A short, somewhat grim account of being a middle aged man and feeling that life has completely passed you by. I’m classifying it as non-fiction because it’s presented as a memoir. Some of the observations were uncomfortably close to home, but in general I felt I’d had a better life than the writer and wasn’t learning much from this. It’s well written, though, the account of the circumstances around his son’s conception being especially gripping.

• The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified
  
  !!!
  (tags: uspolitics )

I have got three novels to nominate for the Retro Hugos – The Ill-Made Knight, by T.H. White; Kallocain, by Karin Boye; and Twice in Time, by Manly Wade Wellman; I’m not nominating either Slan or Gray Lensman, though I think they are certain to feature on the list. I’m still looking for a fourth or fifth, having rejected also Henry Kuttner’s A Million Years To Conquer.

This won’t help fill the gaps on my ballot. It’s the thirtieth Oz novel, in the series started long long before by L. Frank Baum, but the first by John R. Neill. It starts with a heroine who herself takes her name from a racist legend of the New Jersey/Pennsylvania border, having an encounter with a leprechaun who is as Oirish as they come. The happy ending of the book – I am not making this up – comes when the Wizard of Oz surgically removes any trace of ambition from the heroine, so that she can be a modest and pleasant girl. There is an election, which is determined by assigning voters to each candidate randomly and adding up their total weight. (Oz experts claim that this bit was not written by Neill. It’s one of the better bits of the book.)

By my count it just struggles across the 40,000 word threshold to count as a novel. But I hope that next year’s Hugo administrators won’t need to make that judgement.

• Peter Capaldi: ‘Sexism in the TV industry is ridiculous’
  
  Hear, hear!
  (tags: doctorwho sexandgenderandsexuality )

This had somehow passed me by – a pastiche of Dickens by Pratchett, with no sfnal elements at all as far as I can tell, introducing us to the Dodger and his elderly Jewish friend as heroes rather than villains, caught up in an international political plot which involves a beautiful foreign princess, Charles Dickens, Sweeney Todd, Benjamin Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, and a host of other historical figures from the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. It’s good but not great; I felt that Pratchett couldn’t decide between being didactic about the situation of London in the period, smart about his remoulding of Dickens, or just caught up in telling the story as it came to him. He was reaching, I think, for anger at the situation of the poor, but didn’t quite get there (maybe my palate has been jaded by recently rereading Les Miserables).

Dear Lucy,

I’m very happy to give you some thoughts on what 21st-cetury Doctor Who books to nudge towards your LotR-appreciating 11-year-old. There are some quite good 20th-century Who books out there as well! But I shall stick to my remit. (I’m assuming that you have already got this year’s annual – the Doctor Who annuals have been of consistently decent quality since your 11-year-old was born.)

The three 12th Doctor and Clara novels that came out this  year – Deep Time by Trevor Baxendale, Royal Blood by Una McCormack and Big Bang Generation by Gary Russell – look like a good place to start, linked stories by seasoned writers. I am looking forward also to The Legends of Ashildr by Justin Richards and James Goss which comes out next week – James Goss is my favourite current writer of Who books.

If we’re going back a bit further, almost all of the short stories in the Time Trips collection published last year, and the Twelve Doctors, Twelve Stories collection published in 2013, are really good introductions to earlier Doctors.

Favourite books from the 21st century featuring New Who Doctors:
Borrowed Time by Naomi Alderman (11th Doctor and Amy)
Dead of Winter by James Goss (11th Doctor, Amy and Rory)
The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who (comic by Paul Cornell)

Beautiful Chaos by Gary Russell (10th Doctor, Donna and Wilf)
Prisoner of the Daleks by Trevor Baxendale (10th Doctor on his own)
Dead Air by James Goss (audiobook read by David Tennant)

Only Human by Gareth Roberts (9th Doctor, Rose and Jack)
Winner Takes All by Jacqueline Rayner (9th Doctor and Rose)

Two more to add, more for you than for your eleven-year-old. First, earlier this year James Goss published the novel adaptation of the 1979 Tom Baker story City of Death, with the 4th Doctor and Romana in Paris. It’s a treat. As I said, I rate Goss highly; here he is working with material originally by Douglas Adams. Second, you of all people are likely to appreciate the jokes in The Shakespeare Notebooks, a series of pastiches of various Doctors in various Shakespeare works. All great fun.

I’m posting this in public, so there may well be further suggestions in comments!

.

• Xi Jinping meets President Omaba in Paris
  
  (tags: languages China )
• The £100,000 cost of sacking the sysadmin
  
  Which company *could* this have been???
  (tags: work computers )

A recent book by Aldiss, collecting together several dozen short-short stories, of two or three pages each. Actually rather few of them have a beginning, a middle and and end; mostly they are just one or two ideas (sometimes, frustratingly, an idea and a half) explored at the length of a thousand words or so. But they are all unmistakeably in Aldiss’s unique voice, more than vignettes, reflections of the world as his characters think it is. Mostly non-sf, at least as far as you can tell in the parameters of the story.

Current
Keeping it Real, by Justina Robson
Short Fiction Eligible for the 1941 Retro-Hugos Vol 3, ed. von Dimpleheimer
Between The Acts, by Virginia Woolf
Instruments of Darkness, by Gary Russell

Last books finished
Babes in the Darkling Wood, by H.G. Wells
Waiting for Elizabeth, by Joan Rosier-Jones
De Tweede Kus, by Conz
When I Was a Child I Read Books, by Marilynne Robinson

Last week’s audios
The Yes Men, by Simon Guerrier

Next books
Moon Over Soho, by Ben Aaronovitch
Helliconia, by Brian Aldiss
The Gallifrey Chronicles, by Lance Parkin

Books acquired in last week
Lethbridge-Stewart: Mutually Assured Domination, by Nick Walters
Ms. Marvel Volume 2: Generation Why, by G. Willow Wilson, Jacob Wyatt and Adrian Alphona
Saga Vol. 5, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
Hoger dan de bergen en dieper dan de zee: kroniek van een migrant, by Laïla Koubaa and Laura Janssens

• The Marshall Islands Are Disappearing
  
  Report from the global warming front line.
  (tags: climatechange marshallislands )

I actually read this seven years ago, and recommended this edition, with translation by Anne and Peter Wiseman (the latter lectured J.K. Rowling in classics and is rumoured to have been a model for Dumbledore) and lots more maps and photographs of archaeological remains. Reading the introduction, I was startled by the Wisemans’ description of the Gauls as “primitive” and the Britons and Germans as even more so. The book was published in 1980 which seems rather late in the day for such strong colonialist language. Caesar himself is much clearer about the strengths of his opponents – the Helvetii had a Greek-language census, the Veneti have excellent seafaring skills (though the Romans of course still win) and Ambiorix and Vercingetorix come close to beating him. Granted, of course, this is propaganda to make the writer look good by defeating sophisticated foes, but the editors frame the narrative more strongly in terms of civilised Romans vs barbarians than Caesar does. Certainly he seems to have killed a lot more non-combatants, or at least bragged about doing so, which is hardly a mark of civilisation.

Anyway, it’s a straightforward military narrative written by a key figure, and refreshingly clear even two millennia later. Worth the reread.

• Portaferry tells a sad tale as funding runs dry
  
  Peninsula fan quotes me.
  (tags: northernireland )
• Dave Sim thought aloud to himself
  
  Tom Whiteley @janeanpatience on Sim after Cerebus.
  (tags: comics )
• Significant Digits From The Paris Climate Talks
  
  @fivethirtyeight looks at the numbers.
  (tags: climatechange )
• Computational Plate Tectonics and the Geological Record in the Continents
  
  @louismoresi explains.
  (tags: geology )

Sorry to say that I pretty much bounce off Jones’ prose completely – I remember really enjoying the novella version of Bold As Love, but found both the extended version and White Queen rather tough reading. The same was true here: the identity confusion between several of the main characters confused me too, and I just wasn’t really sure what they were trying to achieve. No doubt this reflects my own concentrations levels more than the quality of the prose.

I’ll say one thing though: Jones had characters whose concept of gender was completely and pronoun-wrenchingly different from that of their human interlocutors more than twenty years before Ancillary Justice, as of course did Ursula Le Guin more than twenty-five years before that. Those of us who voted for it last year weren’t giving Ann Leckie cookies for a new idea, we were applauding a number of familiar tropes combined and given new and startling twists.

• Meet Spencer, the airport robot that will make sure you don’t miss your flight
  
  Aww.
  (tags: travel netherlands )
• Where the polls went wrong
  
  The election explained.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Explaining POLITICO Europe’s overreaction to @jonworth’s blog post: an explorative approach
  
  @ronpatz explains.
  (tags: eu blogging news psychology )