October 2018 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 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.

My travel this month was a work trip to London and a Worldcon planning trip to Dublin. At home, we had a nice excursion with the girls. It was impossible to get them both looking at the camera, but at least in this shot they are looking at each other.

My brother visited Brussels, and I persuaded F to come into the city for dinner. As far as I know, we are the only male-line descendants of our great-great-grandfather Nicholas Charles Whyte (1784-1844). He had two younger sons, our great-grandfather’s brothers. One of them never married; the other had four daughters and a son, but the son had no children. Our grandfather was one of nine brothers, but the other eight between them produced only one daughter. Our father had just the one sister. Apart from our own sister, who has kept her birth name, our closest Whyte relatives are descended from brothers of our great-great-grandfather and are therefore at least our fourth cousins.

On the last weekend of the month the local woods had a heitage day, including historical re-enactment of a local court session.

I read only 15 books that month.

Non-fiction: 3 (YTD 45)
Here’s My Card, by Bob Popyk
Seychelles: The Saga of a Small Nation Navigating the Cross-Currents of a Big World, by Sir James R. Mancham
Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, ed. Steve Berry

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 26)
Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust
Gentleman’s Agreement, by Laura Z. Hobson

sf (non-Who): 6 (YTD 103)
Ringworld, by Larry Niven
The Sound of his Horn, by Sarban
Larque on the Wing, by Nancy Springer
The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells
Words of Radiance, by Brandon Sanderson
Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards

Doctor Who, etc: 2 (YTD 31)
Doctor Who: The Women Who Lived – Tales for Future Time Lords, by Christel Dee and Simon Guerrier
The Vampire Curse, by Mags Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard

Comics: 2 (YTD 24)
Doctor Who: The Widow’s Curse, ed. Tom Spilsbury
Retour sur Aldébaran, tome 1, by Leo

~5,000 pages (YTD ~62,300)
6/15 (YTD 96/236) by non-male writers (Hobson, Springer, Wells, Edwards, Dee, Halliday/Hale)
1/15 (YTD 24/236) by PoC (Mancham)

My favourite of these was Tiptree winning Larque on the Wing, now much better known for her Enola Homes series; you can get it here. Worst of the month, and I think probably worst of the whole year of 2018, was the vastly out-of-date Here’s My Card by Bob Popyk; you can get it here.

Saturday reading

Current
Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait, by Yvonne Çerkez
An Eloquent Soldier: The Peninsular War Journals of Lieutenant Charles Crowe of the Inniskillings, 1812-14, ed. Gareth Glover
Moon Boots and Dinner Suits, by Jon Pertwee
The Caucasus: an Introduction, by Thomas de Waal

(all non-fiction, for once.)

Last books finished
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The End of the Day, by Claire North
The Harem of Aman Akbar, by Elizabeth Scarborough
Doctormania, by Cavan Scott et al
The First World War Diary of Noël Drury, 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers: Gallipoli, Salonika, The Middle East and the Western Front, ed. Richard Grayson

Next books
Hyperspace Demons, by Jonathan Moeller
The Danger Men, by Nick Walter
Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman

Gravity

Gravity won both the Hugo and Bradbury Awards in 2014. We have the Hugo statistics which show that it had a very healthy margin over the competition.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Pacific Rim were finalists for both the Hugo and the Bradbury Awards; Frozen and Iron Man 3 were up for the Hugo, and Europa Report and Her for the Bradbury. (That was the year of the last UK Worldcon, when Ancillary Justice won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel.) The only one of those that I have seen is Frozen, and that’s “seen” as in “was in the same room as small children who were watching it”.

IMDB users rate Gravity 3rd best film of the year on one ranking but a surprisingly low 41st on the other. The voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were very favourable – it won seven Oscars, the most ever for any film, other than Cabaret, that did not win Best Picture. I’m with the award voters; I really liked it. I’m putting it at about the 40% mark of my Hugo/Nebula/Bradbury winners list, in 21st place out of 55, below Aliens and above The Truman Show.

There are only two visible members of the cast (a record low, I think, for this sequence of films), and neither had previously been in an Oscar-winning, Hugo-winning, or Nebula/Bradbury-winning film, and neither has ever been in Doctor Who. We do have the unseen Ed Harris, who was the sinister illusory Parcher in A Beautiful Mind and the equally sinister Christof in The Truman Show; here he is the voice of Mission Control, but is not visible, so no photos.

It’s a very straightforward film about two American astronauts marooned in low earth orbit after a disaster destroys their space shuttle. They are played by impossibly cute actors, George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. Like Aliens, it does just one thing and does it very well, for only 97 minutes. Clooney and Bullock are both very watchable, but to be honest we are really distracted from their good looks by the unceasing momentum of the plot and the steadily increasing danger of the situation.

Incidentally, at the time of writing, the ten astronauts currently in space have an average age of 46 years and nineteen days, and a median age of 45 years and eleven months, so we can call it an even 46. The youngest, Anna Kikina, is two months past her 38th birthday. The oldest, Koichi Wakata, is three months past his 59th. So Sandra Bullock, at 49, and George Clooney, at 51, are realistically in the current age bracket for astronauts. (In the early days of spaceflight, things were very different.)

I commented after watching Twelve Years A Slave that I looked forward to seeing why Oscar voters thought that Gravity had better cinematography and film editing. Well, it does. It’s a masterpiece of technology, for much of the film putting a single actor into special effects and getting the maximum believable performance out of both her and the system. The weightless sequences are simply amazing. We haven’t seen anything like this before. I am sure that Bullock did not have to try very hard to act exhausted at the end; the entire film depends on her.

The music won an Oscar as well; I wasn’t blown away by it but I liked it well enough.

Not a lot more to say about this, but I glad that I finally got around to watching it. Next up is Guardians of the Galaxy, which won the Hugo and Bradbury Awards the following year, and is rated higher than Birdman which won the Oscar.

Lineage, ed. Shaun Russell

Second paragraph of third story (“What’s Past is Prologue”, by David A. McIntee):

‘Are the girls ready?’ Alistair asked.

A collection of short stories in the timeline of Candy Jar Books’ Lethbridge-Stewart sequence, this time looking at the Brigadier’s ancestors and relatives from the seventeenth century to the present day (2018). All good fun, nothing that especially stood out (maybe the Quarks in the last of the stories). You can get it here.

The Bad Christian’s Manifesto: Reinventing God, (and other modest proposals), by Dave Tomlinson

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Eventually I settled on one of the God channels, the sort my wife scorns me for watching. But, hey, she wasn’t there; I could do what I liked. The show featured a man talking about a near-death experience (he called it his ‘resurrection’ experience). He told how, after leaving his body, he travelled through a tunnel of light and arrived in heaven where an angel greeted him and escorted him into the ‘throne room’ of God for a personal audience with the Almighty.

This is a book for Christians, especially those involved in ministry, and that basically means it is not a book for me. I appreciate the author’s efforts to advocate a more open, more generous and more inclusive Christianity, but it’s not my circus and not my monkeys, and I put it aside after fifty earnest pages. You can get it here.

This came to the top of three lists simultaneously: top unread book acquired in 2015, shortest unread book acquired in 2015, and non-fiction book which had lingered longest unread on my shelves. The two remaining books in my 2015 pile are both non-fiction and both equally popular on LibraryThing (in that I am the only recorded owner of either). I will start with the shorter one, Welcome to the Doomsphere: Sad Puppies, Hugos, and Politics, by Matthew M. Foster, and then move to the one I acquired earlier, Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait, by Yvonne Cerkez.

La Femme, ed. Ian Whates

Second paragraph of third story (“A Winter Bewitchment”, by Storm Constantine):

“What is it, my lady?” Mimosa asked.

An anthology which I got in 2015, probably because that year’s BSFA Short Fiction Winner, “Honey Trap” by Ruth Booth, was published in it. The stories all have a common theme of women protagonists with agency. It starts strongly with two very good stories – “Palestinian Sweets”, by Stephen Palmer, who I don’t think I have otherwise come across, and “Slink-Thinking”, by Frances Hardinge. I wasn’t as sure about the rest, and unfortunately the last story in the volume is by an author whose personal conduct has put me off reading any of their work. A mixed bag. You can get it here.

This was both the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2015. Next on the first of those lists is To Rule in Amber by John Betancourt, which I’ll get to when I start clearing the 2016 acquisitions. Next on the second is The Bad Christian’s Manifesto, by Dave Tomlinson, which I have in fact also read between finishing La Femme and publishing this review.

Doctor Who: A British Alien?, by Danny Nicol

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The United Kingdom is also characterised by English domination, insofar as England is by far the most populous of the four nations, accounting for some 55 million of the Kingdom’s 65 million people. As a result, governments tend to be English dominated. This English preponderance contains the seeds of Scottish and Welsh discontents. At the same time, whether those who grow up and live in England choose to self-identify as English or British remains very much a question for the individual. Aside from certain sports, there is scant social necessity for an English person to identify as English rather than British. Though probably most choose to define themselves as English, some identify primarily as British while many others may express different identities in different contexts. There is also ambiguity over whether Englishness constitutes a nationality or an ethnicity, a haziness which impacts on whether non-whites in England favour a British identity over an English one. These sensitivities and nuances may create difficulties within Doctor Who studies, particularly for scholars not imbued with the lived experience of England. For example, in a chapter entitled “Rose is England”, Tanja Nathanael argues that Doctor Who companion Rose Tyler represents England and that indeed “the body of Rose is conflated with England”.3 Yet Nathanael’s account does not explain why Rose represents England rather than Britain and, on occasion, she uses the terms “England” and “Britain” interchangeably. There is, in fact, some evidence that Rose’s narrative aligns her more closely with Britishness than with Englishness.4
3 Tanja Nathanael, “Rose is England”, in Who Travels with the Doctor? eds. Gillian I. Leitch and Sherry Ginn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 79-90.
4 For example, Rose is the only companion to have adventures with the Doctor in England, Scotland and Wales, and she is closely connected to the Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom, in “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances” (2005) and “The Idiot’s Lantern” (2006). If she were representing England she would be aligned with England’s own flag, the Saint George’s Cross.

I was alerted to this book by Paul Driscoll’s criticism of it in his Black Archive on The Movie, and then realised that I already had it on the shelves, having acquired it in February but having forgotten to log it in my system. The author is an academic lawyer, and he spends the first three chapters analysing Doctor Who and Britishness, as you would expect from the book’s title; but then he looks at broader questions of law and politics for the remaining four chapters, constituting more than half of the book, so it is slightly mis-sold.

There are interesting thoughts here, but some gaps and slips as well. As Driscoll points out, The Movie, which is remarkable for the extent to which it highlights the Doctor’s Englishness, is barely mentioned (likewise The Dæmons, which we’ve just covered). It’s true that there’s not much to say about either part of Ireland in the show pre-2020, but there is a bit more than Nicol has found. And just a minor point, but it’s not true that everyone except the TARDIS crew has been killed by the end of Warriors of the Deep.

I got the most out of the exploration of wider political ideas in Doctor Who, about the shift from British to international governance (not only UNIT) and the fairly consistent challenging of corporate authority (until 2018’s Kerblam!). ON the other hand, I really didn’t think it was worth spending fifty pages analysing whether or not the Doctor can be considered a war criminal.

So, an interesting enough addition to the shelves, with flaws. You can get it here.