Monthly Archives: August 2021

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On trusting your gut, and lactose intolerance

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I was at a big family party (big, subject to COVID regulations) last weekend, and discovered the hard way that I have become lactose intolerant. The dessert on Saturday lunchtime was a lovely creamy affair, meringue piled high with cream and more cream, and I allowed my taste buds to over-rule any concerns expressed by my digestive system and lapped it up.

Perhaps an hour later I was seized by intense stomach cramps, followed by bloating and other symptoms which need not be further described, and retired to bed and could not get out of it (apart from repeated urgent trips across the landing) until the morning. I was already aware that too much cheese disagrees with me (but then again, that's what "too much" means) and now I must add cream and probably all dairy products to the caution list.

It was pretty unexpected, though. At a gathering of relatives, I seem to have been the only one affected. I think that a couple of years ago I would probably have been all right. But it won't do me any harm at all to drastically cut down on the (already low) amount of dairy in my diet.

And of course this puts me in line with the majority of humanity, whose tolerance for lactose ends with childhood. We who are (or, as in my case, were) able to digest dairy products as adults are mutants.

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Mother Ross, aka Christian Davies: a genderqueer soldier under Marlborough

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Third paragraph of The life and adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, commonly call’d Mother Ross; who, in several campaigns under King William and the late Duke of Marlborough, in the quality of a foot-soldier and dragoon, gave many signal proofs of an unparallell’d courage and personal bravery, taken from her own mouth when a pensioner of Chelsea-Hospital, and known to be true by many who were engaged in those great scenes of action:

Nothing remarkable occurs to my Memory from the Time of this Monarch’s being proclaimed, to that in which he was forced to throw himself into the Arms of his Iriſh Subjects, having been driven from the Throne of England by King William. The Iriſh very readily eſpoused his Cauſe, and among others (from a Conſciouſneſs of its being a Duty incumbent on him to ſupport his lawful Sovereign, notwithſtanding his being of a different Religion, which he thought not Reaſon ſufficient to affect his Loyalty) my Father ſold all his ſtanding Corn, and other Things of Value, to Mr. Aſcham, a neighbouring Farmer, and was thus enabled, with what ready Money he had by him before, to raiſe a Troop of Horſe, and provide them with Accoutrements, and everything neceſsary to take the Field; and having furniſhed himſelf with a fine Horſe, and whatever elſe was requiſite, he ſet out at the Head of this Troop, which was called by his Name, Cavenaugh’s, to join the Reſt of the Army. I remember I was very fond of riding this Horſe, for a Reaſon which would have prevented any other of my Sex venturing upon him; I mean his Mettle; for he was ſo fiery, that not one of the Troop durſt mount him. You will, perhaps, wonder how I could; but I had ſo often fed him with Bread and Oats, that he would ſtand for me to take him up, when at Graſs, though he would have given twenty Men Work enough to catch him. When I had once hold of him, I would put on his Bridle and lead him into a Ditch and beſtride him bare-back’d. I have often mounted him when ſaddled, and took great Pleaſure to draw and ſnap the Pistols, and have not ſeldom made my Friends apprehend for my Life. I mention this, not as worth Notice, but only to ſhow my Inclinations, while a Girl, were always maſculine.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh, by Anne Holland:

The river was tidal at this point, and teemed with fish. James’s army of 23,000 guarded a fording point near Oldbridge. A little further south the river reached Rosnaree before turning north again to Slane, where, as part of the battle preparations the Jacobites had destroyed the bridge to prevent their enemy crossing it. But the possibility remained that James’s army could be outflanked if their opponents marched upstream and managed to ford the river somewhere else. If that happened, their only escape route would be by bridge over the Nanny, a tributary of the Boyne at Duleek.

I am hugely grateful to Wim Uyttebroeck, expert on the 1693 Battle of Landen aka Neerwinden, for flagging this up to me. Christian Cavenaugh, born in Dublin in 1667, ran an inn there and married her barman; but then he was unexpectedly conscripted into the Duke of Marlborough’s army and disappeared from Ireland completely. Christian Welsh, as she now was, decided to go looking for him by dressing as a man and enlisting at the Golden Last (which incidentally has just been refurbished); it took her several years to track him down, and then several more years before an army doctor treating her after the Battle of Ramillies discovered that she had breasts (her secret had survived earlier treatment for a hip injury). In the meantime she had courted many women in male guise, while forbidding her husband to go near anyone else once she had found him.

Once the secret was out, she became a camp follower, ensuring logistics and provisions for her husband in particular and his comrades, and also unapologetically and frequently engaging in the looting of civilian property. Her long-lost first husband was eventually killed in action. She married twice more, ending her life as Christian Davies. When peace finally came she got a pension from Queen Anne and on 19 November 1717 was admitted to Chelsea Hospital as a Pensioner; she is recorded there as a “fatt, jolly-breasted woman [who] received several wounds in the Service in ye habitt of a man”.

Her account really is an extraordinary document. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been attributed to Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe; but this seems very unlikely as he died eight years before it was published. (And also I think he would have written it more smoothly.) It’s a combination of detailed military history of the wars, which has been fairly thoroughly checked out for accuracy and consistency of dates, and Christian’s own personal history, which seems a lot more vulnerable to inaccuracy – to give the most blatant example, we are told that between the Battle of Aughrim, where her father was supposedly killed, and the Battle of Landen/Neerwinden, where she herself received her hip injury, she ran the Dublin tavern, got married, had three children, wondered where her husband was for a year, and finally enlisted. But the two battles were only two years apart, so it seems improbable. However, it’s clear from the rubric of the book that she was delivering it as oral history, without documentation, to an unnamed scribe, who then quite possibly finessed the military history research.

I really want this to be largely true. It fully caught my attention in the second sentence, where she states that her father’s landlord soon after her birth in 1667 was an Arthur White of Leixlip. As it happens, an Arthur White of Leixlip, born in 1611, was the son of my 7x great-grandfather Sir Nicholas White and brother of my 6x great-grandfather Charles White/Whyte (therefore my 7x great-uncle, if you’re counting). There is evidence to suggest that my Arthur White died before 1648; but he may well have had a son or a nephew of the same name, or Christian may be wrong about the dates. The coincidence seems a bit too good to ignore. (Especially since, as Cailtin White (no relation as far as I know) points out, a lot of her other Irish details are shaky.)

I was also struck by the local details regarding our part of Belgium. When she finally finds her husband in Breda, she is drinking a pint of “hougarde”, ie the Hoegaarden blond beer which we still know and love today. After Ramillies, her secret is discovered while she is being treated for a skull wound at Meldert, which is the next village to Hoegaarden, very close to where B and U live. The bits about Flanders are very definitely written by someone who knew this part of the world. (The bits in Germany seem a bit vaguer – in particular the description of the Battle of Blenheim doesn’t actually use the name “Blenheim” for it, which seems odd for the climactic battle of the earlier war.)

Particularly interesting for me is an account of an unsuccessful French raid on Leuven in 1710:

The Partiſan du Moulin attempted to ſurprize Lovain, but was diſappointed by the Bravery of the Burghers. On the 5th of Auguſt he detach’d a Party, who ſcaled the Wall between the old and new Gate of Bruſſels, where the Ditch is dry, and having the good Fortune to enter the Town without being perceived, diſarm’d the Burghers Guard, open’d a Gate, and let in their Comerades to the Number of four or five hundred; who poſting themſelves in Saint James‘s Church-Yard, ſent a Party thence to the Heart of the Town, who ſeiz’d upon the Guild, and ſecured the Burghers Grand Guard. After this Expedition, they intended to poſſeſs themfelves of the other Gates, the Gariſon which was but a hundred and fifty Men, having withdrawn on the firſt Notice into the Cattle. In the Interim, the whole Town was alarm’d, and the Burgher-Maſter awaking with the Noiſe made in the Streets, ran diſguis’d to St. Peter‘s Church, where he ſhut himſelf in and rang the Alarum Bell. Immediately the Burghers took to their Arms, and headed by Van de Ven, march’d to the Square and drew up in order before the Guard. Du Moulin hearing that all was in motion, ſent in all ſpeed an Officer on Horſeback, to ſee how Matters went. He came to the Square with his drawn Sword in his Hand and threaten’d the Burghers to fire the Town, if they did not lay down their Arms: but this Menace was ſo far from having the deſired Effect, that one of them fired at him and the Ball taking him in the Throat, tumbled him dead from his Horſe. The Burger-Maſter, immediately order’d the Inhabitants to repair from their different Quarters to the Gate the Enemy had open’d and retake it; while he at the Head of his Company march’d with beat of Drum to St. James‘s Church-Yard to diſlodge the French: But they fearing they ſhould be cut off from the Gate, thought of nothing but their Retreat, and it was time for them to do it, for the Burghers arrived juſt as they left the Church-Yard, and hooted them as they went off.

This is a reasonably well documented event (the Emperor presented the city with a golden key as a reward), but I’m struck by the detail provided. The Sint-Jakobskerk is indeed just off the Brusselsestraat, and just inside the old city wall; the churchyard, immediately to the south, is now the rather soulless Sint-Jakobsplein open air car park. It’s bizarre to think of this as the site of a pitched battle 311 years ago last week. (Though that’s equally true of many other parts of Belgium.)

I’ve used she / her pronouns here, because that’s clearly what Christian used, but she’s equally clearly an early well-documented case of genderqueerness. I bet that she gave a lot of physical joy to the Dutch and Belgian women she courted, though they may have been puzzled that she did not go as far as most male soldiers would have done. (Of course, some of them may have known perfectly well, and been happy enough!) By her own account, supported by the existence of the Chelsea record, she was as effective (and brutal) as any other soldier in the army, and thrived living as a man.

And she was not alone – one of her early anecdotes is that a French officer who died in her parents’ house in Ireland turned out to be a woman when she was laid out for burial. An appendix to the original 1740 book alleges that the dead French soldier had a device for easy urination standing up, which Christian then appropriated and used during her own military career. This seems perhaps a little too good to be true; but then so does the entire story.

You can access the original copy of the Life and Adventures here or here, or also get it from Amazon here. Terry Pratchett must surely have known about this when he wrote Monstrous Regiment; in fact I would not be surprised if there is some direct borrowing (which was his usual MO), but I have not checked.

A few years ago, Anne Holland produced a version of the Life and Adventures which somewhat uneasily straddles the genres of novelisation, historical research and simply reprinting chunks of the original. It doesn’t add a lot, to be honest, but it may be more readable for people less used to eighteenth-century style. You can get The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh: A Remarkable Irishwoman and Soldier here.

The Truman Show

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The Truman Show won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1999, beating three other films and a Babylon 5 episode. I have not seen any of the losing films, which were Dark City, Pleasantville and Star Trek: Insurrection, in that order. IMDB users rate the Truman Show 3rd of the year's films on one system and 4th on the other, with only Saving Private Ryan ahead of it on both systems; it is well ahead of that year's Oscar winner, Shakespeare in Love (which is why I'm doing it first).

None of the cast appears to have been in Doctor Who, or in previous Hugo-winning films, but there is one who was in an Oscar-winning film. Muriel Moore plays the (briefly seen) teacher here, and was Miriam, one of Daisy's friends, in Driving Miss Daisy. The Truman Show is her last credited work on IMDB; I have no further information about her.

The film is about a chap whose entire life has been a reality TV show, without him realising it. His parents, wife, friends, neighbours and colleagues are all actors, and he lives in a huge film set created purely for him. And of course he finds out.

Back in the innocent days of 1998, this sort of society seemed like a potential future nightmare that we would none the less surely be wise enough to avoid. But the film has turned out to be eerily prophetic, both with the rise of reality TV as entertainment and with the ubiquity of the surveillance society. The TV show Big Brother premiered in the Netherlands the following year, though MTV's The Real World dates back to 1992, and the Dutch Nummer 28 to 1991.

It's not just the satire, of course, it's the story of Truman Burbank's own conceptual breakthrough, one of the most fundamental of all SF plots; and I could not help but be struck by the similarity between the famous Camille Flammarion engraving, and the moment when Truman's yacht hits the wall that was serving as the sky.

Not going to write too much more about it, except to salute the performances of Jim Carrey in the title role, and Ed Harris as the sinister Cristof who is actually in charge of it all.

We've all felt a bit like Truman Burbank at times, I suspect, and the film beautfilly plays on niggling doubts that we may in fact be someone else's Property. Non-white characters don't get a lot to do, and the women are very much supporting the male leads, but it's not the only film of which that is the case.

So, generally very entertaining, and I'm putting it a third of the way down my list, ahead of The Empire Strikes Back but behind Aliens.

Next up is The Sixth Sense.

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Friday reading

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Current
The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
A Hero Born, by Jin Yong

Last books finished
In de tuin, by Noëlle Smit
Hr. Alting, by Bente Olesen Nyström
Trocoscópio, by Bernardo P. Carvalho
Meidän piti lähteä, by Sanna Pelliccioni
Mijn straat: een wereld van verschil, by Ann De Bode
Fridolin Franse frisiert, by Michael Roher
Otthon, by Kinga Rofusz
La Ciudad, by Roser Capdevila
Sortie de nuit, by Laurie Agusti
The HAVOC Files 2, ed. Shaun Russell
Strange Bedfellows: An Anthology of Political Science Fiction, ed. Hayden Trenholm
Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker
Thirteen, by Steve Cavanagh
Dalek, by Robert Shearman
Fish Tails, by Sheri S. Tepper
The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams
A Tale of Two Time Lords, by Jodie Houser et al
A Woman in Berlin

Next books
Cryptozoic, by Brian Aldiss
The Primal Urge, by Brian Aldiss

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I think it would be a good idea: playing Civilization 6

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Over the last few months, I’ve been working away at a little project: to win Civilization 6 on every one of the maps, on all four victory settings. For each game I played, In decided in advance which victory I was going for and chose a map, but let the game assign me a leader, and in general it worked. A waste of time? Well, I don’t get as much from it as I do from reading or watching a film. But it is tremendously satisfying to Take Over The World, in various different ways, in various different worlds.

I have not gone overboard: I didn’t get any of the expansions, and once or twice I accidentally won the wrong way. But it is a fun game, and although I have finished this project I may go back to it from time to time.

Religious victory:

This is actually the easiest and quickest of the four to achieve. Provided you invest in religious buildings, and, if possible, Stonehenge, from the beginning, you can build up a massive advantage in religious output very early, and successfully stamp out heresy with quite a small number of cities, sometimes even before the dawn of the Industrial Age. All the other three victories need you to have at least an average sized empire to achieve critical mass; but if you are a religious superpower, you may need only half a dozen cities by the end, four on a small map.

Shares with the domination victory a need to explore the world to find other civilisations to convert/conquer. I tried it on one of the big maps and won while pulling in over 500 Faith points a turn by the end.

You can get some lovely paradoxes by winning with incongruous combinations: Queen Victoria converting the world to Zoroastrianism was one of my favourites.

Domination victory:

To win a domination victory, you obviously invest in military training and industrial production, but you also have to start conquering your neighbours early. The most difficult bit of this for me psychologically is that you spend most of the game with all the other empires angry with you, because they think you are a warmonger, because you are a warmonger. For a people pleaser like me, that goes against the grain. But basically once you have nobbled a neighbouring capital or two, you are already probably the biggest civilisation in the world, and then it is just a matter of industrializing, developing tanks and aircraft, and out-thinking the AI’s rather poor military strategy, until the last capital falls. Again, you have to explore the world to win.

Science victory:

This and the cultural victory require you to have at least an average sized civilization, but don’t require the same dominance as the military route. The space race can get quite competitive between civilizations at the end, and you need spies to sabotage your neighbours’ spaceports and stop them getting to Mars first. You need to finish with three working spaceports, which means a fair bit of strategic forward planning, more than for any of the other victory conditions. Once or twice I had to resort to a quickly assembled military strike force to take out the more advanced capitals, but it is also possible to win without fighting a single war.

Cultural victory:

This was the most difficult to get the hang of, and I am still not sure that I have completely got it. It requires a lot of investment in the early game: every theatrical district you build is a holy site or campus or encampment that you didn’t. It also needs a strong enough religion in your own territory at least to be able to send apostles into other civilizations to get martyred and generate relics. And again you need spies to steal works of art from any other civilization with cultural pretensions. The crucial Wonder for me in a couple of these games was the Eiffel Tower, which enabled me to build loads of seaside resorts and generate a winning advantage. At the end, once you have built up the momentum, the tourism points suddenly start shifting your way with dizzying rapidity, but it can feel like a long wait.

Anyway, it’s been fun, though I have spent too many nights sitting up late playing it for just a few more turns before turning in. I may even try some of the expansion kits, but before I do that I want to try this year’s Hugo finalists now that we are trying the games category.

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August 2012 books

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This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days, I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

The main business of the month was our family holiday in Northern Ireland. We went to Newgrange, which is always amazing.


And discovered the then fairly new museum at Bagenal's Catle in Newry, where you can dress up as an Elizabethan.


We also went to the brand new Titanic exhibition, but I took only one photo, of the last despairing radio exchange from the doomed ship.

I profited from the holiday to read 30 books. A lot of my spare time was spent setting up systems for the 2014 Worldcon.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 39)
The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong
The Portable Greek Historians, ed. M.I. Finley
The Reign of Elizabeth 1558-1603, by J.B. Black
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, by Émile Durkheim

Fiction (non-sf) 8 (YTD 28)
Gold from Gemini, by Jonathan Gash
Watchman, by Ian Rankin
The Public Prosecutor, by Jef Geeraerts
Jade Woman, by Jonathan Gash
Emil and the Detectives, by Erich Kästner
The Great California Game, by Jonathan Gash
Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Not A Creature Was Stirring, by Jane Haddam

SF (non-Who) 7 (YTD 50)
Spectrum IV, ed. Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest
Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn
A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle
Morgoth's Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien
The Quantum Rose, by Catherine Asaro
Yearwood, by Paul Hazel
The Poison Factory, by Oisín McGann

Who 7 (YTD 50)
Dark Horizons, by J.T. Colgan
Doctor Who: The Time Traveller's Almanac, by Steve Tribe
The Wheel of Ice, by Stephen Baxter
Warlock, by Andrew Cartmel
The Space Age, by Steve Lyons
Alien Adventures: The Underwater War, by Richard Dinnick
Alien Adventures: Rain of Terror, by Mike Tucker

Comics 4 (YTD 17)
With The Light vol. 5, by Keiko Tobe
Barbaraal Tot Op Het Bot, by Barbara Stok
The Book of Bunny Suicides, by Andy Riley
Return of the Bunny Suicides, by Andy Riley

~8,500 pages (YTD ~54,900)
7/30 (YTD 55/188) by women (Armstrong, Haddam, L'Engle, Asaro, Colgan, Tobe, Stok)
1/30 (YTD 8/158) by PoC (Tobe)

Best of the month was a reread, A Wrinkle in Time, which you can get here. Other good 'uns included no less than four excellent Doctor Who books: New Adventure Warlock, which you can get hereDark Horizons, which you can get hereThe Wheel of Ice, which you can get hereThe Time Traveller's Almanac, which you can get here. At the other end, I reread The Quantum Rose and still didn't like it; you can get it here. And I thoroughly bounced off Durkheim, but you can get him here if you want.



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Martin Lukes: Who Moved My Blackberry, by Lucy Kellaway

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Second email of March:

From: Martin Lukes
To: Keri Tartt

Hi Keri
How are you this morning? Great outfit! If you’ve got a mo, a large latte and a pain au chocolat would go down nicely. Also a big bag of felt pens – I’d like some thin ones and some of those big chunky highlighters and some A3 paper
Tx Martin

Classic novel of corporate life in London, as expressed through the emails of Martin Lukes, both self-obsessed and utterly un-self-aware, working through hubris, nemesis, and just possibly catharsis. You can spot pretty early on what is going to happen – as soon as the attractive new PA comes on the scene, it basically writes itself (her surname is actually Tartt, in case you needed the obvious pointed out to you even more clearly) – but having said that I anticipated the middle part of the book, Kellaway brings in a couple of twists at the end that I admit I did not expect. The behaviour of people engaging in office politics with added sex is brutally and mesmerisingly portrayed. Usually she is accurate, sometimes unnervingly so:

Recommended, and you can get it hereThe Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor (the second volume of the Welcome to Night Vale scripts).

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Nine European picture books

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Here's a lovely thing. The Slovenian Presidency of the EU has made available a book from each of the 27 EU member states for us all to read. Nine of them are picture books, and there's a graphic novel; seven are represented by short stories, four are rather bravely represented by poetry, three have novels and the last three are represented by essays.

I had a sleepless night the other night and fairly quickly worked through the nine picture books. I think all of them require a decent-sized screen to really appreciate; but I also think all of them could be bought for the small person of your choice. As is my usual habit, I'm listing them here in my reverse order of preference, with my favourite kept till last.

Portugal: Trocoscópio, by Bernardo P. Carvalho. Third page:

Comes with a helpful video in English and Slovenian explaining how to read the book. (I love the sound of spoken Slovenian, more than any other Slavic language.)

A series of geometrical drawings, into which you can project your own story. You can get it on the European Readr site here, or a hard copy from Amazon here.

Spain: La Ciudad (The City), by Roser Capdevila. Third page:

Only five pages, each a vignette of life in a city not very different from Barcelona. Lots of detail in each one. Not a lot of non-white people though. You can get it on the European Readr site here, or a hard copy from Amazon here. An English translation (of a book with hardly any words!) may also exist.

France: Sortie de nuit (A Night Journey), by Laurie Agusti. Third page:


Imago smells something different.                     In the crowd, with no nectar, he is still hungry. 

Imago the butterfly flies on a somewhat creepy journey through the city at night. I have to say that knowing how fragile butterflies are, I found this really creepy, especially when we meet the dark butterflies towards the end. Perhaps I am overthinking, but this one did not help me sleep. You can get it on the European Readr site here, or a hard copy from Amazon in French here.

Netherlands: In de tuin (In the garden), by Noëlle Smit. Third page:


March           Spring is coming.                                          Look, the first crocuses!         

A straightforward set of pictures of a market garden through the twelve months of the year, which would appeal a lot to people who are more interested in gardening than I am, and to their children. You can get it on the European Readr site here, or a hard copy from Amazon in Dutch here or in English translation here.

Hungary: Otthon, by Kinga Rofusz. Third page:

A book with only one word ("eladó", meaning "for sale") and lots of pictures explaining a child's feelings as his family moves from the only home he has ever known to a new house. Rather sweet but very short. You can get it on the European Readr site here, or a hard copy from the publisher here.

Denmark: Hr. Alting (Mr Everything), by Bente Olesen Nyström. Third page:

Wow. This is pretty psychedelic. There is in fact a table of contents in Danish, supplying captions for each page, but they are very far from meshing with the content of the pictures (eg the one for page 3 is "the hidden treasure of the hurricane"). Mr Everything's world is a rich and fantastic one, and perhaps it's better if the instructions are in a language you don't understand. You can get it on the European Readr site here, or a hard copy from the publisher here.

Finland: Meidän piti lähteä (We Had to Leave), by Sanna Pelliccioni. Third page:

Worldless story of a family who have to flee their home because of war, and end up makign a new home somewhere else. Rather moving. Sometimes you don't need words. You can get it on the European Readr site here, or a hard copy from the publisher here.

Austria: Fridolin Franse frisiert (Fridolin’s Hair Salon), by Michael Roher. Third page:


washing                                                                                                   

A customer comes into Fridolin's hair salon with very long hair, in which a vast number of stories are concealed. Maybe I'm easily pleased but this was sheer delight. You can get it on the European Readr site here, or a hard copy from Amazon in German here.

Belgium: Mijn straat: een wereld van verschil (My Street: a world of difference), by Ann De Bode. Third page:


At Jona's (Jona is from Israel)                                                                                                     

I don't think it's just patriotic fervour on my part; the Belgian entry is really good, a series of vignettes of life on an urban street (probably Antwerp) where everyone has character without veering into thoughtless stereotypes, with everyone looking forward to the street party at the end. (And then I had to go back and look for the hidden gnome in each picture.) Loved it and will look out for other work by this artist. You can get it on the European Readr site here, or a hard copy from the publisher in Dutch here.

This leafing through nine of the 27 books was prompted by insomnia, but I think I'll try and work through the other eighteen now, and hopefully while I am awake.

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510 days of plague; or, who’s a silly boy then?

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So. I have a work meeting in London on Thursday. This would have been not unusual before March 2020, but now it is a new step into the unknown. Booked on the only Eurostar of the day for Wednesday, will stay two nights and then off to family gathering in Northern Ireland.

Of course, despite my doubly vaccinated status, the British still require me to have a negative COVID test before I travel. So I hunted around last night, and I found a testing centre near the office, and booked in for 3pm today.

At about 4.30 this afternoon, I looked up from doing last week’s timesheets, and thought, wasn’t there something I was supposed to do after lunch?

OH SHIT

Frantic googling found that the testing centre near Bruxelles Midi / Brussel Zuid still had vacancies this evening. I booked for the 1745-1800 slot, sweated through my 17h Zoom call, and jumped in an Uber.

That last bit shows just how deranged I had become. Our office is a stone’s throw from the Trône / Troon metro station, from where it is a smooth ride to Midi / Zuid. It’s easy and reliable, and frankly I could have just as easily booked an 1800-1815 slot to give myself some extra leeway. Instead I sweated for what seemed like an hour (but in reality may have been four whole minutes) in the traffic jam on Place du Trône, until the driver was able to nip across the junction.

I was there by 1751, and tested and out by 1801. A colleague who got tested there at the same time of day a few weeks back tells me that he had his results by lunchtime the next day. As long as they come through by the time I reach St Pancras on Wednesday, I’ll be happy.

So how was your day???

Edited to add: my results came through at 8 the next morning, 14 hours after the test. I am clear of COVID.

Too Innocent Abroad: Letters Home from Europe 1949, by Joan Hibbard Fleming

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Second paragraph of third letter:

It is hard to keep up and give you day-by-day descriptions, but it is better because I can't find time to write in the journal. By evening, I am very ready for bed. But I shall try to go back to where I left off at the last letter

In the course of my family research I discovered that Joan Hibbard, my father's American second cousin, had published a book of her letters home from her European trip of 1949. She had had two not very happy years studying music at Smith College in Massachusetts, and was about to switch to Barnard College in New York. She had been pestering her parents for a chance to study abroad, and the compromise was the Grand Tour led by Mrs Olive Kammerer, a chaperoned group of about ten girls all from the same sort of WASP background. This included two weeks in Paris, two weeks in Italy, a week in Switzerland, two and a half weeks in Ireland, ten days in Scotland and finally two weeks in England. It turned out that not all the expenses were actually covered and a lot of Joan's letters home include requests for more money.

She turned 20 during the trip and the letters are basically what you would expect from a well-to-do American teenager encountering Europe for the first time. As well as the usual, she has an audience with the Pope (73-year-old Pius XII) and, much more important, visits my father, his sister and his mother in Northern Ireland (my grandfather had died in January).

My father was 21 at the time. (My son has just turned 22.)

Joan started her two years at Barnard College almost as soon as she got back from Europe, and married as soon as she graduated. She and her first husband moved to Houston a year later, where she spent the rest of her life. She died in 2012, and there are obituaries of her here and here.

Mrs Kammerer, who led the trip, comes over as quite a character. She had divorced her headmaster husband in 1941 and gone off to work for the Red Cross in Europe for the rest of the war, and then seems to have made a living from her girls' tours until she set up the Villa Mercedes Junior College for [American] Girls in Florence, in 1956. She was killed in an air crash at Milan airport in 1959, aged 67.

The actual book is readily available on the second hand market in Houston; you can get it here.

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Contact, film and book

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Contact won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1997, beating four other films (the first time since 1992 that no TV episode was on the ballot, and only the second time since 1992 that a cinematic film won). The losers were, in order, Men in Black, Gattaca, The Fifth Element and Starship Troopers. I have seen Men in Black and Starship Troopers, and I really like them both, but I actually think Contact is better. IMDB users are not as impressed, rating it 13th of the year's films on one system and 19th on the other, with all the other Hugo finalists ahead of it on the latter ranking and all but one on the former. Top IMDB spot for the year goes, of course, to Oscar-winner Titanic, on both rankings.

There are a number of returnees from previous Hugo and Oscar winning films. To start with the big one, Jodie Foster stars here as Ellie Arroway, and also starred as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, which won the Oscar six years ago.


And there's a pretty big Doctor Who crossover too, in the form of John Hurt, billionnaire S.R. Haddon here; as Kane, he was the first to die by the jaws of the Alien 18 years ago; back in 1966, 31 years ago, he betrayed Thomas More as Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons, and in 2013, 16 years hence, he would appear as the forgotten incarnation of our favourite Time Lord, the War Doctor.



Another Alien crossover is Tom Skerrett, the main antagonist David Drumlin here, the doomed captain Dallas in 1979.


Several smaller parts went to actors who had appeared three years ago in Forrest Gump, also directed by Robert Zemeckis. Geoffrey Blake is astrophysicist Fisher here (in the middle) and previously abusive boyfriend Wesley (also in the middle).


Timothy McNeil is Davio, another astrophysicist here (on the left) and the T-shirt guy (I think) in Forrest Gump.


Finally, director's son Alex Zemeckis here plays the son of Major Russell (who is himself played by Stephen Ford, son of former President Gerald Ford) and was one of the nasty kids on the bus in Forrest Gump (I am fairly sure I have got the right kid, there's something about the determined set of his brows).


Marc Macaulay, who plays a NASA technician here, is one of the reporters in Edward Scissorhands, but I did not find good shots of him in either role.

This film is based on a novel by the great astronomer Carl Sagan, who died during production or else would surely have been seen in a cameo role (his wife Ann Druyan does appear on the chat show with Geraldine Ferraro). Set in the present day (1997), it's about a mysterious message received by aliens, and the astronomer who discovers it, decodes it and then becomes the sole passenger on the machine built according to the aliens' instructions, a journey in which she meets her long-dead father.

Cards on the table: I really liked it, more than I had expected to. I have a vague memory of watching it once before at the end of a long evening and being underwhelmed. I obviously wasn't paying attention. There is a lot to like here, and I'm putting it in my top ten Hugo-winning films, just below Terminator 2: Judgement Day but ahead of Superman.

To start with the one thing that I did not like so much: all the main characters are white, and although there is a decent represenation of African-Americans and Asians among the second-rank cast, they are all there to support the white folks. This is one of the few points where the film does not live up to the book, which has Chinese, Indian and African travellers, along with a Russian, joining the protagonist on her journey. I guess you have to do some ruthless trimming (and more on that when I get to the book) but it's a shame that the interesting non-white characters were trimmed.

Ellie is a bit isolated as a lead woman character (the top credited woman apart from her, Angela Bassett, is also the top credited actor of colour), but a) that's partly the point, and b) she is given a lot of agency. And let's also shout out to Jena Malone, who went on to a solid enough acting career, as young Ellie, especially in the famous mirror shot.

The film crawls over the Bechdel test, with Jodie Foster asking Angela Bassett where she can buy a dress, but a pass is a pass.

I liked everything else. A nice touch is that various luminaries of the 1997 political and media scene (Geraldine Ferarro, Larry King, a dozen more) appear as themselves commenting on the impact of the alien message and the appropriate response. Particularly cheekily – and I believe the film-makers got into truouble for it – they spliced in real footage of then-President Clinton commenting on the potential discovery of bacteria on a Mars rock in 1996, cut to make it look like he was commenting on the events of the film. As a politics geek I just love this kind of thing.

The special effects are just sufficiently flashy to be convincing and support the narrative, and not so flashy as to overwhelm it. The climax is of course the heroine's journey to another world, and I love the way we keep grounded in what is happening to her despite the extraorinary things happening to the dodecahedron – it's both a homage to and an improvement on the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I don't often say this about Hugo-winning films, but even ahead of the FX, I was wowed by the performances here. It could very easily have slipped into cliche, but doesn't. Making Ellie's lover the thoughtful evangelical Christian, rather than the senior government official (who is trimmed from the film), makes them both more interesting and gives her more agency. John Hurt possibly is hamming it up a bit, and James Woods as dodgy security apparatchik Kinz is a little two-dimensional, but everyone else is dead serious, and makes you take it seriously.

And this starts and ends with Jodie Foster, who leads without dominating. Always watchable, this must be one of her best performances (and she has many good ones). Here she meets the alien intelligence incarnated as her father:

Anyway, brilliant stuff. Next up is The Truman Show, which is ahead of Shakespeare in Love, the 1998 Oscar winner, on IMDB.

As usual, I went back and reread the book. The second paragraph (if one takes a quote from Kafka as being part of the first para) of the third chapter is:

In the control room she quickly reassured herself that all was in order. Through the window she could see a few of the 131 radio telescopes that stretched for tens of kilometers across the New Mexico scrub desert like some strange species of mechanical flower straining toward the sky. It was early afternoon and she had been up late the night before. Radio astronomy can be performed during daylight, because the air does not scatter radio waves from the Sun as it does ordinary visible light. To a radio telescope pointing anywhere but very close to the Sun, the sky is pitch black. Except for the radio sources.

I had read this soon after it came out in 1985 – I was a big Carl Sagan fan, of course, and lapped it up uncritically. Coming back to it a third of a century later, I can see the flaws, particularly those that were addressed by Zemeckis in making the film. There is way too much info-dumping, and too much philosophical debate on subjects that interested Sagan deeply, but are only loosely connected to the plot. Ellie's relationship with the senior government official is much less interesting to us (and indeed to her) than the screen relationship with the evangelical chap. The coda in which Ellie finds the secret message from the Creators to the Universe concealed in the digits of pi reminded me, perhaps unfairly, of the end of Douglas Adams' So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (which was published the year before, so this is mere coincidence). But on the other hand, fitting five passengers into the cosmic journey makes it more interesting on paper, where you cannot see the cinematic special effects. And I should not be too harsh: the whole thing is inspired by a sensawunda that I basically share and sympathise with. You can get it here.

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July 2012 books

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This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days, I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

Early in the month, I visited the Hague overnight for work – I cannot now remember why – and unusually we took a couple of days over the England and Wales leg of our family holiday, starting with cousins in Broadstairs (E in the middle has just got into Cambridge; how time flies):

where we made a small pilgrimage:

and went on to visit H in Brighton:

with dinner with cousins in Cardiff, one of them very new:

before an overnight ferry to Ireland.

This was also the month of the fantastic Olympic Games opening ceremony, and although we missed it at the time, I have grown to love it.

I read 28 books that month. For this listing, I have reclassified Sophocles and Whitman into a new Plays and Poetry section, in line with my more recent tallies. Lovejoy has an uncanny ability to tell real antiques from fake, but I am counting him as non-genre; and although I bought the Countdown Annual for its Doctor Who content, 90% of it is about other stuff so I classify it as general sf.

Non-fiction 7 (YTD 35)
Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth I, by Alison Plowden
Elizabeth Regina, by Alison Plowden
The Bible: The Biography, by Karen Armstrong
Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl, by Harriet Anne Jacobs
Russian Phoenix: The Story of Russian Christians, 988-1988, by Francis House
The Imprint of Place, by David Becker
Broadstairs: Heydays and Nowadays, by Nick Evans

Fiction (non-sf) 6 (YTD 20)
Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding
The Mermaids Singing, by Lisa Carey
Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid
The Spring of the Ram, by Dorothy Dunnett
Paid and Loving Eyes, by Jonathan Gash
Last Term at Malory Towers, by Enid Blyton

Plays and poetry 4
Antigone, by Sophocles
Oedipus the Tyrant, by Sophocles
Oedipus at Colonus, by Sophocles
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

sf (unless entirely Who) 4 (YTD 43)
The Postscripts BSFA sampler, ed. Peter Crowther
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon
The Countdown Annual (1971)

Doctor Who 6 (YTD 43)
The Fall of Yquatine, by Nick Walters
Code of the Krillitane, by Justin Richards
Risk Assessment, by James Goss
Wonderland, by Mark Chadbourn
Parasite, by Jim Mortimore
Coldheart, by Trevor Baxendale

Comics 1 (YTD 13)
Keys to the Kingdom, by Joe Hill

~7,600 pages (YTD 46,400)
9/28 (YTD 48/158) by women (2x Plowden, Armstrong, Jacobs, Carey, Kincaid, Dunnett, Blyton, Moon)
2/28 (YTD 7/158) by PoC (Jacobs, Kincaid)

Best were Speed of Dark (reread), which you can get herewhich you can get hereSpring of the Ram, which you can get here. Failed to be wowed by most of Leaves of Grass, thought there are some good bits; you can get it here.


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Friday reading

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Current
Fish Tails, by Sheri S. Tepper
Strange Bedfellows: An Anthology of Political Science Fiction, ed. Hayden Trenholm
Thirteen, by Steve Cavanagh
The HAVOC Files 2, ed. Shaun Russell

Last books finished
The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, Commonly Called Mother Ross by Daniel Defoe
The Beast of Stalingrad, by Iain McLaughlin
The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh, by Anne Holland
Contact, by Carl Sagan

Next books
The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams
The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Star Tales, ed. Steve Cole

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Second paragraph of third story ("Einstein and the Doctor", by Jo Cotterill):

‘I can't believe we're going to meet Einstein,’ Graham said, his eyes alight. ‘What a legend.’

A collection of six stories by different authors, each bringing the Thirteenth Doctor and her friends, and sometimes earlier incarnations too, into contact with historical celebrities Jenny T. Colgan does Amelia Earhart, Paul Magrs does Elvis, Jo Cotterill does Einstein, Steve Cole as well as editing the book does Houdini, Trevor Baxendale does Pythagoras and Mike Tucker does Audrey Hepburn, in most cases fighting off alien menaces and time paradoxes. The first two are actually rather poignant as Amelia and Elvis come close to avoiding their early deaths, but Destiny Must Prevail. This is not Great Literature, but it kept me entertained. You can get it here.

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“Grotto of the Dancing Deer”, by Clifford D Simak

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Second paragraph of third section:

John Roberts was waiting for him on the park bench. They nodded at one another, without speaking, and Boyd sat down beside his friend

When I first wrote this up in 2006, I said:

Simak is of course most famous for his characteristic rural and pastoral take on sf: David Pringle and John Clute, in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, describe "Wisconsin in about 1925" as being his true spiritual home, and his style as "constrained, nostalgic, intensely emotional beneath a calmly competent generic surface". At first sight, "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" might seem a new departure, set as it is in the foothills of the Pyrenees and Wahington DC. But in fact it is a quintessentially Simakian take on one of the oldest of sf tropes: if there were immortals living among us, what would they be like?

Most stories featuring immortals either treat immortality as a curse (the first of these probably being Gulliver's Travels) or as a blessing, probably one of several supertalents possessed by the story's protagonist or protagonists (see Zelazny or Heinlein). Simak's immortal is an ordinary rural bloke, with (unlike the hero of his Way Station) no particular explanation for, or purpose to, his immortality; he just gets along with life as best he can, and breaks his 20,000-year silence simply because he is lonely.

That's about all there is to it. The viewpoint character, Boyd, offers the immortal Luis the temptation of writing a book, becoming a millionaire; Luis rejects it. He in turn offers Boyd the location of Charlemagne's treasure, lost since Roncesvalles twelve centuries before; Boyd accepts the information but says he won't use it. Luis' immortality is not a blessing; he feels it has made him into a coward, a skulker, a participant rather than an observer. Actually, we know this is not entirely true; he has been a conscientious and responsible worker on Boyd's digs, who has studied in Paris and Oxford, and who is also a brilliant artist as Boyd has discovered. But it is clear that the worst thing about his immortality is the loneliness of a secret that cannot be told.

I love the way Simak economically sets the scene. "Luis was playing his pipe when Boyd climbed the steep path that led up to the cave." The first sentence introduces the two main characters, the main setting, and indeed the clue to the mystery (Luis' pipe). He does it again introducing the short section back in the States: "The last leaves of October were blowing in the autumn wind and a weak sun, not entirely obscured by the floating clouds, shone down on Washington." There's something very autumnal about Simak's style in general and perhaps about this story in particular. (Indeed, the choice of the word "autumn" rather than the usual American "fall" is both surprising and appropriate.) I wish I could write like that.

There must have also been an autumnal factor in the choice of the Nebula and Hugo voters. Simak, born in 1904, was by some way the oldest ever recipient of either award at the time, born six years before the previous record-holder, Fritz Leiber, who had won both awards with "Catch That Zeppelin" five years earlier. (Simak's record stood for two decades until the recent [in 2006] surge of affection for Jack Williamson.) "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" was his second last published short story. He had already been made a Grand Master (the third, after Heinlein and Williamson). It also can't have done any harm that he was the Guest of Honour at the Worldcon where the Hugo was awarded.

But basically this is a good story – probably my favourite of the joint winners in the Short Story category after Connie Willis' "Even the Queen" – which doesn't seem to have had a lot of competition (I haven't read any of the other nominated stories, but none has had much reprint history, which is often a good indicator, and the Hugo voting was pretty one-sided), and which happened fortunately also to be by a popular author in his last years as a writer. Not perhaps a classic, but certainly a gem.

(Small note on the story's title: As originally published in Analog it appears to have been "Grotto of the Dancing Deer", and that title seems to have then been used by all the early collections. But The Best of the Nebulas firmly uses "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer", which appears also to be the case for the two Simak collections, The Marathon Photograph and Over the River and Through the Woods, and for the Jack Dann/Gardner Dozois anthology Immortals. However in its latest publication, The SFWA Grand Masters, Volume 1 ed. Frederik Pohl (1999), the definite article is once more absent. I assume that Simak himself preferred to have it in, but since it seems to have won Hugo and Nebula without, I'll continue referring to the story as "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" here.

There's not much to add to that, fifteen years on. Maybe just worth noting that there are only three characters in the story (the protagonis, the immortal, and the friend in Washington), and they are all white men.

"Grotto of the Dancing Deer" won both Hugo and Nebula for Short Story in 1981. No other story was on both final ballots. It was a year when there was unusually little crossover between the two sets of awards. Best Novel went to The Snow Queen (Hugo) and Timescape (Nebula), each of which I would have thoguht more likely to win the other award rather than the one they did win. Best Novella went to “Lost Dorsai”, by Gordon R. Dickson (Hugo) and “Unicorn Tapestry”, by Suzy McKee Charnas (Nebula). Best Novelette went to “The Cloak and the Staff”, also by Gordon R. Dickson (Hugo) and “The Ugly Chickens”, by Howard Waldrop (Nebula), this last also being about unexpected historical survivors alive in the present day. The Hugo for best Dramatic Presentation went to The Empire Strikes Back.

Next in this sequence is another shorter piece that was the only joint winner in its year, “The Saturn Game”, by Poul Anderson. My memory is that I did not like it as much.

This is a much reprinted story, most recently in the fourth volume of Simak's collected fiction, appropriately titled Grotto of the Dancing Deer and Other Stories. I also have it in a couple of other places, notably Bova's Best of the Nebulas collection.

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Empire Games, by Charles Stross

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

They left the conference center in a Tesla with blacked-out windows, then drove her for half an hour through the trackless, officezoned industrial yards of Seattle. Their destination was an anonymous warehouse with a loading dock and a windowless door. There was nothing to distinguish it from hundreds of others except for a couple of unobtrusive bird-drones soaring overhead like legless, featherless seagulls with telephoto eyes. Inside, it was furnished with office cubicles and, disturbingly, a shipping container tricked out as a motel room—if motel rooms came without windows and had doors that locked from the outside. Gomez and her sidekick—Rita gathered he was called Jack, but his surname remained elusive—ushered Rita into a room like a compact Holiday Inn, then locked the door. Half an hour later it opened again and a uniformed cop shoved her suitcase inside. It had been searched and clumsily repacked, but everything was present.

First of the second series of Merchant Princes books by Charles Stross, where the ability to move between worlds is restricted to a few with the right gene, but the economic and military effects of the linkage between parallel universes is profound. Some very good setup of the intelligence connections between a world rather like ours, except with an even bigger disruptive event than 9/11, and another where a newish revolutionary regime in the east of North America is teetering on the brink of governance breakdown, with the added drama of the family relationship between the two protagonists. Looking forward to the next one. You can get this one here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is the omnibus of the first two books in the original series, Bloodline Feud. (Which I did actually read back in the day, but I'll go back to them happily.)

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