August Books

I just realised that this did not go live as I had planned on 31 August, the day I arrived in Chicago, so here it is now.

Non-fiction 8 (YTD 70)
Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen
Manifesto, by Bernardine Evaristo
The Life of Col. Samuel M. Wickersham, ed. Edward Wickersham Hoffman
The Curse of Fenric, by Una McCormack
The Time Warrior, by Matthew Kilburn
That Damn’d Thing Called “Honour”: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860, by James Kelly
The Kosovo Indictment, by Michael O’Reilly
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich

Non-genre 2 (YTD 13)
Alaska Sampler 2014: Ten Authors from the Great Land, eds Deb Vanasse and David Marusek
The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

SF 9 (YTD 69)
Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher
The Initiate, by Louise Cooper
Sprawl, ed. Cat Sparks
The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter
Roger Zelazny’s Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt
The Harp and the Blade, by John Myers Myers
“Tangents”, by Greg Bear
The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett
The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 23)
Dalek Combat Training Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker
The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen
Scary Monsters, by Simon A. Forward
Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric, by Ian Briggs
Doctor Who and the Time Warrior, by Terrance Dicks

Comics 1 (YTD 13)
Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor: Operation Volcano, by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel

6,100 pages (YTD 49,800)

9/25 (YTD 78/192) by non-male writers (Evaristo, McCormack, Alexievich, Vanasse, Howard, “Kingfisher”, Cooper, Sparks, Hall)

1/25 (YTD 25/192) by a non-white writer (Evaristo)

360 books currently tagged “unread”, after adding lots of Doctor Who comics

Reading now
The Traders’ War, by Charles Stross
Brasyl, by Ian McDonald
Mr Britling Sees It Through, by H.G. Wells

Coming soon (perhaps)
Speaker to the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
Political Animals, by Bev Laing
Empire Of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi
Jocasta, by Brian Aldiss
Complete Short Stories: the 1950s, by Brian Aldiss
The End of the Day, by Claire North
The Harem of Aman Akbar, by Elizabeth Scarborough
Null States, by Malka Older
Voorbij de grenzen van de ernst, by Kamagurka
Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman
Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney
The Clockwise War, by Scott Gray
The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
Metamorphoses, by Ovid
What If? by Randall Munroe
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross
Thirteen, by Richard Morgan
The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells

November 2017 books

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.

That month I travelled to Washington DC, Sofia in Bulgaria, and twice to London. I don’t seem to have taken a lot of photos; the vast majority were from a pleasant afternoon at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum near Dulles airport.

More domestically, here’s a rainbow framing Leuven station.

I read 16 books that month.

Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 48)
Isaiah Berlin
, by Michael Ignatieff
Washington, D.C.’s Vanishing Springs and Waterways, by Garnett P. Williams
Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee
Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response, by Tony Connelly

Fiction (non-sf): 4 (YTD 24)
A Man of Parts, by David Lodge
Dear Old Dead, by Jane Haddam
Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle
Mutiny on the Bounty, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 69)
The Deepest Sea, by Charles Barnitz
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
The Knight of the Swords, by Michael Moorcock
The Queen of the Swords, by Michael Moorcock
The King of the Swords, by Michael Moorcock

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 48)
Short Trips: Indefinable Magic, ed. Neil Corry
A Life Worth Living ed. Simon Guerrier
Doctor Who: The American Adventures, by Justin Richards

4,900 pages (YTD 53,600)
2/16 (YTD 57/214) by women (Lee, Haddam)
0/16 (YTD 16/214) by PoC

It was great to return to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which you can get here, and Tony Connelly’s masterful account of Brexit is going to be a set text for decades; you can get it here. Wolf in White Van was pretty bad, but you can get it here.

The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Eric’s suite contained the pampered luxury I expected, with overstuffed furniture and a magnificent view of the Plaza outside. A bottle of champagne stood on a low glass table, uncorked. The air was filled with the tinny tones of a ragtime band, emanating from a wireless set – not the compact government-issue People’s Receivers you would have found in every British home in those days, and known universally as Marvin’s Megaphones, but a big chunk of American hardware in a walnut cabinet.

This is a sequel to The War of the Worlds, authorised as such by the H.G. Wells estate, set in an Earth which overcame the original Martian invasion and where England has become a dystopian dictatorship. The narrator is the suffragette sister-in-law of the narrator of The War of the Worlds, with vignettes from all over the world as the Martians launch another assault, having learned lessons from their first unsuccessful attempt.

It’s an interesting contrast with the two sequels to The Time Machine that I have read in recent years, The Time Ships, also by Stephen Baxter, and The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest, which also has some Martian sequences in it. Unfortunately it’s not quite as good as either; there are some vivid set-pieces, but otherwise the plot rather plods along from place to place and battle to battle. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The End of the Day, by Claire North.

The impact of EPH

The system by which the Hugo nominations are converted into the final ballot, known as E Pluribus Hugo, is coming up for renewal at this year’s business meeting, and I thought it would be interesting to see what the actual impact on the last five years of ballot papers has been. (I was involved with the administration of the votes for all but one of those years.) Mike Glyer has written a passionate defence of EPH, which I hope you will all read; but I thought I would add some empirical analysis.

(By the way, I keep an archive of all known Hugo statistics here.)

For each of the last five years, including three when there were also Retro Hugos, I have looked at the published results and compared the real final ballot with the hypothetical final ballot that would have resulted from taking the same nominees and votes, but simply ranking them in the order of total votes received, as would have been done under the old system (hereafter, “the old system”). I have assumed that all disqualifications and withdrawals were the same as in real life, and I have also assumed that nominees who missed the ballot because of EPH were in fact eligible, which they may not have been.

Apologies for posting this as an image; I generally love WordPress, but it is not good at tables. I have also noted below the final ballot ranking of those finalists who got onto the ballot because of EPH, in brackets after each entry.

It’s interesting to note that while the intended effect of EPH was to disadvantage nominees whose support is too similar to other popular nominees (and thus to boost nominees with more localised support), another important effect has been to split ties. It is not impossible to have a tied result in EPH, producing a ballot with more than six finalists, but it is much less likely to happen than under the old system. For voters and administrators, this must be counted as an advantage. With at least 19 categories on the ballot, it is already quite long enough without being extended further by a quirk of the numbers.

The overall effect on Hugo ballots is that 19 finalists in 18 categories who would not have qualified under the old system did qualify for the final ballot under EPH, and 29 finalists in 26 categories who would have qualified under the old system were kept off the ballot paper by EPH. There are also two cases (not otherwise noted here – you can check them out for yourself) of nominees who were disqualified by the administrators under EPH, but would not have had enough votes to even be disqualified under the old system.

There is a surprising skew in terms of diversity. (My apologies in advance to anyone whose identifications I have got wrong, even by implication; I’ll try and fix any mistakes brought to my attention.) Of the 29 potential finalists excluded by EPH, 12 (counting Bill and Ted Face the Music, but not Camestros Felapton) are white men or by white men. Of the 19 finalists who owed their places to EPH, 12 (counting Tenet) are men or by men (all white, I think, apart from John Picacio). Basically the potential finalists excluded by EPH were 41%-45% white men, and the finalists who got onto the ballot thanks to EPH were 58% white men.

These are small numbers of course. There are only four cases in three categories where women who would have qualified under the old system were replaced by men thanks to EPH (all in 2018), and one should balance that against two cases where men were replaced by women thanks to EPH (one in 2019, one in 2021). So the case that EPH systematically replaces one gender with another is weak. The stronger effect seems to be that in the process of splitting ties, the nominees excluded are more often women than men. Is this simply because there are more women nominees in general these days?

I actually pointed out back in 2016 that the effect of EPH on recent ballots then would also have been to make them more male. It is interesting that this effect seems to have continued. I’m generally in favour of EPH for its deterrent effect on slates and also (we’ll get to this) its impact on the Retro Hugos, but we must also be clear about the empirical evidence of its effect on the ballot. (In, admittedly, only about 10% of all categories.)

I have also recorded the final ballot ranking of each of the 19 finalists who were got their place because of EPH. One of them actually went on to win their category (Gardner Dozois, Best Editor Short Form, 2019) and two won second place. One took third place and another took fourth place; five ended in fifth place, six in sixth place and three finished in seventh place, below No Award (puppy candidates in 2017). So the majority of finalists brought onto the ballot by EPH are not especially popular with voters deciding the winner (as you would expect from those at the lower end of the nominations curve), but the exceptions are exceptional.

Retro Hugos and EPH

Three years of Retro Hugos have been subject to EPH, 1943 (awarded in 2018), 1944 (awarded in 2019) and 1945 (awarded in 2020). The effect here has been much more drastic. It is of course possible that different administrators might have made different calls about which categories to allow on the ballot, but I’m proceeding here on the counterfactual basis that all the same categories would have been run with all the same votes cast.

Because of the lower overall numbers participating in Retro Hugo nominations, the likelihood of ties for the last place on the ballot is much greater, and EPH has come into play as a tie-breaker much more frequently. In those three years, no fewer than 19 potential finalists who would have qualified for the ballot under the old system were knocked off it by EPH, and only 4 were added to the ballot by EPH. All (as far as I can tell) were white men or by white men, so there is no diversity angle to consider.

Of the four lucky stories (they are all stories) added to the ballot by EPH, two finished in last place in the final ranking, and one in fourth, but one, “I, Rocket”, by Ray Bradbury, won.

There’s an obvious fix to make the Retro Hugos less hassle for everyone, which is not to run them in the first place. However, if the decision has been made to run them, I think EPH helps rather than hinders the process, and as an administrator I’d much rather have it on my side than not.

But the Business Meeting gets to decide these things, and I don’t.

Saturday reading

Current
The Traders’ War, by Charles Stross

Last books finished
“Tangents”, by Greg Bear
The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich
The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall

Next books
Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
Mr Britling Sees it Through, by H. G. Wells

Ms Marvel

We watched the new Ms Marvel TV series over the last few weeks, and loved it. I very much enjoyed the first volume of the G. Willow Wilson comic and voted for it (along with the majority) for the 2015 Hugos, was less impressed by the second volume and not sure if I read later installments. The TV series takes a different angle. Here’s a trailer:

It’s still the origin story of a Pakistani-American girl with super powers growing up in New Jersey; but it links the life of an ordinary-ish American teenager of today, in conflict with the forces of the U.S. deep state, but also processing the trauma of Partition, seventy-five years ago this month; it will be pretty educational for the core audience of Disney+ viewers. The fifth episode in particular takes the story back to Karachi in 1947, conveying the chaos and horror of the time very economically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdpw-nlE5ps

It’s also very attractive to see Islam portrayed in a matter of fact way, as a religion practiced by ordinary middle class Americans, with the local mosque having all the same internal politics manifest in any religious organisation, or indeed any human organisation at all. The mosque itself is played with quiet assurance by the Fabulous Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, an enormous movie palace built in 1929 in consciously Islamic style.

The script is witty and wise, and various points are well made. And I get a little patriotic glow from the fact that the directors are Belgian. I don’t think I was familiar with any of the cast before, but they are all excellent, and the whole thing critically depends on Iman Vellani, here in her first significant acting job, in the title role. It’s way more interesting than, say, Harry Potter.

Anyway, strongly recommended (in case that was not clear).

Sprawl, ed. Alisa Krasnostein

Second paragraph of third story (“How to Select a Durian at Footscray Market”, by Stephanie Campisi – third if you count the opening poem):

There are blobs of fruit flesh on the ground where people have pestled kumquats or grapes beneath their shoes, shoes that are old and friendly sandals or heels thin and high as kebab skewers. Kids, hair carved into waterfalls that trail down their necks or propped up in pineapply plumes with supercute sparkly hair bobbles, stagger about in that toddlerish way, their plump bellies steering them towards tasting plates of chopped up sour mango, glistening papaya, white and virginal dragonfruit and blobs of eyeball-like longan.

An anthology of sff stories by Australian writers, published in 2010 in anticipation of that year’s Worldcon. They’re all pretty good. I particularly liked the opening by Tansy Rayner Roberts, “Relentless Adaptations”, which looks at a dystopian future for literature, and the sinister youth of Angela Slatter’s “Brisneyland by Night”. but I don’t think that there is a dud in the collection. You can get it here.

This was both my top unread book acquired in 2015 and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles are two books by Brain Aldiss, respectively Complete Short Stories: The 1950s and Jocasta, Wife and Mother.

The Curse of Fenric, by Una McCormack (and Ian Briggs)

When I first watched The Curse of Fenric in 2007, I wrote:

The Curse of Fenric had been strongly recommended to me, and I adopted the suggestion that I watch the extended director’s cut version on the DVD rather than the show as originally broadcast (in keeping with the non-sequential traditions of the show, this was actually the last story of the four that I watched, during a three-hour stopover in Ankara airport last Friday).

Well, it is indeed a good story – most memorably, Nicholas Parsons, of all people, playing it straight as the doomed vicar Mr Wainwright; a setting in the second world war that actually looks a bit like it might be the 1940s; vampire villains which now seem an eerie foreshadowing of Buffy; secret codes and ancient evils, and the crucial importance of faith. Indeed, of the four last stories, it is the one which most resembles classic Who at its best.

I was not utterly convinced by the plot; I never like stories which crucially depend on some unbroadcast and untold past adventure of the Doctor’s. And although I did like Tomek Bork’s portrayal of Sorin, I was not totally convinced by the behaviour of the Russian soldiers (and to a lesser extent of the British) – as soldiers, that is. However, in general, this was a good ’un.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

I watched the original version of The Curse of Fenric this time rather than the director’s cut, and noticed only one significant difference – we cannot hear what the Doctor is saying when he makes his profession of faith to ward off the Haemovores, whereas the director’s cut makes it clear that he is reciting the names of all his companions in a litany. It’s another excellent story, with the plot of human conflict being exploited by non-human forces which has a venerable pedigree in Who, and the continuing accumulation of details about what the Doctor may really be up to – and, almost two years after her arrival, more about what Ace is there for – I think only Turlough acquires a comparable amount of back-story in the course of his time in the Tardis, and Ace’s tale works much better. My only quibble about The Curse of Fenric is that I have never been impressed by the Haemovores, whose costumes are a bit cheap-looking to the point that we have to be told to be scared of them by scary music.

Rewatching, I wasn’t quite as impressed as I had been on previous occasions – and I note that both times I had seen it before in the context of the rest of the season; this was the first time I had tried it as effectively a standalone. It feels frankly a bit under-directed; too often the actors are just moving from point A to point B without doing much else, and the cinematography is workmanlike rather than interesting. Also this time around I watched the original TV broadcast, which is not as good as the subsequent edits, and that may have been a mistake. I’m glad that Cartmel was trying to revive the show, but he had not yet got there.

Here’s a weird one for you. Pyramids of Mars, already covered by the Black Archive, and Full Circle, also already covered by the Black Archive, were broadcast on exactly the same calendar dates as The Curse of Fenric: 25 October, 1 November, 8 November and 15 November, in 1975, 1980 and 1989 respectively. The first two were shown on Saturday nights, and The Curse of Fenric on Wednesdays. The day after Episode 3 was shown, the Berlin Wall fell.

When I first read the novelisation in 2008, I wrote:

Ian Briggs, on the other hand, does a masterful job with The Curse of Fenric, perhaps the most adult of any of the Who novelisations (in the sense of talking about sex). The most striking change from the TV original is that the vicar, Mr Wainwright, is explictly young (rather than Nicholas Parsons). Apart from that, the whole narrative feels very soundly rooted both in itself and in Who – particularly with Ace’s introduction in Dragonfire (which of course Briggs also wrote). For once, the Doctor’s-hidden-past motif actually seems to make sense rather than feeling like a bolted-on idea (the only other story that achieves this is The Face of Evil). An excellent read.

Also a comfortable pass for the Bechdel test, what with Phyllis, Jean and their landlady on the one hand, and Katharine, Audrey and the Wrens on the other, with Ace wandering between them.

The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

A thin trickle of villagers, all dressed in their grey Sunday best, were making their way home down the country lane. Only Miss Hardaker, a sharp-faced spinster in her fifties, and two teenage girls lingered on the church porch where the young vicar listened patiently. Miss Hardaker was determined to make her point.

Rereading the novelisation, the same points struck me again; it’s a surprisingly adult book for the range, with the London girls and Ace bantering about sex. And given the timings, it does make more sense for the vicar to be a young man, rather than 66-year-old Nicholas Parsons. There are a couple of good interludes as well, one of which appears to have a drown-up Ace marrying a Russian aristocrat ancestor of Sorin’s. It’s one of the best of the 160+ novelisations.

Both of my Black Archive reads for this month are by writers who I consider friends. Una McCormack is a sparring partner on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/unamccormack/status/1473947186853523459

In this monograph, she has gone for an approach of developing at length four of the interesting themes of The Curse of Fenric, rather than an all-round justification of the story, and as someone who loves the story less than she does, I found it helpful and redemptive. I love most of all the Black Archive books that explain to me why I like some of my favourite Doctor Who stories; but I probably get more out of the ones like this that challenge me to think again about some that are less high up my personal list.

The short introduction sets out her stall, making the link between the timing of first broadcast and the Fall of the Wall, and asserting boldly that “The Curse of Fenric is the best story in what was, at that point, the best season yet of Doctor Who. In other words, I love it.”

The first chapter convincingly positions the story and the entire era in the context of a decade of Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher (who as it turned out would last only another year), and the culture wars waged by government supporters, particularly on and in the BBC. The solution to the chess puzzle of the story is, after all, for the pawns to break ranks and join forces against their common oppressor.

The second chapter points out that this is the first Doctor Who story to explicitly use the Second World War as a setting. (Surprisingly, the Nazis in Silver Nemesis are not named as such.) The war itself is of course a crucial cultural historical experience for the UK, as for other countries. But it’s interesting to look, as McCormack does, at the other later presentations of the war in Who, some of which work and many of which don’t, and to explore the good and bad side of using it as the background for a Who story.

The third chapter looks at Ace as a character, arguing that her arc is the first example of the more modern approach to companions that we have seen in the New Who era, and applying some good feminist analysis to the Doctor and his relations with the women who he tracvels with. The second paragraph of the third chapter, including a quote from Joanna Russ, is:

Russ, in her essay, and in typically acerbic fashion, rapidly sketches and dispenses with the clichés of science fiction: the ‘intergalactic suburbia’ in which the 1950s household remains intact and the woman is wife, mother, and home-maker; the ‘passive and involuntary’ women as prizes or motives for space-faring ‘He-Men’; and the domineering Amazons of matriarchies, waiting to be brought to heel by the arrival of men. Her most illuminating criticism for our purposes, however, is of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. This novel, published in 1969, a Nebula Award winner and generally accepted to be ground-breaking in its treatment of gender, concerns the inhabitants of the planet Gethen, who have no sex or gender, except that every four weeks they pass through a cycle in which they become either male or female, and sexually potent. The story is motored by the arrival on Gethen of a male human observer, who becomes immersed in Gethenian culture and politics. Russ skilfully argues this is a book from which women are absent:

‘It is, I must admit, a deficiency in the English language that these people must be called “he” throughout, but “put that together with the native hero’s personal encounters in the book, the absolute lack of interest in child-raising, the concentration on work, and what you have is a world of men.’4

4
Russ, ‘Image of Women’, p215.”

The brief short chapter reflects on myth and Doctor Who, and the way in which Cartmel was setting up the Doctor as a mythic figure and using themes from mythology to help tell the story.

I guess my biggest complaint about the book is that it’s a bit short. But you can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
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) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | 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)

October 2017 books

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 highlight of the month was my first trip to South Africa, the farthest south that I have been in my life, for a Liberal International meeting.

The highlight of that was probably the tour of the Constitution Hill complex, including the Constitutional Court and the prison where both Mandela and Gandhi were imprisoned at different times.

Rigorous analysis of social media found that I was the 37th most influential of the top 40 EU twitterers.

Even more important, I got my photo taken with Jenna Coleman at FACTS in Gent.

I read 21 books that month.

Non-fiction: 6 (YTD 44)
What Made Now In Northern Ireland
, ed. Maurna Crozier
1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, by Gavin Menzies (not finished) (tempted to put this in the fiction category)
Memoir of the Queen of Etruria, Written by Herself / an Authentic Narrative of the Seizure and Removal of Pope Pius VII, with Genuine Memoirs of His Journey Written by One of His Attendants
An Assessment of the Economic Impact of Brexit on the EU27, by Michael Emerson, Matthias Busse, Mattia Di Salvo, Daniel Gros, and Jacques Pelkmans
Running Through Corridors 2: Rob and Toby’s Marathon Watch of Doctor Who, the 70s, by Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman
A Crocodile in the Fernery: An A-Z of Animals in the Garden, by Twigs Way
0007269374.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg

Poetry: 1 (YTD 2)
From Bed to Bed
, by Catullus, trans. James Michie
1857995635.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg

Fiction (non-sf): 5 (YTD 20)
All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
Cimarron, by Edna Ferber
Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum
Caprice and Rondo, by Dorothy Dunnett
Cavalcade, by Noël Coward (theatre play)
0099532816.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg 3780FAF2-A49A-4369-BA34-C2E6A9F8AAC4.jpeg 0140252304.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg

sf (non-Who): 4 (YTD 64)
The Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Moorcock (not finished)
The Last Castle, by Jack Vance
The Past Through Tomorrow, by Robert A. Heinlein
Thorns, by Robert Silverberg
529F78AA-5D57-49B3-A26B-90471FACE7B8.jpeg

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 45)
Short Trips: Christmas Around the World, by Xanna Eve Chown
The Big Hunt, by Lance Parkin
Plague City, by Jonathan Morris
1785942700.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg

Comics: 2 (YTD 23)
Antarès, Épisode 5, by Leo
Antarès, Épisode 6, by Leo
2205071270.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg 2205073974.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg

4,700 pages (YTD 48,700)
7/21 (YTD 55/198) by women (Crozier, Queen Maria Luisa of Etruria, Way, Ferber, Baum, Dunnett, Chown)
0/21 (YTD 16/198) by PoC

Several of these were very good, specifically:

  • What Made Now In Northern Ireland, ed. Maurna Crozier (get it here)
  • An Assessment of the Economic Impact of Brexit on the EU27, by Michael Emerson, Matthias Busse, Mattia Di Salvo, Daniel Gros, and Jacques Pelkmans (get it here for free)
  • From Bed to Bed, by Catullus, trans. James Michie (get it here)
  • Caprice and Rondo, by Dorothy Dunnett (get it here)
  • Thorns, by Robert Silverberg (get it here)

On the other hand, 1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, by Gavin Menzies, is absolute tosh. You can get it here but I wouldn’t bother if I were you.

Manifesto: On never giving up, by Bernardine Evaristo

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Romantic love. Random sex. Hopeless crushes. Short-lived flings. Proper relationships. All of these experiences contributed to making me the person and writer I became, one for whom the pursuit of freedom was paramount: freedom to move home, freedom from a conventional job, freedom to follow the whims of my sexuality, freedom to jump from one encounter to another, freedom to write experimental fiction. Even when my freedom was seriously curtailed, as it was during one relationship in my twenties, I broke free and carved out the life I wanted for myself again.

This is a tremendously entertaining and thought-provoking short book, the autobiography of the author of Girl, Woman, Other and of The Emperor’s Babe, taking her from childhood in Woolwich to fame and success as a Booker Prize winning author. As with all good autobiographies, there is a fair bit of self-reflection; I found her accounts of her love life (mainly lesbian in her 20s, mainly straight before and since) interesting (other people’s lovel lives are almost always interesting) and I also appreciated her frankness about the shortcomings of some of her earlier books, though I may try and get one or two of them anyway – in particular Blonde Roots, an alternate history which was on the 2008 Artchur C. Clarke Award shortlist. She is also very clear about the impact of racism and sexism on her career, which originally was intended to be on the stage (and she has done a good deal of stage work). Punches well above its weight, as does the writer. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that pile is Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi.

The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen; Scary Monsters, by Simon Forward

Two more in the Candy Jar series of Lethbridge-Stewart stories, a novella by the “showrunner” and a novel by a veteran Who writer.

The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen. Second paragraph of third chapter:

He eventually found the Docherty house, but Mr Docherty was of no help.

This is really good, one of the best of the series so far. It takes the Brigadier and friends to John O’Groats in the far north of Scotland, where they are investigating something resembling the selkie myth; at the same time they are pursued by journalist Harold Chorley and his associate Larry Greene. It turns out that Chorley is actually from Monaghan and reinvented himself with posh English accent to become a journalist, making him one of very few Irish characters in the Whoniverse. The whole thing is very well done, playing with identity and fate, and I strongly recommend it even for those who are less familiar with this continuity. Spinoff fiction at its best. You can get it here.

The Laughing Gnome: Scary Monsters, by Simon A. Forward. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Major Grigoriy Bugayev parked the service truck at the base of the steps. In his mirror, the fuel truck veered gently to a stop under the airliner’s wing.

Perhaps my concentration was weak while on holiday, but I found this rather confusing and not all that interesting. The Brigadier and friends jump all along their own timelines, including alternative timelines, and it did not make a lot of sense for me. I may try it again. You can get it here.

The Initiate, by Louise Cooper

Back in 2017 I read a Doctor Who novella by Louise Cooper, who I had not previously heard of, and was really impressed. Her best known work is the Time Master trilogy, which I picked up pretty cheaply at Eastercon, and The Initiate is the first volume. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Taunan pointed towards a familiar dark patch in the sward ahead, and carefully the two riders guided their horses over it, making sure that not one hoof strayed beyond its boundaries. And as they crossed it, the change began.

I enjoyed it. The protagonist undergoes a fairly standard fantasy narrative arc, exiled from his home after an unfortunate magical accident to get trained at wizard school; but he is a deeply flawed individual, and the effect of the dark side of his personality on his colleagues and friends is well depicted. A rounded off novel in itself which still leaves us well set up for the next book. You can get it here.

This was my top unread sf book; next on that pile is Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri.

Saturday reading

Current
The Traders’ War, by Charles Stross
The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich

Last books finished
Doctor Who and the Time Warrior, by Terrance Dicks
The Time Warrior, by Matthew Kilburn
Roger Zelazny’s Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt
That Damn’d Thing Called “Honour”: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860, by James Kelly
The Harp and the Blade, by John Myers Myers
The Kosovo Indictment, by Michael O’Reilly
The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Next books
The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall
“Tangents”, by Greg Bear

Inception

Inception won the 2011 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, and also SFWA’s Ray Bradbury Award for that year. Hugo voters gave it a thumping win at both stages of the ballot.

IMDB users rank it the top film of the year on both scales. It beat How To Train Your Dragon, Toy Story 3 and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for both Hugo and Bradbury; the other Hugo finalist was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, and the other Bradbury finalist was my favourite Doctor Who episode of that year, Vincent and the Doctor. I voted for it myself for the Hugo.

A few Oscar and Doctor Who crossovers here. At the top is Leonardo di Caprio, here the protagonist Cobb, previously Billy in The Departed and before that Jack in Titanic.

Tom Berenger, Browning here, was a sergeant in Platoon (my least favourite Oscar winner).

And Earl Cameron, credited here as “elderly bald man” though he clearly is not bald, was the astronaut Glyn Williams in The Tenth Planet, William Hartnell’s last story as the lead actor of Doctor Who in 1966, 54 years before Inception.

Slightly to my surprise, neither Michael Caine nor Pete Postlethwaite (who died soon after the film was released) had previously been in Oscar-winning or Hugo/Nebula/Bradbury winning films.

Back in 2011, I wrote:

In forty years’ time, when my grandchildren (or yours) ask me how I voted in this year’s Hugos, I think this is the only defensible choice. Admittedly I found it rather hard to follow, due to being in pain and on various drugs while watching it in several installments, but that was true when I watched all the others as well, so in fact not a great excuse. It looks and sounds utterly fantastic, and is clearly paying homage to Philip K. Dick while bringing in various other sexual and social paranoias, in the ultimate example of someone’s personal relationships interfering with their career. I wasn’t totally sure about [Elliot] Page, but maybe my appreciation would have been greater under normal circumstances. In any case, no work of art is perfect, and I can happily give this my top vote.

Again, unfortunately, I watched the film while suffering from a mild tummy upset so again my concentration was not all that it should have been. But I felt that a lot of balls were juggled with consummate skill here – the layers of dreams, the gradual realisation of what is really true and what isn’t, the capitalist struggle for resources taken into the realm of the subconscious. I also liked Elliot Page’s performance more this time around. I’m putting it in 12th place in my rankings, just below Contact and ahead of Superman.

That year’s Oscar winner was The King’s Speech, which I will turn to next.

Dalek Combat Training Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker

First page of Section III:

This is a lovely lovely book about the Daleks, supposedly by the Time Lords, citing all of the Doctor’s televised adventures with them and constructing as much continuity as is possible. Nothing very new for me, but a joy none the less. Well done Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker for putting it together. You can get it here.

September 2017 books

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.

I went to Sofia once and London twice that month, the second London trip combining with a conference at Christ Church in Oxford, where I met Sir Tim Berners Lee:

and finished with a formal dinner at Blenheim Palace.

Back in London the next day, I went to the Pink Floyd exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

My other cultural expedition was to Leuven for a really great historical tour.

This was also the month that I started my sequence of Oscar-winning films with Wings.

I read 15 books that month.

Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 38)
Thinking, Fast and Slow
, by Daniel Kahneman
A Short Guide to Irish Science Fiction, by Jack Fennell
Peoplewatching, by Desmond Morris
Space Helmet for a Cow, vol 2, by Paul Kirkley
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sf (non-Who): 4 (YTD 60)
Synners, by Pat Cadigan
Press Cuttings, by George Bernard Shaw
The Red Leaguers, by Shan F. Bullock
The Famished Road, by Ben Okri
IMG_1062.JPG 25D6150C-B598-4A34-A7A2-7DCA754236FC.jpeg 644BA976-61E4-4C82-B672-A837FD736566.jpeg

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 42)
How The Doctor Changed My Life, ed. Simon Guerrier
Life During Wartime, ed. Paul Cornell
Diamond Dogs, by Mike Tucker
6009FBCB-0EF6-450D-B092-878DC0900D59.jpeg5DE51B90-446A-499D-9020-84514B93D203.jpeg 1785942697.01._SX175_SY250_SCLZZZZZZZ_[1].jpg

Comics: 4 (YTD 21)
Antarès, Épisode 2, by Leo
Onthuld, by Kristof Spaey and Bart Vaessens
Antarès, Épisode 3, by Leo
Antarès, Épisode 4, by Leo
8A9E44A3-1763-47BD-8640-9A9FB9FF690D.jpeg 2017-09-16 18.24.38.png 8627C0CD-D8E1-49A1-B6EF-D96400486666.jpeg 3A112BCA-5A9C-43F4-9EF2-E846DF6E6CE5.jpeg

3,600 pages (YTD 44,000)
1/15 (YTD 48/178) by women (Cadigan)
1/15 (YTD 16/178) by PoC (Okri)

The best of these by a long way was Daniel Kahnemann’s Thinking, Fast and Slow; you can get it here. The worst is the near-future (of 1904) Irish independence novel The Red Leaguers, but you can get it here.

Alaska Sampler 2014: Ten Authors from the Great Land, eds Deb Vanasse and David Marusek

Second paragraph of third chapter (an extract from Still Points North: An Alaskan Memoir, by Leigh Newman):

Some identifiers: The Great Alaskan Dad flies his plane on floats in the summer and on skis in the winter. He hunts for caribou, moose, wild sheep, wild goats, geese, and ducks, plus fishes for halibut, salmon, and trout. No matter where he goes, his outfit remains the same: falling-down hip boots, patched wool pants, drugstore sunglasses with Polaroid lenses for spotting fish underwater, and a Stearns life jacket with a red plastic tag that reads PULL-IN-THE-CASE-OF-AN-EMERGENCY, which has never been pulled, despite his frequent, always almost fatal emergencies. A buck knife — the blade stained with dried unidentified blood and slime — dangles from a lanyard somewhere on his person.

This is a collection of ten pieces by ten Alaskan writers, which I guess I picked up due to the unlikely happenstance that Alaskan author David Marusek was my roommate at the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow. The majority of the pieces are fiction, but I found myself more drawn to the non-fiction pieces – the standout pieces are extracts from A Time Machine Called the Chilkoot Trail, by Dana Stabenow (better known as a mystery writer) and from Cold River Spirits by Jan Harper-Haines. Though it’s all good, and certainly knocks on the head any thought you may have had that Alaska is devoid of culture.

You can get both the 2014 and 2015 Alaska samplers for free here. The 2015 version has the same editors and twelve authors, some overlapping with the 2014 volume.

This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2015. Next on that pile is Political Animals, by Bev Laing.

Operation Volcano, by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel

I realised a couple of weeks ago that I had paid for a couple of Humble Bundles of Doctor Who comics published by Titan over the years, and now had dozens of unread books to add to my Librarything catalogue. (Which is going to mean a big jump in the number of unread books that I log at the end of this month.) I’m going to go through them in order of internal chronology, hopefully at a rate of one a month, which will be enough for several years to go…

So that means starting with Operation Volcano, a collection of Seventh Doctor stories first published in 2018 as a three-shot series and then collected as a graphic novel. The majority of pages are taken up with the title story, by no less than Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch, which takes the Doctor and Ace to Australia for an adventure of alien infiltration with Group Captain Gilmore. It’s a well done, densely written adventure, which perhaps shows that the comics medium does not suffer the same limitations as the screen.

Second frame of third part of “Operation Volcano”:

There are also three shorter stories in the volume. “Hill of Beans”, by Richard Dinnick, takes the Psychic Circus from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy to a planet ruled by a president who looks just like Donald Trump. the art is by Jessica Martin who played Mags in the TV story and whose character features here. I’m afraid it did not really work for me.

“The Armageddon Gambit”, by John Freeman and Christopher Jones, is a less ambitious but more successful Doctor-and-Ace-outwit-the-aliens tale. Given that it is the third story in the book, I’ll give you its second frame as well.

(I think we know the answer to the alien commander’s questions)

Finally, an unexpected treat: a six-pager from Paul Cornell and John Stokes, “In-Between Times”, which explores the relationships between Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, the First Doctor and the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan. Rather lovely; and I suspect it may be the most recently published new First Doctor comic as of the time of writing.

You can get Operation Volcano here (if you didn’t get the Humble Bundle like I did). Next up is an Eighth Doctor volume, A Matter of Life and Death.

Three books from the Hugo packet

Hugo voting is over for this year, and the winners will be revealed in three weeks. The Hugo voter packet included several books that were not themselves on the final ballot (though their authors or editors were). I’m therefore giving myself a bit more licence to write up those that I read in the last couple of weeks.

Winter’s Orbit, by Everina Maxwell (who is an Astounding finalist). Second paragraph of third chapter:

Kiem had the photo in his head, but it was still a shock to see that grave stare right in front of him. Jainan’s dark eyes gave a hidden spark of electricity to an expression that was otherwise entirely proper and neutral. His clothes were Thean, a half-sleeved tunic with a blunter, looser cut than Iskat styles, in a muted blue that split the difference between a formal outfit and mourning grays.

A space empire tale with full marriage equality and gender diversity. Yet at the same time there are arranged marriages, and the two chaps at the centre of the story are forced into one at the very beginning (and inevitably discover that they quite like each other by the end). Inventive and entertaining, but I struggled a bit with the empire’s political and diplomatic structures, which are completely inflexible up to the point where the plot needs them to be suddenly flexible. You can get it here.

Soulstar, by C.L. Polk (third in the Kingston Cycle, one of the Best Series finalists). Second paragraph of third chapter:

Marlon handled the Windweaver shifts and sent two of them to board the train’s engine car. It looked strange to see its stack smoking with the leavings of burning coal, but all trains could run on coal if there was an emergency. People gathered on the platform, some gathered in clumps organizing their roles on the trains, others getting in the way with their gawking.

I could not get into this, not having read the first two volumes, and gave up not very far into it. This illustrates one of the real problems of the Best Series category, as I have repeatedly argued; a diligent voter cannot possibly familiarise themselves with all of the relevant material, so most votes are cast from imperfect knowledge of the finalists. Though if I had been the author, I think I would have included the first rather than the third volume of the trilogy in the Hugo voter packet. You can get it here.

Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher (part of the World of the White Rat, also a Best Series finalist). Second paragraph of third chapter:

A man just came out of the sword. I drew the sword and he appeared.

This was much easier to grasp. A fantasy world with, again, gender diversity, but where old gender roles remain strong and our protagonist, a young widow, discovers that she has inherited a sword which summons a long-dead warrior when it is drawn. The warrior may be long-dead but he is perfectly vigorous when he needs to be, and they have a very satisfying confrontation with the forces of conformity and greed. I enjoyed this one a lot. You can get it here.

Heaven Sent, by Kara Dennison; Hell Bent, by Alyssa Franke

The two next in sequence in the generally wonderful Black Archives series of monographs on particular Doctor Who stories. In general I write one post per Black Archive, but that’s partly because in general I have already written a lot of material on each story; that’s less the case with the more recent stories, and in any case these two stories are quite closely linked, so I’m giving you both of them here.

Heaven Sent is, in my completely objective view, one of the best episodes of New Who and possibly the best of the Capaldi era. It’s the one where the Doctor finds himself imprisoned in a tower, doomed to repeat the same actions over and over again until he achieves freedom; Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor is the only speaking part, though we also see Jenna Coleman as the recently deceased Clara, and the mysteriously threatening Veil (played by Jami Reid-Quarrell). It is directed by Rachel Talalay, who is one of the best directors of Doctor Who ever, and written by Steven Moffat, who sometimes dropped the ball but is fantastic when on form, and this time he is on form. It looks great and was the last Doctor Who episode to do at all well in the Hugos (coming second to Jessica Jones). I mentioned it as my top Twelfth Doctor episode in my list of recommendations for people who want to get into New Who.

Kara Dennison’s excellent monograph starts with an introduction wherein she makes the point that this is a rare, possibly unique, case of a Doctor Who story which is all about the character development of the title character. We have the Doctor grieving and guilty over Clara’s death, imprisoned in a castle which will take billions of years to break out of, learning from repetition. An extraordinary setup.

The first chapter analyses the story in Jungian terms, which after all is a pretty obvious thing to do: the rooms, the dust and skulls, the moat, the ascent and descent. This analysis mainly works because Jung was largely right, and hit on some pretty deep threads of the mind.

The second chapter looks at the only other significant presence in the story the Veil, and how it reflects the Doctor’s own personality and experience. And also Freddy Krueger from Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.

The very short third chapter looks at how the Doctor’s repetition of the path through the castle changes both him and the path, and how the clues are laid out; is he the king or the shepherd boy? Or both? Its second paragraph is:

It is, of course, the way of the Doctor. Despite the Doctor’s constant talk of ‘fixed points,’ with everything from Jack Harkness1 to moon dragons2, he can’t claim that he’s ever left a site untouched.
1 Utopia (2007).
2 Kill the Moon.

The fourth chapter looks at the Doctor’s personality in itself, and how it has been developing since the last season of Old Who (including in Moffat’s The Curse of Fatal Death); and in particular how Heaven Sent exposes some of the flaws in his character.

The fifth chapter looks at time loops, bringing in the fascinating case of the Endless Eight anime which I was previously unaware of. (Also of course Groundhog Day and The Dark Tower.)

A final brief sixth chapter admits that Moffat may not have been thinking about Jung at all. To be honest that misses the point for me; if Jung was right (and I think he was), we are all subconsciously thinking along Jungian lines, whether we like it or not.

Anyway, a book that gave me new things to consider about a favourite story. You can get it here.

The season finale which immediately followed Heaven Sent was Hell Bent, which I do not rate as highly, though rewatching I realised that it does have a number of excellent aspects. The Doctor, having escaped at the end of the last episode, seizes control on Gallifrey, brings Clara back to life but ends up with no memories of her; meanwhile she ends up romping around the universe with Maisie Williams’ character Ashildr/Me.

On first watching, and on rewatching before writing this, I found the story a bit too convoluted to be completely entertaining. However there are some lovely bits. The regeneration of the Gallifreyan general, previously played by Ken Bones, into Tnia Miller is the first clear onscreen change of a Time Lord between apparent races and genders. It was also my first introduction to Miller, who I have since found captivating in Years and Years and Foundation.

And on the one hand, I slightly regret Moffat’s tendency not to let the dead stay dead, but on the other, I actually prefer this closure to Clara’s story than the one we got in Face the Raven; and Maisie Williams is always a fun element to add to the mix.

When I visited the Doctor Who studio in 2015, the Tardis set was still set up from this story. The books on the shelves include a lot of H.E. Bates.

Alyssa Franke (who in real life works on the staff of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand) has provided what I found a rather redemptive reading of Hell Bent, persuading me that there are indeed hidden depths to it; in particular she brings a feminist analysis to the story, which certainly made me reconsider it (in a good way). And also I have to admit that her fannish enthusiasm for Hell Bent is slightly infectious.

A brief introduction sets out her stall, quoting a glorious line from the script:

‘The Doctor is flying around the classic console, like a distinguished Scottish actor who’s slightly too excited for his own good.’

and concludes,

My hope is that you will read this and not see it as a definitive statement on Hell Bent’s feminist values, but rather as an exploration of how it explores themes of power, privilege, patriarchy, and autonomy. It’s the beginning of the conversation, not the end.

The first full chapter examines the Doctor’s patriarchal flaws, particularly of the Tenth and Twelfth Doctors, and looks at how he often erodes, or attempts to erode, the autonomy of the women who he meets and travels with. Clara’s fate is in stark opposition to Donna’s, and must surely be read as a commentary on it.

The second chapter looks at the Western genre in Doctor Who, given that large chunks of Hell Bent are set in the US desert (in a diner which turns out to be Clara and Ashildr’s Tardis) and also given the dynamic between the Doctor and the Gallifreyans. Franke makes some telling comparisons with Shane.

The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Clara was always a character who was never content to play second fiddle to the Doctor. When Steven Moffat first wrote the character, he imagined her as a young, contemporary, female version of the Doctor, who would be ‘terribly clever’ but also have ‘a wayward ego’, reflecting both the Doctor’s strengths and flaws. And like the Doctor, she isn’t particularly suited to living an everyday, domestic life. Moffat said that Clara ‘doesn’t feel like she particularly fits in the world that she lives in’ and that ‘she’s not really very good at living a normal life.’ 1
1 Anderson, Kyle, ‘Steven Moffat on Clara Becoming the Doctor in Doctor Who Series 8’.

It looks in more detail at Clara and the extent to which she was always set up as a contrast to the Doctor – I had not noticed that Jenna Coleman is credited ahead of Peter Capaldi in Death in Heaven – and compares her arc and departure with the other New Who companions, again notably Donna, but also Rose and Amy. (Martha, who leaves completely of her own volition, is the exception.)

The fourth chapter looks briefly at Clara’s leitmotif – I like that fact that the Black Archives often do include a look at the incidental music for the show. It’s really neat that the Doctor plays it diegetically on his guitar when he meets Clara in the desert without knowing who she is.

The long, final fifth chapter mentions Hell Bent only incidentally as part of a sustained campaign by Moffat to normalise the possibility that the Doctor could be a woman, undoing the harm of his jokey introduction of Joanna Lumley in The Curse of Fatal Death. I mentioned above that my own most vivid memory of the episode is the General’s regeneration into Tnia Miller, and I’m sure that I’m not alone. But Franke goes in depth into public statements and other sources to show how the ground was prepared for Jodie Whittaker by Moffat.

So, this is the Black Archive at its best: I like it when (as with Heaven Sent) they produce good and thought-provoking analysis of a story that I already like; but I love it when they produce good and thought-provoking analysis of a story that I did not particularly care for, and prod me into reassessing the experience. You can get the Hell Bent monograph here.

Next up: The Curse of Fenric.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
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) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | 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)

Saturday reading

Current
Roger Zelazny’s Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt
The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
That Damn’d Thing Called “Honour”: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860, by James Kelly
Doctor Who and the Time Warrior, by Terrance Dicks

Last books finished
Scary Monsters, by Simon A. Forward
Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric, by Ian Briggs
Sprawl, ed. Cat Sparks
The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter
The Curse of Fenric, by Una McCormack

Next books
The Harp and the Blade, by John Myers Myers
The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie

I finished rereading Midnight’s Children almost two weeks ago, but had not yet got around to blogging it until yesterday’s terrible news pushed me into action. It’s good to hear that Salman Rushdie is likely to survive this dreadful attack, but awful that he has been grievously wounded in the course of what should have been a normal professional engagement.

I fear that there are lessons here for anyone involved with organising cultural events; none of us is safe from a determined malefactor. I know that the internal culture of sf conventions is increasingly conscious of security risks, both internal and external. It sucks but it is necessary.

It should also be noted that the risk comes from all extremes. No ideology or belief system has a monopoly on the use of political violence. Christians, Jews, atheists, leftists and right-wingers all use terrorism. Anyone who says that it is a uniquely Muslim phenomenon can go forth and multiply with themselves.

This particular incident is almost certainly rooted in the fatwa pronounced against Rushdie back in 1989 by Ruhollah Khomeini, shortly before his death. I have always suspected that it was an outworking of Iranian politics at the time; the dying Ayatollah wanting to reinforce the place of his regime as a champion of Islam against the West, as the world in general was undergoing revolutionary changes, and therefore picking on a very prominent Westernised Muslim writer as an easy target of opportunity.

The practical effects for Rushdie were devastating even before yesterday. I recommend reading the account he wrote (in the third person) for the New Yorker ten years ago. He makes a very interesting point about the real problem as he saw it:

When friends asked what they could do to help, he pleaded, “Defend the text.” The attack was very specific, yet the defense was often a general one, resting on the mighty principle of freedom of speech. He hoped for, felt that he needed, a more particular defense, like those made in the case of other assaulted books, such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses,” or “Lolita”—because this was a violent attack not on the novel in general, or on free speech per se, but on a particular accumulation of words, and on the intentions and integrity and ability of the writer who had put those words together.

I don’t feel well informed enough to comment in much more detail. I read The Satanic Verses fifteen years ago and found the critique of Islam pretty mild stuff, at least to what I am used to reading about Catholicism. I hope that Rushdie survives to write more.

My copy of Midnight’s Children was given to me 35 years ago by a dear friend who I have since fallen out of touch with. Opening it again was a return to the better times of that relationship, and I felt a warm glow of nostalgia just from the title page. I enjoyed it over Christmas in 1987, and I enjoyed it again now. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug – that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust. That is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)

This weekend is the 75th anniversary of the Midnight of the title, the moment of India’s independence in 1947. The book is the story of India in the last years of British rule and the first thirty-odd years of independence, and it covers also Pakistan and Bangladesh, because you can’t tell the full story otherwise. We know we are onto a good thing in the second chapter, when hereditary nasal problems prove an unexpected blessing to the narrator’s grandfather during the Amritsar massacre:

As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather’s nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer’s right and twenty-five to his left; and Adam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. ‘Yaaaakh-thoooo!’ he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life.

The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is one of the thousand children born in the first hour of India’s independence, all of whom are endowed with supernatural powers of one kind or another. He is perpetually conflicted about his own identity, unaware that in fact he was swapped at birth with the child of a poorer neighbour. His life loops in and out of Indian (and Pakistani and Bangladeshi) history; his powers prove more a curse than a blessing; the political becomes personal and the personal political. It is tremendously engaging; sometimes funny, sometimes very bleak, sometimes both.

If you don’t know a lot about India (or Pakistan or Bangladesh), as I did not in 1987, you’ll learn a lot from this and enjoy the process. If you do know a bit more, I think you’d still enjoy it. I think the one point that has not aged all that well is that the protagonist is actually not a very pleasant person, especially to the women in his life (who are in general as well drawn as the men), and that gets a bit tiresome. But overall I can see why it was acclaimed at the time and why it remains popular. You can get it here.

This was the top book on my shelves which I had read but not yet written up on line. Next is a much older magical book, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

August 2017 books

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 major event of August 2017 for me was the Helsinki Worldcon my first gig as Hugo Administrator; I wrote up my memories of it here and here. I was also sorry to hear that we had lost Brian Aldiss and Tony de Brum. I needed a lot of decompression from Worldcon, especially after missing my flight home on the last evening. Here are two lovely Hugo ceremony pictures from Wikipedia with my successive Deputy Administrators, Colette Fozard and Kathryn Duval.

I did manage to read 21 books that month.

Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 34)
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
, by Erving Goffman
QI: The Book of the Dead, by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
William Cecil, Ireland and the Tudor State, by Christopher Maginn
You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), by Felicia Day
The Life of the Bee, by Maurice Maeterlinck

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 15)
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Children are Civilians Too, by Heinrich Böll

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 56)
The Moon Stallion, by Brian Hayles
Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid
Pelléas and Mélisande, by Maurice Maeterlinck
The Fall of Arthur, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Blue Bird, by Maurice Maeterlinck

Doctor Who, etc: 6 (YTD 39)
Decide Your Destiny: Claws of the Macra, by Trevor Baxendale
Decide Your Destiny: Judoon Monsoon, by Oli Smith
Decide Your Destiny: Empire of the Wolf, by Neil Corry
Short Trips: Transmissions, ed. Richard Salter
A Life of Surprises, ed. Paul Cornell
The Shining Man, by Cavan Scott

Comics: 3 (YTD 17)
Aliénor: La Légende Noire, vol 1, by Arnaud Delalande and Simona Mogavino, art by Carlos Gomez
Aliénor: La Légende Noire, vol 2, by Arnaud Delalande and Simona Mogavino, art by Carlos Gomez
Moomin: The Complete Comic Strip vol. 7, by Lars Jansson

4,500 pages (YTD 40,400)
4/21 (YTD 47/163) by women (Day, Stockett, Mogavino x2)
1/21 (YTD 15/163) by PoC (Hamid)

The two best of these, by a long way, were Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, which you can get here, and Heinrich Böll’s Children are Civilians Too, which you can get here. The QI Book of the Dead did not do much for me, but you can get it here.

The Life of Col. Samuel M. Wickersham, based on his writings 1863-1894, ed. Edward Wickersham Hoffman

After a few days off (and very relaxing holiday) I’m back to bookblogging again. I have built up quite a backlog thanks to general downtime an also some shorter books, though this one is not very short.

Second paragraph of third letter (from Yorktown, VA, 7 December 1862):

My regiment is pronounced by the officers as the best that has ever landed at their shores and their arrival is a valuable addition to the strength of this important post. After reporting, leaving one company in barracks in the Fort I marched the other companies to the boat. Deposited guns and knapsacks and they distributed the rations and gave them privilege to go ashore and cook their vitals [sic] and a happy merry time they had. All are now on board, gone to roost, guards are stationed, and I am writing to my dear little wife. Tomorrow morning I go to Gloucester, across the York River, to select the ground for my camp and lay it out for winter quarters where I hope to succeed in training my men rightly. All are in good spirits and anxious to acquire knowledge in their art.

More of the correspondence of my great-great-grandfather, a Pittsburgh iron merchant who married his third wife, my great-great-grandmother, in 1860 as the Civil War loomed. She seems to have been very diligent about keeping his correspondence; none of hers to him or to anyone else survives, but we also have a few letters from the daughters of his earlier marriages, addressed to “Mother” (ie their stepmother).

The first volume in this series dealt with the courtship between Samuel Wickersham and Fanny Belt; they lived most of their subsequent lives together, so the only other substantial amount of correspondence comes from his six months of service in the Civil War (briefly in charge of the Pennsylvania 22nd regiment and then second-in-command of the Pennsylvania 169th), and then settling back into the swing of things immediately after when she was spending a lot of time in Philadelphia – partly due to her father’s illness, but also their relationship seems to have had the occasional rocky patch.

Wickersham did not have a terribly dangerous civil war. The Pennsylvania 169th lost a total of eleven men in the few months of its existence, all through disease and none in combat. The closest they got to serious action was pursuing the defeated Lee southwards after Gettysburg, but at that point the Confederates were too busy running away to shoot back. Most of Wickersham’s letters to his wife complain that he has not been paid yet, that she hasn’t written recently and/or that he has got diarrhoea again. There is also some rather sweet commentary on the children, including my great-grandmother getting her first teeth.

Content warning: racism

The most interesting thing for me is that although he was fighting in a war to end slavery, he was still pretty racist. From the 7 December 1862 letter:

4,000 contraband [freed slaves] are quartered about the town in tents or shanties. General Nagle says the best houses in these parts are occupied by them, and woe betide the officer who would displace them to accommodate the soldiers. I told him that if the needs of comfort of my men come into collision with those of the negroes, I fear I shall be recusant to any such orders.

From 13 February 1863:

I hope to do my whole duty to my country under all circumstances, but the negro I never did and never will acknowledge but as an inferior race. I am not and never was an abolitionist, but now to end this war, I would take from our enemies all that strengthen their arms to strike us and if we could afterwards deport the entire negro race to some other clime a source of the most wicked crimes and demoralising influences on our own race would be removed.

From 21 July 1863, after the post-Gettysburg pursuit:

The backbone of this heinous rebellion is broken and the end of it appears. Let us thank God for this. The reign of the n****r in the South ends with it and white man will take his proper place there and Virginia will yet be what nature has so fitted her to be the great state of the union.

It is quite an extraordinary leap to describe the antebellum South as being under the “reign of the n****r”. And I am left not quite understanding why he was so enthusiastic about the war, if he was so prejudiced against African-Americans and actually opposed to Abolition. I guess that there is context here that I have not seen.

One more point of historical mystery: on 25 October 1866, he writes to Fanny,

I have just been tendered the appointment of Asst. Secretary of War & asked for my acceptance. What say you? Mr. Stanton retires & Gen. Sherman takes the position of Secretary of War & ’tis under the new Secty that the offer is made to me.

President Johnson was in perpetual conflict with Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, and indeed his attempt to fire him in 1868 would eventually lead to his impeachment. In October 1866, Johnson must have been hoping that the November elections would give him more room to manoeuvre. Wickersham was friends with Andrew Curtin, the Governor of Pennsylvania, who presumably would have recommended him in Washington.

In fact, the radical Republicans, who felt (entirely correctly) that Johnson was being too soft on the former rebels, won a crushing victory in the 1866 elections and we hear no more of Wickersham’s ambitions in the Executive Branch. (Forty-odd years later, his son was appointed Attorney-General by President Taft.)

There are some interesting personal glimpses as well. There is a mysterious incident where Wickersham fauxpologises, twice, to Fanny for destroying a photograph of her that he did not like, and then tries to guilt her into coming home from her parents, a pattern that is all too familiar to students of human nature. Wickersham’s oldest daughter, Katie, writes several letters to her stepmother about her courtship with a boy we know only as Will G. She never married and died of tuberculosis in her forties. A number of Wickersham’s sketches have survived, as has a single faded flower plucked from the fields of Virginia in the spring of 1863.

There is no point in sugar-coating the past; our ancestors were people of their time, and it is better to acknowledge the facts of racism and injustice than to pretend that they did not exist. This book is probably of limited interest except to the specialist, or to Wickersham’s (many) descendants, but you can get it here.

The report on the Hugo Awards Study Committee report

Way back in 2017, my then Deputy Hugo Administrator and I proposed that a study committee should be set up by the WSFS Business Meeting to revise the Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist categories, which are difficult to understand and hugely out of date. The Business Meeting amended our resolution, with our consent, to create a Hugo Award Study Committee (HASC) with a broad remit to “study revisions to Article 3 (Hugo Awards) of the WSFS Constitution, including any such proposals for amending Article 3 as may be referred to it by the Business Meeting or suggested by others; [and] make recommendations, which may include proposing constitutional amendments, to the 2018 Business Meeting.”

In the last five years, the HASC has changed precisely two words of the Constitution. (Since you asked: adding the words “or Comic” to the title of the “Best Graphic Story” category.) The HASC’s defenders will complain that we had two years of pandemic, and that the committee switched to Discord rather than email only this year, and that there are lots of proposals this year. But the fact remains that so far the practical impact has been slower than I imagined when I first proposed the Committee.

There is now a detailed report of its activities in the last year and proposals for the coming WSFS Business meeting in Chicago. (Pages 56-77 of the Business Meeting agenda., with individual proposals discussed on pages 33 to 44.) Individual areas are broken out into separate headings with a named set of subcommittee members and a Chair and Sub-Chair. I am one of the signatories to the report, but I have also several dissents, as I will explain below.

My first point of dissent is in the introduction. Unfortunately, I did not feel that discussion was always respectful or effective, and it felt at times like a closed group of people which should have found a better way of reaching out to wider fandom. I do not think that the Committee’s mandate should be extended for another year, and if it is, I would like to see new leadership. The first draft of the report called for the current Chair to continue, but after much wrangling, that recommendation was deleted by a formal majority vote of the Committee. I am grateful to the current leadership for their work, but I think a change of tone will be healthy. Volunteers interested in facilitating inclusive and constructive discussions will be very welcome. (Assuming that the Business Meeting ignores my advice and renews the Committee; more on that later.)

Going through the subcommittees:

Best Related Work

Here the HASC makes no recommendations, and I agree. I certainly prefer when this category goes to prose non-fiction commentary, but I can’t find it in my heart to say that the voters got it wrong in the last three years when they chose other things. (Archive Of Our Own, Jeannette Ng’s Campbell Award acceptance speech, and Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf translation.) And if we carved off non-fiction prose into its own category, as some would prefer, I don’t really think that there is enough other material to reliably populate an “everything else” category.

Best Dramatic Presentation

Here the HASC also makes no recommendations, and I also agree. Any further split will mean an increase in the number of Hugo categories, to honour winners who do not always show a lot of interest in our process. The discussion did not really seem to reflect the proposals I have seen from wider fandom.

Best Audiobook

Here the HASC again makes no recommendations, and again I agree. For any new Hugo category proposal, I would like to see evidence 1) that it’s responding to the demands of a significant market share of fandom, 2) that it’s redressing an injustice in the current set-up for works loved by fans which are not getting on the ballot in existing categories, and 3) that it would be an appropriate thing for Hugo voters to vote on. I don’t see a problem here with the third of these criteria, but there is no clear case for the first two.

This was business referred to the HASC by the 2021 Business Meeting. It would have been preferable to give the Audiobook proposal a clean death in 2021, rather than sentence it to suffocation by committee.

Best Game or Interactive Work

A new Hugo category is proposed. I think this is very good, and despite my general dislike of new categories, it clearly meets my three criteria above (that it’s responding to the demands of a significant market share of fandom, that it’s redressing an injustice in the current set-up for works loved by fans which are not getting on the ballot in existing categories, and that it would be an appropriate thing for Hugo voters to vote on). This is something that both fans and the wider public can get excited about. Procedurally, it should be noted that this was largely the work of one activist supported by an ad hoc committee, refined by discussion with HASC members.

Best Series

This is one of three discussions where the HASC seriously lost its way. Best Series very narrowly survived an attempt to sunset it in 2021 by 35 votes to 30. The report declares, contra all evidence other than wishful thinking, that the “fundamental problem” with the category is “the possibility of a work being nominated for both Best Novel/Novella/ Novelette/Short Story and for Best Series (as a component), leading to reduced chances for other works to be nominated or win”, and therefore proposes two amendments.

The first of these amendments disqualifies from Best Series any series any of whose component parts has ever won a Hugo in any written category. The second makes it against the rules for the same material to appear on the same year’s ballot both on its own and as part of a series.

The immediate impact of both of these amendments will be to increase headaches for Hugo administrators, who will have to disqualify popular works that people have actually voted for, just because the 2021-22 Best Series subcommittee thinks that voters have been Doing It Wrong. There will also be some interesting judgement calls about exactly what works fall into or out of a particular series.

Both amendments also decrease the pool of eligible nominees by eliminating the ones that are too popular or too long-running. If either of these is passed, when the statistics come out and it becomes clear which nominees have been disqualified, it’s not the 2021-22 Best Series subcommittee who will get the blame, it will be that year’s administrators.

Cards on the table: I opposed the creation of Best Series at the time, and I’d have voted to kill it if I’d been in DC last year, and I’ll vote to kill it again if I ever get a chance. But this is not the moment to re-hash those arguments; we are where we are, and I would prefer that if we are to have a Best Series award at all, voters get to decide what works they want to honour, with no more intrusion from the rules than is strictly necessary. Both amendments should be rejected.

Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist

This is the bit that I wrote, with much welcome input from others, on an issue that was core to the founding of the Committee and has been referred back more than once by WSFS Business Meetings. The old definitions of the Artist categories are very out of date. Professional Artist basically means “Illustrator”. “Fan Artist” has a long list of eligible venues for publication which however is not exhaustive. I have had some pushback that the proposed Fan Artist amendment does not explicitly mention fanzines or conventions; the fact is that categories that are defined by place of publication or display will always run the risk of becoming outdated. So we have looked instead at the economics.

The proposal is to define Fan Art as art that is not produced for professional profit, and Professional Art as art that is produced for professional profit. If you’ve done three or more pieces of art in the last year that weren’t paid for at the time (might have been sold subsequently), then you will be eligible for Best Fan Artist. If you’ve done three or more pieces of art in the last year that were paid for at the time, then you will be eligible for Best Professional Artist. And if you’ve done both, you will be eligible for both. Selling your fan art after it’s been first displayed at a convention doesn’t make you eligible for Pro Artist in itself, because it was created for the convention, not directly for sale.

We went back and forth on this quite a bit, but the artist community indicated that they were happy with where we ended up. I am sure that it is capable of further refinement, but it’s a huge step forward from the status quo. The proposal opens up both categories to artists who were previously excluded, and decreases the burden on Hugo administrators to make tricky eligibility calls. (Or, for instance, to try and explain the concept of Semiprozines to artists who speak no English and have no connection to Worldcon fandom.) It will continue to be possible that an artist could qualify in both categories. I for one can live with that, if it is what fans choose to vote for.

Fan vs Pro

I did not understand this discussion, and I still don’t. It was supposedly driven by an incorrect perception that for the Artist categories, “at the root of the issue is a lack in the Constitution of a single definition for ‘Professional’, ‘Non-Professional’, or ‘Fan’.” I did not pay too much attention to the internal discussion, as I didn’t see the point of it, and also we were told that no new constitutional amendment on this would be formally proposed by the HASC.

Then suddenly at the last moment it turned out that such an amendment had been proposed by the HASC leadership, without the HASC as a whole being informed that this was happening. This proposal in particular went down like a lead balloon in some quarters of fandom, and the way it was handled was not appreciated by a number of HASC members, including me.

A minority opinion has been posted in the HASC report, expressing the entirely correct view that this should never have been proposed without wider community consultation. (In fact, the minority is rather close to being a majority.) I agree with most of it, and have co-signed, with a caveat: I am not certain that the problem (if there is one) should be addressed in this way at all, ie with a global definition of Fan and Pro. My instinct is that, if changes are needed, it may be better to do that category by category, as is proposed with Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist.

Even if this or something similar is passed, the specific definitions in the Best Artist categories (both as they currently are, and if my proposed amendments are passed) will take precedence for those categories, as will any other specific definitions elsewhere; and that nullified the supposed basis for the whole discussion.

Thresholds

This is the third category where the HASC seriously lost the run of itself. Two amendments are proposed, and I have signed a minority report opposing both. The current rule is that the total first preference vote for finalists in a particular category is less than 25% of the whole Hugo poll, that category is No Awarded. The first proposed amendment changes that to the lesser of 25% or 200 votes.

To have a 25% threshold makes the lower-participation categories very vulnerable to a future year when loads of people join Worldcon to vote for the previous year’s howling commercial success in Best Novel or Best Dramatic Presentation, and nothing else. As for the 200 votes option, I am leery of hardwiring numerical thresholds into the constitution, given that it will take two years to change if we turn out to have got the wrong number.

Really, it would be better (as others outside the HASC have proposed, and as the minority report recommends) to simply abolish the threshold. It has never been used. No Award has on occasion won the preference ballot, most recently in 2018; and there is also a provision that if a majority of voters prefer No Award to the candidate which would otherwise have won, the category is No Awarded. The threshold is superfluous to those provisions, and brings unnecessary risk.

The second and final proposed amendment sets conditions under which the Business Meeting would consider the abolition of low-participation Hugo categories. I simply don’t think it is appropriate for the Constitution to direct and potentially constrain future Business Meetings in that way. If the point ever comes that we need to abolish a category, we’ll know it without the constitution telling us so. I’ll have more to say on that once this year’s award cycle is over.

Continuation

As I said at the start, I do not think that the Hugo Awards Study Committee should be continued. Despite five years of existence, no new proposals have emerged on Best Related Work, Best Dramatic Presentation, or Best Audiobook, and those discussions should now return to the wider community. Good proposals have been made this year on Best Game / Interactive Work and (cough) the Best Artist categories, but bad proposals have been made on Best Series (two of them!), thresholds (another two!), and the supposed need to hardwire definitions of Fan and Pro into the constitution (proposed without the approval of Committee members).

The risk of establishing a separate Study Committee for a body like WSFS is that a few vocal participants will use it to promote their own hobby-horses, and present them to the Business Meeting with the veneer of committee support. There’s no easy way to prevent this, in what is, after all, a volunteer body. Appointing new leadership will be helpful, but is probably not sufficient.

I believe that it would be better to disband the Study Committee, now that the job has been done on Best Game and the Artist categories (and, years ago, the title change to “Best Graphic Story or Comic”). In future the Business Meeting can and should set up ad hoc specialist groups to look at particular issues as required, just as it has done in the past, without the overthinking that has happened recently as a result of silo-ing the discussion, and with more openness to stakeholders outside the Business Meeting itself.

Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen

Second paragraph of third chapter:

For the next three nights, unknown to the five prisoners who could hear no sound through the thick walls, carpenters were hard at work erecting gallows and gibbets in the fortress courtyard. At 3.30 a.m. on 8 May they were woken by prison guards, shackled and chained again, and told that in accordance with the sentences imposed on them at a Special Session of the State Senate held three weeks earlier they were now to be hanged. Their offence: an attempted assassination of the Tsar. Jailers said later that the five young men, all of them students at St Petersburg University, were unusually calm as they dressed and prepared themselves for death.

I got this book a couple of years ago because I was chasing a particular historical fact that had eluded me: precisely where in Brussels was the initial venue of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, which saw the original Bolshevik / Menshevik split? The Congress met for a few days in a rat-infested flour warehouse, somewhere fairly central, but had to relocate to London because of oppressive surveillance by the Belgian police. The details that we have are entirely from a single account written years later by Lenin’s wife. As with Karl Marx’s residences, I wanted to tie down the historic specificity.

Incidentally, for some reason the façade of the house in Brussels where Lenin lived some years earlier is blurred out in Google Streetview. I have never seen that before, for any other building.

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1552571193588420608?s=21&t=kJc6zfSPa660YN8rv4qemQ

Anyway, I emailed a couple of Lenin experts to see if anyone knew where the Second Congress was held, and the author of this biography replied recommending that I buy his book. I did, but it was not my top priority, and I have only now got around to reading it.

Lenin’s life is of course interesting because he changed the world. He created a revolutionary movement and took power in an empire. He inspired generations. He was responsible for the deaths of multitudes, in many cases personally. So we are entitled to ask how this came about.

Sebestyen is good on the basics. Russia was seething with revolutionary movements in the late nineteenth century. Lenin’s genius was to bind them together with a shared ideology and a centralised political direction. He was helped by literacy and by the organisation of printed party newspapers. As a succession of weak governments in Russia collapsed, starting with the Tsar, he was in the right place at the right time, because he had planned to be. And he ruled with terror for a couple of years, before he died.

He had also endured years of exile, along with his wife and his other long-term partner (they knew about each other perfectly well). He was already a celebrated figure; when he was shipped from Zürich to Russia in the famous sealed train, the likes of Stefan Zweig and James Joyce passed sardonic comment. By the time he took power, his health was failing, and his early death was accelerated by wounds from an assassination attempt. There is an interesting human story there.

Unfortunately I cannot really recommend this particular biography. For a start, it does not actually answer my question about the venue of the Second Congress, as the author had assured me it would. I caught several misspellings of names of minor figures, which looked orthographically suspect to me and where Google instantly confirmed my suspicions. A couple of memorably gory incidents of state violence were either not confirmed or flatly contradicted when I checked other sources. Many of the good bits are simply copied without comment from Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife (though I suspect that’s true of a lot of Leninology).

I will have to resign myself to the loss from historical memory of the location of the rat-infested flour warehouse where Lenin and the comrades argued in 1903. But this has scratched my itch to know more about the man. You can get it here.

This was the top unread non-fiction book on my shelves. Next on that pile is What If?, by Randall Munroe.

Saturday reading

Current
The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter
Scary Monsters, by Simon A. Forward
Sprawl, ed. Cat Sparks

Last books finished
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen
Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher
Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor: Operation Volcano, by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel
Alaska Sampler 2014: Ten Authors from the Great Land, eds Deb Vanasse and David Marusek
The Initiate, by Louise Cooper
Dalek Combat Training Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker
The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen
Manifesto, by Bernardine Evaristo
The Life of Col. Samuel M. Wickersham, ed. Edward Wickersham Hoffman

Next books
Roger Zelazny’s Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt
The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

July 2017 books

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.

We had two lovely family trips, one to south-east Belgium for the National Day, where we took in Bouillon, Sedan and the caves of Han-sur-Lesse:

Though some of the cuisine was less healthy:

And another trip to London, for F’s 18th birthday, where I don’t seem to have taken many pictures apart from this one of the Tower.

I wrote some important pieces that month, including one on the Hugo artist categories whcih I hope will come to fruition soon, my advice for new Doctor Who viewers, a piece for Slugger on Brexit, and a piece for EurActiv which was shamelessly ripped off by the Daily Express.

I read 27 books that month, but a lot of them were rather short, and I see that I did not get around to blogging them until September.

Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 30)
1688: A Global History, by John E. Wills
New Europe, by Michael Palin
The Etymologicon, by Mark Forsyth
Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 by David Kynaston
Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light

Fiction (non-sf): 4 (YTD 13)
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
Lives of Girls and Women, by Alice Munro
The Angel Maker, by Stefan Brijs
The Double Deckers, by Glyn Jones

sf (non-Who): 1 (YTD 51)
Sultana’s Dream, by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Doctor Who, etc: 15 (YTD 33)
Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership, ed. Keith R.A. DeCandido
Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Glass Prison, by Jacqueline Rayner
Decide Your Destiny: The Spaceship Graveyard, by Colin Brake
Decide Your Destiny: Alien Arena, by Richard Dungworth
Decide Your Destiny: The Time Crocodile, by Colin Brake
Decide Your Destiny: The Corinthian Project, by Davey Moore
Decide Your Destiny: The Crystal Snare, by Richard Dungworth
Decide Your Destiny: War of the Robots, by Trevor Baxendale
Decide Your Destiny: Dark Planet, by Davey Moore
Decide Your Destiny: The Haunted Wagon Train, by Colin Brake
Decide Your Destiny: Lost Luggage, by Colin Brake
Decide Your Destiny: Second Skin, by Richard Dungworth
Decide Your Destiny: The Dragon King, by Trevor Baxendale
Decide Your Destiny: The Horror of Howling Hill, by Jonathan Green
Decide Your Destiny: The Coldest War, by Colin Brake

Comics: 2 (YTD 14)
It’s Dark In London, ed. Oscar Zarate
Re-#AnimateEurope: International Comics Competition 2017, ed. Hans H.Stein, by Jordana Globerman, Stefan “Schlorian” Haller, Štepánka Jislová, Noëlle Kröger, Magdalena Kaszuba, Davide Pascutti and Paul Rietzl

5,500 pages (YTD 35,900)
5/27 (YTD 43/142) by women (Light, Munro, Hossain, Rayner, Globerman/Jislová/Kröger/Kaszuba)
1/27 (YTD 14/142) by PoC (Hossain)

The best of these were the two on British history, Common People, which you can get here, and Austerity Britain, which you can get here. The worst was Angel Maker, which I found repulsive, but you can get it here.

2022 Lodestar Award

As before, just noting without specifying my preferences that I have read all of this year’s finalists for the Lodestar Award for Best New Writer.

Chaos on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

You can get it here.

Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao. Second paragraph of third chapter:

I lurch up from my straw bed, where I’ve been festering with a twisted stomach all night, turning my wooden hairpin over and over and over in my hand like a thick chopstick.

You can get it here.

The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“I know you were,” I said grimly, taking it, but her expression didn’t change; probably my tone didn’t sound very encouraging. So I added, “If you were going to say no, it wouldn’t have jumped us,” a little pointedly, because she should have figured that much out by then. A mal smart enough to have been quietly lurking in her floor pillows—floor pillows she’d probably inherited from a previous New York enclaver—for years and years, conserving its energy and slurping up anyone other than her who was unlucky enough to be left alone in her room—which is the kind of thing enclavers do, invite friends over for a study group after dinner with the understanding that one of them is going to arrive first and make sure the room is all right—hadn’t just leapt at us because it suddenly lost all self-control. It had done it because Chloe was about to get on board with me, meaning that especially delicious me was about to become a much harder target.

You can get it here.

Redemptor, by Jordan Ifueko. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“I’m not hiding,” I lied, humming with manic cheer as I swept through the gilded Imperial Suite hallways, balancing a sloshing tureen on one hip and a bundle of scrolls on the other. “I’m busy. You haven’t had your coneflower tea yet, have you?”

You can get it here.

A Snake Falls to Earth, by Darcie Little Badger. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Surrounded by markers and pieces of construction paper, thirteen year-old Nina sat cross-legged on the living room floor, staring at a scanned copy of Rosita’s portrait. She had to make an ancestral chart for class; it was a social studies project worth 10 percent of the class grade. Due to her tribe’s enrollment requirements, Nina already knew the recent branches on her family tree, so the project should have involved minimal research. And initially, yeah, it had been easy. First, Nina Arroyo had written her name, date of birth, and birth town on the bottom of a bright green piece of poster paper. Two branches extended upward: Richie N. Arroyo (father, bookstore owner) and Alicia T. Arroyo (mother, translator). Next, her parents grew four grandparents (one living, three deceased), who grew eight great-grandparents (three living, five deceased), who grew sixteen great-great-grandparents (all deceased). And that’s when things got tricky, since Nina’s teacher would never accept that Great-Great-Grandma Rosita was born in the 1870s (give or take) and died over 150 years later. But everything Nina knew about her ancestor supported this impossible truth.

You can get it here.

Victories Greater Than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders. Second paragraph of third chapter:

My phone is jittering with all the gossip from Waymaker fandom and random updates about some Clinton High drama that I barely noticed in the midst of my Marrant obsession … and then there’s a message from Rachael on the Lasagna Hats server.

You can get it here.

Ninth Doctor Adventures: Old Friends

Trailer:

As previously noted, I’ve been increasingly enjoying the Big Finish audio adventures with Christopher Eccleston reprising his role as the Ninth Doctor, and this was another good set installment. Unusually the three stories are a singleton and a two-parter, so you’ll need to plan your listening accordingly.

The first story, Fond Farewell, is set in an intergalactic funeral parlour where the decedents are resurrected in replica to preside over their own memorial ceremonies. Roger Zelazny had a similar idea in his short story “Walpurgisnacht” (collected in the original and better Unicorn Variations). All is not what is seems, as the deceased archæologist who the Doctor wishes to honour has left a complex situation of romance and memory.

Heavy star power in the form of Juliet Stevenson as the grieving widow, though Emily Taaffe (a rare Irish voice) is more dominant as one-off companion Sasha. It’s by David K. Barnes, who also wrote the First Doctor/Second Doctor mashup Daughter of the Gods and one of the episodes of Doctor Who: Redacted. Good enough.

The two-parter Way of the Burrymen / The Forth Generation brings together Eccleston, Cybermen and the Brigadier (this is not a spoiler as they all feature on the cover). It is by Roy Gill who wrote the first of the Class spinoff audios and a Tenth Doctor story. The Tardis lands in Edinburgh in the present day where there is anthropology, the Forth bridge, and tragic doomed romance.

Jon Culshaw does a very good and respectful job of evoking Nicholas Courtney in his later years (and of course the very first UNIT adventure also featured the Cybermen). But there is a lovely dynamic between the two lovers at the centre of the story, played by Warren Brown and Elinor Lawless. A good cap to the first dozen Eccleston audios.

You can get the set here.