The woman in the wheelchair hummed towards the receptionist’s station. ‘Iris Beckstein, to see Dr. Darling. He’s expecting me.’ She smiled at the secretary: the self-assured smile of the financially secure.
This is a compilation and revision of what were originally the fifth and sixth volumes of this series, following on from The Bloodline Feud and The Traders’ War, and laying the ground for the first in the next series, Empire Games. It is a very good romp through a slightly alternate early-noughties America, twinned with a couple of parallel universes where history worked out differently; in all three there are rapid and drastic changes of government, with extraordinary violence in our own world and a rapid turnover of US leadership. Stross maintains his fascination with economics and the management of intelligence services, and his central figure remains a largely sympathetic character trying to improve the worlds that she lives in but also getting to grips with her own limits. I may go back to Empire Games now, and look for the rest in the series. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier.
This was also the first book I finished this month, posting this review on the 13th.
‘But I’ve been offered a place at Sussex University,’ said Cara. She wore a white loopback cotton sweater and pre-distressed, wide-cut jeans with no socks. For two years her OCEAN Personality Test Score had been 40 89 15 60 90, within a tolerance of 0.4%.
Marginalised non-humans trying to integrate into our society. Two and a half narrative strands that did not really add up. Omnipresent narrator has weird obsession with precise measurements, including of characters’ personalities. I didn’t like it all that much, but you can get it here.
I don’t seem to have written anything about The Rings of Akhaten when it was first broadcast in 2013, nor did I pick is as one of my essential Twelfth Doctor watches in my 2017 guide to New Who. Both on first watching and on rewatching ten years later, I enjoyed it without especially loving it. It’s Clara’s first proper adventure as a companion, after several previous appearances, and I like the variety of alien races and the back-story for Clara, while regretting that more wasn’t made of either of these in the continuity. Emilia Jones rather glows as the main guest actor, in a story filmed when she was ten years old. She went on to star in an Oscar-winning film (CODA). I am less wild about planet-sized (let alone star-sized) evil aliens. Like I said, I enjoyed it without especially loving it.
It has not been adapted for print, and no subsequent adventure in TV or other media has returned to Akhaten. Several of the alien species have been seen again, notably as exhibits in Nightmare in Silver, and the story itself is moored into the wider continuity by the Doctor’s remark that he had previously visited Akhaten with his granddaughter. (And one of the alien races is a Hooloovoo, encountered differently in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)
William Shaw’s Black Archive monograph has really opened my eyes to what was actually going on in the story. and succeeded in making me feel that I need to give it another go to catch what I missed first time round. (Though I don’t think of myself as a careless watcher, so perhaps I should not take all the blame for my having missed some of these points.)
A brief introduction defends Shaw’s choice of The Rings of Akhaten to analyse, and introduces the themes of the book.
The first and longest chapter, “The Doctor as New Atheist”, jumps right in by looking at the impact of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists on Doctor Who in the Russell T. Davies years (Dawkins himself actually appears on the show, of course) and examines how the Moffatt years saw a shift to a more measured engagement with gender, race, colonialism and indeed religion. The Rings of Akhaten is in fact a story about a religious ceremony, and the Doctor, coming in with a dismissive attitude to religion, is proved wrong several times. That’s a lot more interesting than I had realised.
The second chapter, “Clara, Merry, and the Most Important Leaf in Human History”, looks at the centrality of Clara and her relationship with Merry in the story, taking some time also for consideration of Murray Gold’s music and Orientalism by Edward Said. Again, I realised that there was more going on than I had noticed, especialiy if you consider the story’s place in Clara’s narrative arc.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “Marks out of Akhaten” is:
This chapter therefore focuses on The Rings of Akhaten’s flaws, in terms of both its storytelling and its wider political context. In particular, it examines the episode’s relationship to some key concepts in postcolonial and feminist theory, and the ways in which it both exceeds, and ways in which it both exceeds, and tragically fulfils, the expectations of these schools of thought. None of this is to denigrate the episode. It is simply to argue that, while The Rings of Akhaten represents a positive step forward for Doctor Who, there are several ways in which it could have gone further.
I like very much that Shaw concedes that the story has flaws; some other Black Archive writers feel the need for total defence of their chosen story even when it’s a much worse story than The Rings of Akhaten. He mentions that its narrative beats are a bit uneven, which I agree with, and that there are not enough non-white actors, which I also agree with. He also looks at the disappointment felt by fans of writer Neil Cross’s previous career who may have expected something closer to the “gritty cop drama” Luther for which he is best known. I was not familiar with any of Cross’s non-Who work so that point passed me by.
The fourth chapter, “Anniversary Anxiety”, looks in a little more detail at the wider arc of story-telling in Moffat-era Who (though that phrase is not used), and how the story is one of the building bricks of the Clara narrative, interrogating and subverting what the show is actually about (ie the nature of the Doctor himself).
A brief conclusion explains Shaw’s own journey from sceptic to fan, having not enjoyed The Rings of Akhaten on first broadcast to realising its deeper significance.
An appendix asks whether Akhaten is a planet or a sun.
A second appendix has a decently long interview with the director, Farren Blackburn, explaining some of the artistic choices made during production.
A third appendix reproduces Blackburn’s “Director’s Statement”, his vision for the episode.
This is one of the longer Black Archives, but it really opened my mind to some of the aspects of the story that I wished I had caught for myself on watching. The last in this series that really excited me in the same way was Alyssa Franke’s monograph on Hell Bent. You may be able to get The Rings of Akhatenhere. (Or here.)
Standing in her kitchen with a glass of water in hand, which means he went through her cupboard to find it. His big hand out-stretched to touch the thyme growing behind the sink, in the patch of light that comes in from the emergency stairwell. He’s wearing a chain around his neck. At the end of it, a ring with a purple stone that she recognizes as his mother’s.
Young woman who is the tool of a dystopian surveillance state conspires to overthrow it. Has been done better elsewhere. You can get it here.
Current The Shape of Irish History, by A.T.Q. Stewart π3 The Robots of Death, by Fiona Moore Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
Last books finished φ3 A Brief History of Stonehenge, by Aubrey Burl K9 Megabytes, by Bob Baker Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard Doctor Who and the Robots of Death, by Terrance Dicks β2
Next books The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, by Philip Bates City of Soldiers, by Kate Fearon The Cider House Rules, by John Irving
I enjoy cooking, but I don’t always have the time I would like for it. We have a lot of recipe books in the house, but there are four that I find myself returning to, usually to remind myself about old favourites, but sometimes to branch out a bit into new territory.
The Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, first published in 1948, was a wedding present almost thirty years ago. It’s still my go-to for reminders of how long to cook various types of meat. All the basic resipes are there, and a few more adventurous ones as well. (Last Saturday I tried out the one for baked trout, with success.) The version we have is available for a pound plus postage, and there is an updated Ultimate Recipe Collection as well.
The New Internationalist Food Book, by Troth Wells, was also a present, more recently, from my sister. We’ve found it very good at helping us to step outside the usual Euro-Atlantic comfort zone and sample recipes from Africa, Asia and Latin America – all made with standard enough ingredients, and simple to follow. You can get it here.
I first visited Georgia (the real place, not the American wannabe state) in 2003, and immediately became obsessed by the food; several of the recipes in this book are among my standards – chakhokhbili (chicken stew), sousi (beef stew), tevzis buglama (salmon stew), chanakhi (lamb stew), cauliflower satsivi (walnut sauce), pkhali (beetroot salad), lobio (beans with egg), all very yummy indeed. Khatchapuri is too cheesy for me, unfortunately, and I have not been successful with khinkali (dumplings). You can get The Georgian Feast here.
The much-missed Maureen Kincaid Speller recommended the Indian cookery writer Mridula Baljekar a couple of years ago, and I was lucky enough to score a copy of the Best Ever Indian Cookbook, which she co-authored. I love Indian food anyway, and will always settle for tipping a jar of curry sauce (korma, jalfrezi or whatever) into the pot. But there’s something very satisfying about doing it from first principles. You can get the Best Ever Indian Cookbook here; I see it’s rather expensive now, even second hand, so I must have simply been lucky.
Happy cooking, folks. I must admit that I do it much more willingly and imaginatively when I have people to cook for; the advantages of family life.
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.
So, the first half of November 2021 wasa pretty good to me. We started with a family expedition to Modave, to see more of the ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche:
But I paid a price; in the corridors at Novacon, after twenty months of pandemic, I picked up a dose of COVID that put me in bed for sixteen days, as chronicled here. I don’t remember much about the rest of the month.
But I did read 31 books.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 44) Paul: A Biography, by Tom Wright Building Healthy Boundaries: An Over-giver’s Guide to Knowing When to Say ‘Yes’ and How to Say ‘No’ in Relationships, by Helen Snape Image of the Fendahl, by Simon Bucher-Jones Ghost Light, by Jonathan Dennis A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar Exploding School to Pieces: Growing Up With Pop Culture In the 1970s, by Mick Deal – did not finish
Non-genre 3 (YTD 27) The Ice Cream Army, by Jessica Gregson Summer, by Ali Smith Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney
Poetry 1 (YTD 5) The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, by J R R Tolkien, ed. Verlyn Flieger
SF 13 (YTD 122) Not Before Sundown, by Johanna Sinisalo The Empire of Gold, by S.A. Chakraborty – did not finish The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde The Burning God, by R.F. Kuang Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve River of Gods, by Ian McDonald Waste Tide, by Qiufan Chen Iron Council, by China Miéville – did not finish One Bright Star to Guide Them, by John C. Wright The Last Witness, by K.J. Parker [Tom Holt] The Last Defender of Camelot, by Roger Zelazny (2002) – did not finish Shanghai Sparrow, by Gaie Sebold
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 23, 31 inc comics and non-fiction) The Book of the War, ed. Lawrence Miles The HAVOC Files 3, ed. Andy Frankham-Allen The Witchfinders, by Joy Wilkinson Doctor Who and the Image of the Fendahl, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who – Ghost Light, by Marc Platt
Comics 3 (YTD 37) Sweeney Todd & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots, by Philippe Brenot and Laetitia Coryn Le dernier Atlas, Tome 3, by Fabien Vehlmann and Gwen de Bonneval
7,300 pages (YTD 67,900) 12/31 (YTD 111/262) by non-male writers (Snape, Nasar, Gregson, Smith, Rooney, Flieger, Sinisalo, Chakraborty, Kuang, Sebold, Wilkinson, Coryn; Gwen de Bonneval is male) 4/31 (YTD 41/262) by PoC (Nasar, Chakraborty, Kuang, Chen)
The best of these were two translated sf novels, Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen, which you can get here, and Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo, which you can get here; and Helen Snape’s very brief self-help book with a long title, Building Healthy Boundaries: An Over-giver’s Guide to Knowing When to Say ‘Yes’ and How to Say ‘No’ in Relationships, which you can get for free here.
I’m feeling a bit uncharitable so I’m going to call out three particularly poor books. The iBooks collection of Zelazny stories, The Last Defender of Camelot, insults the writer and the stories with appalling production values, at least for the ebook; you can get it here. Mick Deal’s Exploding School to Pieces, on 1970s TV, is superficial and poorly researched; you can get it here. And John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them is derivative and disjointed, and not exactly subtle in its ideology; you can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Time-Tombs”, by J.G. Ballard):
Most of the time-tombs on the southern edge of the sand-sea had been stripped centuries earlier. But Shepley liked to saunter through the straggle of half-submerged pavilions, the warm ancient sand playing over his bare feet like wavelets on some endless beach. Alone among the flickering tombs, with the empty husks of the past ten thousand years, he could temporarily forget his nagging sense of failure.
An anthology of ten stories from the sf magazine Worlds of If, all published between 1963 and 1967, all by white men (though two at least were British). Several of these were familiar to me from their appearances in other collections, mostly chosen by their authors; the one exception, published only here and in its original magazine appearance, is a spooky-little-girl story, “Toys for Debbie”, by Dave Kyle, who is better remembered for his activities in fandom but published three authorised Lensman novels in the 1980s, ten short stories between 1941 and 1994, and contributed art including the cover of the first edition of Asimov’s Foundation. Most of these are effective enough, but there are noticeably few women (Brian Aldiss scores here, with his tough warrior girl in “In the Arena”).
My copy, the 1951 Sphere edition, has no table of contents or index, and clearly the publishers struggled to squish the material into 256 pages. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next up is an Ace double, Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett, half of which I have already read.
Now that the Clarke shortlist is out, I’m posting my brief notes on those books which were not shortlisted and which I do not intend to reread. In many cases it’s because I didn’t think the book was all that good, though often enough (including today) it was a decent enough book which just didn’t end up in the top six, or clearly not sf or not a novel and therefore not eligible. There are about a dozen that I do intend to get back to in due course, so I won’t be publishing my original notes about them here.And we’re starting with Braking Day, by Adam Oyebanji.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The pattern began to disappear. Slowly at first, then ever faster under tendrils of green mold that spread across the surface until all that was left of the plate beneath was its shape. And soon, not even that. The mold kept growing. Thicker and higher, and thicker and higher, until it was reaching his face and forcing his mouth apart and putting roots down in his throat.
The first of the 98 books submitted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award which I read. A good example of the generation starship tale, which held together very well though there were a couple of twists that didn’t quite work for me. Debut novel, so will look forward to more from this writer. You can get it here.
I’ll do these Mondays to Fridays until I run out. That will take several months.
“J-Just to look,” sheu says, catchan the poynt o the yolewife’s quaistion. Sheu’s been raedan aboot the Wrack-Hofn’s mystery, aboot the yoles landan thair haal o Lights, aboot the stoor i the gowden tide, aboot the paece o distance,
aboot a uncan wey o spaekan, o wirkan, o pittan up wirds, o bidan, belongan, an waantid tae luk. But nou sheu’s askan the first body sheu saa i the dock fer the first directions, an habbers, fer the first time no kennan hoo tae explaen hersel.
The visitor, Darling, looks for a place to stay
“Just to look,” she says, catching the point of the boat worker’s question. She has been reading about the Wreck-Havenharbour’s mystery, about the boats landing their haulcatch of Lights, about the stormstrifestrainspeeddust in the golden seatimetide, about the peace of distance, about an unknownweird way of speaking, of working, of praying, of waitstayliving, belonging, and wanted to look. But now she’s asking the first bodyperson she saw in the dock for the first directions, and stammers, for the first time not knowing how to explain herself.
This won last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, for the best sf novel published in the UK in 2021. Rather unusually, it has the form of an epic poem in Orcadian, the language of the Orkney Islands, with English translation running along the lower half of each page. (Also unusually, it is the first part of the author’s PhD thesis.) It’s a love story between a local and a visitor in a spaceport where there are humans and aliens and general things of wonder. It’s actually quite short, and the plot as such is not original, but the characters and setting are very well drawn, in two languages.
And anyway the point is to shake us out of Anglophone complacency and to consider the value of less-spoken languages, and their potential for added nuance and expression, and giving us readers a broader experience of what the world can contain. It very much ticks the Philip K. Dick box, that good sf shouldn’t just be “What if…?” but “My God! What if…?” – in a very different way. I thought ti was fantastic from that point of view. You can get it here.
The other Clarke finalists that year were Hugo-winning A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine, which I read and hugely enjoyed; BSFA finalist Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley, which I did not enjoy as much; and Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, A River Called Time, by Courttia Newland and Wergen: The Alien Love War, by Mercurio D. Rivera, none of which I have read.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Party Activists, Interest Groups and Polarization ion American Politics”, by David Karol):
In this chapter, I argue that activists and interest groups are key elements of political parties. Activists and party-aligned interest groups work within parties to advance their policy goals via candidate selection and lobbying elected officials. Unlike the formal party structure and some elements closely linked to it, activists and interest groups are a force for polarization. I review delegate and donor surveys as well as trends in interest group campaign contributions revealing evidence of polarization among activists and lobbies. Elected officials’ relationships with party activists and interest groups are not one-sided. Even more than highly informed voters, activists take cues from politicians, and interest group leaders are subject to pressure from elected officials. Still, evidence suggests that activists and party-linked interest groups promote polarization.
This was kindly given to me by co-editor James Thurber a few years ago. (Since you asked, I have worked out that he is the fifth cousin once removed of the humorist James Thurber.) It pulls together papers from a conference in May 2014, looking not only at the polarisation of American politics in Congress, but also at state legislatures, in the Supreme Court, in the media and in party structures. The situation was bad in 2014, and nine years later it looks worse.
The 18 essays come to some stark conclusions. The two parties are more ideologically distinct now than they have ever been, and the Republicans are further to the right than the Democrats are to the left. The political system incentivises pandering to your own hardliners rather than, y’know, actually governing. It is difficult to see any realistic path by which this can be reversed. Thomas Mann, in a foreword, suggests that a few more electoral defeats could be healthy for the Republicans and therefore for politics. I would point out that the Republican candidate for President has got more votes than the Democrat in precisely one of the eight elections since 1988, and it doesn’t seem to have chastened them.
I did wonder why some questions were not asked. From a European perspective, it’s actually not such a bad thing to have political parties that clearly represent different points of view. To me it seems that it’s not so much the ideological polarisation that is screwing American politics, it’s the culture of demonisation of political opponents, which actually goes back a long way but has got worse recently. European parties in general know that they may well have to work with each other in government after the election and so find politer ways of disagreement. (There are exceptions, of course.)
The other glaring omission, though it was not as obvious in 2014, is the surge of political violence in the USA, and its endorsement by leading figures on the right, most notably the 6 January 2021 coup attempt. Genteel analysis and numerical coding by academic observers rather pales into insignificance when you have an entire political party whose leadership has supported overthrowing the constitution by force.
Anyway, this is thought-provoking and depressing stuff, painting a gloomy picture which has turned out not to gloomy enough. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is City of Soldiers, by Kate Fearon.
Current A Brief History of Stonehenge, by Aubrey Burl Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard K9 Megabytes, by Bob Baker φ3
Last books finished θ4 The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Fredrik Pohl The Rings of Akhaten, by William Shaw The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross χ4 The Endless Song, by Nick Abadzis et al δ3
Next books The Shadowman, by Sharon Bidwell The Course of Irish History, by A.T.Q. Stewart Winter, by Ali Smith
Here is my photo of the 98 submitted books, in alphabetical order by title. (One was submitted electronically – see if you can spot the printed out cover.)
I’ve also checked the rankings of each of the submitted books on Goodreads and LibraryThing, noting the number of reported raters and owners respectively, and also the verage ranking on the two systems. As usual, the books are ranked by the geometric average of Goodreads and LibraryThing owners; I have bolded the top 19 in each column (which is almost a quintile, there being 98 books in total).
Goodreads
LibraryThing
raters
av rating
owners
av rating
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
354710
4.25
2082
4.12
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
157847
4.12
2021
4.07
The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
51616
3.65
1156
3.53
Upgrade by Blake Crouch
67902
3.82
813
3.74
The Anomaly by Hervé le Tellier
41415
3.83
900
3.73
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
34902
4.03
1007
3.95
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
38202
3.68
846
3.78
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
35442
3.86
694
3.84
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
32809
3.79
668
3.83
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
19317
3.62
508
3.69
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
18310
4.39
322
3.80
Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse
11637
4.11
338
4.14
The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin
9509
4.15
412
4.16
Mickey⁷ by Edward Ashton
7575
3.79
213
3.76
Lost In Time by A G Riddle
12502
4.25
127
3.60
Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky
7774
4.22
187
4.06
Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata
8551
3.78
168
3.85
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky
7316
4.11
191
4.12
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
5061
4.02
225
3.90
Poster Girl by Veronica Roth
6156
3.67
176
3.63
The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal
3565
3.90
287
3.92
Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin
4650
3.63
220
3.81
The Violence by Delilah S. Dawson
5983
3.87
163
3.94
Leech by Hiron Ennes
3962
3.64
211
3.53
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
3261
3.74
195
3.67
The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings
3734
3.64
161
3.85
The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews
3611
3.56
155
3.81
Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko Tawada
2713
3.40
161
3.59
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell
3055
3.27
112
3.08
Oval by Elvia Wilk
1694
3.38
116
2.96
The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard
1192
3.26
158
4.00
Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch
1456
3.55
99
3.14
Last Exit by Max Gladstone
1082
3.68
124
3.34
Speaking Bones by Ken Liu
1241
4.59
101
4.56
The Moonday Letters by Emmi Itaranta
1334
3.80
81
3.50
Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde
1415
3.86
76
3.00
Stars and Bones by Gareth L. Powell
1188
3.68
74
3.29
Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser
1071
3.34
82
3.33
Until the Last of Me by Sylvain Neuvel
1195
3.83
71
3.63
City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky
969
4.07
87
3.95
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
1236
3.83
67
3.83
Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji
1103
4.03
71
3.79
Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot
1074
3.91
72
3.57
The Men by Sandra Newman
1202
2.96
58
2.47
The Splendid City by Karen Heuler
468
3.03
132
2.81
Metronome by Tom Watson
1721
3.77
35
3.79
August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White
742
3.87
76
3.72
The Stars Undying by Emery Robin
605
3.59
87
3.70
The Shadow Glass by Josh Winning
811
4.11
52
3.69
The Immortality Thief by Taran Hunt
808
4.16
49
4.00
Mindwalker by Kate Dylan
812
4.16
42
4.00
The Circus Infinite by Khan Wong
471
3.64
50
3.67
The This by Adam Roberts
339
3.87
61
3.91
Pod by Laline Paull
611
3.65
33
4.10
Neom by Lavie Tidhar
307
3.97
62
4.27
Full Immersion by Gemma Amor
384
3.86
45
3.75
Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley
325
3.60
51
3.69
The Thousand Earths by Stephen Baxter
497
3.93
33
3.00
A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers by Jackson Ford
582
4.25
23
4.10
36 Streets by T.R. Napper
478
4.00
25
3.75
The Chosen Twelve by James Breakwell
431
3.64
27
4.13
Azura Ghost by Essa Hansen
314
4.17
33
3.07
Momenticon by Andrew Caldecott
287
3.78
29
3.50
The Last Storm by Tim Lebbon
308
3.68
26
4.00
Stringers by Chris Panatier
317
3.77
25
3.50
A Fractured Infinity by Nathan Tavares
198
3.57
29
3.00
The Flight of the Aphrodite by S J Morden
275
3.85
20
3.83
Mercury Rising by R.W.W. Greene
221
3.77
24
3.75
Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest
119
3.61
36
4.17
Deep Dive by Ron Walters
238
3.77
18
4.13
Glitterati by Oliver K. Langmead
183
3.72
21
3.92
Off-Target by Eve Smith
403
4.08
8
–
Lambda by David Musgrave
159
3.27
20
2.67
Wormhole by Eric Brown and Keith Brooke
167
3.8
17
3.92
Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick
145
4.06
18
3.38
Equinox by David Towsey
263
3.45
9
–
Where it Rains in Color by Denise Crittendon
99
3.80
23
2.50
HellSans by Ever Dundas
161
3.67
14
3.00
Love And Other Human Errors by Bethany Clift
398
4.38
5
5.00
Ion Curtain by Anya Ow
86
3.49
12
4.00
The Key to Fury by Kristin Cast
83
3.78
11
–
The Fish by Joanne Stubbs
78
3.69
6
3.50
Appliance by J.O. Morgan
63
3.56
7
–
Ricky’s Hand by David Quantick
90
3.73
4
–
The Ends by James Smythe
44
4.14
7
4.33
The Quickening by Talulah Riley
134
2.92
2
–
The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift
19
4.53
8
–
Outcast by Louise Carey
44
4.05
3
–
New Brighton by Helen Trevorrow
43
3.84
2
–
The Mars Migration by Wayne M. Bailey
17
4.71
2
5.00
Hangdog Souls by Marc Joan
12
4.58
2
4.00
The Transfer Problem by Adam Saint
17
3.94
1
–
The Visitors by Owen W Knight
9
4.33
1
–
Titan Blue by M.B. Fox
4
4.75
1
–
Harpan’s Worlds: Worlds Apart by Terry Jackman
1
3.00
1
–
Stray Pilot by Douglas Thompson
0
–
2
–
Prophets of the Red Night by Sophie McKeand
0
–
1
–
The Hunt – For Allies by David Adams
0
–
1
–
I crunched these numbers a couple of weeks ago, and they won’t have changed much in the meantime. I make it 48 by writers who are not men, and 23 by writers who are not white. But my statistics are not authoritative.
This is in no way a guide to the shortlist or the winner, but it does show the extent to which the novels submitted have permeated popular consciousness, at least in the universe of Goodreads and LibraryThing users.
As previously noted, we took the Whitsun / Pentecost / Pinksteren weekend in the Netherlands for some low-key tourism, the most high-energy part of which was the Amsterdam church tour recommended by Cate Desjardins. To get the basics oout of the way:
We stayed in the Schiphol Airport Hampton by Hilton, in the outskirts of the town of Hoofddorp, across the road from the railway station and just off the motorway. Very comfortable room and decent breakfast. Half the price of similar hotels in the city.
Friday dinner: nipped across the road to the Novotel for the Gourmet Bar, very acceptable. Saturday coffee:Aran’s Irish Pub, between Max Euwe Plein and Singelgracht. Saturday lunch: McDonald’s, I’m afraid. (Damrak 8, near the Nieuwe Kerk) Saturday snack:De Koffieschenkerij, beside the Oude Kerk. Saturday dinner: we ventured into Hoofddorp which turns out to be an atrtactive enough dormitory town, and ended up at the Tandoori Lounge which was absolutely fine. Sunday coffee: at the English Reformed Church, Amsterdam Sunday lunch:De Wachtlokaal, a cheerful cafe near the station in Haarlem; my salad was huge. Sunday snack:Cleef Frans Hals, the museum cafe in Haarlem. Sunday dinner: I was determined not to leave the Netherlands without a rijsttafel, and found one at Sari in Heemstede, 10 km from our hotel. Monday lunch: Fantastic pancakes at ‘t Hoogstraatje on a square in Nijmegen. Monday snack:Eis Cafe Riva in Kleve.
On Saturday and Sunday we travelled to Amsterdam and Haarlem by train, and then drove to Heemstede that evening, and Nijmegen and Kleve on Monday.
So, what did we do? One thing that didn’t work out was my original plan to visit the Rijksmuseum. We had already completely missed the Vermeer exhibition, which apparently sold out in a couple of hours after the tickets became available. And it turns out that the rest of the Rijksmuseum is so popular that you need to book several days in advance just to get to the permanent exhibition. So we struck out on both Saturday and Sunday.
On Saturday, as mentioned, we did the church tour and on Sunday we went back to the English Reformed Church (which is in fact run by the Church of Scotland) as it had been closed the previous day, and mingled with the congregation drinking coffee.
We then took the train to Haarlem, to visit the Frans Hals Museum. Misleadingly, it doesn’t have all that much art by Frans Hals, though it does have some, including all of his surviving group portraits (one currently on loan from the Riksmuseum). It does have a very rich store of European art from his day onwards, including this Bosch-like Temptation of St Anthony by Jan Mandijn:
From more modern times, I very much liked this Standing Nude by Theo van Rysselberghe, a Belgian painter who tried pointillism and then tried nudes, this one dating from the crossover point. (I have not found another image of this particular painting online, though there are plenty of the same model painted nude by van Rysselnerghe in different poses.)
We spent most of the afternoon atthe museum and could easily have spent longer. The cafe was good too.
The next day was Open Church Day in the Netherlands, and we discovered that another church with decorations by Jan Dunselman was open for visitors in Nijmegen. This is the furthest from Amsterdam of any of his churches, the only other outlier being his home town of Den Helder.
In the Church of the Nativity of Mary in Nijmegen, Dunselman again did the Stations of the Cross, similar and also different to the ones in the Basilica of St Nicholas in Amsterdam. Compare the two takes on “Jesus Falls the Third Time”, Nijmegen above, Amsterdam below.
The walls are also decorated with various saints offering their approval. My eye was caught by the two St Catherines. Are you Team Alexandria, or Team Siena?
We walked to the centre of Nijmegen, past a lovely ruined chapel, and had lunch outside at a pancake restaurant on the square.
Our final stop was across the German border, at the Church of the Assumption by the Kleiner Markt in Kleve. This interests me not so much for what is there but for what is no longer there. The white building on the right is on the site of the inn “Zum Grossen Kurfürst” which featured several stucco ceiling by my favourite seventeenth-century stuccador, Jan Christian Hansche. It was destroyed during the second world war.
Anne *in* Cleves, not Anne *of* Cleves
There is some striking sculpture in the square, the “Fountain of Fools” in the middle:
And by the church, the Fallen Warrior by Ewald Matare, erected in 1934, removed and broken up by the Nazis in 1938, and restored in 1981.
The church itself is rather pretty inside, with some medieval artwork that must have survived elsewhere, but I don’t seem to have taken any photos. We had a little look around Kleve and had a final snack in a square whose fountain boasts another remarkable sculpture by Karl-Hennig Seemann, commemorating local legendary boy Lohengrin:
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 two major excitements were the dorpfeest at the start of the month (described in the “540 days of plague” post below), and a Saturday excursion to Roman re-enactment sites in Belgium and the Netherlands.
The month ended with F getting pinged for COVID, but I’m glad to say that he had no symptoms and the rest of us escaped, on that occasion at least.
I read 29 books that month.
Non-fiction 3 (YTD 30) Rose, by Jon Arnold The Massacre, by James Cooray Smith Gods and Tulips, by Neil Gaiman
Non-genre 3 (YTD 22) Jack, by Marilynne Robinson Kipps, by H. G. Wells 4.50 from Paddington, by Agatha Christie
Scripts 1 (YTD 3) Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Poetry (mostly) 1 (YTD 4) Love, Fishie, by Maddy Gaiman
SF 11 (YTD 94) Zodiac Station, by Tom Harper The Return of the Discontinued Man, by Mark Hodder – did not finish Hurricane Fever, by Tobias S. Buckell The Man Who Walked Through Walls, by Marcel Aymé Felaheen, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood The Bloodline Feud, by Charles Stross “The Saturn Game”, by Poul Anderson Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Zelda Knight & Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, by Matt Ruff The Rain-Soaked Bride, by Guy Adams Mama Bruise, by Jonathan Carroll
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 13, 17 inc non-fiction and comics) Angel of Mercy, by Julianne Todd, Claire Bartlett and Iain McLaughlin Blood of Atlantis, by Simon Forward The Ruby’s Curse, by Alex Kingston Doctor Who: Rose, by Russell T. Davies Doctor Who: The Massacre, by John Lucarotti
Comics and art books 5 (YTD 34) Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez Retour sur Aldébaran, Épisode 2, by Leo Retour sur Aldébaran, Épisode 3, by Leo De Walvisbibliotheek, by Judith Vanistendael and Zidrou Reflected, ed. Peter de Rijcke
The best of these were Tiptree-winning Set This House in Order, which you can get here, graphic historical account Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, which you can get here, and Night Vale scripts Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, which you can get here.
On the other hand, I totally bounced off The Return of the Discontinued Man, which you can get here.
When I can stand without wobbling, I walk. The row behind me a dusty dream. I started out in one of the bigger houses hidden in the dense jungles of the Park, where Angela and Kimberly live now. Sometimes on a really hot or busy day, or if I’ve had one too many, I forget I don’t live there anymore. My feet walk me right up into the Park grounds where I lived with Graham, and Lee when he came home, in a house that looked over the bushy rear of the dingo enclosure. Back then, Graham did the Park’s maintenance and I had a cleaning job doing the toilets, the café, the gift shop, and all the offices. Used to read the manager’s emails for a laugh. I know exactly how much shit the Park was in before our Ange took over. It was a good life after being on the road so long. Me and Graham grew a bit of sneaky marijuana in the roof of the house. He could fix anything that didn’t have a heart, and our Lee dropped out of high school and went up to the city to play bongo drums and pick up backpackers. He’d come down to the Park on the weekends and test his charms out on the rangers — until he got Angela in trouble and it all went balls up. We battled it out until Kimberly was born, then Graham fucked off back down south and Lee followed him. Me back in the workforce as a guide and moved out to the row. Ange, a single parent with a good head on her shoulders. We do alright.
Again, an Arthur C. Clarke Award winner, this time from two years ago. I thought this was very enjoyable indeed, though also rather grim with its theme of eco-catastrophe in Australia. The central character is a middle-aged woman sharing the care of her granddaughter with her estranged son’s ex, who is also her boss. Plague hits the population, thematic for a 2020 novel, though not as inconvenient as COVID with the side benefit of enabling communication with animals. And the animals are not anthropomorphised; they are just about comprehensible in their own way. The human and natural landscapes of Australia are evocatively portrayed, and I can see why it appealed to that year’s judges. Recommended. You can get it here.
The other finalists were Chilling Effect, by Valerie Valdes; Edge of Heaven, by R. B. Kelly; The Infinite, by Patience Agbabi; Vagabonds, by Hao Jingfang and The Vanished Birds, by Simon Jimenez. I have only read the last of these, as the author was up for the Astounding Award that year, but lost to Emily Tesh. (I really liked it.) Apart from that, none of the six was on the final ballot for the Hugo, Nebula, Otherwise or BSFA Awards. The Animals in that Country did win the Aurealis Award, but lost the Ditmar to The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, by Garth Nix.
