Mark Morris
Spin, by Nina Allan
[Doctor Who] Salt of the Earth, by Trudi Canavan
Essays on Time-based Linguistic Analysis, by Charles-James N. Bailey
Companions: 50 Years of Doctor Who Assistants, by Andy Frankham-Allen
[Doctor Who] Search for the Doctor, by David Martin
[Doctor Who] Crisis in Space, by Michael Holt

Last week's audios
[Blake's 7] Counterfeit, by Peter Anghelides
Current: [Doctor Who] Scavenger, by William Gallagher

Next books
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
Any Given Doomsday, by Lori Handreland
[Doctor Who] The Garden of Evil, by David Martin

Books acquired in last week
None!

See announcement here.

The numbers for Ancillary Justice remain impressive, though God’s War is ahead on LibraryThing and Nexus is most loved by GoodReads users.

The second paragraph from Chapter 3:

Meanwhile, she [Serafina Pekkala] looked down at the melting ice-cap, the flooded lowland forests, the swollen sea, and felt heartsick.

Sometimes you shouldn’t revisit former favourites; I have to say that I have been much less blown away by the His Dark Materials trilogy on re-reading than I was first time round. I loved the bits with Mary Malone and the mulefa, but found the land of the dead sequence a bit internally inconsistent – likewise the death of God – and got really a bit fed up with Mrs Coulter and some of the others (eg the Gallivespians ). And while if you are a young teenager in love it does indeed feel as if the entire universe depends on that fact, actually it often turns out to be a temporary phenomenon. Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but it just did not have the same magic for me on second reading.

The second paragraph of the third chapter:

"Big Finish was looking for a way to do stories with the First, Second, Third and Fourth Doctors, and Nick [Briggs] came up with the inspired idea of telling stories from the perspective of the companions," explains the current range producer, David Richardson.

I was a little disappointed with this big heavy glossy book; it simply lists the Big Finish plays up to about 2010, with cast list, plot summary, and a few almost invariably positive words of description from those who were involved with the production. This is fine for enjoying the triumphs (where indeed I, Davros is a clear winner among several high points) but it means that the nadirs (eg Nekromanteia, The Poison Seas) are rather glossed over. The book also has similar surveys of several of the Big Finish ranges which I simply don't know at all – Sapphire and Steel, Highlander – and might now try. But for what it is, it's rather overpriced.

It was sad to read that the Sapphire and Steel range was basically discontinued because of too much torrenting. I wonder if that would still be the case today.

The second paragraph from the third section of the Völsungakviða en Nýja:

Long ruled Sigmund,
sire and uncle;
Sinfjótli sat
at his side proudly.
There towered the tree,
tall and ancient,
birds in the branches
were blithe again.

One (well, actually two) of Tolkien's works that he never expecetd to see published – a translation into modern English, but using ancient metre, of highlights and interpolations from the Poetic Edda, much of which was also used by Wagner for his operas. I found the story-telling a bit dense – it is not always totally clear what is going on – but the language rather beautiful, with occasional moments where the two do come together rather well. Interesting to spot elements which were later borrowed for the Silmarillion and LotR.

The Turing Test, by Simon Guerrier
Solitary, by Nigel Fairs
Counterfeit, by Peter Anghelides

Big Finish had a special offer on last month for the first three sets of Blake’s 7 audios, which after a little reflection I decided to go for. I didn’t quite know what to expect; what I got was three Companion Chronicles-style narrated stories, the first with Paul Darrow being Avon with a little Michael Keating as Vila, the second with Michael Keating as Vila and an Anthony Howell as a new chaacter, and the third with Gareth Thomas as the man himself, plus a bit of Paul Darrow as Avon.

All three are set in early Season One, with Cygnus Alpha still a recent memory. I liked the first best – Darrow doing a brilliant Avon, undergoing something of a moral and ethical quandary in the course of the story. The other two were good solid stories which would have made decent enough TV episodes, both with twists that work better on audio than would have been possible on video. Gareth Thomas’s voice has noticeably changed since the 1980s; Michael Keating’s voice notably hasn’t, Paul Darrow in between. Look forward to the other two sets of plays now.

Murray Leinster, whose real name was William Fitzgerald Jenkins, was one of the major figures of mid-twentieth century science fiction. His story “Exploration Team” (1956) won the second ever Hugo for Best Novella; his “First Contact” (1945) established a humorous twist on humans-meeting-aliens; his “A Logic Named Joe” (1946) foresaw computers in every household, communicating with each other; his story “Sidewise in Time” (1934) gave its name to the awards for alternate history.

Justly forgotten (until now) is his 1960 story “Attention Saint Patrick”, in which a planet which has been settled by the Irish government (both planet and government confusingly referred to as “Eire”) has a reptile problem which is solved by a smart girl visiting from earth. You can download it in various formats from Project Gutenberg here. The opening paragraph, just in case you had not yet decided if you wanted to read it:

President O’Hanrahan of the planetary government of Eire listened unhappily to his official guest. He had to, because Sean O’Donohue was chairman of the Dail—of Eire on Earth—Committee on the Condition of the Planet Eire. He could cut off all support from the still-struggling colony if he chose. He was short and opinionated, he had sharp, gimlet eyes, he had bristling white hair that once had been red, and he was the grandfather of Moira O’Donohue, who’d traveled to Eire with him on a very uncomfortable spaceship. That last was a mark in his favor, but now he stood four-square upon the sagging porch of the presidential mansion of Eire, and laid down the law.

And the last paragraph:

“Ah,” said the chief justice. “Some way will turn up to handle the matter. Like Sean O’Donohue was sayin’ to me yesterday, at the very bottom of a bottle, we Erse can always depend on St. Patrick to take care of things!”

Erse, indeed. Or something like that.

The second and third paragraphs from Chapter 3:

They fed from the ship’s structure in the boot-cupboards, and played dice with the universe in the cloisters. Creations, phantasms, aberrations…
… why be coy? Monsters. They were monsters, that was all.

My peculiar reading sequence means that I read this about a month after The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, rather than five years earlier; so I can see it as clearly Miles’ first novel, with all the elements that he would later use, but not yet in their mature form. The 1799 in America environment was interesting, but ran slightly off the rails at times, the Tardis/Gallifrey bits fairly incomprehensible, but at least Roz got some good sequences despite a generally dodgy line on gender and race. Some commentators whose opinions I generally respect are huge fans of Miles; I am not yet there myself.