Monthly Archives: February 2022

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700 days of plague

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The end may be in sight. Other countries have moved a bit quicker than Belgium; I don’t really begrudge the authorities here their caution, but I’m very glad that restrictions are going to be drastically reduced from Friday.

I won’t be here for it. I’m going to the USA on Thursday for a week and a half, first to Gallifrey One in Los Angeles, reprising my last big trip before everything went wrong in 2020; then I hope a day in Vancouver, and a weekend in Seattle with an old friend, before getting home on the 28th. So I’ve been rather frantically trying to close off various work files this week, not helped of course by major developments for two of our more sensitive clients over the weekend.

I’ve also been following the Ottawa protests, with mounting disbelief. Gareth Evans, my former boss, used to joke that Canada is such a polite country that people say “thank you” to the ATMs when getting their money from the bank. We haven’t seen as much of that in recent days, as an externally funded group of unrepresentative activists has disrupted the life of the capital city. Here’s Amal El-Mohtar, expressing herself eloquently (as usual):

I’m just going to reiterate what I’ve been saying in private to family abroad thinking they’re supporting “freedom”: Centretown is under aggressive, belligerent, illegal occupation by white supremacists, & if you support them you are hurting me personally & I am ashamed of you.

— Amal El-Mohtar is on Hiatus until Feb 15 (@tithenai) February 6, 2022

These “protesters” want to decide government health policy by mob intimidation and are calling for the overthrow of a democratically elected government. I think it says a lot for Canadian tolerance that they have been allowed to endure this long. But as with 6 January 2021 in Washington, it’s a direct challenge to the rule of law, and it’s not clear that the rule of law has won.

The other direct challenge to the rule of law of course is the continuing awfulness of Boris Johnson, unapologetic for his repeated breaches of his own rules, or for his appalling slur on the Leader of the Opposition and the subsequent inflamed mob. Part of me hopes that the Conservatives dump this charlatan quickly, for the sake of the UK as a whole. Part of me hopes that he is allowed to linger on for months, with steadily dwindling authority, and that his successor is unable to rally a damaged and divided Conservative party in time to prevent a Labour victory. Keir Starmer has disappointed me on occasion, but at least he is not an instinctive, habitual liar and cheat.

Health-wise, the last of my follow-ups from my hospital visit in November revealed the rather surprising news that I have a granuloma on my larynx. It’s one of those psychological things where I went into the consultation convinced that there was nothing at all wrong, and came out of it convinced that I could clearly feel a lump in my throat. Apparently it is probably caused by acid reflux, can be treated with drugs and should go away without surgery. (It also turns out that I have extra arteries feeding my kidneys, but apparently this is found in 25% to 40% of cases, so it’s not quite as unusual as the extra bronchus in my trachea.)

As regards other people’s health, I was very sorry to see the news about Paul Byrne, who was only 44. He was probably a teenager when I last saw him, when his sister and my brother were an item, so it’s very sad news. (Also sad but less of a shock: former Slovak foreign minister and MEP Eduard Kukan, aged 82.)

I love Belgium in general. But I have been very frustrated by the post-Brexit customs charges on imports from the UK. Last week I finally received a keyboard for my iPad which physically arrived in Belgium in September. It was a replacement for faulty goods, so should not have been subject to VAT or import costs. I made many phone calls and sent many emails over the months, asking what had happened to my purchase; what struck me was the complete refusal of anyone I contacted to take responsibility for the delivery of my goods. A couple of times I got the answer that the package had been handed over to the customs service for a technical check; my problem with this response is that it clearly wasn’t true the first few times it was given, and in any case the responsibility for timely delivery still rests with the post office even if a different government department is involved. To a certain extent, Belgium is a country created by bureaucrats for bureaucrats; one is not reminded of this too often, I suppose. There would of course have been no need for an import procedure without Brexit, but there was no need for the import procedure to take 21 weeks.

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  • Mon, 12:56: RT @wake_oliver: Terry Nation’s work on Doctor Who, Survivors and Blake’s 7 is well-known, but his earlier science fiction work which led t…
  • Mon, 18:21: The Complete Debarkle: from 1880 to 2020, by Camestros Felapton https://t.co/e0QunSjEtZ
  • Mon, 21:16: RT @SkyNews: Former Prime Minister of Finland Alexander Stubb says Putin has already “got what he wanted”, adding “the world is right now f…
  • Mon, 21:55: RT @Ianblackford_MP: This is just awful. @Keir_Starmer has has death threats and yet @BorisJohnson shows no empathy or appreciation that he…
  • Tue, 10:45: RT @castlvillageman: To remind people that you needed a travel permit to go from Britain to Northern Ireland before EU membership. https://…

The Complete Debarkle: from 1880 to 2020, by Camestros Felapton

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Part 1 of our Debarkle saga is estories [sic] about the past. Most of them take place this century but some of the precursors to the events in our saga take place in the Twentieth Century. I can’t hope to do justice to the full breadth of science fiction’s history but I will be looking at selected events from that history that have repercussions to later events. What follows in this chapter is a whistle-stop tour over many decades up to the early 1990s to just briefly touch on some elements of the past that will re-appear later. We’ll touch briefly on the roots of early fandom but mainly highlight some parts of US history that will be important later.

This is on the BSFA Awards long-list; a chronology and analysis of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, and their unsuccessful attempts to take over the 2015 and 2016 Hugo Awards, by the anonymous Australian blogger known as Camestros Felapton. I’ll be upfront and say that I vote for (almost) anything with my own name in it, and I am quoted half a dozen times here so it’s getting my vote to go on the BSFA short-list. In particular, it becomes clear that my own 2011 review, of Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International was a major cause of resentment for him, the one thing he kept coming back to when complaining about mean people in SMOFdom. (At the time I wrote it, of course, I was not a SMOF at all; my involvement with Worldcons did not begin until the following year, and I was appointed as a future Hugo administrator for the first time only in 2015.)

I think in general Debarkle is fair, and attempts to understand both the Puppies and their opponents on their own terms. Throughout, the wider cultural and political context from which the Puppies emerged is linked to the specifics of the story – this includes Racefail, the Requires Hate affair and a bunch of other sf controversies, but also Gamergate, and the future Trump and Brexit victories of 2016.

After all that analysis, one is left a little mystified as to what the goal of the Sad Puppies actually was, once the founder Larry Correia had bowed out and his wounded pride was no longer a factor; the various mission statements made by Brad Torgersen and the Mad Genius Club are somewhat contradictory, to put it mildly. Torgersen is eloquent without actually being articulate, and this meant that a number of naïve, mostly right-wing fans with a vague political grievance threw their lot in with him, whereas other more sensible people took one look at his frothing blog posts and decided they’d seen enough.

As for the Rabid Puppies, they were a manifestation of Vox Day’s determined self-promotion and general evil intention of wrecking other people’s fun. (Vox Day has self-described as “evil” on numerous occasions, so I don’t feel that I am being judgemental here.) Some people saw the (very partial) success of the Rabid Puppy slate as proof of Vox Day’s cunning; in fact all it showed was that he was able to persuade his acolytes to throw away their money. His dismal lack of critical thinking skills, clear enough at the time from his political polemics, have been vividly demonstrated since by his gormless adoption of the QAnon / Trump mythos.

The book ends with the author’s “unified puppy theory” which attempts to explain Correia and Torgersen’s behaviour as manifesting a business development strategy, and it makes some sense, though really I think the briefest summary is that the principals simply lost the run of themselves, as we say back home.

The author has made the whole book available for free here. I wish they had spent a bit more time chasing down typos and tightening up the prose, and also I wish that they’d hyperlinked the footnotes, which would make for an easier read. But it’s very much worth getting, if you lived through that period, and it probably will stand as the best record of what exactly happened.

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The stucco ceilings of Jan-Christian Hansche, part 7: a visit to Gent

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F and I went to Gent last weekend to track down a couple more of the seventeenth century stucco ceilings of Jean-Christian Hansche. One of them is in the library of the law faculty of the University of Gent;Luc De Bie, the faculty secretary, wants it to be known that he is very happy to show visitors around by appointment, and he gave us a great tour of the buildings as a whole. I think I would recommend going at a warmer time of year, to take advantage of the courtyards.

The building is lovely, but I’m afraid I only had eyes for the library and its ceiling.

As you can see from the picture, there is a gallery all round the side of the room, from which you can get a closer look at the detail though you lose the big picture.

We were a group of six: left to right, here are F, Luc De Bie, and three friends of mine who live in Gent, R, JC and L – all masked and socially distanced.

To be honest, it’s the least adventurous of the seven Hansche ceilings that I have seen so far, and we wondered if it might have been one of his earlier works. It lacks the shocking three-dimensionality of the Park, Perk and Modave stuccos, or the lost ones in Germany, and even the Antwerp and Franc-Waret ceilings have a few projections into our space.

However, the detail is still beautiful. Mythological beasts cavort in pursuit of wisdom, and people and plants soothe the nerves.




Incidentally I think those are boy dragons. (Or possibly gryphons, someone on social media suggested.)


Hansche certainly had balls.

It did make me reflect that there are not very many women figures in Hansche’s work, and they generally aren’t as striking as the men. On the law library ceiling there are a couple of rather crude bat-like creatures with chest bumps, not quite as vivid as the dragons or whatever they are.


So that’s the Gent law library: a lovely space which students are fortunate to be able to use, as originally intended. It’s had a bit of a history – at one point it was a laboratory for chemistry students (one shudders to think of the effect on the stucco) and at a different time it was a gymnasium.

That is not the only work by Hansche in the Gent area. The other is in a private house,whose owner, Mrs D, generously allowed me and F to look at it last weekend while we were in the neighbourhood. What’s now Mrs D’s living room was originally built as a meeting room for one of the guilds, and has since been a coach repair shop and a perfume shop – again, think of the chemical effects on the plaster!

Mrs D’s ceiling is spectacular, at the top of my list along with the Park and Modave ceilings. It’s also less elevated than any of the others, including the law library, so you feel that you are right in the middle of Hansche’s world. At Mrs D’s request, we did not take photographs of her ceiling ourselves. However, there is a brilliant picture showing the scale in a 1995 book called Flanders: The Art of Living by Piet Swimberghe with photographs by Jan Verlinde.

In addition, the Gent city archive has several in stock, taken many years ago, which they have given permission for me to copy here. The most striking panel is the centrepiece, Phaethon and his chariot falling from the sky (Collection Archive Gent, Inventory number SCMS_FO_7496), also in the 1995 photograph above.

The figures of Phaethon and the horses are correctly proportioned and intruding into our space. It’s really startling. This was also the subject for one of the lost Hansche panels in Kleve:

The other panels in Gent are scenes from the Labours of Hercules, all again very three-dimensional. Here Herk is biffing the Lernaean Hydra, with his head, his club and the monster’s neck and head all solidly protruding – though the Hydra is usually depicted with more than one head (Collection Archive Gent, Inventory number SCMS_FO_7497):

It’s much more ambitious than Hansche’s treatment of the same subject at Modave, where the monster has more heads (as is traditional) but the 3D execution is much less:

Back in Gent, here is Hercules killing the dragon that guards the golden apples of Hesperides with a single arrow. His bow, like Phaethon’s reins, is ironwork rather than plaster. His arm and the dragon’s head, and the bow, are all in our space. The dragon’s tongue is slightly tinted red even after all these years (Collection Archive Gent, Inventory number SCMS_FO_7494, rotated).

Though again I found myself questioning Hansche’s depiction of women. This may possibly be Hercules seizing the belt of the Amazon queen Hippolytathe lion’s mane that he is wearing (Collection Archive Gent, Inventory number SCMS_FO_7493, cropped).

Anyway, I’m tremendously grateful to Mrs D for letting us see her ceiling.

So, I still have three nearby castles to visit with Hansche stucco ceilings, all in private ownership; I am in touch with one of the owners so far, but my next trip will have to wait until I get back from my coming US trip. This is a very interesting little project.

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Saturday reading

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Current
Scherven, by Erik de Graaf
The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake
The Dreamer’s Lament, by Benjamin Burford-Jones
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

Last books finished
Roger Zelazny, by F. Brett Cox
The Flaming Soldier, by Christopher Bryant
Chaos on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer

Next books
After Atlas, by Emma Newman
Duran Duran: The Book by Neil Gaiman

Howl’s Moving Castle

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Howl's Moving Castle won the 2006 Nebula Award for Best Script, beating Batman Begins, a Battlestar Galactica episode and Doctor Who's "The Girl in the Fireplace". It came nowhere near the Hugos, probably the farthest away from the Hugo Awards of any Nebula-winning film (I have not checked), with 58 nominating votes where 92 would have been needed to get on the 2006 ballot, beaten not only by the finalists but also by Peter Jackson's King Kong. IMDB counts it as a 2004 film, where it is ranked respectably, 13th on one list, 20th on the other, behind The Incredibles in both cases.

It's on Netflix in Belgium, so we decided to watch it with the Japanese soundtrack and English subtitles (therefore failing to share the experience of the Nebula voters, who were working from the English translation rather than Hayao Miyazaki's original text). I have to say that we thoroughly enjoyed it. Here's a trailer:

In case you don't know, the story is about young Sophie, who becomes involved with the wizard Howl; she is transformed into an old woman by a wicked witch, and spends the rest of the story trying to help Howl, return to her own youth, and incidentally stop the war between her kingdom and the one next door.

I felt it was a beautifully realised mixture of Japanese and European elements. The city-scapes are clearly Central European, as are Sophie and her family and neighbours, but Howl himself and junior wizard Markl are straight out of Japanese manga. Howl's castle is very reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations, except done rather better. The music is great and the script sparkles. The airborne sequences are particularly memorable. The plot resolution is a bit rushed and compressed at the end, but I was forgiving after having really enjoyed the first hour and fifty minutes.

I did find it intriguing that so many of the characters have names that are difficult to say in Japanese – Howl himself, junior wizard Markl, the fire demon Calcifer, the evil sorceress Suliman, Sophie's sister Letty. This may simply be my ignorance of Japanese, and heaven knows I am probably badly mangling every Japanese name that I attempt to say.

Anyway, I liked it a lot more than The Incredibles, another award-winning animated film of the same year, and I'm putting it halfway down my league table, just below Young Frankenstein but above Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

I had not read the original novel by the late great Diana Wynne Jones. the second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Her hand could not come near it. Some invisible wall stopped her hand about a foot from the door. Sophie prodded at it with an irritable finger. When that made no difference, she prodded with her stick. The wall seemed to be all over the door from as high as her stick could reach, and right down to the heather sticking out from under the doorstep.

There are a lot of differences with the film, and I guess it made me more conscious of what DWJ was reaching for as a writer. For a start, the novel is very English, and also Welsh, in a way that the film is not. The suburban streets are definitely not Continental, in a way that's difficult to describe but impossible to mistake. But also, DWJ is much more into complex family dynamics than into spectacle. Howl's apprentice Michael (rather than the Alpine-sounding Markl) is a grown young man rather than a boy. Sophie has two sisters and a stepmother. There is a lot (as usual with DWJ) about family dynamics, both Sophie's birth family and her adopted household in the moving castle. There is a distinct lack of spectacular flying scenes. The plot is still a bit tangly, and the resolution is just about better than the film, untidier than usual for DWJ. However, it's great fun and you can get it here.

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Scream of the Shalka, by Jon Arnold (and Paul Cornell)

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Next in the sequence of Black Archive monographs about individual Doctor Who stories, this time it’s the 2003 webcast which briefly promised to be a new start for the show, and was then blown out of the water by BBC Wales. I rewatched the actual story again, having been underwhelmed on first watching in 2012 when I wrote:

Scream of the Shalka is the reboot that didn’t come off. It is a shame in some ways because it has its strengths – notably the animation, which is far ahead of the other three in quality, Paul Cornell’s story-line of alien beings breaking into our world from an unexpected direction, and Sophie Okonedo’s performance as one-off companion Alison, and Derek Jacobi, not for the last time, as the Master. (Also keep an ear out for a brief appearance by David Tennant as a minor character.) But the biggest problem is Richard E. Grant’s Doctor, a pale and vampire-like presence whose arrogant character lies somewhere between the low point of Pertwee’s Doctor and the mid-point of Colin Baker’s for likeability. (Which is to say, not very high.) In the last episode we are told – by the Master, no less – that the Doctor is dealing with the scars of some dreadful conflict too awful to describe, an idea brought into NewWho also; and he gradually mellows throughout the story. In the end it feels a bit like The Movie, a false start, which relies a bit too much on continuity and does not do enough to make this about a character you would want to watch another seven, or twenty-six, or fifty years of. (For instance, Old Who fans will be baffled that the Master is now n sevraqyl ebobg; those new to Who will wonder why they are meant to care.) And there is an awful lot of screaming, though of course the clue is in the title.

This time around, I took it at an episode every evening, mostly glancing at the iPad while cooking, and it works maybe a little better at that pace, with the tension of the narrative tightly linked to the episodic structure (Cornell after all knew his stuff, as a reasonably experienced screenwriter). It’s also worth noting that the Shalka!Doctor is dealing with the recent loss of a dear companion, and presumably if this continuity had been prolonged we’d have learned more about that. You can (still) watch it here.

I also revisited Cornell’s novelisation. Second paragraph of third chapter:

The figure was green, its features smooth, like a polished marble statue. Its mouth was flexible and muscular, the only part of it that spoke of function over form. It was androgynous, and had no need for clothes. It was a representation of a human-being as seen from a distance, as seen from a superior culture.

When I first read it, also in 2012, I wrote:

I was really surprised and pleased by how much I enjoyed this book, the novelisation of the webcast story starring Richard E. Grant as the other Ninth Doctor. Perhaps it is partly that, at least in the opening pages, it so consciously draws on the style of the Dicks and Hulke novelisations of the Third and Fourth Doctor stories which meant so much to fans of the same sort of age as the author and me. But also a lot of the sequencing that didn’t quite work for me in the webcast seemed to me to be much better here: the Master’s new situation, the reasons for the Doctor’s emotional coldness, the back story to Alison’s relationship. We do miss out on Conor Moloney’s performance as Greaves, though. Perhaps the last week of work before the Christmas hols was a bad time to watch the webcast; I am certain that if I had read the book before watching it, I would have enjoyed both more.

Some of the similarities between Shalka continuity and New Who are even more noticeable here: that the Ninth Doctor is suffering PTSD after an awful war in which many people he cared about were killed, and that the new companion chooses to travel with the Doctor rather than remain in a (dull) interracial relationship. (As in Rose, there is also a monster leader underground controlling its minions who burst into the normal world to terrify humans, and the Doctor must descend to their lair to do battle, but those are fairly standard plot elements.)

The book also comes with a long afterword – a quarter of its total length – including the original story proposal and the author’s account of how the story came to be made, told with Cornell’s typical enthusiasm, but with first-hand accounts patched in from the production team as well. This may have turned out to be just a sidetrack in Who history but we are lucky that it is so well chronicled, including the story of how Cornell, on honeymoon in New Zealand, had to get a friend to break into his house to transmit the script to the BBC after an email went astray. It certainly adds to what is already a good book for fans to track down.

Not much to add this time. I really enjoyed the return to both the novelised story and the lengthy afterword. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Jon Arnold’s monograph, with footnotes (the third chapter is about the Master):

The role played by the Master was originally intended to be played by a holographic representation of a former Doctor. Cornell suggested that this should be the fifth Doctor, as ‘his kind and open personality would provide a nice contrast with our rather more harsh and edgy Doctor.’112 This was a contrast he’d used before, in his New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Revelation (1991), where the fifth Doctor was portrayed as an almost saintly presence in contrast to the seventh Doctor, who carried the weight of the universe on his shoulders. This would have given Shalka a very different flavour; the fifth Doctor was established as an unambiguously heroic figure, and whilst he often demonstrated a dry sense of humour, any edge to the relationship would have had to come from Grant’s Doctor, rendering him even less sympathetic than he initially appears to be. Cornell changed this setup for two reasons: firstly because he felt that holograms had been overdone in telefantasy shows113, and secondly so that this assistant could have a ‘complicated, somewhat dangerous relationship’ with the Doctor and be ‘programmed to do the nastier things that our emotionally wounded and defensive Doctor couldn’t bring himself to do’114. Essentially then, this version of the Master would retain the amoral methodology he had often demonstrated in his prior television appearances but, with apparently less selfish aims, he was now redefined as a hero.
112 Cornell, Scream of the Shalka, p202.
113 The obvious telefantasy antecedents Cornell is referring to which feature holograms able to assist but not interfere would have included Quantum Leap (1989-93), whose main character Sam was assisted by Al, a hologram of a person from Sam’s original time; the Emergency Medical Hologram called ‘the Doctor’ in Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001); and possibly even the command hologram from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993-95). He may have also been referring to Red Dwarf (1988-99 and since revived) and Stargate SG:1 (1997-2007); however, the holographic characters in these series serve very different roles. Holography was relatively uncommon in the series to this point, only appearing under that name in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), The Leisure Hive (1980), Time and the Rani (1987) and Dragonfire (1987). The series’ use of holograms has become more common since 2005.
114 Cornell, Scream of the Shalka, p202.

Arnold actually wrote the very first of the Black Archive series, on Rose which came out the year after Scream of the Shalka and thoroughly stole its thunder. The actual analytical content of the book is the shortest of any of the Black Archives I have seen so far. Given that Scream of the Shalka turned out to be a dead end in continuity, there is not a lot to say, and most of it had already been said by Paul Cornell.

However there’s one particularly interesting point covered off by Arnold in the first chapter, which is on the nature of the Doctor; namely, why is it that the average viewer (Arnold quotes Russell T. Davies and Elizabeth Sandifer, but I would agree with them) finds Grant’s performance rather lacking in vigour, while those who were present at the actual shoot (Paul Cornell and James Goss, both of whom I would normally regard as reliable witnesses) describe him as thoroughly and energetically engaged in the recording? Arnold’s answer is that the medium itself is the issue:

The problem is that each line is delivered clearly and in full before the next line begins; everyone politely waits for the other person to fully finish speaking before they begin their line. As Who’s Next‘s verdict on Shalka notes, this feeling of the ‘in-the-room intimacy of a radio drama […] sits oddly when you’re watching pictures on a screen at the same time.’82 Conversations therefore rarely develop the energy of genuine interaction between two people, and instead feel like two people speaking in the same place and same time but not actually communicating. Whilst animation ameliorates this to a degree by the simple use of close-ups and characters facing each other, it drains the energy and emotion from performances; we don’t get proper reactions to build a scene.
82 Clapham, Mark, Eddie Robson and Jim Smith, Who’s Next: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who (2005), P390.

This is one of the most interesting production-related insights I’ve gleaned from the Black Archive series so far.

Just for completeness, the (few) chapters of Arnold’s monograph cover:

  • the nature of the Shalka!Doctor, as already discussed, and his roots in Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Cornell’s other work;
  • Alison as a companion;
  • The Master, as noted;
  • Scream of the Shalka as a reboot story;
  • a conclusion to the main narrative: “It’s a brave, flawed attempt to find a future for Doctor Who when no-one thought it had one.”
  • an appendix debating the extent to which Scream of the Shalka is canon;
  • another appendix looking at “The Feast of the Stone”, the only other published story in Shalka!Doctor continuity;
  • a final, very long appendix presenting the sequel which came closest to being made, Simon Clark’s “Blood of the Robots” (other script proposals by Paul Cornell and Jonathan Clements were recycled elsewhere in the Whoniverse; the one by Stephen Baxter has not resurfaced).

If you’re intrigued by the possibilities of the Shalka!Doctor continuity, this book will tick your boxes. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)

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The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu

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Second paragraph of third chapter of The Three-Body Problem (first half of third paragraph in the English translation):

她听到有个男声在轻轻叫自己的名字。 She heard a male voice softly calling her name.

Second paragraph of Part III of The Dark Forest:

罗辑从冬眠中醒来。 Luo Ji awoke from hibernation.

Young F kindly got me the second volume of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy for Christmas, having correctly noted that I already had the first and third, and I decided to reread all three to give me the full sense of the narrative. Then the BSFA long list came out just as I was about to finish The Dark Forest, so I've put Death's End on hold for now.

When I first read The Three-Body Problem, I ranked it second on my Hugo ballot for that year (which of course it won) and wrote:

This is a novel about contemporary Chinese scientists dealing with alien contact, video games and the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. It's very neatly constructed and convincing. Ken Liu's footnotes on Chinese politics and history inform without intruding. It slightly lost me when the aliens actually appeared, but I still really enjoyed it.

On re-reading, if anything I felt it worked better this time round; the aliens are suitably alien and internally divided, and I think first time round I had slightly lost patience because the book is quite long. You can get it here.

The Dark Forest slightly threw me near the beginning when the United Nations appoints four people (all men) with plenipotentiary and unaccountable power to spend public money as they see fit on resources to deal with the alien Trisolaran menace. But having swallowed this implausibility, I thought it was worked out well, with two particularly good sequences – an orbital assassination and a spaceship battle. The last part of the book is set 200 years on, and I liked the portrayal of the problems of someone who has been asleep for two centuries trying to integrate with a world that has changed. I'm sorry I didn't get to this sooner; I might have enjoyed the third volume more. You can get it here.

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February 2015 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.

As was increasingly routine, I had two work trips to London that month; also Anne and I went to a concert in Antwerp, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of my favourite composer, Sibelius. And at the end of the month my sister C and her daughter S came to visit, and we went to the Atomium.

I read 20 books that month.

Non-fiction: 3 (YTD 11)
Het Achterhuis, by Anne Frank / The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, see also later note on Alfred Dussel / Fritz Pfeffer
Anne Frank: The book, the life and the afterlife, by Francine Prose
Tree and Leaf, by J R R Tolkien (has a little more non-fiction content than fiction)

Het Achterhuis The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank: The book, the life and the afterlife Tree and Leaf

Fiction (non-sf): 1 (YTD 2)
I Don't Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson

I Don

SF (non-Who): 9 (YTD 24)

The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne
Mars Evacuees, by Sophia McDougall

The Abyss Beyond Dreams, by Peter Hamilton – did not finish
Amnesia, by Peter Carey
Firefall, by Peter Watts
The Blood Red City, by Justin Richards
Cataveiro, by E.J. Swift – not finished
Transit of Earth (anthology, no editor credited)
Descent, by Ken MacLeod

Transit of Earth

Doctor Who, etc: 4 (YTD 7)
Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks
Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters
Dragon's Wrath, by Justin Richards
Doctor Who Annual 2015

Warmonger Reckless Engineering Dragon Doctor Who Annual 2015

Comics : 2 (YTD 4)
Bétélgeuse, v2: Les Survivants, by Leo
Boerke bijbel, by Pieter De Poortere

Bétélgeuse, v2: Les Survivants Boerke bijbel

~6,000 pages (YTD 14,500)
6/19 by women (YTD 16/48) – Frank, Prose, Pearson, Byrne, McDougall, Swift
0/19 by PoC (YTD 1/48)

Always worth returning to Anne Frank, whose diary you can get hereDescent, by Ken MacLeod, which you can get here. Unimpressed with both Hamilton's Abyss Beyond Dreams, which you can get here, and Boerke Bijbel, which you can get here.

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Why I Write, by George Orwell

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This is a nice collection of four essays by Orwell, three very short and one much longer, and I'm going to treat them separately, because that gives me an excuse to inflict Orwell's gorgeous prose on you several times.

"Why I Write"

Third paragraph:

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous "story" about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my "story" ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: "He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf," etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The "story" must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

An interesting bit of self-reflection, available here, in which Orwell starts by describing his own artistic growth, and then the impact of politics on his thoughts and words. But he finished with a description which I recognise from some writers who I have known:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

"The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius"

Second paragraph of third section:

One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and south England loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English and Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of “France” and “the French”, recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which in fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outside, even the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance.

The longest essay in the book, taking up more than two thirds of the 120 pages, available separately here. On the one hand, it's very much moored in the particular time it was written – 1941, when it was not at all clear who was going to win the war – and with a particular agenda in mind – the necessity and inevitability of a Socialist government which would win the war and modernise Britain. In fact, of course, the Labour victory came only after the war was over, though it's certainly fair to say that the war could not have been won without the social changes that came with it. On the other, some of Orwell's observations are simply brilliant.

Since the ’fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for opening tins.

When I posted that last sentence admiringly to Facebook, lots of people jumped on me with examples of successful bayonet charges since Orwell wrote; but his point is that the soldiers were not being taught anything else.

"A Hanging"

Third paragraph:

Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. ‘For God's sake hurry up, Francis,’ he said irritably. ‘The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren't you ready yet?’

A detailed account of an execution in a jail in Burma, effectively and efficiently conveying the horror and pointlessness of the situation.

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You'd better all come out and have a drink,’ he said quite genially. ‘I've got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.’

"Politics and the English Language"

Third paragraph:

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

This is a tremendous piece on writing clearly. He is particularly interested in political writing, which he felt was especially bad:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.

I don't know if things have improved much since Orwell's day. But his six rules for good writing should be on the wall of everyone who writes for a living, or indeed for a hobby:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

A short book that I picked up at the John Rylands Library in Manchester in November, but you can get it here. It almost immediately hit the top of my unread non-fiction pile. Next on that pile is Lost in Translation, by Ella Frances Sanders.

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The God Complex, by Paul Driscoll

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

One of the more plausible interpretations of The Shining covered in the documentary movie, Room 237 (2012), is that the movie is a reworking of the Theseus and the Minotaur myth. At the end of the film Jack dies inside a hedge maze, a location that Kubrick added to King’s novel. The association of Jack with the Minotaur is foreshadowed elsewhere in the movie: there are moments when Jack appears taurine-like – as if he’s a bull about to charge; there is a poster of a skier who looks like the Minotaur beside another of a cowboy riding a bull; and in another scene, Jack’s wife, Wendy, makes a comment about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, reminiscent of Ariadne’s thread. The God Complex is far more explicit in its mining of the Minotaur myth, but its association with The Shining extends far beyond this shared mythical inspiration.

Next in the sequence of Black Archive monographs on individual Doctor Who stories, which I am reading at the rate of two a month in an attempt to catch up. (Both this and the next one in sequence are numbered #10 on the cover, but it seems that this is really #9.)

The God Complex is one of my less favourite episodes in one of my less favourite series of New Who, and I didn’t write it up at the time, nor did I recommended it in my epic “Which New Who to Watch” post. In case you need your memory refreshed, here’s the “Next Time” trailer:

It’s the one where the Doctor, Amy and Rory are stuck in a hotel with a few other characters, of whom the best developed is Rita, played by Amara Karan; but it turns out that the hotel is a prison for a Minotaur. Personally I didn’t feel that the plot held together at all, and the scene at the end, where the Doctor basically kicks Amy and Rory out of the Tardis to start their lives without him, was disappointingly underdeveloped. But others differ; here, for instance, is Matt Smith reflecting on what the story might have told us about the Doctor:

In a panel at Dragon Con 2017, Matt Smith revealed his own theory for what was in the mysterious Room 11 in The God Complex and it’s much darker than you’d expect. #DoctorWho #MattSmith pic.twitter.com/It95XFR3PJ

— Tom Bowen (@ThetaSigma2017) January 27, 2022

Driscoll is clearly also a fan of the story, finding a lot more depth to it than I had imagined was there. The chapters are as follows:

  • The symbolism of the Minotaur, and modern treatments of the story in and beyond Doctor Who;
  • The roots of the story in Orwell’s 1984 (surveillance in particular);
  • The roots of the story in The Shining, film rather than book (hotel horror, obviously, though he also blames it for the weakness of the closing scene);
  • The roots of the story in previous Who stories about bases under siege and about religion (though I think he misses a couple of interesting examples on religion);
  • A rather good chapter on fear and terror as storytelling devices;
  • A more confused chapter trying to work out what the story is trying to tell us about faith and religion;
  • A long chapter on the Doctor’s fallibility as a hero;
  • A chapter on the role of the companions in Doctor Who;
  • a concluding short chapter wondering what the hell the symbolism of the fishbowl is meant to be?

Driscoll likes the story more than I did, but is not unaware of its flaws. I went back myself and watched it again to prepare for this post, but I think it will be a while before I repeat the effort. You can get Driscoll’s book here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)

The spiritual progress of William Charlton Hibbard

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Sarah and William Hibbard

My great-great-grandfather, William Charlton Hibbard, lived from 1814 to 1880. He was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, the oldest of six, and grew up between there and Waterford, just across the border in Vermont. In 1849 he married Sarah Ann Smith (1815-1891), from Dover at the other end of New Hampshire; they spent most of their lives in Boston (William had moved there in 1837 to pursue a career in engineering), and had five children. I'm preparing some deeper research into the lives of the Hibbard family, but some really interesting stuff has come up about William Charlton Hibbard's religion, which I'm summarising here.

William's father (and my 3x great-grandfather), Lyman Hibbard (1783-1865), is variously described as a lumberman and a mechanic in official documents. But the only time he is mentioned in the three-volume History of Littleton, published in 1905, is in the context of the Congregational Church, Littleton's first place of worship:

In this period [between 1803 and 1820] also Lyman Hibbard was one of the most active and intelligent members [of the Congregational Church]. It was his fortune soon afterward to be the first member of the church to be arraigned at its bar, and to suffer the penalty of excommunication. His offence was heresy, the particular form of which the record does not state, but it would doubtless be covered by the term "agnostic," which [T.H.] Huxley applies to all sorts of doubters.

Lyman's father, my 4xgreat-grandfather David Hibbard, was deacon of the Congregational Church in nearby Concord, Vermont, so expelling his son must have been a pretty big deal. But the dating of this incident is frustratingly inexact. We know that Lyman was born in 1783, and married Rebecca Charlton in 1813. Her father is also noted as being one of the pillars of the Congregational Church in Littleton, so the balance of probabilities is that Lyman was excommunicated some time after the marriage rather than before, in other words around the time William was born in 1814 or when he was very young.

Three decades later, it's interesting to note that William and Sarah married in a civil ceremony in New York in 1849, the officiant being a local alderman. Civil weddings were of course far from unknown in the USA at that time. But of eighteen weddings recorded in that week's The Literary American, theirs is one of only two non-religious ceremonies, held instead in the Irving House Hotel on Broadway. I can't find any strong connection for either side of the family with New York City; I wonder if this was a mid-nineteenth century "destination wedding" for the New Englanders, Broadway being 1849's Las Vegas or Antigua?

There is another fascinating hint to William's beliefs in an official document, the transcript of an 1853 patent infringement court case between inventor Ross Winans and the Eastern Railroad Company, where he appeared as an expert witness for Winans (who claimed intellectual property rights over the design of passenger railroad carriages). The official transcript runs to several pages of technical inquiry about Hibbard's qualifications and links to the parties, and then turns startlingly theological. William had declined to take a religious oath at the start of his deposition, and the Eastern Railroad's lawyers pounced on him:

“Do you believe in the existence of a God, who will reward the good deeds and punish the evil deeds done in the body, in a future state of existence?” “Do you believe in the existence of a Supreme Being; and that he will reward and punish you according to your deserts?”

William refused to answer either of these questions.

The reference to the 1852 Howe vs Bradford trial is also intriguing. This was a notorious case where the inventor Walter Hunt had clearly been the first person to develop a sewing-machine, in the 1830s, but had never developed the idea as a business proposition; twenty years on, Elias Howe and Isaac Singer were locked in a series of law suits to claim patent rights, one of which went to full jury trial. Hunt himself was a disastrous witness; he had more or less forgotten about his own invention, and had a tendency to tell people about his unorthodox views about God. I cannot find a reference to the judge saying, as William Hibbard reports, that Hunt was "not bound to answer" questions about his religious views; on the other hand, it was widely reported in the news that the judge actually refused to allow Hunt to testify, because he was an atheist – here, for instance, is a representative article from a local newspaper in Virginia, the Staunton Spectator (21 July 1852):

Walter Hunt and William Hibbard may well not have used the word "atheist" to define their own beliefs, but it was an easy label for their opponents to put on them.

Likewise, their relatives. My grandmother was born in 1899, almost twenty years after William had died, but she seems to have downloaded as much as she could from her own father, who was William's second son, and later from her stepmother. My grandmother notes that William

was an atheist, and left to himself he would have preferred his children to have no religious instruction at all, but my step-mother told me that Papa told her that his mother – though I doubt if she had any strong religious belief herself – said that the children must be brought up like the other children in West Roxbury, near Boston, where they lived, and she saw to it that they attended the Unitarian church there.

My grandmother's note may sound like her own grandmother sending off the kids to a nice respectable Sunday school, but that is not quite what was happening. The Unitarian church in West Roxbury is now named in honour of Theodore Parker, the firebrand minister who was based there from 1837 (the year that William Hibbard arrived in Boston) to 1846. The church congregation was very progressive, firmly opposed to slavery and supporting social reforms, and members included Louisa May Alcott, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (It is intriguing that there is no explicit mention of Sarah attending the church herself, but maybe I am over-interpreting.)

The only obituary that I have found of William is in a place that greatly surprised me: Banner of Light, a weekly newspaper for Spiritualists. Its 5 June 1880 issue sadly notes:

Mr. William C. Hibbard, of West Roxbury, joined the procession of the homeward bound on the 28th ult [i.e. May]. Mr. H. was a parishioner of Theodore Parker, and had his attention directed to the subject of Spiritualism many years since by Prof. Mapes. In connection with that gentleman he made a very thorough scientific investigation and analysis of its phenomena, and became convinced of its truth, as every one invariably does who follows with an equal degree of honesty and determination a similar line of inquiry. He was intimately associated with the pioneers and early workers in social reforms; and zealously opposed all oppression and bigotry, whether introduced under a cloak of sanctity or otherwise. He claimed individual sovereignty for himself and all others; hence he cared nothing for what folks thought or said, pursuing the even tenor of his way, conscious of his own integrity and regardless of unfriendly criticism.

His conceptions of a Supreme Power were very far in advance of those commonly accepted. He despised all shams in men and dogmas in religion. He did not estimate the value of man by the quality of his clothes, or consider the amount of money he possessed as an indication of what he was worth. He thought nothing of preaching but very much of practicing. With such views and feelings he could have but little sympathy with the thoughts and purposes of the majority. He was, consequently, during his later years, what the world would term “much shut up in himself” but which really was a living of the life and an association with the intelligences of another world while held by his body to this. He had learned much, but no one more than he felt that he had much to learn. He has gone and taken his treasures with him.

One can read quite a lot between the lines there, but maybe that's for another time.

It's worth remembering that in mid-nineteenth century America, spiritualism was regarded as totally scientifically robust by its proponents, and that they in turn tended to be politically progressive, with for instance Harriet Beecher Stowe writing a pro-Spiritualist pamphlet as well as Uncle Tom's Cabin. For a man like my great-great-grandfather, an engineer brought up without a particular church tradition and perhaps with a distrust of organised religion, the proofs of an afterlife offered by Spiritualism, "scientifically" proven but unshackled by doctrine, may have been rather compelling. My own encounters with Spiritualism have not been convincing – at the age of 18 I attended a service in Northamptonshire where rather standard English hymns were interspersed with a tired medium passing ambiguous messages to the congregation from the voices in her head. But everyone must find their own way.

The Banner of Light obituary also confirms the connection with Theodore Parker of the West Roxbury Unitarian church. Although Parker had left his formal leadership role some years before the Hibbard children were born, he continued to circulate in that community (and anyway William had probably got to know him soon after they both moved to Boston in 1837). There's a bit of a conflict here between the progressive politics of Parker and the awful views of Ross Winans, who tried to get Maryland to join the Confederacy in 1861; but that was some years after the 1853 court case where William Hibbard had testified in his favour.

It may also be worth noting that William and Sarah's first child, Mary, died before her third birthday, in 1852. They were of course not the only parents ever to suffer that kind of tragedy, but it must have affected them deeply, and it is the sort of experience that can lead to a reassessment of one's views about the afterlife. Their other four children all survived to adulthood and three have living descendants, including me; the fourth lives on in biology. William and Sarah have two living great-grandchildren, a brother and sister in their eighties who still live in New England, the only branch of the family that has consistently stayed in the region for the last 170 years; and it's pleasing to report that they were brought up as Unitarians, in the family tradition.

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Saturday reading

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Current
Roger Zelazny, by F. Brett Cox

Last books finished
Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones
Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz
The [Unofficial] Dr Who Annual [1964], by David May
The War in the Air, by H. G. Wells

Next books
Scherven, by Erik De Graaf
The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake

690 days of plague

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Here we still are, twenty-three months in. But I think (and I know I’ve said this before) the end is in sight. The peak for infections in Belgium seems to have been passed about the time of my last ten-day update; hopitalisations, ICU numbers and deaths are still rising, but I think the first two at least are likely to peak next week. Even the most Eeyore-ish of Belgian health experts thinkswe’ll be able to relax the restrictions soon.

Apparently our 80% teleworking mandate is stronger than anywhere else in Europe art the moment – no more than one day a week in the office, and the office should not have more than 20% of personnel present – and I must admit it’s really getting to me. There’s nothing to beat in-person contact with colleagues and friends; when you try and get someone’s attention on Zoom, you’ve already lost the spontaneity of popping down the corridor or spotting someone at the coffee machine. And in general I’ve been a passive supporter of lockdown measures, but I did wonder if the latest tranche has actually made much difference.

Myself, I noted in the last ten-day entry that I’d had a persistent sore throat; it lingered with me for more than a week, and I needed a full day and two afternoons in bed to really get rid of it. Woke yesterday feeling much more like myself, which is a relief. I do wonder if the “Long COVID” effects made it more difficult for me to shake the bug. I kept neurotically taking home COVID tests every couple of days, and they kept consistently coming up negative.

In other health news, I had a full specialist check-up of my heart on the Friday before last. When I went to hospital in November, the doctors thought they might have spotted something in the EKG, and given that my father and both my grandfathers died of sudden heart attacks in their sixties, and I turn 55 this year, my instinct is to be cautious. The final phase of this was to wear a heart monitor for 24 hours, hooked up to my torso by half a dozen taped-on sensors that made me feel like the Emperor Dalek.

That was jolly uncomfortable and I found it almost impossible to sleep with it on. When the moment came at 5pm on the Saturday that I could take it off, I was actually driving home from Antwerp with Anne, but I pulled over, stripped to the waist, pulled off all the sensors and had a damn good scratch, no doubt to the consternation of passers-by. Anyway the verdict is that apart from mild hypertension there’s nothing wrong with my heart, which is a relief, but I’ll get in the habit of annual check-ups given my family history.

I’m going to keep up these posts at least until we reach the end of restrictions in Belgium, which I suspect means I’ll do another three or four. See you next time.

Neither Unionist nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War by Stephen Sandford

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

On the eve of the First World War the officer strength of the British regular army was approximately 12,738 with a further 2,557 attached to the Special Reserve and 3,202 in the Reserve of Officers. Of a further 9,563 officers of the Territorial Force, only 1,090 had agreed to serve overseas in the event of war.2 While on the surface this may appear sufficient for an army that was 10,932 men (6%) under its peacetime establishment, it was totally inadequate for one that was to expand by over a million men in the first four months of the war.3 At full strength an infantry battalion required 30 officers, although in peacetime — except for units stationed in India — this was rarely achieved. An infantry battalion was commanded by a Lieutenant-Colonel with a Major as second in command who, together with the machine gun officer, adjutant, quartermaster and a medical officer attached to the battalion from the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), made up the battalion headquarters. A further six officers were attached to each of the battalion's four rifle companies, one of whom would double as battalion transport officer. It was usual practice for a battalion on active service to leave one of its officers at the regimental depot to bring out its 'first line' reinforcements to replace casualties. An infantry battalion would therefore usually go to the front with 29 regimental officers and a medical officer.4
2 Statistics of the military effort of the British Empire, pp 234-5; the annual return of the Territorial Force for the year 1913, [Cd 72541, H.C. 1914, lii, 5 and 125.
3 Parl. Deb. Fifth Ser., 63, 25 May 1914, col. 37; Statistics of the military effort of the British empire, p. 364.
4 Ronald Clifford, 'What is a battalion?' in Stand to! no. 30 (Winter 1990), pp 17-19; 22.

My grandfather fought in the First World War with the 6th battallion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and indeed ended the war as its commanding officer; the 6th Dubs were part of the 10th (Irish) Division, which mainly fought in the east – Gallipoli, Macedonia and Palestine. This book is full of detail about the nature of the Division, which unlike the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions was not aligned with either Nationalism or Unionism. I found it a bit hard to get through. There are lots and lots of statistics about the background of the soldiers, especially the officers, and the comparative disciplinary record; the actual fighting occupies only 22 pages, less than 10% of the book; only two maps are reproduced, and they are not much help in trying to understand the narrative. There is a rather poor chapter analysing military leadership as demonstrated in the Division's own leaders, and a better one on the lessons learned, or not learned, about military tactics in the course of the campaign. I couldn't really recommend it to anyone who isn't a First World War completist. But it did point me to the diary of Noel Drury, who would have known my grandfather well; it is apparently being published in April, edited by an old friend of mine, so I look forward to getting it – sometimes the primary sources are a better read than the later analysis.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Twinkling of an Eye, by Brian Aldiss, of which I have higher hopes.

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January 2015 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.

Two trips to London and one to Bulgaria this month. This was also the month that Ulster University appointed me to a Visiting Professorship, which I still hold. And Croatia elected a new president.

This was also the month that I was inspired to start my series of posts on the best known books set in each European country, according to Goodreads and LibraryThing, starting with England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

I read 29 books that month. Few of them got blogged at the time, because of various reasons.

Non-fiction: 7
Circe's Cup, by Clare Carroll
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin
Een geschiedenis van België voor intelligente kinderen (en hun ouders), by Benno Barnard and Geert van Istendael
Getting the Buggers to Behave, by Sue Cowley
Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, by Ambrose Bierce
The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided The Battle Of Waterloo, by Brendan Simms
The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest by Paul Nolan, Dominic Bryan, Clare Dwyer, Katy Hayward, Katy Radford & Peter Shirlow

Circe's Cup Mary Wollstonecraft Turner's Taoisigh geschiedenis van België Getting the Buggers to Behave Write It Right Longest Afternoon Flag Dispute

Fiction (non-sf): 1
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

SF (non-Who): 15 (all Clarke submissions)
Afterparty, by Daryl Gregory
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
Meatspace, by Nikesh Shukla
The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross
God's Dog, by Diego Marani
Cibola Burn, by James S.A. Corey
Fontoon, by John Schoneboom – did not finish
Bowl of Heaven, by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Sand, by Hugh Howey
Black Moon, by Kenneth Calhoun
TimeStorm, by Steve Harrison
Infidel, by Kameron Hurley
The Country of Ice Cream Star, by Sandra Newman
Future Perfect, by Katrina Mountfort
Tigerman, by Nick Harkaway

Doctor Who, etc: 3
The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis
The Domino Effect, by David Bishop
Oh No It Isn't!, by Paul Cornell

The Ultimate TreasureThe Domino Effect

Comics and cartoons: 3
Turner's Taoisigh, by Martin Turner
Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel
The Blood of Azrael, by Scott Gray, Michael Collins, Adrian Salmon and David A. Roach

Are You My Mother Blood of Azrael

~8,500 pages
10/29 by women (Carroll, Tomalin, Cowley, Dwyer/Hayward/Radford, Leckie, Hurley, Newman, Mountfort, Bechdel)
1/29 by PoC (Shukla)

Best book this month, and eventually the best book of the year other than the Clarke Award list, was Claire Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which you can get here, closely follwoed by Ann Leckie's Ancillary Sword, which you can get here, and Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, which you can get here.

A couple of turkeys from the Clarke submissions, though, Diego Marani's God's Dog, which you can get here, and John Schoneboom's Fontoon, which you can get here.

The Doctor – His Lives and Times, by James Goss and Steve Tribe

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Second paragraph of Third Doctor section (presented as the Brigadier’s memoirs):

Memory is odd (says he, writing his memoirs) but in some ways my recollections of my years with UNIT’s infuriating scientific adviser are sharper than my time in Peru, or even my recent visit in the Black Archive with Sarah Jane Smith (of whom, more anon, I’ll bet).

One of the glossy volumes produced by the BBC in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who – and isn’t it weird that we’ll get to the 60th anniversary next year? This is really very nice indeed. For each Doctor, we get an account of the TV stories written from the perspective of one or more of the characters – Susan, Ian Chesterton, the Brigadier, occasionally the Doctor himself – combined with a collage of other mocked-up material, of which one of my favourites is this Salamander election poster:

Each chapter then includes a box on the lead actor, and an assembly of quotes about the making of the show from those who were involved. There are also a few short commentaries on individual stories by guest commentators, most of whom have strong connections with the show, the exception being Sir Tim Berners-Lee on The War Machines. As my regular reader knows, I rate James Goss very highly as one of the best Who writers, and this really doesn’t disappoint. It’s the sort of thing that could, perhaps, be easily updated to include the next ten years and two Doctors for 2023; and would it be too much to hope that such an update could also include Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures and Class?

You can get it here (really cheaply).