If you haven’t already done so, watch this video, and count how many times the players in white pass the basketball to each other – both aerial passes and bounce passes.

I hope you watched the video through to the end.

This book is about how we are not as observant, or indeed as smart, as we think. We think we are fully aware of our surroundings, but in fact one of the things that we aren’t aware of is precisely the extent to which we are not aware of our surroundings. We think we can remember specific events in full detail, but other people who were there may have completely different memories in perfectly good faith. We trust people who display confidence in themselves and their own judgement, yet in fact they are no more likely to be right or trustworthy than people with lower apparent confidence. We don’t know as much as we think we do, and often we don’t realise how little we know (the Dunning-Kruger effect). We mistake correlation for causation. And we believe that there may be mental tricks to unlocking our brain’s full potential, when in fact the only thing that really has been shown to work for everyone is just keeping fit.

Chabris and Simons wittily and forcefully pull apart each of these illusions, fully backed by research and worked examples that you can try on yourself (and on willing friends and relatives). The conclusion is that we must be eternally vigilant, especially about ourselves.

I’ve had some bad luck with popular psychology books recently – in particular a couple of stinkers by Pinker – but this is much better. Recommended.

The latest of Sandifer’s collected essays from his blog, published only last month so it’s hot off the presses. There is a lot less to say about this less popular era of Doctor Who – his previous two books covered the seven Tom Baker years, this one book covers five years and two Doctors. There’s not a lot of people who pick this as their favourite era of the show. But Sandifer does his best to find redemptive readings – “it is preferable, given the choice among reasonable arguments, to like a piece of art rather than to dislike it” or, even more succinctly, “Disliking it frankly requires more effort than liking it, and I just can’t be bothered” – and generally succeeds, showing, alongside the usual complaints, the achievements and merits of even John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward (though not Ian Levine).

As usual, he finds interesting things to say about some of the least celebrated stories, even trying to make a positive case for Time-Flight. But towards the end of the book he has to shift format, because there are fewer TV episodes to talk about. There’s a lot more about spinoff literature than I remember from previous volumes. The essay near the start on Cold Fusion is particularly good. An upside of the Fifth/Sixth Doctors is that we are now in Big Finish territory, and I wish Sandifer had covered more than one Fifth Doctor audio (though if you have to choose one, he gets it right with Spare Parts) – he does six Sixth Doctor audios (though again, in line with his redemptive policy, this is where Colin Baker shows his strengths).

There are also a number of essays that don’t fit any of Sandifer’s usual categories: one on Tegan, a long interview with Robert Shearman, several pieces about why and how Doctor Who was cancelled / put on hiatus, and a great one at the start about the Five Faces of Doctor Who season of repeats in 1981. All very good stuff, and I’ll be seriously considering this as a potential Hugo nominee for Best Related Work next year.

• Graphing the distribution of English letters towards the beginning, middle or end of words
  
  Glorious!
  (tags: english )
• A Very Revealing Conversation With Rihanna
  
  The interviewer is seduced.
  (tags: music )
• Canada’s election: a dead cat and niqabs
  
  @padams29 explains.
  (tags: canada )

• Enda Kenny: I will hold the election in Spring 2016
  
  Ignore rumours to the contrary.
  (tags: ireland )
• New Pluto Images from NASA’s New Horizons: It’s Complicated
  
  Wow.
  (tags: astronomy Pluto )
• In Berlin, it’s better to have a Belgian bank account than a German one
  
  Wahnsinn!
  (tags: eu belgium germany )

Originally posted by at Enclos des fusillés / Erepark der gefusilleerden; and Edith Cavell

F and I went to see The Martian last night. I had read the book for the Clarke Award, and enjoyed it very much (though obviously not quite as much as the ones we shortlisted); it was by far the most widely owned of all the books submitted on both LibraryThing and Goodreads. The film did what I hoped it would do, and included almost all of the set piece scenes from the book, making them at least as good as they had been in my head. I’m not going to claim that it’s Great Art, but I do think it’s Hugo-worthy and I expect it will be on my list for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) – the only other film I’ve seen in the cinema this year was The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, which came out in 2014 and so would have been eligible for this year’s Hugos (but didn’t even make the top 15).

• Astronomy Community Mounts Stronger Response In Sexual Harassment Case Than UC Berkeley
  
  Vested interests v community.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality astronomy )
• Patrick Moore’s legacy
  
  Brian May explains.
  (tags: astronomy )
• Why Free Markets Make Fools of Us by Cass R. Sunstein
  
  Great (though long) review of what sounds like an excellent book.
  (tags: psychology economics )
• The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy
  
  What Schulz was really trying to say.
  (tags: comics )

I had intended to spend this weekend with Alastair Reynolds and many others at CapClave in Washington DC, but alas something came up and I must stay in Europe. I have read shamefully few of his books, though I have greatly enjoyed his company when fate has thrown us together – I particularly remember a rather hungover but very collegial train journey to Dublin after the infamous 2007 Octocon (best wishes to organisers and attendees there this weekend).

Anyway, Galactic North, slightly to my surprise, turned out not to be a novel but a set of short stories set in the universe of Revelation Space. I had read a couple of them before – I particularly remembered “A Spy in Europa” from when it was first published in Interzone – though I see that three of the stories were published only in this volume. The whole is greater than its parts (and the parts are pretty good). Out of the context of the framing narrative of Reynolds’ future history, they just seem like neat, vivid ideas; grouped together, the overall plan becomes clear. Reynolds explains the order and method of composition in an afterword; I guess if I’d stopped to think while reading I’d have spotted fairly easily which the first written story is, but I was enjoying it too much to reflect. Good hard sf in that distinctly British voice that Reynolds shares with Stephen Baxter.

• For the UK, getting what it wants in the EU is not enough. It needs to feel it has won. | Jon Worth
  
  @JonWorth’s concerns.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Un jour, il arriva à Senez, qui est une ancienne ville épiscopale, monté sur un âne. Sa bourse, fort à sec dans ce moment, ne lui avait pas permis d’autre équipage. Le maire de la ville vint le recevoir à la porte de l’évêché et le regardait descendre de son âne avec des yeux scandalisés. Quelques bourgeois riaient autour de lui.
One day he arrived in Senez, an ancient episcopal town, riding an ass. His resources, which were very depleted at that time, did not allow him any better turn-out. The mayor came to welcome him at the gates of the town and watched, scandalized, as he dismounted from his ass. Some of the townsfolk around him were laughing.

I first read this I think in 1988 or 1989, in my last year as an undergraduate, in an ancient and not terribly fluent ten-volume translation which I checked out one by one from the Union Society’s library; and around the same time I fell in love with the stage musical, which I managed to see in the summer of 1989. A quarter of a century later, the political and romantic plot lines resonate if anything more deeply now that I have lived and loved a bit longer. And Christine Donougher’s Penguin translation seems a real step forward – especially with the footnotes and endnotes conveniently arranged in the Kindle edition.

It’s a long book but a great one. In reality the 1832 Paris rebellion was probably the least distinguished of many such efforts in the nineteenth century; but Hugo turns it into a real occasion of heroism and challenge, yet in itself insufficiently linked to the real human dramas going on beneath the surface. Yes, there are mad digressions (the section on slang could be easily dispensed with); yes, the romance between Marius and Cosette is basically between the two least interesting of the major characters; but there is a tremendous passion for shaking the middle-class readership out of their complacency and complicity combined with a humanity that Dickens often blunts with mockery. The stage show dispenses with the two younger Thénardier boys, and with Marius’ grandfather, but I think they are crucial to the big picture that Hugo is painting. (Last week, as part of a team-building exercise at work, several dozen of us were coached into performing “Do You Hear The People Sing”France to Les Misérables with some hesitation. My doubts are resolved; it’s a worthy winner. Go get it, especially in the Christine Donougher translation.

• ‘Rocky Horror’ cast reunites 40 years later
  
  Susan Sarandon, Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick, Meat Loaf, Patricia Quinn!
  (tags: sf )
• Merkel slams Eastern Europe on migration
  
  “I lived behind a fence for long enough.”
  (tags: )
• Is Vladimir Putin Trying to Teach the West a Lesson in Syria?
  
  Ivan Krastev on the pedagogy of atrocity.
  (tags: russia syria )
• Europe or bust: The campaign to keep the UK in the EU is lagging and needs charismatic leadership
  
  The Independent warns.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• Made in Northern Ireland
  
  15 local(-ish) science and tech breakthroughs.
  (tags: northernireland historyofscience )

Current
TARDIS Eruditorum – An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 6: Peter Davison and Colin Baker, by Philip Sandifer
The Arabian Nights, ed. Muhsin Mahdi, tr. Hussein Haddawy
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us: Or Why You Have No Idea How Your Mind Works, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

Last books finished
Jacaranda, by Cherie Priest
Forsaken, by Kelley Armstrong (did not finish)
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds

Last week’s audios
Fractures [Blake’s 7], by Justin Richards
Prisoners of the Lake [Third Doctor], by Justin Richards
The Havoc of Empires [Third Doctor], by Andy Lane

Next books
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
Business Unusual, by Gary Russell

Books acquired in last week
TARDIS Eruditorum – An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 6: Peter Davison and Colin Baker, by Philip Sandifer

• FBI helped thwart nuclear smuggling plot in Moldova
  
  Interesting.
  (tags: uspolitics moldova waronterror )
• The Joy of Sad Place Names
  
  Most seem entirely deliberate.
  (tags: maps )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When you apply to go to the moon the LDC insists on a DNA test. If you plan on staying, if you plan on raising children, the LDC doesn’t want chronic genetic conditions showing up in later life, or in your descendants. My DNA is from all over Earth. Old World, New World ; Africa, eastern Mediterranean, western Mediterranean, Tupi, Japanese, Norwegian. I’m a planet in one woman.

This is a novel about near-future colonisation of the Moon by corporate clans (or clannish corporations) and their internal struggles over political power and resources. It starts with half a dozen young people running naked over the lunar surface, and goes on from there. I loved it: I like McDonald’s lush prose style anyway, but I thought here he has managed both exuberance and discipline simultaneously, and also has tied the story in with traditional sf interpretations of lunar colonisation in a very gratifying way. I’m pretty sure I’m adding it to my Hugo nominations list for next year. (Also: looking forward to the TV series.)

Rising Damp by UA Fanthorpe.

‘A river can sometimes be diverted but is a very hard thing to lose altogether.’
(Paper to the Auctioneers’ Institute, 1907)

At our feet they lie low,
The little fervent underground
Rivers of London

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet

Whose names are disfigured,
Frayed, effaced.

There are the Magogs that chewed the clay
To the basin that London nestles in.
These are the currents that chiselled the city,
That washed the clothes and turned the mills,
Where children drank and salmon swam
And wells were holy.

They have gone under.
Boxed, like the magician’s assistant.
Buried alive in earth.
Forgotten, like the dead.

They return spectrally after heavy rain,
Confounding suburban gardens. They inflitrate
Chronic bronchitis statistics. A silken
Slur haunts dwellings by shrouded
Watercourses, and is taken
For the footing of the dead.

Being of our world, they will return
(Westbourne, caged at Sloane Square,
Will jack from his box),
Will deluge cellars, detonate manholes,
Plant effluent on our faces,
Sink the city.

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet

It is the other rivers that lie
Lower, that touch us only in dreams
That never surface. We feel their tug
As a dowser’s rod bends to the surface below

Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Styx.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I seemed to be looking at an enormous illuminated painting, lit both by the unsettled water and by a deep light transmitted through the body of the cavern. What surprised me, as I pushed the cabin door against the current, was the intense clarity of every detail. In front of me, above its sloping lawn, was the half-timbered Tudor mansion. A number of people were watching me, like figures posed by the artist in a formal landscape. None of them moved, as if frozen by the burning aircraft that had burst out of the afternoon sky and fallen into the water at their feet.

For all that the BSFA Best Novel award has its faults (notably, that the first thirty recipients included twenty-nine men and one woman), it has often looked to more inventive, if less enduring, works than the Hugo or Nebula. This is a case in point – a year when the two US-based awards both went to The Fountains of Paradise, a book that I love but which is hardly ground-breaking in its description of the engineering challenges of constructing a space elevator, with a couple of sideswipes at organised religion. By contrast, The Unlimited Dream Company is about a bloke who may or may not be killed in a plane crash at the end of the second chapter, and emerges to become the magical ruler of Shepperton (which is of course the Surrey gateway to other worlds, thanks to the film and TV studios located there, as I will discuss when I finally do my reviews of Here Come the Double Deckers). It’s vivid, erotic, lush, surprisingly readable, and rather out of date even in 1979. It seems a much better fit for the sf of ten years earlier, though perhaps it is informed by the disappointments of the 1970s. It’s very interesting that it won an award when it did.

Of course, awards are hit and miss. This was the only book by Ballard to win a major SF award. (Empire of the Sun, which is not SF, won a couple.) We know now that the best-selling and possibly also most influential sf novel of 1979 was The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Unlimited Dream Company now looks more like a last gasp of the New Wave (which was almost twenty years old by then) than a pointer to the future of the genre. Brian Aldiss, whose earlier work was more in line with Ballard, was about to shift decisively towards harder SF with Helliconia. Christopher Priest perhaps has stayed closest to the Ballardian path, but I don’t think any of his writing is quite as, well, gonzo as this. Michael Moorcock still writes books like Michael Moorcock, at least. I’m glad that the sf community did eventually honour Ballard for his contribution to the genre, both in content and visibility; it’s just a bit surprising that it took so long.

Seond paragraph of third section:

“That, Mr. Pond, is no ordinary milk-float. That float has been rendered spaceworthy! As you said, what we are lacking in space travel today is a viable means of propulsion, and even then we are limited by the speed of light. But there is one substance which can travel faster than light —boiling milk, when it thinks you’re not looking!”

This was one of the many Neil Gaiman works made available a couple of weeks ago in the most successful Humble Bundle ever. Gaiman describes it as “my worst short story ever… It misfires in so many ways.” The above paragraph, as it happens, captures the punchline of the story. It really isn’t very good, is it?

• Cruel and increasingly unusual
  
  Capital punishment in the USA.
  (tags: uspolitics death )
• New here? Welcome to Brussels
  
  A guide fore the perplexed.
  (tags: eu )
• The UN draft climate treaty
  
  20 pages, PDF
  (tags: climatechange )
• This Insurance Agent Threatened Me, I Got Him Fired
  
  Uncomfortable reading [trigger warning].
  (tags: internet )
• What happens to British expatriates if the UK leaves the EU?
  
  Old news, but still not good news.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )

Whose hand is steering the Tardis?

The frightening truth: an unqualified driver is at the helm:

To explain. I have a cousin who works here:

And the weekend before last, he very kindly took a group of relatives around the studios, including me. I can't say much about what we saw, but we were allowed to take pictures of the interior of the Tardis itself (positioned right next to a square in ancient Athens for the forthcoming Midsummer Night's Dream).

It's a really big space. The set has the full 360° walls, which can be opened up if necessary, but fundamentally it's a very large circular room on several levels (and scary drops between them). The lights were not on, so all pictures are illustrated by my iPhone flash (apart from the first two in this post, which were taken more professionally by an uncle). But here's a view of the console from the gallery, my mother and most of an aunt dimly visible behind:

Down below the console is a further floor level, with the Tardis innards spilling out:

I was fascinated by the console itself, which is as elaborate as you would hope:

But even more fascinated by the gallery, whose elaborate designs are barely hinted at on-screen. What does the Doctor listen to and read on his travels?

What memories does he carry of past adventures?

And what is to come?

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Aisha and Halima told her what they wanted—General Tso’s Chicken Very Spicy, Chicken Wings, Orange Chicken—with the quick ease of people saying what they said every day.

You need to know more about Nigeria. It is the seventh most populous country in the world (after China, India, the USA, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan) and is becoming a middle-income country (wealth per capita a little ahead of Moldova, a little behind Armenia). It has the largest population and the largest economy in Africa, the 20th largest GDP in the world (just behind Australia, just ahead of Thailand). One in six Africans is Nigerian, and soon it will be one in five.

I went to Nigeria for 48 hours in July, and a couple of colleagues strongly recommended this book to me as a pathway to understanding the country. It was a good recommendation on their part. There are three major themes to the book: exile, race and hair. As an expatriate migrant myself, I have thought a lot about exile and distance from the country where you grew up, and the sense of betrayal at leaving it behind. Adichie’s protagonist Ifemelu eventually returns home voluntarily from the USA; her lost love Odinze is humiliatingly deported from the UK; and both find that while you can never completely leave, you can never completely go back either.

The book is sharpest in contrasting American (and to a lesser extent British) attitudes to race with the experience of people who have grown up in societies where it simply isn’t an issue because there are no (or hardly any) white people. Ifemelu achieves (slightly anonymous) fame as a blogger on race, with the rise of Obama as political backdrop to her years in America. She shocks her black friends as well as her white friends and colleagues in a very good way. She shocks me as well.

As for the hair question: I had no idea. Really.

Excellent book. Go and get it.

• Centre Right wins Portuguese election
  
  Just about, anyway.
  (tags: portugal )

I wrote a few weeks back of my determination to be a good Hugo nominator next year, and in particular to read the entire 2015 output of those sources which have given me most of my personal first choices in recent years – Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and Subterranean Press – plus also Strange Horizons as I'm a long-term supporter. Once I've established a baseline from those five sources, I'll look around what other people are recommending as well; there should be time enough for that.

The process so far hasn't been quite as straightforward as I would have liked. I was able to read all of Tor.com and Strange Horizons for free online, or rather by saving individual stories to the Read Later tab on Safari; I could probably have done the same for Clarkesworld, but opted instead to buy individual issues through iTunes. (NB one alternative that I have used in the past is to cut and paste stries from web pages to Evernote, which then makes them available across all my devices, but that risks losing formatting.)

Asimov's was much more difficult. After much wrestling with the website, I failed to find an easy way of getting back issues in any of my preferred electronic formats, and in the end, advised by "Mark" from File770, downloaded each issue to the Newsstand app on my iPad. Not expensive at all, but also not ideal; I found the font size just a bit too small to be comfortable, and that may have affected my judgement.

Subterranean Press was much the most difficult. Its online catalogue gives no hint whatsoever about dates, so it's impossible to look for 2015 publications per se. Fortunately the Locus guides to forthcoming books and books already published in 2015 came to the rescue, helpfully informing me that only two novellas have been separately published so far this year, and only one more was planned at that stage (now published, I believe).

But then actually getting hold of the novellas in legitimate electronic format proved impossible. Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble both informed me that the books are not available in Kindle or Nook format, presumably because I am in Belgium rather than the USA. And my wallet balked at paying the equivalent of the price of four paperbacks from my local English language bookshop to get hard copies of two novellas. In the end I was able to locate DRM-free copies of both and read them that way. But I'd rather have paid the fair price for the ebooks (and will still do so if it is made possible). It also strikes me that if they are so difficult to get hold of, they are unlikely to have been read by many people with Hugo nominating power.

Anyway, having gone to the lengths of acquiring Jacaranda by Cherie Priest and Forsaken by Kelley Armstrong, I don't think either will feature in my Hugo nominations. Jacaranda, though ostensibly set in Priest's steampunk alternate timeline of Hugo-nominated Boneshaker, is really a ghost story about a haunted hotel, and Forsaken (which I didn't finish) is urban fantasy about international werewolves in today's world; neither ticks my subgenre boxes (though Jacaranda is well spooky).

Strange Horizons also surprised me with the heavy proportion of fantasy to sf in its Jan-Mar output. A lot of it is good, of course, but I lean a little to the sf side in general and especially when considering the Hugos. The SH story I liked most, Amal El-Mohtar's "The Truth About Owls", is ineligible because of prior publication in 2014. The other story that really grabbed me with an emotional gut punch was the very first one of the year, L.S. Johnson's "Vacui Magia". I think it will be on my list in the Best Short Story category (at a little under 3500 words), though as will become clear my nominations in that category are already getting a bit crowded.

Tor.com also has a digestible number of good stories. I see a lot of love out there for David D. Levine's "Damage", which I don't really share; it's a neat enough story about a sentient warship, but didn't seem to me to push the envelope much. I guess the point is that the Puppies claim to like that kind of thing. My own favourite from Tor.com, which will definitely be on my nominations list, is Nino Ciprio's "The Shape of My Name" – time-travel romance, perhaps, but with a very new twist to that venerable trope. At 6500 words it too falls into the Short Story category.

It took me longer than it should have done to realise that only about half the stories in this year's Clarkesworld will be eligible for next year's Hugos, the rest being reprints. From issues 100-102 covering the first three months of 2015, Naomi Kritzer's "Cat Pictures Please" is getting a lot of positive reaction. Myself I thought it was a one-joke story, and I prefer the Hugos to go to more serious stuff, but I suspect it will tick a lot of people's boxes. Another story that I think is objectively good but didn't excite me was "Ether" by Zhang Ran, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu. The Clarkesworld story that really grabbed me hard, despite its graphic violence, was Kelly Robson's "The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill", at 5300 words yet another for the Best Short Story category.

The only traditional magazine in my initial roundup is Asimov'sF&SF and Analog and Amazing continue to produce good stuff, but for now I am establishing a baseline from a magazine that published three of my personal picks in the last five years. Asimov's publishes solid sf, often not terribly exciting and a little old-fashioned, but catering to an important part of the audience. Each of the three issues I read (January, February and March 2015) had a story that I reckoned was worth nominating for its traditional virtues. For January 2015 (but is it eligible, having been on the shelves the previous month?) it is Allen M. Steele's "The Long Wait," apparently the conclusion to a series of stories about a generation starship (drawing from the same well as his Coyote stories, which I also liked) and those monitoring its progress on Earth; I only found this out when writing this summary, and certainly found it perfectly accessible even though I had not read the previous parts of the series. It's marketed as a novella; I haven't counted the words but that seems right to me.

For February 2015 (again, I worry that this hit the shelves in late December) the standout story for me was a novelette, Eneasz Brodski's "Red Legacy", apparently the author's first professional sale, which throws together cloning, an alternate Cold War, Lamarckian genetics, Soviet heroes and fiendish Brits and Americans, and some moments of impressive horror. The issue also included Michael Bishop's "Rattlesnakes and Men", which I found a rather heavy-handed satire of American gun culture, but no doubt readers who are closer to that situation will get more out of it than I did.

The March 2015 issue ends with Kristine Kathryn Rusch's novella "Inhuman Garbage", an excellent detective story set on the Moon (and thus turned out to be good mental preparation for Ian McDonald's Luna: New Moon, of which more in due course). Apparently it too is part of a series, but I had no problem with getting into it. A dishonorable typographical mention, I'm afraid, for "Pareidolia" by Kathleen Bartholomew and her sister, the late Kage Baker, in which Byzantine-era Greeks address the narrator as "Kupios" in the Latin alphabet. First, the Greek word is properly spelt "Κύριος" which transliterates as "Kyrios". Second, if you're using it to address someone it should be "Κύριε", as in "Kyrie eleison", "Lord have mercy".

Score so far of potential Hugo nominees:

Novellas
Allen M. Steele, "The Long Wait" (Asimov's, Jan 2015)
Kristine Kathryn Rusch "Inhuman Garbage" (Asimov's, Mar 2015)
Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric's Demon (Spectrum)

Novelette
Eneasz Brodski, "Red Legacy" (Asimov's, Feb 2015)

Short Stories
L.S. Johnson, "Vacui Magia" (Strange Horizons, Jan 2015)
Kelly Robson, "The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill" (Clarkesworld, Feb 2015)
Nino Ciprio, "The Shape of My Name" (Tor.com, Mar 2015)

And on to the second quarter, April, May and June.

• New Doctor Who BBC Three Spin-Off Series – Class
  
  Hooray!
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Cameron’s ‘renegotiations’ (or Russian roulette) with the EU
  
  “Brussels seems manageable, but the UK wild cards remain or are getting wilder” – Michael Emerson, my former boss.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• Ten commandments for Brussels conferences
  
  Not just Brussels.
  (tags: eu )
• Ted Cruz is toast: It’s not just that he won’t be president — his days in the Senate are numbered, too
  
  Becoming a celebrity.
  (tags: uspolitics )

• Moldova’s Maidan
  
  Chișinău wakes up.
  (tags: moldova )
• APCO’s Party Conference Quiz
  
  Win champagne!
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Secret bank accounts, income inequality—and why Luxembourg matters
  
  A fascinating analysis of offshore assets.
  (tags: economics )
• EU Council adopts roaming charges ban and net neutrality rules
  
  Though the one may weaken the other.
  (tags: eu internet )
• Taxi tax scrutinised
  
  Uber backlash goes unexpectedly.
  (tags: belgium )

Mistakenly posted the September books list as “Thursday reading” yesterday, which was actually Wednesday. This entry really is my reading since last week.

Current
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds

Last books finished
The Unlimited Dream Company, by J. G. Ballard
Luna: New Moon, by Ian McDonald
Jacaranda, by Cherie Priest

Next books
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us: Or Why You Have No Idea How Your Mind Works, by Christopher Chabris
Business Unusual, by Gary Russell

Books acquired in last week
Whispers Underground, by Ben Aaronovitch
Lethbridge-Stewart: The Schizoid Earth, by David R. McIntee