Second paragraph of third essay (Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from “The Lord of the Rings”: A Textual Excursion into the “History of the “The Lord of the Rings””):
We know about these rejects and false starts because Tolkien was a pack rat. He neither burned his rejects nor threw them in the trash; he saved them. Just about all of the drafts and manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings are preserved at the Archives of Marquette University, and a detailed narrative account of the slow crafting and polishing of the tale was stitched together by Christopher Tolkien in the four volumes of “The History of The Lord of the Rings,” a subseries of the 12–volume History of Middle-earth. The volumes are The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated; the Appendices are treated separately in The Peoples of Middle-earth, and will not be discussed in this paper.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever met David Bratman in the flesh, but he was one of those who kept the faith with Livejournal until quite late in the day, and indeed posted a lengthy and well-argued rebuttal to my foolish assertion that Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring is Any Good At All.
I was tipped off to this book of essays by File 770, and grabbed it immediately. I’m a sucker for any serious Tolkieniana, and what I particularly liked about the essays collected here is their chronological scope, from a time before The Silmarillion had been publish to nearly the present day. The shape of the scholarly field has changed a lot in the meantime a there are several telling anecdotes about the early days. If I had to pick two of the Tolkien pieces that really struck me, I think they would be the Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from The Lord of the Rings, and the exegesis of Smith of Wootton Major.
The other essays include four pieces about the Inklings (two on C.S. Lewis, one on Charles Williams and one on their links with the Pacific), and several on other fantasy topics, including a fascinating piece on Lord Dunsany as a playwright, and a standup encomium of Roger Zelazny. There is also a critique of the Peter Jackson films written presciently before they had actually been released.
Clara was twenty-eight years old and, for the past few years, she’d been mixed up with a suspicious gentleman in a blue box who hopped periodically into her life and caused varying degrees of chaos.
I did not write up the two-part story The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion at the time of broadcast, though I did note that it was my favourite two-part story of Series 9 (though my favourite Capaldi story remains Heaven Sent, also from Series 9). I enjoyed it – there’s some necessary preachiness about the Other, and immigration and terrorism, some very good skullduggery by villains who can look just like you, and some excellent horror in everyday life. The scene of the plane being brought down by a hand-held missile is a bit too close to the bone for me; several friends of friends died when the Russians destroyed MH-17 in a similar way.
The novelisation is a good competent screen-to-page job, adding a bit more background about the Zygon Bonnie (who used to have a boyfriend called Clyde, who looked like Danny Pink). There are a couple of footnotes citing other DW novelisations, including one quoting a books called The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, for which you will search bookshops in vain. At my reading pace it’s quicker to read the novelisation than rewatch the story, and it’s well enough done. You can get it here.
I was about to get out of the car, but my payment and location would be traceable. I told it to drive on and it took me a couple of miles south. I got out, doubling.
Started it three times and failed to finish the first chapter. Eventually got to page 50 and put it down. You can get it here.
But in the evening, on the way to church, the Frobishers and their guest crossed the market-square as his string of boys marched along the west side. And the guest was arrayed in a gay new dress, as if it was already Easter, and her face set in its dark hair came with a strange effect of mingled freshness and familiarity. She looked at him calmly! He felt very awkward, and was for cutting his new acquaintance. Then hesitated, and raised his hat with a jerk as if to Mrs. Frobisher. Neither lady acknowledged his salute, which may possibly have been a little unexpected. Then young Siddons dropped his hymn-book; stooped to pick it up, and Lewisham almost fell over him… He entered church in a mood of black despair.
Another unexpectedly enjoyable Wells novel, a young man who finds that he has to make a choice between two women having already married one of them (not a situation that Wells himself was unfamiliar with), at the same time as dealing with embourgeoisement and the tension between ideals and reality. Quite short, totally credible, would probably make a terrible film. You can get it here.
This was top of my list of H.G. Wells novels; next on that pile is The New Machiavelli.
Paved alleyway, close on all sides, the Old Quarter. The men at the bia hơi she’d just left watched her go, sullen, red-eyed. The heat beating down, worse than usual, night but still unbearable, air thick. Tempers on edge, the aftermath of a Chinese crackdown the week before. A prism grenade thrown into a high-end restaurant popular with Chinese military; two dead officers, two dead waiters, a dozen injured. Not the most notable of attacks, except one of the dead officers was a general. So there were raids and arrests and bodies turning up, young men and young women, tortured and aired out and worse. Everyone an informant, everyone Việt Minh, no one able to talk or trust.
Current The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd “Doctor Who: Doom’s Day” Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent
Last books finished Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir DALEKS, ed. Marcus Hearn Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier War of the Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al
Next books Extraction Point, by MG Harris Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway
You kindly asked me to contribute my thoughts on social media in the Brussels bubble following the decline of X/Twitter. I’m afraid I’ve missed your deadline – first week back after the hols – but you’re welcome to quote from the below anyway. I can’t speak for the Brussels bubble, I can only speak for myself.
X/Twitter is still going, but feels very much on life support. There have been some improvements since last October – most notably that the length limit for Tweets (as I still call them) has been drastically increased. I notice also that engagement seems to be creeping up again after cratering a few months back. But I get the sense that the ownership cares very little about providing a good user experience, and it feels like it’s just a step away from becoming MySpace. As Hemingway put it, the end comes in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
I was a fairly early adopter of Mastodon, but I am increasingly frustrated with it. The lack of a search function – which is entirely deliberate – removes a lot of the point of social media for me; I want to find out what other people are saying about the political crisis in Grand Fenwick, and if people are talking about it on Mastodon, I won’t see it if they are not in my feed – or even if they are, and I happen to miss the twenty minutes when their toot about it is top of my screen. I am hanging on, because there are rumours that this will be fixed, but I feel it’s not being designed for people like me.
Bluesky is much more promising, though I have been there for only a couple of weeks. It’s easier to Find Good Stuff, and the tone of discourse is noticeably more civilised than on Twitter. However so far, it’s much more useful and interesting for my cultural interests (particularly science fiction) than for following politics. Perhaps this is a critical mass issue, and if in particular Bluesky can market themselves in non-English-speaking countries, we may see an uptick in political relevance for my local interests.
LinkedIn, that venerable beast, seems to me to be the winner for now of the decline in Twitter, at least as far as my professional interests are concerned. I personally find it rather an annoying platform – you have no idea of how the algorithm decides what you want to see, you get little information about how successful your own posts have been. But on the other hand, an increasing number of stakeholders are posting important content there – not just their own thoughts, but reblogging others. And, again, the tone of discourse is markedly more civilised and professional than on Twitter. Discussions on LinkedIn are very different in feel from Twitter threads, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Facebook and Instagram continue as ever, mainly as places where I read personal news and views from friends and look at their holiday photos respectively. Facebook has much less relevance for my work life than ten years ago, and Instagram never had much at all. Let’s see what happens when and if Threads ever comes to the EU.
And finally, we of a more venerable generation are getting completely left behind by the young ‘uns using TikTok. I know that there are concerns about its use of data, but there’s already a clear and growing demographic who are there and nowhere else. I myself featured briefly in a TikTok last month; probably not for the last time.
It’s all a work in progress, and I think my prediction is that LinkedIn will continue to grow at Twitter’s expense, and that none of Threads, Bluesky or Mastodon can become what Twitter once was (and neither can Twitter). But who knows?
Edited to add: I was not in fact too late for H’s deadline, and his piece quoting me and others is here and here:
Not too much commentary here: I know what I like and what I don’t like, and I also know that my tastes don’t always correspond to the wider electorate.
Best Fan Artist
Slightly surprised here that none of the finalists is living in China – this is often a low-turnout category at nominations stage. Anyway, here we go:
6) Orion Smith
Sorry, this didn’t do much for me.
5) España Sherriff
Not much to judge from in the packet.
4) Iain Clarke
I generally like his stuff a lot, but I liked other submissions more this year.
3) Alison Scott
This is the most interesting piece, a moody tribute to Jan Pieńkowski (partly AI-generated).
2) Laya Rose
This was the only art in the packet that really grabbed me.
1) Richard Man
Very unusual to have a photographer in this category, but his series of portraits of leading figures in the SF community is very charming and evocative.
Best Professional Artist
A much stronger Chinese presence here, some of it of really gorgeous quality.
6) Paul Lewin.
Only one piece submitted, and it’s OK, but others are better,
5) Kuri Huang
Gorgeous use of colours and movement. Not quite so sure about the human figures.
4) Jian Zhiang
Breathtaking future machinery, reminiscent of Chris Foss. A bit sterile.
3) Enzhe Zhao
More future machinery, but this time with a little bit more humanity to put it in scale.
2) Alissa Wynans
Nicely framed studies of human or animal figures in a lush fantastic background.
1) Silja Hong
This gorgeous set of images really did take my breath away.
6) Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, and Krzysztof Ostrowski
Second frame of third page:
I could not understand what this was about at all. I could not follow the plot (if there was one) or get the characters sorted out in my head. You can get it here.
5) Monstress vol. 7: Devourer, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Second frame of Chapter Thirty-Eight (the third chapter in this volume):
Lots of people love this series, and I’m sorry, but I don’t; the art is gorgeous, but I have lost track of the plot by now, and I find the violence too squicky. You can get it here.
4) DUNE: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, by Lilah Sturges, Drew Johnson, and Zid
Second frame of third page:
This is quite nicely done, but lacks both the visual grandeur of the film and the narrative detail of the book (even though of course it has more narrative detail than the film, and more visual grandeur than the book). Dune already has twoHugos anyway. But you can get it here.
3) Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
Second frame of third chapter:
I had actually read this last year, because I have been enjoying this series so much: King Arthur comes back as an undead demon revenant, and our hero, his grandmother and his girlfriend are desperately mobilising a small group of allies across the real and unreal realms. Cracking humour, great characterisation; maybe a bit less tied into the underlying mythos than previous volumes, maybe that’s not a bad thing. You can get it here.
2) Saga, Vol 10, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
Second frame of third part:
After the brutal end to volume 9, and the subsequent three-year pause in publication, I wondered how the authors would manage to pick it up. I need not have worried; time has passed for the main characters as well, and we see a lot of the story from the viewpoint of Hazel, the little girl whose parents have been at the centre of Saga up to now. Lots here about smuggling, blended families, evil galactic plots and so on. Ends yet again on a cliff-hanger. Not sure how this will appeal to those who have not read the previous nine volumes. (Six of which were Hugo finalists, the first winning in 2013.) You can get it here.
1) Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes
Second frame of third chapter:
I came to this without any expectations, and was thoroughly won over. I’m not especially familiar with the mythology of Superman, still less Supergirl, and in any case I suspect that this off-earth adventure of cosmic vengeance may not be a typical Supergirl story. But I thought it was brilliant: a super script and plot, gorgeous art making the most of the potential of the comics format, and a thoroughly satisfactory characterisation of Supergirl and her pal Ruth. I felt that Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is head and shoulders above the rest of the field. You can get it here.
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.
Two trips out of Belgium that month, one to London where I also took in the Science Museum’s (somewhat disappointing) exhibit about science fiction, and a spontaneous excursion to Amsterdam with F to meet up with my brother and his daughter just before Christmas. Meanwhile I got in the moo for the office Christmas party, which had a “jungle” theme:
I read 30 books that month.
December 2022 books
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 97) Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins Zink, by David Van Reybrouck The Romans, by Jacob Edwards The Ahtisaari Legacy, ed. Nina Suomalainen and Jyrki Karvinen What If? by Randall Munroe
Non-genre 3 (YTD 18) A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg A Ship is Dying, by Brian Callison On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe
SF 17 (YTD 122) The Spare Man, by Mary Robinette Kowal Titan Blue, by M.B. Fox Filter House, by Nisi Shawl The Splendid City, by Karen Heuler Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton Ion Curtain, by Anya Ow Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen Bluebird, by Ciel Pierlot “Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison with Marvin Minsky The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness “The Last of the Winnebagos”, by Connie Willis Shadows of Amber, by John Betancourt The Red Scholar’s Wake, by Aliette de Bodard Killing Time, by Caleb Carr The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson Sewer, Gas and Electric, by Matt Ruff
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 34) Doctor Who: Origin Stories (ed. ?Dave Rudden?) Doctor Who and Warriors’ Gate, by John Lydecker Doctor Who: The Romans, by Donald Cotton
Comics 2 (YTD 20) Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko The Carnival of Immortals, by Enki Bilal
7,100 pages (YTD 66,500) 9/30 (YTD 109/298) by non-male writers (Suomalainen, Unigwe, Kowal, Shawl, Heuler, Ow, Pierlot, Willis, de Bodard, Melo) 4/30 (YTD 39/298) by a non-white writer (Unigwe, Shawl, Ow, de Bodard)
The best of these were the essay collection The Ahtisaari Legacy, which is out of print, and The Red Scholar’s Wake, which you can get here; the worst was Titan Blue, which you can get here.
2022 books roundup
I read 298 books in 2022, two more than in 2021, the fourth highest of the nineteen years that I have been keeping track, and the highest since 2011.
Page count for the year: 76,500, ninth highest of the nineteen years I have recorded, almost in the middle; there are some very short books in there.
Books by non-male writers in 2022: 109 (37%), second highest tally and fourth highest percentage of the years I have been counting.
Books by PoC in 2021: 39 (13%), second highest tally and third highest percentage since I started counting.
Most-read author: a tie between two previous winners, Terrance Dicks and Kieron Gillen, with five each. The Dicks novelisations were all re-reads.
1) Science Fiction and Fantasy (excluding Doctor Who)
When I first wrote up my books of the year I didn’t name any of the Clarke submissions. I will now say that the three I enjoyed most which I read in 2022 were:
95 books (32%) – highest ever number, third highest percentage. I think this has been driven upwards by the excellent Black Archive series of short books about Doctor Who stories, but that’s not the only factor.
Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five, by Neil Gaiman, early stufffrom a writer who went on to much better things; out of print.
3) Doctor Who
Fiction other than comics: 39 books (13%), 10th highest total (dead in the middle) of the last nineteen years and highest since 2017, 13th highest percentage
Including non-fiction and comics: 72 (24%), 7th highest total and 6th highest percentage, both highest since 2013
Snotgirl Volume 1: Green Hair Don’t Care, by Bryan Lee O’Malley and Lesley Hung, an encouraging start to a new series; get it here
Once and Futurevol 3: The Parliament of Magpies and vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain, continues to delightfully and brutally subvert Arthuriana; get them here and here
The 2022 winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize was, for the first time, a book of poetry, The Sun is Open, by QUB-based writer Gail McConnell. In fact the 119 pages of text are one long poem broken into chunks, playing with text and with font colour, processing the writer’s reaction to going through a box of her father’s things, long after he died in 1984 at 35, shot dead by the IRA while checking under his car for bombs, in front of his wife and his then three-year-old daughter.
Gail McConnell barely remembers her father and has no memory of that awful day, but of course it has affected her whole life, and the poetry captures that disruption and the effect of engaging with her father through a box of personal souvenirs, most notably a diary and a Students Union handbook from his own time at QUB. There is some imaginative playing with structure – quotations from the box are in grey text, documents are quoted in fragments to let us fill in the blanks, at one point the page fills with vertical bars to symbolise the prison where her father worked. It’s provocative and unsettling, and meant to be.
I thought it was incredible and it’s my book of the year for 2022. You can get it here.
Previous Books of the Year:
2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here) 2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here) – Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here) 2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here) 2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here) 2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here) 2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here) – Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here) 2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here) – Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here) 2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here) 2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here) 2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here) 2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here) 2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here) 2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (get it here). However I did not actually blog about these, being one of the judges at the time. – Best book I actually blogged about: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here) 2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here) 2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here) 2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here) 2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here) 2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here) 2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)
Second paragraph of third chapter (first part; you don’t need it all):
I turned to the chapter on Strathspey flies where I kept my research list. Jumping off points for my nightly dives generally fell under one of the following topics, and quickly devolved from there.
Really awful. Not as funny as he thinks it is, by a long way. You can get it here.
