Monthly Archives: September 2018

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The Ginger Star, by Leigh Brackett

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He had the advantage of surprise, but that was short-lived. In the matter of strength and reflexes he was as near animal as a man can reasonably be, but the creature he fought with was in its own element. Stark grappled with it and it shot upward from the water like a tarpon, breaking his grip. He saw it briefly above him in the cluster-light, outstretched arms shaking diamond drops, body girdled with foam. It looked down at him, laughing, and its eyes were like pearls. Then it was gone in a curving arc that drove it beneath the surface. Its form was manlike, except that there seemed to be webs of skin in odd places, and the head was earless.

A planetary fantasy, Brackett’s first after a ten-year hiatus, published in the mid-1970s but really belonging to an earlier decade. Our hero, Eric John Stark, lands on the planet Skaith to seek his mentor Ashton, who has disappeared; he himself was raised by primitives on Mercury before Ashton rescued him and educated him in the ways of humans. (His name on Mercury was N’Chaka, which is suggestive.) On his quest northwards he runs into one well-written peril after another, aided sometimes by Gerrith, daughter of Gerrith, whose vision is that he will destroy the regime of the Lords Protector. (Guess what happens at the end?)

Brackett’s earlier stuff (or at least what I have read for Retro-Hugo purposes) was better, but this is still not bad if pulpy, and frankly much better than the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels which inspired it. But it’s curiously out of place in 1974; The Dispossessed, published the same year, a planetary romance much more in tune with the times, won both the Hugo and the Nebula, and I think most people would agree that the voters got it right. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2014. Next on that list is Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards.

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Vurt, by Jeff Noon

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Yeah, sure! And the king was in his counting house, counting out his money. No doubt. Except that we’d just trashed a week’s dripfeed on five lousy Blues and a single done-it-already Black. Sure, The Beetle could sell some low-level Vurt to a robo-crusty. Or maybe I could persuade Brid to sing some smoky songs in one of the locals, me on keyboards and decks, but the shadow-cops were everywhere. Most pubs had one, broadcasting from above the Vurtbox, shining inpho all over undesirables. Those inpho beams could match a face up to the Cop Banks in half a nanosec.

Winner of the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award, beating among others Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I had not read it before; people seem to either love it or not love it, depending on how close to original publication they read it. It’s set in a near-future Manchester, where the protagonist and his friends are habitual consumers of Vurt – possibly a drug, possibly a virtual game, possibly both – which is absorbed by oral intake of feathers of different colours. The style draws both on Philip K. Dick and cyberpunk, with a bit of Hero’s Journey in there. I found it particularly interesting that the key figures are all crusties, a 1990s subculture that I had completely forgotten about until now. (Are there any still around? I see from Wikipedia that it meant something different in North America.)

I was not really blown away by the book, as so many readers clearly were when it first came out (including the Clarke judges, who in my view should have gone for Snow Crash). Cyberpunk isn’t really my subgenre, Dick did the Dickian bits better, the characterisation is rather flat, and in the set-up, the state rather implausibly seems to have little contact with the alternative scene of our protagonists (when in fact you’d expect police and welfare agencies at least to be keeping a wary eye and at worst to be complicit in the supply of dubious substances). I found it rather dragged, despite its relatively short length. I can see why some people liked it, but it didn’t really work for me. Still, if you like, you can get it here.

Next in my list of award-winning books is Larque on the Wing, by Nancy Springer.

Arthur C. Clarke Award winners:
The Handmaid’s Tale | The Sea and Summer | Unquenchable Fire | The Child Garden | Take Back Plenty | Synners | Body of Glass | Vurt | Fools | Fairyland | The Calcutta Chromosome | The Sparrow | Dreaming in Smoke | Distraction | Perdido Street Station | Bold as Love | The Separation | Quicksilver | Iron Council | Air | Nova Swing | Black Man | Song of Time | The City & the City | Zoo City | The Testament of Jessie Lamb | Dark Eden | Ancillary Justice | Station Eleven | Children of Time | The Underground Railroad | Dreams Before the Start of Time | Rosewater | The Old Drift | The Animals in that Country | Deep Wheel Orcadia | Venomous Lumpsucker | In Ascension | Annie Bot

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Byzantium: The Surpising Life of a Medieval Empire, by Judith Herrin

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

While Latin was used throughout the West, Greek remained the lingua franca of all the eastern regions. Until the sixth century, the Byzantine Empire employed both ancient languages. Administrators sent from the West to the eastern half of the empire were often issued with wordbooks giving the Greek equivalent of Latin words and explaining local terminology. Translation from Greek to Latin was largely the work of Christian scholars who wanted to make the Scriptures and theological writings available to westerners. Much less Latin literature was rendered into Greek. Most of Cicero, Ovid, Virgil and Horace, for instance, remained unknown to monoglot Greek speakers. Most well-educated men, however, were bilingual. Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330-92 or later), a native of Antioch who identified himself as a Greek and a soldier, wrote a history of his times in Latin which documents the campaigns of Emperor Julian. He also brilliantly evoked the beauty of ancient sites, such as the temple of Sarapis in Alexandria, levelled by Christians in 391, or the Forum of Trajan in Rome.

Gibbon very unfairly neglects the Byzantine Empire, and Judith Herrin here argues for its rehabilitation as a vibrant civilisation in its own right, until it was dealt a deadly blow by Western Christianity in 1204 (and yet still survived another quarter of a millennium). She avoids doing a straight historical narrative, instead concentrating on different aspects of Byzantine politics and culture, arranged roughly in chronological order; there is an early chapter on the Hagia Sofia, a late chapter on Trebizond and the other post-1204 splinters. I felt that the risks of this approach did not quite pay off – there ends up being some repetition between chapters, and the whole thing seemed a bit unmoored from a firm timeline. Of course the risk of going the other way is that you would get too much into the dynastic politics of the people at the top, to the neglect of the rest.

Speaking of the people at the top, I had not appreciated that several women ruled the Byzantine Empire in their own right, or that two of them responsible for ending the two spells of iconoclasm. And having complained about the weak connection to the passage of time, I must say that I was very satisfied with the book’s treatment of the shifting geography of the Byzantine empire, particularly the account of how the Ravenna mosaics came to be in Ravenna. Fans of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors will be enlightened by this book, which may be better absorbed chapter by (short) chapter, rather than reading through in a few sittings. You can get it here.

This was both the top unread book on my shelves by a woman, and the top unread non-fiction book. Next in those piles are The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells, and Who I Am, by Pete Townsend.

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Boundary Commission – the detailed projections

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So, the Boundary Commission’s report is finally out, as already discussed by Mick and commentators here. As ever I have done some number-crunching; details below but here are the headlines.

At Westminster level, five currently DUP-held seats are squashed into four – East Londonderry is replaced by the new seat of Causeway; most of North Antrim becomes Mid Antrim; South Antrim is split several ways, and the new seat with that name actually has more of the old Lagan Valley in it; the old Strangford largely becomes Mid Down. North Down loses Holywood to East Belfast but takes in the Ards Peninsula.

This means that the DUP lose one of their seats (effectively the old South Antrim). But on the raw numbers, this is compensated by the large number Ards Peninsula voters added to North Down, who may not be very helpful for the small majority of Independent MP Lady Sylvia Hermon – though it should be noted that she argued for that change herself, and as she was not a candidate in the Peninsula last year, we don’t know what result she would have got.

At Assembly level, the abolished Antrim seat takes with it, in theory, two DUP MLAs and one each from the UUP, Alliance, and the Nationalists (probably the SDLP seat which was narrowly and unexpectedly won in Lagan Valley last year). But enough Unionist voters go into West Belfast to create a notional gain for the DUP from Sinn Fein, and the shift of voters from the old East Londonderry to Causeway is probably enough to deprive the SDLP of another of their unexpected wins last year, likely also to the benefit of the DUP.

So I project last year’s vote onto the new boundaries to give the DUP 28 seats out of 85 (no change), SF 26 (-1), the SDLP 10 (-2), the UUP 9 (-1), Alliance 7 (-1) and the Greens holding 2, with the TUV, People Before Profit and the independent MLA Claire Sugden holding their single seats.

These numbers of course must be considered as only a rough guide to the new political landscape. The one thing that is certain about the next election is that voters will vote differently to the way they did last time. How differently? Only time will tell.

And that, of course, assumes that these boundaries ever come into force in the first place…

The details

Starting with the eastern bloc of relatively unchanged seats, the Belfast four and East Antrim.

East Belfast
New Westminster (projection): DUP 54%, Alliance 30%, Ind U 4%, UUP 3%
(2017 Westminster: DUP 55%, Alliance 33%, UUP 3%)
The Ind U figure here is my allowance for Sylvia Hermon’s vote in Holywood.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 37%, Alliance 30%, UUP 14%, PUP 6%, Green 5%
(2017 Assembly: DUP 38&, Alliance 31%, UUP 13%, PUP 7%, Green 4%)
No change to Assembly representation, 2 DUP, 2 Alliance, 1 UUP.

North Belfast
New Westminster (projection): DUP 44%, SF 41%, Alliance 6%, SDLP 5%, UUP 2%
(2017 Westminster: DUP 46%, SF 41%, Alliance 5%, SDLP 4%)
Taking into account the UUP votes moving in from the Antrim seats, the situation is unchanged.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 31%, SF 29%, SDLP 13%, Alliance 9%, UUP 7%, PUP 4%, PBPA 4%
(2017 Assembly: DUP 32%, SF 29%, SDLP 13%, Alliance 8%, UUP 6%, PUP 5%, PBPA 4%)
Alliance were runners-up here last time, and the new boundaries help, though not quite enough to change my projection of seats: SF 2, DUP 2, SDLP 1.

South Belfast
New Westminster (projection): DUP 33%, SDLP 24%, Alliance 18%, SF 15%, Green 5%, UUP 4%
(2017 Westminster: DUP 30%, SDLP 26%, Alliance 18%, SF 16%, Green 5%, UUP 4%)
Slight strengthening of the DUP position.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 22%, SDLP 19%, Alliance 18%, SF 17%, Green 10%, UUP 9%
(2017 Assembly: DUP 21%, SDLP 19%, Alliance 18%, SF 18%, Green 10%, UUP 9%)
No change to Assembly representation, one seat to each party except the UUP.

West Belfast
New Westminster (projection): SF 58%, DUP 21%, PBPA 9%, SDLP 7%
(2017 Westminster: SF 67%, DUP 13%, PBPS 10%, SDLP 7%)
Still solid SF, but more Unionist voters brought in from the Shankill and Dunmurry.

New Assembly (projection): SF 54%, DUP 15%, PBPA 13%, SDLP 8%, UUP 4%, Alliance 3%
(2017 Assembly: SF 62%, PBPA 15%, DUP 10%, SDLP 9%, Alliance 2%, UUP 2%)
Enough Unionist votes come in for the DUP to gain a seat from SF, who would retain 3 and PBP keep 1.

East Antrim
New Westminster (projection): DUP 56%, UUP 18%, Alliance 14%, SF 7%
(2017 Westminster: DUP 57%, Alliance 16%, UUP 12%, SF 9%)
DUP remain strong.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 38%, UUP 24%, Alliance 15%, SF 8%
(2017 Assembly: DUP 35%, UUP 23%, Alliance 16%, SF 10%)
No change at Assembly level: 2 DUP, 2 UUP, 1 Alliance

I’m going to leap across the province now, to the western and southern constituencies which are not changed very much, starting with two where the changes are too small to calculate on the basis of the available data, so I am just giving the recent results.

Foyle
Westminster: SF 40%, SDLP 39%, DUP 16%, PBPA 3%, Alliance 2%
Assembly: SF 37%, SDLP 32%, DUP 13%, PBPA 11%, Alliance 3%
MLAs: 2 SF, 2 SDLP, 1 DUP

Fermanagh and South Tyrone
Westminster: SF 47%, UUP 46%, SDLP 5%
Assembly: SF 42%, DUP 30%, UUP 12%, SDLP 10%
MLAs: 3 SF, 1 DUP, 1 UUP

Sperrin
New Westminster (projection): SF 51%, DUP 26%, SDLP 14%, UUP 5%
(West Tyrone 2017 Westminster: SF 51%, DUP 27%, SDLP 13%, UUP 5%)
Although “Sperrin” is a new name, it is basically the same as West Tyrone with the addition of Dungiven, and the changes which look big on the map barely move the needle.

New Assembly (projection): SF 49%, DUP 20%, SDLP 14%, UUP 8%
(West Tyrone 2017 Assembly: SF 48%, DUP 20%, SDLP 14%, UUP 8%)
MLAs unchanged at 3 SF, 1 DUP, 1 SDLP.

Mid Ulster
New Westminster (projection): SF 54%, DUP 27%, SDLP 10%, UUP 6%
(2017 Westminster: SF 55%, DUP 27%, SDLP 10%, UUP 6%)
Again, little change to results from an apparently big change on the map.

New Assembly (projection): SF 52%, DUP 20%, SDLP 13%, UUP 9%
(2017 Assembly: SF 53%, DUP 19%, SDLP 13%, UUP 9%)
MLAs unchanged at 3 SF, 1 DUP, 1 SDLP.

Upper Bann
New Westminster (projection): DUP 43%, SF 29%, UUP 15%, SDLP 9%, Alliance 5%
(2017 Westminster: DUP 44%, SF 28%, UUP 15%, SDLP 9%, Alliance 5%)
No change.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 32%, SF 29%, UUP 20%, SDLP 10%, Alliance 5%
(2017 Assembly: DUP 33%, SF 28%, UUP 21%, SDLP 10%, Alliance 5%)
MLAs unchanged at 2 DUP, 1 SF, 1 UUP, 1 SDLP.

Newry and Armagh
New Westminster (projection): SF 49%, DUP 24%, SDLP 17%, UUP 8%
(2017 Westminster: SF 48%, DUP 25%, SDLP 17%, UUP 8%)
No change.

New Assembly (projection): SF 49%, DUP 17%, SDLP 17%, UUP 13%
(2017 Assembly: SF 48%, DUP 18%, SDLP 16%, UUP 13%)
MLAs unchanged at 3 SF, 1 DUP, 1 SDLP.

South Down
New Westminster (projection): SF 39%, SDLP 34%, DUP 18%, UUP 4%, Alliance 4%
(2017 Westminster: SF 40%, SDLP 35%, DUP 17%, UUP 4%, Alliance 4%)
No change.

New Assembly (projection): SF 38%, SDLP 25%, DUP 16%, Alliance 9%, UUP 9%
(2017 Assembly: SF 39%, SDLP 25%, DUP 16%, Alliance 9%, UUP 8%)
As with North Belfast, Alliance were runners-up here in 2017 and the new boundaries help a little, but not enough to change the projected result: 2 SF, 2 SDLP, 1 DUP.

To finish off with, the belt where six old constituencies are squeezed into five new ones.

Causeway
New Westminster (projection): DUP 54%, SF 21%, UUP 8%, SDLP 8%, Alliance 7%
(E L’derry 2017 Westminster: DUP 48%, SF 26%, SDLP 11%, UUP 8%, Alliance 6%)
DUP stronger due to losing less fruitful territory.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 38%, SF 20%, Ind U 9%, UUP 9%, SDLP 7%, TUV 6%, Alliance 5%
(E L’derry 2017 Assembly: DUP 34%, SF 26%, Ind U 12%, SDLP 8%, UUP 7%, Alliance 4%, TUV 3%)
The SDLP scraped into a seat here in 2017, but with fewer Nationalist votes to go round, that won’t be likely under the new boundaries. The DUP would be most likely to gain, leaving the score 3 DUP, 1 Sugden, 1 SF.

Mid Antrim
New Westminster (projection): DUP 55%, SF 17%, UUP 11%, SDLP 6%, TUV 6%, Alliance 6%
(N Antrim 2017 Westminster: DUP 59%, SF 16%, UUP 7%, TUV 7%, Alliance 6%, SDLP 5%)
DUP still ahead.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 38%, SF 16%, UUP 14%, TUV 13%, SDLP 8%, Alliance 6%
(N Antrim 2017 Assembly: DUP 41%, SF 16%, TUV 16%, UUP 13%, SDLP 7%, Alliance 5%)
Slight swing from Unionists to Nationalists is not enough to change the seat distribution, which remains 2 DUP, 1 SF, 1 UUP, 1 TUV.

South Antrim
New Westminster (projection): DUP 47%, UUP 21%, SF 13%, Alliance 10%, SDLP 8%
(S Antrim 2017 Westminster: DUP 38%, UUP 31%, SF 18%, Alliance 7%, SDLP 5%)
(Lagan Valley 2017 Westminster: DUP 60%, UUP 17%, Alliance 11%, SDLP 8%, SF 4%)
More of the new South Antrim comes from Lagan Valley, which is strongly DUP, than from the old South Antrim, which was more marginal.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 35%, UUP 21%, Alliance 14%, SF 12%, SDLP 10%
(S Antrim 2017 Assembly: DUP 34%, UUP 21%, SF 16%, Alliance 12%, SDLP 10%)
(Lagan Valley 2017 Assembly: DUP 41%, UUP 25%, Alliance 14%, SDLP 8%, SF 4%)
In each of the two current constituencies, the DUP have two seats, the UUP and Alliance one each, and the fifth is held by a Nationalist. It’s pretty clear that the new constituency would elect the same proportion of MLAs, with Sinn Fein ahead of the SDLP. The seat losses are therefore 2 DUP, 1 UUP, 1 Alliance, 1 SDLP; and the MLAs elected on this vote pattern would have been 2 DUP, 1 UUP, 1 Alliance, 1 SF.

Mid Down
New Westminster (projection): DUP 61%, UUP 14%, Alliance 11%, SF 6%, SDLP 5%
(Strangford 2017 Westminster: DUP 62%, Alliance 15%, UUP 11%, SDLP 6%, SF 3%)
Little difference.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 42%, UUP 23%, Alliance 12%, SDLP 6%, SF 6%, Ind 5%
(Strangford 2017 Assembly: DUP 40%, UUP 20%, Alliance 15%, Ind 8%, SDLP 7%, SF 3%)
The SDLP were runners-up in Strangford in every election since the Good Friday Agreement. The new boundaries make it more difficult for them, and consolidate the existing balance of MLAs, 3 DUP, 1 UUP, 1 Alliance.

North Down
New Westminster (projection): DUP 43%, Ind U 32%, Alliance 10%, Green 5%, SDLP 3%
(2017 Westminster: Ind U 41%, DUP 38%, Alliance 9%, Green 7%)
This is the only seat where projecting the 2017 votes onto the new boundaries suggests a change of winner – enough DUP votes come in from the Ards Peninsula, and enough of Sylvia Hermon’s votes are detached via Holywood, to make it a notional DUP gain. However, we do not know how well Sylvia Hermon might have done in the Peninsula if she had been a candidate.

New Assembly (projection): DUP 38%, UUP 21%, Alliance 17%, Green 11%, SDLP 4%
(2017 Assembly: DUP 37%, UUP 22%, Alliance 19%, Green 14%)
It may be telling telling that the new territory makes very little difference to the outcome at Assembly level, where the Greens can expect their vote to dip but also to pick up enough transfers from Nationalists to retain their seat, keeping the status quo: 2 DUP, 1 UUP, 1 Alliance, 1 Green.

Westminster notional change: Ind U (Hermon) -> DUP in North Down
Assembly notional changes: SDLP down 2 seats, Alliance down 1, UUP down 1, SF down 1; DUP notionally unchanged, likewise Greens, PBP, TUV and Ind U (Sugden).

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Monday reading

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Current
The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust
Ginger Star, by Leigh Brackett

Last books finished
Moominland Midwinter, by Tove Jansson
Byzantium, by Judith Herrin
Vurt, by Jeff Noon
Moominsummer Madness, by Tove Jansson

Next books
Moominpappa at Sea, by Tove Jansson
Dark Satanic Mills, by Marcus Sedgwick
Missing Adventures, ed. Rebecca Levene

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Open Monumentendag: the Battle of Neerwinden and the Three Tumuli of Tienen. And a Siberian Owl.

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Today was Open Monument Day in Flanders, when various historical sites are on display and particular activities laid on for the interested public. F and I struck eastwards, to Neerwinden and to Tienen, both places which I already know well but where there was a little extra being provided.

In Neerwinden, site of a terrible battle in 1693 (and again 1793), Wim from the local historical society was providing a guided tour of the battlefield. Here he is at the chapel of the Holy Cross, north of Neerwinden, taking us over the course of the battle.

Alas, the battlefield itself doesn’t give tremendously good photographs, since it is quite literally a set of fields. However another local enthusiast demonstrated the use of contemporary firearms for us:

Apart from Tristram Shandy and Lord Perth, quoted in my previous entry, Wim told us a couple more anecdotes worth following up. One concerns the Duke of Berwick, son of James II and Arabella Churchill, who was fighting on the French side of the battle, got cut off and tried to escape posing as an Allied officer, and had the misfortune to encounter his own uncle – not the future Duke of Marlborough but his younger brother Charles – and was captured by him. In fact, here it is in Berwick’s own words:

This interests me particularly because in 1695 Berwick married Honora, the young widow of Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, who died of wounds sustained in the Battle of Neerwinden and is apparently buried in Huy. Honora’s brother John was my 5x great-grandfather.

The other fascinating story, which I must now chase down, is that another of the soldiers captured during the battle (but this time the other way round, an Irish soldier fighting for the Allies but captured by the French) was actually a disguised woman, known variously as Christian Davies or Mother Ross, whose story was told many years later in a book attributed to Daniel Defoe. I must have a closer look at that.

After that F and I went into Tienen for lunch, where we bumped into a man with a Siberian eagle-owl on his arm. As you do. The owl’s name is Siba.

The Three Tumuli, as reported previously, have been massively cleaned up from their condition when I first visited them, and today was the official opening day.

We met up with P, who was a big part of F’s school career, with her daughter M, to see what was up.

There was Roman re-enactment.

And a Celtic band.

By now P’s wife E had joined us, and their older daughter S. We were treated to a very gory explanation of Roman battlefield medicine. S took it all in with such great interest, and helped out with extracting a slingshot projectile; I wonder if a medical career lies in front of her.

A lovely warm day, and the exercise did me no harm at all.

Jenny – the Doctor’s Daughter

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Cue excellent theme tune.

Big Finish have scored a major coup by persuading Georgia Tennant to return to her brief role as Jenny, the Tenth Doctor's cloned daughter, for more sfnal adventures across space and time, flanked by Sean Biggerstaff as the innocent but mysterious Noah, and both pursued by Siân Philips (who was Livia in I, Claudius forty years ago) as a vengeful cyborg, the Colt-5000. (Georgia Moffatt, as she then was, had a part in a Big Finish audio back in 2000, when she was only 16.)

The first of four stories here, Stolen Goods by Matt Fitton, brings back the established Big Finish character of Garundel, a venal and rather camp space frog (played by Stuart Milligan who was President Nixon on screen), who attempts to get the better of Jenny in a complex but well-portrayed insurance scam. The plot doesn't occupy a lot of the hour, which leaves plenty of time for exposition and scene-setting, ending with the introduction of Philips's cyborg bounty hunter. The dialogue sparkles and Jenny is clearly established as a character to look out for. Also glad to hear Clare Corbett, who is a favourite voice actor of mine, though not that impressed that her character is coded as non-white.

The best of the bunch is the second story, Prisoner of the Ood, by John Dorney (who gives himself a small part as a grumpy writer called John). The narrative jumps forward a bit from the first story, and we gradually find out what happened in the meantime by via flashbacks. Jenny finds herself in a contemprary English village, and quickly makes friends with newly moved in Angie (played by Arabella Weir, herself a former Doctor
Neon Reign, by Christian Brassington (a new writer for the Whoniverse who played the showman in The Silver Turk and is briefly seen in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, and is incidentally godfather to the Tennants' younger son) has good bits and less good bits. It is a well-realised soundscape of a Blade Runner-like future world, ruled by the mysterious Dragon Lord, where all men are addicted to stupefying drugs and all women work themselves to the bone to keep things going. The story's take on sexism isn't especially subtle or sophisticated, and though Moffatt and Biggerstaff keep up the energy level as they plot the inevitable revolution, it's the weakest of the set, with background info about Biggerstaff’s character rather heavily inserted. Pik-Sen Lim, seen in The Mind of Evil back in 1971, has a welcome return to the Whoniverse. (Most of the incidental characters are played by Chinese actors.)
Finally, Zero Space, by Adrian Poynton, takes Jenny and Noah to a place in the universe where there is nothing but a space station inhabited by clones of its two founders, all brilliantly played by Adele Anderson and Anthony Calf (whose first TV role was in The Visitation, where he is killed three minutes into the first episode, and also played Colonel Godsacre in The Empress of Mars). The set-up is very good, and the small cast (joined again by Siân Philips, with a "surprise" cameo at the end from someone else) excellent, but I felt that the script muffed a couple of key points – it's not at all clear why Jenny being threatened with being cloned should be such a big deal; it's treated as if it would be fatal to her; and the ending leaves us with something of a reset button, the mystery of Noah's origins unresolved. It's also unexpectedly short – 45 minutes, whereas the other three are over an hour. The rest of the space is filled with the excellent incidental music of Joe Kraemer.
There's a nice behind-the-scenes disc as well. I generally liked this box set, with reservations about the fourth and especially the third installment; I do think it would be pretty acessible to fans of the Tenth Doctor era who had not listened to any other Big Finish, and could even be a gateway drug for them. You can get it here.
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Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

But there are worse places to live. There are much worse places right here in this U-Stor-It. Only the big units like this one have their own doors. Most of them are accessed via a communal loading dock that leads to a maze of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. These are slum housing, 5-by-10s and 10-by-10s where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets.

This popped to the top of one of my lists just at the moment that I have been reading some of the other award winners from 1994. Snow Crash was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (won by Jeff Noon's Vurt) and the BSFA Award (won by Christopher Evans' The Aztec CenturyAmmonite by Nicola Griffith, which won the Tiptree. The Hugo for Best Novel was shared between A Fire On The Deep and Doomsday Book, the latter winning the Nebula as well; Snow Crash was on the Hugo long-list, but nowhere for the Nebula. (It did win two awards in French translation, and one in Spanish.)

This is surely one of those cases where the awards in general (and particularly across the Atlantic) failed to spot the classic in the making: Snow Crash now has more owners on LibraryThing than any two of the other books named above combined (which is why I read it; see below). I think it's much the best of them. It’s the very breathless tale of Mafia pizza deliverer and swordsman Hiro Protagonist, and teenage skateboard courier Y.T., in a fractured future West Coast America where sovereignty has been downsized to micro-nation enclaves guarded by cyborg dogs, and many people spend much of their time online in the Metaverse. In the middle of all this, an evil evangelical Christian leader is planning to take mass control of human brains through a combination of the latest software developments and an ancient Sumerian curse (the Snow Crash of the title). The whole thing is packed with lore in a way that Stephenson later went overboard with. I know that Neuromancer is generally regarded in high esteem, but I have always bounced off it, and Snow Crash is the archetypal cyberpunk novel for me.

There are some points that have not aged well. The Metaverse inspired many games (including Quake and Second Life) but in fact it turns out that virtual reality is as Balkanised as the meatspace of Snow Crash, with every company and franchise holding onto its own walled gardens. I can’t see this changing; perhaps some virtual spaces in the end will grow and dominate, but there isn’t an underlying systemic reason for them all to unite Internet-like. It’s also notable that everyone who logs into the Metaverse arrives at the same point and then must virtually travel to their desired locations, rather than logging into the place they want to be. 1993 was probably the last year that a novel like this could be written without mobile phone technology; Y.T. has to find land lines to call her mother from. You can only log into the Metaverse from fixed terminals. Stephenson’s characters zoom around California at high speed, but are more tied to the ground than we are.

Also it has to be said that apart from Y.T., all the major characters are alpha males (including the cyborg dog Fido). It’s a book of its time. Apparently Amazon are making a screen version. Meanwhile you can get the book here.

This was the top book on my shelves that I had already read but never got around to blogging. Next on that list is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon.

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Huawei Stories: Explorers, ed. Tian Tao and Yin Zhifeng

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Second paragraph of third chapter ("Pulling Ourselves Out of the Mud", by Yao Yiyu):

In 2001, we managed to develop and launch our next-generation switch, iNET, in a stunningly short time. What awaited us was not ovation or praise, but harsh reality: the customer did not want our product in their network.

A couple of weeks ago I read the companion volume to this, Huawei Stories: Pioneers, which looked at the geographical challenges faced by a Chinese company on its way to becoming a global phenomenon, and really enjoyed it. This volume concentrates on the technical challenges that have faced Huawei, and the difficulties in overcoming them (and they were almost all overcome); it's therefore a set of true-life Heroic Engineer tales. To be honest, I am not sufficiently well versed in mobile phone technology to appreciate the advances that were being made. There is one very entertaining chapter whose narrator, Xiong Ying, drives around his region of China looking for thunderstorms to test his equipment's resistance to lightning strikes. Another team testing equipment in Tibet found that it was affected by sunspots. The one non-Chinese writer, Renato Lombardi, tells the story of setting up Huawei's microwave research centre in Milan, and the process of cultural blending that was needed. But in general I preferred the first book. Still, you can get it here.

This was my top unread book by non-white authors. Next on that list is Seychelles: The Saga of a Small Nation Navigating the Cross-Currents of a Big World, by Sir James Mancham.

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The Laertian Gamble, by Robert Sheckley

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Linc was a graduate engineering student from Bajor University of Science and Art. He wanted to be a spacegoing engineer like O'Brien, had gotten assigned to an assistantship to O'Brien, and already he had learned more than he would have done in five years of regular practice on Bajor. He idolized O'Brien, tried to copy him in every way.

A Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel by Sheckley, who was a pretty prominent writer at one stage, though I confess I think the only things I have read by him were his comic collaborations with Roger Zelazny and Harry Harrison. This isn't terribly special; I'm aware enough of DS9 to appreciate that Sheckley captures the established main characters and puts them in a new situation; the specifics, however, didn't quite convince me – that an interplanetary gambling dispute with Quark could put the entire station (and ultimately the universe) at risk, and the odd pacing of the crisis on DS9 and Kira and Dax's excursion to a conveniently nearby planet to try and sort it all out. First DS9 book I've read – not in a rush to read more. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2012. Next on that list is The Stone Book Quartet, by Alan Garner.

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Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

For a moment we are still concerned with structures, with the setting of the stage. I have always been interested in beginnings. We all scrutinise our childhoods, go about the interesting business of apportioning blame. I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates. I like to contemplate their unknowing inhabitants, busy with prosaic matters of hunger, thirst, tides, keeping the ship on course, quarrels and wet feet, their minds on anything but destiny. Those quaint figures of the Bayeux tapestry, far from quaint within their proper context, rough tough efficient fellows wrestling with ropes and sails and frenzied horses and the bawling of ill-tempered superiors. Caesar, contemplating the Sussex coast. Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Captain Cook… all those mundane travellers preoccupied with personal gain or seized by congenital restlessness, studying compasses and dealing with the natives while they make themselves immortal.

I thought this was a tremendously good book – the story of Claudia Hampton’s life, her lovers, her family, her travels through the world of the twentieth century; there are many memorable scenes, particularly from the wartime section set in Egypt. The narrative style combines first-person, a bit of onmniscience, and tight-third, the last of these sometimes from other perspectives than Claudia’s (occasionally recapitulating the same scene from a different point of view), creating the sense of a life story that consists of many pieces that can be observed from different perspectives and in different ways as they are assembled to make a whole. It really grabbed me. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a woman, and also my top unread non-sf fiction book. Next on those stacks respectively are Byzantium, by Judith Herrin, and Burr, by Gore Vidal.

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Monday reading

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Current
Byzantium, by Judith Herrin
Vurt, by Jeff Noon
The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust

Last books finished
Comet in Moominland, by Tove Jansson
Huawei Stories: Explorers, ed. Tian Tao and Yin Zhifeng
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Finn Family Moomintroll, by Tove Jansson

Next books
Ginger Star, by Leigh Brackett
Dark Satanic Mills, by Marcus Sedgwick
Missing Adventures, ed. Rebecca Levene

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Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Jackie had never felt fear in her entire life. She had felt caution, and unease, and sadness, and joy, which are all similar to fear. But she had never felt fear itself.

I don't think I have previously written up here my thoughts on Welcome to Night Vale, the serial podcast about life in a very strange town somewhere near (but perhaps not quite in) the Southwestern USA. The audio version, in hour-long episodes, is anchored by the reassuring tones of Cecil Baldwin as radio presenter Cecil Palmer, reporting on the horrific absurdities of the town and musing on the latest findings of his scientist boyfriend. (Incidentally, I always pronounced "Cecil" as /ˈsɛsəl/, to rhyme with "trestle", but the US pronunciation seems to be /ˈsiːsəl/, almost rhyming with "diesel".) I listened to every episode from the beginning to about the middle of 2016 and then got out of the habit, mainly due to the competing attractions of Duolingo and Pokémon GO absorbing the time that I had been spending listening to it. I still really enjoyed it, particularly the arc in which the station intern Dana Cardinal, played by Jasika Nicole, becomes mayor of Night Vale.

The novel isn't quite the same. Two women protagonists go in search of a secret which takes them out of Night vale to California; meanwhile we have interjected commentary from Cecil's radio show which isn't really connected to the plot, such as it is. I thought that the Cecil sections were funny and sinister and kept the spirit of the podcast. I was less impressed by the main plot, which started promisingly, faffed around a lot in the middle and finally reached something like a conclusion. I didn't get a strong feel for the main characters' motivations. It is a decent enough read but not as epic as the original medium. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that list is Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams.

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A Very English Scandal (drama), and The Jeremy Thorpe Scandal (documentary)

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Second scene (as broadcast) from third episode:

INT. MINEHEAD POLICE STATION, INTERVIEW ROOM – NIGHT

NORMAN, exhausted, still covered in blood, faces the TWO CONSTABLES. Going over it for the fifth time:

  NORMAN
I’m sorry. But it’s true. I had a homosexual relationship with Jeremy Thorpe, and if anybody wants to see me dead, then it’s him –

…breaking off, puzzled, as the taller CONSTABLE, smiling, stands, beckons with a crooked finger for Norman to follow.

  NORMAN (CONT’D)
What?

He’s beckoning Norman over to the wall. Norman disconcerted, but he’s obedient, follows. Like it’s a secret conversation:

  CONSTABLE
Now tell me that again.
      NORMAN
I had an affair with Jeremy Thorpe –

The Constable grabs Norman’s head, bangs it against the wall.

  CONSTABLE
Jeremy Thorpe
            (bang)
Is a Member of Parliament
            (bang)
And a highly respected man
            (bang)
He is not
            (bang)
To be abused
            (bang)
By a lying little queer.

We missed this excellent mini-series when it first came out in June. For Who fans there is the immediate attraction of Russell T. Davies’ script and Murray Gold’s music (and a small part for Eve Myles); for British politics fans of my age and above, there is the compelling memory of a major political story revived (I met David Steel last year); for any fans of drama, there is Hugh Grant at the height of his powers, inhabiting and transforming the personality of Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party accused of conspiracy to murder his former lover. (This was Hugh Grant’s first acting appearance on British TV since his two minutes as the Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death.) The supporting cast are never less than solid, with standouts being the other two male leads, Ben Whishaw (who hugely impressed me as Richard II) as Thorpe’s lover Norman Joliffe/Scott, and Alex Jennings (who I think I had only previously seen as Prince Charles in The Queen, which was also directed by Stephen Frears) as Thorpe’s friend and fellow Liberal MP, Peter Bessell, who eventually turns against him. Michelle Dotrice, memorable from my childhood as Betty in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, also does a great vignette as pub landlady Edna Friendship.

The success of the three episodes lies in the combination of farce and high drama – the completely botched attempt to kill Scott, combined with the supremely high political stakes; but also Grant’s combination of emotion and determination in his Thorpe, and Whishaw’s blending of vulnerability and integrity in Scott (which Scott himself was reportedly unhappy about). There is a characteristic scene in the first episode which is both a diversion from the main drama and a crucial reinforcement of the background, where Labour MP Leo Abse visits Lord Arran, who keeps pet badgers but is motivated by family tragedy, to discuss the decriminalisation of homosexuality, which of course is the social issue that makes the queer sensibility of the entire drama possible.

The one bit where we do have to suspend our disbelief is in the ages of the actors. Grant, 58, plays Thorpe between the ages of 32 and 50; Jennings, 60, plays Bessell from 40 to 58; and both characters appear more or less the age of the actors portraying them on screen throughout. (There is one jarring line referring to Thorpe’s being very young for a major party leader.) Whishaw is 37, but in better shape than Scott was at 38 in 1979. Grant’s on-screen mother, Patricia Hodge, is only 14 years older than him. We’ve seen worse (notably, Derek Jacobi aged 58 playing Alan Turing, who died shortly before his 42nd birthday, with Prunella Scales, only four years older, as his mother), and I guess most viewers will roll with it.

We also caught Tom Mangold’s 1979 documentary, The Jeremy Thorpe Scandal, which was prepared in the expectation that Thorpe would be found guilty and then (literally) canned when he was unexpectedly acquitted. I was much less happy with this, and if I’d been the commissioning editor in the BBC in 1979, I like to think that I’d have asked for more work to be done before broadcast, even if it had been decided to go ahead. For the first half of it, Mangold’s argument seems to be, not that Thorpe’s homosexuality was tolerated by the establishment at a time when other men where being persecuted and imprisoned (there’s a story there, of course), but that Thorpe’s homosexuality was a dangerous blackmailable character flaw which ought to have prevented him from achieving high office and that the establishment dangerously undermined Britain by allowing him to reach the heights he did. This is fundamentally a homophobic message, and interestingly Mangold’s interviews with Peter Bessell (then) and Norman Scott (then and now) do not really support the narrative that he is trying to push.

Mangold is on firmer ground with his account of the murder conspiracy – and there really can’t be any doubt that Thorpe was guilty as charged, and acquitted through George Carman’s expert defence and the bias of the judge (famously mocked by Peter Cook). Though even here, Mangold suggests that the establishment, at the highest level, helped cover up Thorpe’s involvement in the shooting of Scott’s dog, and it’s not clear to me that that is really supported by the facts; Newton, the hit-man, appears to have stated both to police and at his trial that Thorpe had nothing to do with it, changing his story only when he got out of prison, after which the justice system moved pretty fast, only to be derailed by the events of the courtroom itself. Thorpe’s friendship with Harold Wilson (not referred to in RTD’s script) is interesting colour, but irrelevant after Wilson’s resignation in 1976, six months after Newton shot Rinka the Great Dane. Mangold’s scoop in finding another hit-man who claims to have confessed to police at the time after also bottling out on his mission isn’t quite as impressive as he seems to think; even a much less gifted lawyer than Carman would have torn that story to shreds in seconds.

Anyway, you can skip the documentary, but do watch the series.

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Rare Unsigned Copy, by Simon Petrie

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Second paragraph of third story (Fomalhaut 451):

Zia’s gloved fingers jabbed out the control sequence again, but she knew it was futile: the hab was dead this past year. She’d been sent from Central to discover how, why.

The author ran a contest several years ago offering free copies of this book to the the three people with the most interesting namesakes as revealed by Google, and of course I was up for that challenge and won. The book took a few weeks to reach me from Australia, and it took me a lot longer to get around to reading it. It's a collection of short stories, most of them very brief indeed, with a bit of a tendency to go for last-minute twists or punchlines (à la Asimov, but a little better, which is not difficult). There are several about near-future detective Gordon Mammon investigating various murders. The two that stick in my mind are "Running Lizard", which takes the unpromising concept of were-dinosaurs in the present day and carries it off very well, and the non-sfnal "Scratched" about a little girl, her brother and a mouse. I will keep an eye out for more of Petrie's work. You can get it here. (See author’s note about availabilty in a comment to this post.)

This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next in that pile is Hybrid, by Shaun Hutson.

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Amoras deel 3: Krimson, by Marc Legendre and Charel Cambré

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Second frame of page 3:

I read the first two parts of this series a couple of years ago, and have now got to volume 3 (of 6). Suske and Wiske are trapped in the devastated future world of 2047, at opposite ends of the island of Amoras, subject to the machinations of the evil Krimson. Suske has hooked up with the attractive and dangerous Jérusalem; Wiske with other unsavoury types. Meanwhile in the present day there is a parallel plotline with a young woman called Marie, in a hospital with Aunt Sidonie. There seemed to be less fanservice and more world-building in this volume, which is a good thing. Charel Cambré's art remains outstanding. The plot sometimes jumps between storylines in mid-page, which is a little disconcerting. I would have enjoyed it more if I had come back to it a bit sooner after the first two, and will get to vol 4 a bit quicker. You can get vol 3 here.

This was my top unread non-English language comic (the pilot's words in the frame above are an exception). Next on that pile, I'm glad to say, is the first of a new series by Leo, Retour sur Aldébaran.

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