A nominee for this year’s Hugo for Best Graphic Story, adapted and illustrated by Golden from a story first published by GRRM in 1976. I have to say that the story itself didn’t hugely appeal to me – Martin’s early work was very dark indeed, and the theme of animated corpses serving people’s industrial, entertainment and sexual needs is pretty grim. I was also struck by a lack of physical variation among the women characters, as illustrated, compared to the men. Not quite my cup of tea.

I’ve finished all the Third Doctor novels now, and am onto the Fourth Doctor: here, he ends up separated from Harry and Sarah as they are leaving Skaro by Time Ring, and the three are caught up on different sides of a protracted war which turns out not to be all it seems. It’s a story which has been done both before and since (most recently by Big Finish), but it’s done well enough here and Sarah gets to befriend and humanise an android without pushing my I-hate-cute-robots buttons.

• Football and the Brussels Brontë Story…
  
  Unexpected connections!
  (tags: belgium bronte football )
• jean-paul sartre on: the problem with other players
  
  Some of this might not be true.
  (tags: football france )
• WWII Films
  
  Did WW2 last longer than the films about it?
  (tags: films history )

Current
Het Verdriet van België, by Hugo Claus
Two Serpents Rise, by Max Gladstone
[Doctor Who] Trading Futures, by Lance Parkin
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, by Theodore Roszak

Last books finished
Orbitsville by Bob Shaw
Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary eds. Justin Landon & Jared Shurin
[Doctor Who] A Device of Death, by Christopher Bulis
The Blazing-World, by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
The Meathouse Man, by George R.R. Martin and Raya Golden
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, by Jeff VanderMeer, with Jeremy Zerfoss
Saga, Volume 2, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
[Doctor Who] Damaged Goods, by Russell T. Davis
Green Living for Dummies, by Michael Grosvenor and Liz Barclay

Last week’s audios
The Rosemariners, by Donald Tosh
Current: Tomb Ship, by Gordon Rennie and Emma Beeby

Next books
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler
Ireland Under The Tudors, by Richard Bagwell
[Doctor Who] The Bog Warrior, by Cecelia Ahern

I am easily pleased sometimes. This is a collection of online commentary on sf which was published in 2012, pulling together the sorts of essays I always like reading and wish I could write more often. All the usual suspects are here – in-depth examinations of race and gender as they are manifested in the genre, but also simple critiques of writing as writing. It’s not perfect – the internal ordering of the pieces seems half thought through (is it alphabetical by author’s first name? Not quite, but if not, then what?) and I would have dropped most of the shorter pieces in favour of some more long ones – but I was pretty sure from an early stage that I would give it a high place on my Hugo ballot. Then I reached page 297 and found my own name in the first line. Yep, I’m easily pleased.

• The Judges of Miss World, 1970: Bombs, Blacks And The Angry Brigade
  
  The past is so weird.
  (tags: history sexandgenderandsexuality )
• So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish
  
  Chris Davies MEP says goodbye to Brussels.
  (tags: ukpolitics libdems eu )
• 8 Million City: a Scandinavian Megalopolis
  
  A three-country corridor?
  (tags: maps denmark sweden norway )

One of the classic Big Dumb Object novels of the 1970s, which won the BSFA Award for 1975 (other nominees not recorded; also got third place in the 1976 John W Campbell Award, Silverberg's The Stochastic Man coming second and no award made for the top spot; this was the year that The Forever War won Hugo and Nebula). It's rather of its time, which is to say that the evil ruler is all the more evil because she is a woman, and the hero's wife doesn't get to do much more than be his wife (he bravely fends off sexual advances from one of his own crew in a moment of crisis). In fairness, Shaw was good at portraying troubled marriages (always from the male partner's point of view) in his fiction, and this is another case in point. Orbitsville itself is a Dyson sphere, totally enclosing a star at earth-orbit distance, which our hero stumbles upon after fleeing the evil ruler; I felt a bit short-changed in that Shaw concentrates on the human politics of his story and devotes much less time to describing it than Niven does Ringworld or Clarke does Rama, and we end up in the climactic section of the book just doing a long aircraft trip across relatively featureless landscape. Perhaps the sequel has more stuff that I would like in it.

I’ve been a cheerleader for the series of books on Who produced by Mad Norwegian Press, but I did wonder if there was really room for an entire book on LGBTQ takes on the series. I fear my concerns were well founded; sure, the narrative of coming-out as non-straight is linked with their love of Who for an awful lot of people, and it’s an important and emotionally freighted story for all concerned – and a lot of these stories are moving, empowering, cheering and sometimes appalling. But this seemed to me more a source of primary material for further research than a great set of pieces in itself, even though some of the authors are pretty significant people in the Whoniverse (Paul Magrs, David Llewellyn, Nigel Fairs, Gary Russell) or more widely in the genre (Amal El-Mohtar, Rachel Swirsky). John and Carole Barrowman contribute a foreword.

There is some very interesting stuff too – obviously it’s rather difficult to miss the lesbian subtext in The Stones of Blood, but Julia Rios goes into it in convincing depth. (The only point she misses is that Christopher Isherwood dedicated Goodbye to Berlin to Beatrix Lehmann and her brother.) Naamen Gobert Tilahun provides the best analysis I have read of the role of Mickey in new Who (and there are several other chapters concentrating on particular characters). None of the pieces is actually bad, and that’s a decent strike rate in itself. Still, I am not sure that this will go to the top of my Best Related Work ballot.

• It’s Brazil’s World Cup to Lose
  
  Nate Silver weighs in.
  (tags: worldcup )

I do recommend reading sf classics at the same time as you work your way through this year’s Hugo shortlist. It’s a good yardstick for checking what’s changed in the field and what hasn’t. This is quite a long book, which ends without an ending, promising a second half of the story which has never appeared (and now that we are thirty years on probably shouldn’t); there’s lush and intense description, innovative use of pronouns (as in this year’s top nominee Ancillary Justice, slavery, brain damage and a fair bit of bloke-on-bloke sex. The far future environment is rather reminiscent of the Culture, though of course the inspiration if any must be the other way round. Not a super fun read, but glad to have absorbed it and let it sink in.

I enjoyed this more than I expected. It’s quite deceptive – starts off as just another story of a teenage daughter of the local warrior ruler (slight twist in that it’s her mother rather than her father) who gets into trouble by picking sides in difficult politics and trying to intervene. But about two-thirds of the way through it turns out that we have been slightly misdirected, and the story is now about Flora needing to escape from the life-threatening consequences of her own (well-intentioned) actions; and then it gets into the unexpected re-imagining of her family’s own recent history, and ends very well. Points also for use of ð and þ.

I was moved to seek this out by F.R. Leavis’s praise, and because it’s often recommended on lists of Great Books. I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t blown away (so to speak) and wondered a little what the fuss is all about. It’s about a family where the husband is an agent provocateur in London working for a foreign power, unknown to his wife; he sends her brother (who has learning difficulties) to blow up Greenwich Observatory, and it all goes wrong. As a psychological study of people failing to communicate with each other, it’s rather good, and the husband and wife are realistically and somewhat brutally portrayed. But I found myself approaching it also through the lens of a hundred years of spy fiction written since it was published in 1907, and there are now various things that I expect from novels about spies and secret agents which this doesn’t have – in particular the police and security forces seem moored more in Conrad’s imagination than in the real British bureaucracy. (Not that James Bond is especially moored in reality, of course.)

This is another book of scholarly essays on New Who (and I think it’s just great that I can type “another book of scholarly essays on New Who”), looking exclusively at the Matt Smith era – disappointingly cutting off at Christmas 2012, so missing the last few episodes, the 50th anniversary special and the regeneration. As I’ve come to expect from books like this, it’s generally well-rooted in the discipline of media studies, and includes a piece by Livejournal’s own . The standout chapters for me were actually those at the end that looked beyond the TV series at the computer games (even though I have barely played them myself), online fandom’s reactions to Matt Smith, and the way in which Death of the Doctor was marketed as both a Sarah Jane and Doctor Who episode. All generally good to excellent stuff, with one curious exception – the introduction is clunky and seems to have been written in a rush to capture the 50th anniversary market, not really doing justice to the quality of the essays. However, as I have said before, I regret not reading it in time to nominate for the BSFA or Hugo Awards.

• ‘Tuam babies’ mass grave allegations must spark urgent investigation
  
  Amnesty International speaks out.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Tuam: Nothing to see here, move along now please.
  
  The Bon Secours nuns have hired a PR agent.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Midwife’s memoir reveals the horror of Bessborough
  
  Published in 1998.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• ‘You became so frightened eventually you toed the line’
  
  More from Bessborough, inc from 1989 book.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• No country for young women: Honour crimes and infanticide in Ireland
  
  Stephanie Lord @stephi08 analyses brutally.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Tuam: What lies beneath? | Philip Boucher-Hayes
  
  Latest update.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story
  
  Getting the story straight.
  (tags: ireland appalling )

This wasn’t too difficult a ranking.

6) I thoroughly bounced off Galactic Patrol, by E.E. “Doc” Smith when I tried it eight years ago, and I don’t see any reason to revisit it now. I am sure that 1939 fandom, as it then was, probably would have awarded it the Hugo if they had thought of awarding Hugos that year. But we are not bound to replicate the mistakes that 1939 fans might have made; we should make our own judgements (and our own mistakes).

5) Carson of Venus, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

4) No Award

3) The Legion of Time, by Jack Williamson

2) Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis

1) The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White

What I did find striking was that in all but Galactic Patrol (possibly even there, if I had read more sympathetically) there is a real sense of the impending conflict, of the old order being about to disintegrate in violence, again. I wonder what the readers of 2089 will spot as common themes of this year’s Hugo nominees?

You can vote in this year’s Hugos, and the 1939 Retro Hugos, by joining Loncon 3 at http://www.loncon3.org/memberships .

2014: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Related Work | Best Graphic Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Artist
1939: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist

This is the last of the Retro Hugo nominees for Best Novel for me – actually surprisingly short (I got it in a joint printing with After World’s End from 1939, which I haven’t read yet). I hadn’t appreciated that this was where the phrase “jonbar point” originated; I twitched with some excitement about a reference in a 1938 book to the defence of Paris in 1940 (though there are then Russian rocket pilots from 1947 which is a bit early); I was struck by the intense descriptions of hand-to-hand combat, practically trench warfare, which presumably must have been much in the war literature of the time reflecting the previous conflict (Williamson himself would have been too young to have any direct knowledge of it); I was amused by the notion of gathering together the best soldiers of all time, copied of course by Doctor Who among others; I winced a bit at Good Princess vs Bad Princess; and I was a bit surprised when it was over after less than a hundred pages. Compared to two of the other entries, this is light stuff, but it’s ahead of No Award on my list.

Many many years since I had read this, and it’s one of those rather grim cheap standard translations (I have proven by bitter experiment that my French is up to reading graphic novels but not classics), which still carries off the essential drama – replicated in a thousand soap operas since, but I guess rather daring for its day. It’s impossible surely not to feel sympathy for Emma, condemned to social conformity by a society which believes itself to be in a process of liberalisation (but isn’t really); she is desperately grasping for possible ladders to a more fulfilling life, without looking too closely at the details of where they might lead to. As with Middlemarch (and to a lesser extent Buddenbrooks) the politics of the time get a certain reflection in people’s personal lives.

The translation is strikingly off in places. Flaubert’s wonderful metaphor for emotional blockage caused by domestic torpor, “Elle ne savait pas que, sur la terrasse des maisons, la pluie fait des lacs quand les gouttières sont bouchées” does have some problems anyway in English translation, as very few English or Irish houses have “terrasses” (in America the word “porch” would just about cover it, but this side of the Atlantic “porch” generally means a smaller enclosed area). However, this becomes in English “She did not know that on the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked” – it actually sounds more cod-French than the original, by bafflingly dropping explicit reference to rain, thus leaving us uncertain about what “it” is. I am sorry to say that the translator was Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor.

• Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves
  
  Is this only the start?
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• The Cavan Orphanage Fire of 1943
  
  Lest we forget.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Cherishing all the children, one unmarked grave at a time
  
  This was known in 1946.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Read @Limerick1914
  
  Liam Hogan chronicles the story as it unfolds. (h/t @bmagnanti)
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Tuam babies – one scandal too many?
  
  My old friend @steveddaunt on the latest horrors.
  (tags: ireland appalling )

This remarkable graphic novel won the Costa Award for biography in 2012; but it’s actually two biographies, the story of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James, and of Mary Talbot, daughter of a famous Joycean scholar, and how their family dynamics were jointly shaped by their fathers’ application of the traditional principles in their personal lives which they eschewed in literature. Lucia’s is the more tragic story, thwarted from a promising dancing career (briefly distracted by Samuel Beckett) and eventually hospitalised for many years before her death; Mary managed to find a life partner who eventually illustrated her story and Lucia’s. It’s very good.

Current
Het Verdriet van België, by Hugo Claus
Orbitsville by Bob Shaw
[Doctor Who] A Device of Death, by Christopher Bulis
Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary eds Justin Landon & Jared Shurin

Last books finished
The Legion of Time, by Jack Williamson
The Butcher of Khardov, by Dan Wells
Flora Segunda, by Ysabeau S. Wilce
Six-Gun Snow White, by Cat Valente
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delany
Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It, eds Sigrid Ellis & Michael Damian Thomas

Last week’s audios
Current: The Rosemariners, by Donald Tosh
[Doctor Who] Last of the Colophon, by Jonathan Morris
[Through the Wardrobe] three audio plays produced by Heather Larmour

Next books
Green Living for Dummies, by Michael Grosvenor
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, by Theodore Roszak
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
[Doctor Who] Damaged Goods, by Russell T. Davis

Books acquired in last week
Six-Gun Snow White, by Cat Valente

• The battle for the European Commission: Has Merkel lost her touch?
  
  Cameron has misjudged this too.
  (tags: eu )

Another of the Retro Hugo nominees for Best Novel, which I had read long ago as a child. (NB that the version that appears as the first part of The Once And Future King has some signficant divergences from the standalone text.) I think it goes at the top of my list; it’s a humane story of magic transforming a lonely child’s life, which perhaps speaks to a lot of us, in a world where traditional social structures are not as strong as they appear and where external threats are potentially deadly – the sequence with Madam Mim, for instance, is pretty alarming (and it’s unfortunate that she is the only real female character in the book). Some of the transformation sequences – the birds and the fish, for instance – are freighted with symbolism. I had forgotten, or perhaps never noticed on previous readings decades ago, that the ending is reasonably well signalled in advance, mainly (though not exclusively) by Merlin. I suspect that Out of the Silent Planet will win, but this (just about) gets my vote.

Having bashed his lastest audio, I must say I thought this Eighth Doctor story by Jonathan Morris was excellent, and would make the basis of a good TV episode of New Who: the Doctor and companions turn up to help soldiers of a doomed army fighting against the time winds, which age people to death, trap them in perpetual stasis, or indeed transform their faces into clocks. The focus is very much on the Doctor trying to solve the problem with minimal damage to all concerned. I see that fan opinion is actually rather divided on this one, but I think it’s a hidden classic.

• ‘The Hunger Games’ Explains Political Protests in Egypt, Russia
  
  Ivan Krastev on the global question.
  (tags: politics egypt russia )
• The new European Commission: which president, and what priorities?
  
  Charles Grant against the Spitzenkandidaten
  (tags: eu )
• Democratising the EU in post democratic times
  
  Jon Worth supports the Spitzenkandidaten.
  (tags: eu )
• An insder view of a dishwasher cycle
  
  Because you needed to know.
  (tags: videos )
• Power Struggle Europts Between European Parliament and EU Leaders
  
  Der Spiegel on the Spitzenkandidaten crisis.
  (tags: eu )
• Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America
  
  AstroTurf by the numbers.
  (tags: internet russia )
• Obama Just Did What No Other President Before Him Has Done
  
  Bypassing Congress to act on climate change.
  (tags: climatechange uspolitics )
• Cambridge vice-chancellor Leszek Borysiewicz attacks immigration curbs
  
  Sensible man.
  (tags: ukpolitics migration cambridge )

Collection of short stories set in the same near-future, cyberpunk, sexy, religious, politically fragmented India as River of Gods. Three of these stories were also Hugo nominees (indeed one, “The Djinn’s Wife”, won both Hugo and BSFA Award). I got a lot more out of reading them together, with the setting reinforced by each story in sequence. Of those I had not previously read, I think I most liked “An Eligible Boy”, a story of a genetically engineered child in an arranged marriage and what he does to get his own way in defiance of his birth family. But they are all pretty mind-bending in the typical McDonald way.

The other 50th anniversary of genre importance commemorated in late November last year was the death of C.S. Lewis, and BBC Northern Ireland commissioned three short audios about wardrobes and Northern Ireland. They are extraordinary.

The Belle Dress, by Lucy Caldwell, read by Kerr Logan, is perhaps the best of the three, about a child growing up in Belfast with gender dysphoria. It’s just a vivid description of a couple of turning point moments, but tremendously well done and very moving.

Tilly’s Tale, by Glenn Patterson, read by Michelle “Catelyn Stark” Fairley, is nearly as good, marred slightly by jarring disco music in the framing narrative which is completely irrelevant to the real story – a tale of marital wardrobe sex, body-swapping and domestic abuse which is very eloquent in what is left unsaid.

Finally, The Rosy Rural Ruby, by Frank Cottrell Boyce, takes C.S. Lewis himself to the afterlife through a wardrobe, for a literary confrontation with Amanda McKittrick Ros (surely a bit of an in-joke). The story itself is the weakest of the three, but it is tremendously lifted by David Troughton’s spirited reading, doing Lewis, God, Tolkien, Roger Lancelyn Green, McKittrick Ros and Joy Gresham with utter conviction, and it’s great fun to listen to.

I’m sorry I missed these at the time, but glad I caught up with them in the end. Full marks to producer Heather Larmour for getting these made.

• D-day landings scenes in 1944 and now – interactive
  
  70 years on!
  (tags: photos war history )

Another of the 1939 Retro-Hugo nominees, and the only one of which I had not heard before the nominations came through. It’s pretty rubbish, really. There is an interesting evil Venusian city whose ideology is clearly modelled on the Nazis, but essentially this is a tale of Ruritanian conflicts which happen to be on Venus, involving our hero as the intended husband of a beautiful political heiress. There’s also a desperate attempt to do a gynocracy which is very nearly as appalling as The Worm That Turned, but is fortunately abandoned after a chapter or two.

I have to say this was a rather disappointing Fourth Doctor / Leela audio. The start was rather promising, with a last survivor of his race attended by a robot nurse, discovered simultaneously by the Tardis crew and a surveying spaceship; but it wasn’t terribly well joined-up together, and while Baker clearly loves doing his lines he’s had better. It had some signs of just being written in a rush – for instance, why does Kellaway not ask where Sutton is when the Doctor turns up without her at the end? And I’m sorry, but “Colophon” is a silly name for a sinister alien race. Most of this series of Fourth Doctor adventures has been better, and so is most of Morris’s work.