Monthly Archives: September 2015

September Books

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Non-fiction: 3 (YTD 38)
The Ancient Languages of Europe, by Roger D. Woodard
Companion Piece, eds. L.M. Myles and Liz Barr
Who's Next?, by Derrick Sherwin

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 31)
Girls in Love, by Jacqueline Wilson
The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

SF (non-Who): 7 (YTD 96)
A Vampire Quintet, by Eugie Foster
The End of All Things, by John Scalzi (did not finish)
The Wild Reel, by Paul Brandon (did not finish)
Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Manuscript Found in a Milk Bottle, by Neil Gaiman
The Unlimited Dream Company, by J. G. Ballard
Luna: New Moon, by Ian McDonald

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 35)
The Shadow in the Glass, by Justin Richards and Stephen Cole
The Sleep of Reason, by Martin Day
Tempest by Christopher Bulis

Comics : 1 (YTD 13)
It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, by Seth

~4,600 pages (YTD 57,600)
4/17 by women (YTD 64/213) – Myles/Barr, Wilson, Adichie, Foster
2/17 by PoC (YTD 14/213) – Adichie, Foster

Reread: 0/17, YTD 16/213

Reading now:
Jacaranda by Cherie Priest
Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

By curious coincidence, as a team-building exercise at work today the entire global leadership team of the firm was coached into performing "Do You Hear The People Sing" from the musical version of Les Misérables.

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us: Or Why You Have No Idea How Your Mind Works, by Christopher Chabris
A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to "Faerie", by Verlyn Flieger
A Star Chamber Court in Ireland: The Court of Castle Chamber, 1571-1641, by Jon G. Crawford (2005)
Family Britain, 1951-1957, by David Kynaston
The Dark Tower and Other Stories, by C.S. Lewis
Axis, by Robert Charles Wilson
The Arabian Nights, tr. Muhsin Mahdi
Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro
The Summer Before the Dark, by Doris May Lessing
Saga Volume 4. by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Sleepyhead, by Mark Billingham
The Oxford Book of Christmas Stories, ed. Dennis Pepper
Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch
The Battle for Gaul, by Julius Caesar
Monkey Planet, by Pierre Boulle
The Invention of Happiness, by Brian W. Aldiss
Bits of Me are Falling Apart, by William Leith
Moon Over Soho, by Ben Aaronovitch
Helliconia, by Brian Aldiss
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
North Wind, by Gwyneth Jones
A Princess of Roumania, by Paul Park
Business Unusual, by Gary Russell
The Deadstone Memorial, by Trevor Baxendale
Walking to Babylon by Kate Orman

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Thursday reading

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Current
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
Luna: New Moon, by Ian McDonald
The Unlimited Dream Company, by J. G. Ballard

Last books finished
Who’s Next?, by Derrick Sherwin
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Manuscript Found in a Milk Bottle, by Neil Gaiman

Next books
Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us: Or Why You Have No Idea How Your Mind Works, by Christopher Chabris

Books acquired in last week
Gráinne, by Keith Roberts
The Sea and Summer, by George Turner
Deep Time, by Trevor Baxendale
Big Bang Generation, by Gary Russell 
Royal Blood, by Una McCormack 
A Fall of Stardust, by Neil Gaiman with Charles Vess
A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff, by Neil Gaiman
An Honest Answer & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
Angels & Visitations, by Neil Gaiman
Being An Account of the Life and Death of the Emperor Heliogabalus, by Neil Gaiman
Blood Monster, by Neil Gaiman with Marlene N. O’Connor
Day of the Dead, by Neil Gaiman
Duran Duran, by Neil Gaiman
Feeders & Eaters & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
Free Speeches, by Neil Gaiman
Ghastly Beyond Belief, by Neil Gaiman
Gods & Tulips, by Neil Gaiman
Love, Fishie, by Neil Gaiman
Manuscript Found in a Milk Bottle, by Neil Gaiman
Neil Dreams, by Neil Gaiman
Outrageous Tales From The Old Testament, by Neil Gaiman
Sculpture Stories, by Neil Gaiman with Lisa Snellings
Seven Deadly Sins, by Neil Gaiman
Sweeney Todd & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
Ian S. Forrester: A Scot Without Borders – Liber Amicorum, 2 vols, eds Sir David Edward, Jacquelyn MacKennan & Assimakis Komminos

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Who’s Next?, by Derrick Sherwin

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Now, with time on my hands, the relationship [with first wife Jane] blossomed as I worked hard at my career as an actor and supplemented my income by working as a stage hand with the London Festival Ballet, at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. With my knowledge of scenery I was put in charge of the 'flies' – the area directly above the stage where the backcloths and other scenery are stored on counter-weighted pulleys and lowered or raised as required. This was physically demanding but required little other than the discipline of following an ordered sequence. Changing sets from one ballet to another again required long nights of arduous work, but this was something I was used to from my years in weekly rep.

On paper, Derrick Sherwin was producer of Doctor Who for only two stories and 14 episodes, the shortest tenure of anyone in the old regime. In fact he was the man who rescued the programme from collapse in Seasons 5 and 6 (as script editor and de facto assistant producer), invented UNIT and the Time Lords, and successfully rebooted the show in colour with a new Doctor in 1970. He also wrote, uncredited, one of the best single episodes of the entire original run, the first part of The Mind Robber. This is his autobiography, written pretty blatantly with the intent of cashing in on the 50th anniversary of the programme, published by Fantom as one of their large biographical range with a Whovian bias.

Less than 30 pages of over 200 are about Doctor Who, which is not terribly surprising as it was just two years in the life of an author now in his late seventies. Sherwin is frank but also very sympathetic about the difficulties of Patrick Troughton's difficult relations with the BBC and the show, and frank but less sympathetic about some of his other colleagues. His career in television lasted only a few years after Doctor Who; after various failed experiments (and relationships) he moved to Thailand, and more than half of the book is taken up with the details of his efforts to make a decent expat living there, mainly catering to tourists through hospitality and bungee jumping.

To be honest, this book would have been well served with a bit more editorial input; there is a sense that it was rushed out for November 2013. The first part is rather over-supplied with exclamation marks, and the long Thai section could perhaps have cut down on the detail of every single failed project and relationship that Sherwin started over three decades. I was really shocked to find a blatantly anti-Semitic remark on page 81. I can't warmly recommend it as an example of the showbiz autobiographical genre, but Whovian completists like me will want it on the shelves.

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Links I found interesting for 20-09-2015

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Windows 10 irritations

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Windows 10 irritation #1: Every time I open Chrome after restarting, it tells me Chrome is not the default web browser and asks if I want it to be. I say yes every time. And then it happens again.

Windows 10 irritation #2: iTunes has disappeared from the apps menu and the icon has disappeared from the desktop. I can still open it by finding a file associated with it and opening that. But that is not exactly efficient.

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Companion Piece, eds. L.M. Myles and Liz Barr

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Second paragraph of third essay:

I'm going to look at Barbara and Ian not only as televisual companions to the Doctor, but as icons within the wider worlds of Doctor Who. Who were they, why were they key to the success of the series, and why do we still keep returning to them over 50 years after Ian was the first person to say "but it was just a police box"?

This is the sixth of the Geek Girl Chronicles, and the third of them to collect essays by women about Doctor Who (following on from Chicks Dig Time Lords and Chicks Unravel Time). Published earlier this year, it is eligible for next year's Hugo nominations as Best Related Work; the first in the series won that category in 2011, and Mad Norwegian Press has had three more nominations since (Chicks Unravel Time, Chicks Dig Gaming and Queers Dig Time Lords).

Obviously this is mainly going to appeal to Who fans with a decent knowledge of both Old and New Who, but I commend it to the rest of you anyway. I think the weakest essay here is better than the weakest ones in the two previous volumes; I think that there are a couple of really standout pieces (the para I quote above is from "Scheherazade and Galahad in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks", by Mags L. Halliday, which was one of my favourites); and I think that the best of them relate the ongoing story of Doctor Who to wider cultural and literary trends in a way that should be relevant to anyone with an interest in the genre.

It's quite likely to get one of my nomination slots next spring. But this is the one category where my shortlist is already overpopulated, and mostly with Whoviana at that. I'll leave you with the opening para of the final chapter, Amal El-Mohtar on "A Question of Emphasis: The Doctor as Companion":

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Links I found interesting for 19-09-2015

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Thursday reading

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Current
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Who’s Next?, by Derrick Sherwin

Last books finished
The Ancient Languages of Europe, by Roger D. Woodard
Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Companion Piece, eds. L.M. Myles and Liz Barr

Next books
The Unlimited Dream Company, by J. G. Ballard
Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds

Books acquired in last week
The Apex Book of World SF 4, eds Lavie Tidhar and Mahvesh Murad
Forsaken, by Kelley Armstrong
Jacaranda, by Cherie Priest
Luna: New Moon, by Ian McDonald

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Links I found interesting for 17-09-2015

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Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Its rock was mostly black dolerite, smoothed flat by the ice of an ice age. The ferries carrying people landed near its west coast without incident, close to the robotic landers they had sent down previously.

I am on the lookout for likely Hugo candidates at the moment, and given KSR’s two Hugos and three Nebulas this seemed a decent prospect when I saw it in our local FNAC. It’s also a good hundred pages shorter than any of the other novels by him that I have read (except Forty Signs of Rain).

Aurora is the story of a generation starship sent to Tau Ceti, where there are massive internal tensions among the population which spill over once they finally arise, causing a deep division and a surprising plot development. That happens half way through the book, and without spoiling it, I have to say that’s where I started wondering what the actual point of the story of the journey was. I felt also that the same narrative techniques which I found attractive in the Mars trilogy, written twenty years ago, were getting a bit stale here; and there is one central character whose thoughts are given to us (by whom?) right up to the moment of physical destruction. Huge numbers of people are killed, both in the main narrative and in the back-story, and hardly referred to again. I loved the Mars trilogy as an exploration of how a new world could lead us to new ways of thinking; at the end of Aurora, I wasn’t sure what this was all for. So I don’t think it will make my nominations list, but I did at least finish it.

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Free sf online: a failed experiment

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I'm always open to trying something new on social media, and sometimes it works (eg my posts on the best known book set in each European country) and sometimes it doesn't. This is the brief story of something that didn't.

During a conversation at work on 1 September, the Bob Shaw story "Light of Other Days" came up. I found an online version and shared it with my colleague; and then thought, why not share it more widely? So I pinged it onto Buffer to post to Twitter and Facebook at an hour of the day that I thought might get people looking; and then got all enthusiastic and found a few more great sf stories available and shareable online.

I must admit that part of my motivation for this was a reaction to the debate some are trying to wage about "real sf" vs "message fiction", but I was also just curious to see if posting links like that to Facebook and Twitter would engage people's interest.

The full list, as posted to Twitter, is as follows:

All pretty well-known stories (except perhaps the last). But I was a bit disappointed by the rate of clicking through. The "Seventy-Two Letters" link was mangled going through Buffer, and got a massive 99 clicks, none of which will have worked; apart from that, the best performer was the Pat Cadigan story with 19, most of which will have been because the author herself retweeted it.

It's a non-trivial effort to find a reasonably balanced selection of stories which are both reasonably well known and available online, and since this wasn't generating a lot of feedback I have decided to stop the experiment. On Facebook I got the odd comment, but basically I get better feedback from content that has taken less work to produce. Thanks to those who did comment – I did appreciate it..

The important lesson is that just posting a link to a story (or to any online content), without much in the way of explanation, isn't going to get a lot of attention even from the most devoted of my readers. If I'd planned and announced this mini-campaign in advance, with a hashtag like #SeptemberFreeSF, and perhaps with more of a unifying theme than "stuff I like", it could have caught a bit more resonance. Of course, it might not have – you never know – but the chances would have been higher. A lesson learned for when I start my grand rewatch of Here Come The Double Deckers.

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The Ancient Languages of Europe, ed. Roger Woodard

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Modern scholars recognise a dialectal distinction which fundamentally parallels the ancient tripartite division. Prior to Michael Ventris' decipherment of the Linear B tablets of the Mycenaean Greeks (see §2.1) in 1952 (see Ventris and Caswick 1973:3-27), the ancient Greek dialects (i.e., of the first millennium BC) were broadly separated into (i) Attic-Ionic; (ii) Arcado-Cypriot; (iiii) Aeolic; (iv) Doric; and (v) Northwest Greek. Each of these, in turn, shows some lesser or greater degree of internal differentiation.

I bought this on impulse a few years ago; it turns out to be the European chapters extracted from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, with a foreword explaining that the languages treated here are those with written records from before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press have generously put the whole thing online). That gives a shorter list than I would have thought, the chapters of the book covering Attic Greek, other Greek dialects, Latin, other Italic languages, Etruscan, continental Celtic, Gothic and ancient Nordic. I had not realised that written Irish was later than that. Obviously the chapters on Attic Greek and Latin have the most to say, but they are reasonably disciplined and establish a framework for the other languages that the reader may be less familiar with.

My discovery here is the weirdness of Etruscan, the only language on the list which is not from the Indo-European family. I'm intrigued by the numbers from one to ten – θu; zal; ci; huθ (or śa); maχ; śa (or huθ); semφ; cezp (probably); nurφ; śar – we don't even know whether huθ or śa is four or six. It's fascinating that the Etruscan word "zatlaθ", meaning axe carrier, became Latin "satelles" meaning bodyguard and is the origin of our word "satellite". I'm interested that like some Finno-Ugric languages, nouns take a lot of suffixes but have no gender. (Wikipedia says that the nouns did have gender, but Helmut Rix in this book says not.) And this language, long extinct, is a substratum for Latin which in turn has influenced every European language spoken today.

It is impressive that we have been able to reconstruct as much as we have, and I would have liked to read more about the process by which the ancient scripts were decoded. Most of them are at least vaguely related to the Latin and Greek alphabets which survive today, but only vaguely; if I were trying to decode them, I wouldn't know where to start. Some mysteries remain; the Gaulish letter known as the Tau Gallicum could have been pronounced st, ts, θ, or perhaps an emphatic t' like the Georgian ტ. Or possibly different Gauls pronounced it in different ways at different times.

And all of these languages are a melancholy reminder that life is short, and we have no idea what will survive. Many of the few surviving inscriptions in the lost language of Venetic are dedications to the goddess Reitia. Among other things, she is supposed to have been a goddess of writing, which is just as well as the other Venetic gods have been forgotten, as has any speaker of the language who did not leave their name in writing. And these languages, spoken by hundred of thousands who we could not now understand, are the exceptions rather than the rules. Humans have used language for hundreds of thousands of years, and the earliest European writing is the Linear B referred to in the extract above, from 3500 years ago, and the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs are a thousand years older. So more than 95% of the thoughts ever thought, the stories ever told, the songs ever sung, are forgotten and cannot be retrieved.

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The Sleep of Reason, by Martin Day; Tempest, by Christopher Bulis

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The Sleep of Reason, by Martin Day

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dark clouds are gathering – both literal and, if I might be permitted so fanciful a notion, symbolic – and I do not happily watch them as they form.

One of the last of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, seems to have got rave reviews from a lot of people though I am with who warned me last year that it is alright but not stellar. The Doctor is involved with two different timelines in the same mental hospital, in one of which he is ostensibly a mysterious patient called Smith. Supporting character Laska is nicely done, though at the expense of regulars Fitz and particularly Trix.

Tempest, by Christopher Bulis

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The mainline trains typically comprise fifteen or sixteen large double-decked cars, linked by spherical airlock coupler modules. They’re built more like ground-level spacecraft – not surprising since they have to function in total isolation from Tempest’s poisonous atmosphere for several days at a time, recycling their air and water.

A Bernice Summerfield novel in which she is dragged into investigating a crime committed on a train circling a storm-tossed planet. Not brilliant – some rather sexist elements in the subplots, and I feel the formula of Bernice Summerfield Ace Detective has been done better elsewhere.

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What I do with LinkedIn

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The story of a lawyer who was sexually harassed on LinkedIn is in the news. There’s not much more to be usefully said about that than “Don’t be a dick online, and don’t be surprised by the blowback if you are.” But it has helped crystallise my own thoughts about LinkedIn generally. (For those of you don’t know it, it’s a social network which is a grownup version of Facebook.) I find it both useful and frustrating, with the useful outweighing the frustrating, but the frustrations still there.

First, I like the fact that it’s a good way of not just staying in touch with long-lost friends, but also seeing what is going on in their lives; as long as people keep their own profiles up to date, it is very useful to see who has changed job or country recently. It’s also handy to see who and what you have in common with new professional contacts. Maybe once a month, someone I haven’t been in touch with for ages uses it to contact me, and usually it’s someone I’m glad to hear from.

Second, I often need to quickly locate people with knowledge of particular countries or subjects, and a LinkedIn search is by far the easiest way of seeing who I know that might fit the bill. (For example, the guy in the next seat on my plane flight yesterday turned out to be a bodyguard by profession. It’s unlikely, but not completely impossible, that I may need to find someone offering those services in the future, so I’ve added him.)

Third, I find the news/blog updates much the best source of information about the mechanics of management that I regularly read, particularly the pieces about recruitment and retention of skilled colleagues (I often feel that hiring people is the most difficult thing to do in my line of work). This probably just shows that I’m not a regular reader of Forbes or the back pages of the FT. But…

Fourth, I find the actual newsfeed of LinkedIn very annoying, even though the content is useful. I would like to be able to choose to view just blog posts, or just updates from my contacts, or just job changes. But LinkedIn is actually worse than Facebook in controlling what you are shown without giving you any choice, which is why I spend much less time browsing it than I do other networks. And…

Fifth, LinkedIn is far too promiscuous in encouraging people to make connections with people they simply don’t know. The value of the network is in the strength of its links; LinkedIn asserts this strongly in theory, but in practice strongly encourages people to click the box next to someone who sounds interesting. I get literally a dozen connection requests every week. I reply to all of them, “I’m afraid that I cannot remember how we know each other. Can you remind me please?” Maybe one time in fifty it does turn out to be someone I knew – Hi there, John in Tbilisi! – but otherwise it’s a waste of electrons. I won’t report good faith invitations from people who I have never met, but I won’t accept them either.

If I were more of a freelancer, I’d find LinkedIn even more useful (and perhaps I would find ways of dealing with those frustrations). As it is, I wish they would just fix the obvious problems of giving users more control over the content they see, and encouraging sensible restraint in contacting strangers.

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The Wild Reel, by Paul Brandon

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

As always, the player sat invisible in one corner of the studio, its face hidden by an androgynous porcelain mask that fitted so close it could really only be skin. A wide-brimmed, black hat cast a crescent shadow across most of its bone-white features except for the mouth, a painted-on slash that either curled up or down at the edges depending on what Natty was painting. Its body was wrapped in a shawl of a thousand patchwork colors that looked part Romany, part Tibetan, all Faerie. The instrument, a battered old friend from the foothills of Spain, was cradled across its lap like a child, and the hands that caressed it were ghost-pale and wrinkle-free. Ageless.

I think I’m getting very unforgiving in my old age; I put this aside after fifty pages of Celtic muddle, with an emotional setup for the two protagonists (fairy king and mortal woman) that did not make sense to me and bordered on some potentially abusive territory (he is wooing her by bonking her in her dreams). At the point I gave up, the narrative was about to switch to Australia with potential for hilarious culture-shock japes. Not for me, sorry.

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The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The words were still ringing in the old man’s ears when he walked down the steps to leave and stood still, blinded by the fierce autumn sun. As his pupils slowly shrank, he held on tight to the handrail and breathed in, slow and deep. He listened to the cacophony of cars, trams, the beeping sounds telling pedestrians they could cross. And voices-the excited, happy voices which hastened by to the accompaniment of the clatter of shoes. And music. Had he ever heard so much music? Nothing managed to drown the sound of the words though: You’re going to die, old chap.

Both and (with reservations) recommended this after I really enjoyed The Snowman, and The Redbreast also features Norwegian detective Harry Hole dealing with a very complex murder plot which in this case has political implications going right to the top of the Norwegian government and reaching back to the grim reality of Norway’s relationship with Nazi Germany during the second world war. It’s grittily described and the eventual solution makes sense, with an unresolved plot thread which apparently leads to two more books in the Harry Hole sequence. I was not completely convinced by the use of multiple personality disorder as a major plot point though; it seems to me a bit of a magical cop-out for a mystery writer, and I suspect even though everyone in literature with MPD is a murderer, this may not be true of everyone with MPD in reality! Still, I enjoyed it.

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It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, by Seth

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Second frame of third chapter (set in the Royal Ontario Museum dinosaur gallery):
dinosaur skull
A classic graphic novel from the early 1990s, claiming to be autobiographical, about a Toronto comics artist who becomes fascinated with a Canadian cartoonist of the 1950s and 1960s, and goes on a voyage of discovery about both his predecessor and himself. I’m trying to identify who recommended this to me, or whether I just picked it up because I liked the title; I really enjoyed it, though I hope that the writer is a nicer person in real life than he comes across as being here.

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