Non-fiction 4 (YTD 11) A Life in Questions, by Jeremy Paxman David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, by Simon Guerrier The Sunmakers, by Lewis Baston Bletchley Park Brainteasers, by Sinclair McKay
Non-genre 5 (YTD 9) Three Girls in a Flat, by Enid Yandell and Laura Hayes Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond The Wheels of Chance, by H.G. Wells Moonraker’s Bride, by Madeleine Brent
Poetry 1 The Odyssey, by Homer, tr Emily Wilson
SF 6 (YTD 11) The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach The Fire Starters, by Jan Carson Lizard Radio, by Pat Schmatz The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North Sferics 2017, ed. Roz Clarke
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 2) Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 3 (YTD 5) Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, by Hergé After Life, by Al Ewing et al Sunstone, vol. 1, by Stjepan Sejić
4,900 pages (YTD 10,500) 7/20 (YTD 16/41) by non-male writers (Yandell/Hayes, Wilson, Stronach, Carson, Schmatz, North, Clarke; “Madeleine Brent” is a pseudonym for Peter O’Donnell) 0/20 (YTD 3/41) by a non-white writer (must do better) 3/20 rereads (The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir)
309 books currently tagged unread, up 4 from last month, down 76 from 28 Feb 2023
Reading now Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, by Isabel Hartman
Coming soon (perhaps) Serve You, by Al Ewing et al Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by Frazer Hines Doctor Who: Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt Paradise Towers, by John Toon Doctor Who: Kinda, by Terrance Dicks Kinda, by Frank Collins De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhaut Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu DOOM 94, by Janis Jonevs Ara Guler’s Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs The Return of Marco Polo’s World, by Robert Kaplan Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt When the Moon Was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
These were the joint winners of what was then the Tiptree Award in 2015, a novella and a YA novel.
Second paragraph of third section of “The New Mother”:
All of these names are attempts to capture precisely how it is that babies are being made now in a way they have never been made before. Recall the old, familiar recipe: two cells, a sperm from a man and an egg from a woman, fuse into a single cell which grows into a baby. The sperm and the egg can fuse this way because they are, at a genetic level, different from all the other cells in the body. Every cell contains our complete genetic code, split up into 23 chromosomes. Most cells have two copies of each chromosome (one from mom, the other from dad) for a total of 46. This property of having two copies of every chromosome is called “diploidy.” Almost every cell in the human body is diploid. The lone exception are the gametes, the sperm and the egg. Gametes are “haploid”–they only have one copy of each chromosome. Being haploid is what allows two gametes to fuse into a single diploid cell with a new mix of chromosomes that will develop into a genetically distinct person. This is sexual reproduction, the way human beings have made more human beings from the beginning of the species until sometime in the last six years.
A near-future story in which parthenogenesis becomes possible. I read it when preparing Hugo nominations in 2016 and really liked it, and nominated it. It made the long list in the Best Novella category that year, in 12th place, but would have needed almost three times as many votes as it actually got to qualify.
Rereading it again eight years later, it remains a classic for me – the clash between state-imposed ideological control of fertility, and the demands of humanity and of human nature, are well delineated without thumping the reader over the head with the point. The fact that the story is set in near-contemporary Texas, where some of the worst bits of this dynamic have been playing out in real time since 2016, makes it even more effective now. You can read it here.
Easy Bechdel pass: the protagonist is in a lesbian relationship and she and her partner talk about everything, sometimes but rarely including men.
Lizard Radio is a YA novel by Pat Schmatz, an author I was otherwise unfamiliar with, and jointly won the Tiptree Award with “The New Mother”. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
My fingertips hit the reassuring shape.
There are a lot of dystopian YA novels around, and frankly I’m beginning to find them a bit formulaic, but this is a different matter with a sparkling and nervous energy about it. Kivali, the genderqueer protagonist, is sent to a re-education camp in a dystopian near future, and must negotiate quasi-parental relationships, friends and potential lovers, and the ever-present threat of “vaping”, which in this case means physically spontaneously evaporating, rather than any recreational vapour consumption. The protagonist’s vocabulary is just abit off-kilter and that keeps you as a reader on your toes. I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of this before, and well done to the Tiptree / Otherwise judges for picking it out of the field. You can get it here.
As well as these too, the Tiptree Honor List included four novels, two comic books, a TV series and four short stories. The only one of these that I remember having watched / read is “The Shape of my Name” by Nino Cipri, which I also nominated for the Hugos, though it did not even make the long list.
`Because the journey happens in stages,’ Professor Lovell explained when Robin gave up. ‘Horses don’t want to run all the way from London to Oxford, and usually neither do we. But I detest travellers’ inns, so we’re doing the single-day run; it’s about ten hours with no stops, so use that toilet before we go.’
This won the Locus and Nebula Awards for Best Novel last year, but infamously not the Hugo. It’s an alternative history story where Britannia rules the waves (and much of the land) through the magical use of linguistics and etymology, which has been developed in depth at an institute known as Babel in Oxford University. Our protagonist, Robin Swift, adopted from the streets of Canton (now Guangzhou) by the unpleasant Professor Lovell, is educated to become one of the instruments of British domination, alongside three close friends, a chap from India and two young women from England and Haiti.
After lengthy academic reflections on the nature of language, illuminated by footnotes (not endnotes, thank heavens, and mostly brief and succinct), it becomes apparent to Robin that violent resistance against the British Empire is the only available course of action. (This isn’t really a spoiler as it’s pretty clearly signalled in the novel’s subtitle.) His group of friends fractures and there is a grand tragic apocalyptic climax.
A couple of friends of mine told me (separately) that they really didn’t like the book. They found it too info-dumpy and thought the magical parts were ripped off from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I respectfully disagree. I’ve been fascinated by linguistics since before I was a teenager, and loved the info-dump bits. I’m a Cambridge graduate, so I really don’t mind Oxford being represented as the centre of all that is evil in the world. I found the dynamics between the protagonist, his friends and the rest of society fully convincing. And the idea that words carry power goes a lot further back than Susanna Clarke; only a month ago I was in Prague, where the legend of the Golem lurks around many of the corners. I really enjoyed it, and you can get it here.
Although there are several strong women characters, including two of the protagonist’s three close friends, I had to hunt a bit for a Bechdel pass because the story is largely told from Robin’s point of view. But I found one at least, in Chapter Six, where Letty (Robin’s fellow student from England) tries to discuss the situation of women at Babel with Professor Craft, and Professor Craft tries to deflect her.
As luck would have it, I finished reading Babel on the morning of 20 January, the day that the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo nominations statistics were released and it became clear that it had been disqualified in the Best Novel category. Despite my previous and subsequent involvement with Hugo Award administration, I have no more information than is in the public domain about why this happened. I think it’s a shame. Babel is selling very well in China (translated by Chen Yang). I would have voted for it if it had been on the Hugo ballot, and I suspect that I am not alone.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour, my top unread book by a woman, and my top unread sf book. Next on all three piles is Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler.
On my last day in LA last week, after Gallifrey One, I visited LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with my old friend A. It was a rainy day and I had only an hour and a half between meeting A and needing to run to the airport. I slightly blenched at the $25 admission charge for non-Angelenos (A, as a native and recent returnee, would normally get in for a generous $5 discount). But the museum gods were smiling on us and the ticket machine was broken, so we got in for free.
A, rejoicing in our escape from the admission charges
I’m sorry to say that my initial impression was not hugely positive. The Resnick Pavilion, one of the two main buildings, is full of post-colonial this and that, deliberately de-centering the perspective of the original collectors (which for me is one of the interesting bits). I did like Todd Gray’s “Atlantic (Tiepolo)“, a three-dimensional collage reflecting on the slave trade.
Across the rainy way, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum building has three floors but the middle one was closed. Again, we were a bit underwhelmed by the ground floor, which has some interesting enough LA-inspired stuff but also some large empty spaces. What caught my eye was “El Chavez Ravine“, an ice cream truck covered with a painting by Vincent Valdez in collaboration with musician Ry Cooder, a companion piece for Cooder’s 2005 concepot album “Chávez Ravine” commemorating a Mexican-American community in Los Angeles whose homes were destroyed in the 1950s for a development that was never actually built.
We went upstairs in the BCAM building, slightly wondering why LACMA has been hyped up as much as it has; OK, we’d got in for free, but so far it wasn’t worth the $25 that I would have paid.
But on the third floor everything changed. Here there is a fantastic collection of modern art which is better than many European museums. Picasso, Bracque, Matisse, Barbara Hepworth, Fernand Leger (who I’ve come to appreciate) represented by “The Disks“:
I was grabbed also by Magnus Zeller’s “The Orator“:
That alone would practically have been worth the admission price. (If I’d had to pay it.) After that, A kindly dropped me off at the airport and I came home to mountains of unread emails and hours of jetlag, which I am just about over now.
It was actually a lucky break because A and I had originally planned to visit the Getty Museum, which however is closed on Mondays. Very glad to have seen it. (It’s actually on the same block as the La Brea Tar Pits, which I visited two years ago.)
I have now been appointed Hugo Administrator for Glasgow 2024: A Worldcon for our Futures, double-hatted with the role of Division Head for WSFS. (If the website hasn’t already been updated, it will be soon.) This is my comment on recent events, and my own commitment to future action.
I was not involved with organising the Chengdu Worldcon in any way, though it was a close call. Shortly before the Chengdu bid won the Site Selection vote in 2021, I was invited to become one of the Co-chairs of the convention if the bid won. (I have no idea if Ben Yalow was already on board at that stage.) I declined on the grounds that I really did not have time, but agreed to become a senior adviser, and was listed as such on their org chart presented in DC.
However, I was dismayed by Chengdu Worldcon’s choice of fascist writer Sergei Lukanyenko as a guest of honour, and by a general lack of communication. By summer 2022 I had heard very little from Chengdu Worldcon and it had become clear that they were not very interested in my advice, so I resigned as an advisor and heard no more from them for several months.
In March 2023, rather to my surprise, I was invited to come to Chengdu as a guest of the convention, with no strings attached. I attended Chengdu Worldcon in October and generally enjoyed myself a lot. I was however aware of the undercurrents of dissatisfaction within Chinese fandom about the way that the convention was being run and with how some Chinese fans were being treated by the organisers.
I left Chengdu grateful for the hospitality that had been shown me, inspired by the conversations I had had and by the energy of Chinese fans, but also conscious of the gaps between cultures and political systems. I had had a very good time, but a number of Chinese attendees did not. I am conscious of my privilege.
Then came the publication of the Hugo nomination statistics on 20 January. Every year since at least 2013, before EPH was introduced, I have published an analysis of the votes in each category. It took me very little time on this occasion to conclude that – quite apart from the unexplained disqualifications – the published 2023 numbers cannot possibly be an accurate reflection of the nominating votes cast. I concluded that there was nothing that I could usefully say (and said so).
Others (notably Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones) have put more effort into trying to work out what happened than I have been able to do; but fundamentally the numbers are simply not credible. And no justification has been given for many of the disqualifications. I felt, and feel, sickened and betrayed. I know nothing more about what happened than is in the public domain, and that is bad enough. My cheerful memories of an international celebration of science fiction are now irretrievably tarnished. I feel particularly sorry for all of the finalists and nominees for the 2023 Hugos, and for those Chinese fans who sincerely put their energy into the Chengdu Worldcon.
I am also a member of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee and the Worldcon Intellectual Property board, to which I was elected by the 2022 WSFS Business Meeting. I participated in the January 2024 meeting at which Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow and others were censured for events at and subsequent to the Chengdu Worldcon. I make, and will make, no further comment on those discussions.
I was the Hugo administrator in 2017 and 2019, and part of the teams for 2020, 2021 (for a while) and 2022. My record is clear. We were criticised for allowing contested nominees to appear on the final ballot, including Hidden Figures in 2017, Archive of Our Own in 2019, Jeannette Ng’s speech in 2020, the “George R.R. Martin…” blog post in 2021 and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki in 2022. I stand by those decisions. (Two of those contested nominees went on to win.)
Some nominees are ineligible under the rules. I do not like to unilaterally disqualify anyone. Sometimes a nominee will themselves flag up uncertainty about their eligibility to administrators. If preliminary research indicates that there is a problem with eligibility in a particular case, I prefer to engage in dialogue with the relevant creator to get the full picture. This is not always possible, but it is my ideal.
Sometimes a book has been published in the wrong year (in my experience, one each in 2019 and 2022). Sometimes we have to juggle between entire TV series and individual episodes which were nominated in different categories (twice in 2020, also in 2021 and 2022); and only two episodes of any one TV series are allowed on the ballot, so if more than two have the numbers, they need to be trimmed down (2017). The same goes for authors (2019).
Sometimes artists do not have an appropriate body of work for the years and categories they had been nominated in (four in 2017, one each in 2021 and 2022). Editors turned out to be ineligible in 2020 (one) and 2022 (four). A Semiprozine nominee in 2017 was not eligible. An Astounding nominee in 2020 had been published too early to qualify. Again, I stand by all of those decisions. I helped administer the Retro Hugos in 2019 (for 1944) and less enthusiastically in 2020 (for 1945), and they bring a whole extra dimension of hassle.
The Glasgow 2024 team and I have committed to publishing, along with the final Hugo ballot, the potential nominees who were ineligible or who declined nomination, and the grounds for any ineligibility decision; and along with the final results of voting, the full statistics as mandated by the constitution and in addition a detailed log of our decisions interpreting the rules. My then team did this in 2017, and we can and will do it again in 2024. Kathryn Duval, who was my deputy in 2017, is my deputy again this year (in a slightly different role) and the entire team is committed to transparency. We are considering some additional steps as well.
There are a lot of discussions going on right now about the future governance of the Hugo Awards, of WSFS and of Worldcon. I am personally concentrating my energy on running a better process in 2024, and won’t have time to engage much in those debates. I do however think that the Hugos are fundamentally Worldcon’s award, and removing them from Worldcon will mean that they are no longer the Hugos. But that is enough for now.
I got this collection of 1930s plays five years ago, in the early stages of my Oscar-watching project, because the middle one of the three was the basis of a very successful film starring Lionel Barrymore. In fact all three of these plays were successfully adapted for the screen.
The scripts are prefaced by a short piece from each of the two authors, gently poking fun at each other and giving a sense of the relationship between two Broadway creators. They certainly seem to have got on with each other better than Gilbert and Sullivan.
The first play, Once in a Lifetime, is about a vaudeville trio, down on their luck because of the invention of talking movies which sucks the audience out of theatre, who go to Hollywood and try to make it big there. The dumb guy of the three ascends to huge cinematic power, and the punchline of the play is that the bad decisions he makes turn out to be very successful.
I thought it was really funny. I don’t always find it easy to read scripts, but here I had no difficulty differentiating the characters with their different voices. I noted that George Kaufman, one of the authors, also played the frustrated playwright Laurence Vail in the first Broadway cast.
The key character is Mary Daniels, the woman in the vaudeville trio, who gets the best lines and serves as the audience viewpoint character on what is happening in Hollywood. In the original Broadway production she was played by Jean Dixon.
The opening directions for the third scene are:
(The gold room of the Hotel Stilton, in Los Angeles. Early de Mille. Gold-encrusted walls, heavy diamond-cut chandelier, gold brocade hangings and simply impossible settees and chairs. There is an air of such complete phoneyness about the room that an innocent observer, unused to the ways of Hollywood, rather expects a director suddenly to appear from behind a door and yell: “All right, boys! Take it away!” This particular room, for all its gaudiness, is little more than a passage to the room where Hollywood really congregates—so you can imagine what THAT is like. The evening’s function is approaching its height, and through the room, as the curtain rises, there pass various gorgeous couples—one woman more magnificently dressed than another, all swathed in ermine and so hung with orchids that it’s sometimes a little difficult to see the girl. The women, of course, are all stunningly beautiful. They are babbling of this and that phase of Hollywood life as they cross the room—”This new thing, dialogue”—”Why didn’t you introduce me to him—I just stood there like a fool”—”It wasn’t the right time—I’ll take you to him when they’re ready to cast the picture.” Through it all an unseen orchestra is grinding out “Sonny Boy,” and it keeps right on playing “Sonny Boy” all evening. Because it seems there was a man named Jolson. Weaving through the guests is a CIGARETTE GIRL but not just an ordinary cigarette girl. Like every other girl in Hollywood, she is beautiful enough to take your breath away. Moreover, she looks like Greta Garbo, and knows it. Hers is not a mere invitation to buy her wares: on the contrary, her “Cigars! Cigarettes!” is charged with emotion. You never can tell, of course, when a director is going to conic along. The COAT CHECK GIRL, certainly the most beautiful girl in the world, buttonholes the CIGARETTE GIRL as the crowd thins out)
This scene got cut from the movie.
The 1933 film of the play is available on Youtube at time of writing:
The two major stars here are the dumb-as-rocks George, played by Jack Oakie, and his love interest Susan Walker, played by Sidney Fox. The script clearly intends Aline MacMahon to be the main character as May (renamed from Mary) and the editing and direction of the movie end up a bit unbalanced. It’s hilariious though.
I wrote up the middle play, You Can’t Take it With You, at length in 2018 so you can read that here:
The stage version, even more than the film, concentrates on Grandpa Vanderhof as the central character. In the film he is portrayed electrifyingly by Lionel Barrymore; in the first stage production, he was played by Henry Travers, most famous as Clarence the guardian angel in It’s a Wonderful Life; he also got an Oscar nomination for the station-master in Mrs Miniver. I think he would have been a bit less vicious.
The third play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, is even more overtly a character study than the other two. A famous New York theatre critic slips on an icy patch while visiting Ohio and is immobilised in the home of his reluctant hosts for several weeks. There’s a bit of a comedy of middle-class manners here, but mainly it’s about the monstrous protagonist who is unaware of his own monstrosity.
The opening of the third scene (Act Two) is:
A week later, late afternoon. The room is now dominated by a large Christmas tree, set in the curve of the staircase, and hung with the customary Christmas ornaments. SARAH and JOHN are passing in and out of the library, bringing forth huge packages which they are placing under the tree. MAGGIE sits at a little table at one side, going through a pile of correspondence.
JOHN. Well, I guess that’s all there are, Miss Cutler. They’re all under the tree. MAGGIE. Thank you, John.
I Imagine that this is simple to stage, in that the entire play takes place in the Ohio front room. It’s more of a one-joke story than the other two. The play was written for actor and critic Alexander Woolcott, who had behaved with abominable rudeness while visiting Hart’s family home; for some strange reason he bowed out of actually performing as the character based on himself, and it fell to Monty Woolley to do it on both stage and screen, giving his career an immense boost. The film stars him and Bette Davis. Here’s a trailer:
Once in a Lifetime gets a Bechdel pass. There is plenty of banter between the named woman characters. The opening lines of Act 1 Scene 3 are a conversation between the Cigarette Girl and the Coat Check Girl, who I admit are not named characters, but it’s funny enough to put here (and was censored from the film with the rest of the scene):
COAT CHECK GIRL. Say, I got a tip for you, Kate. CIGARETTE GIRL. Yah? COAT CHECK GIRL. I was out to Universal today—I heard they was going to do a shipwreck picture. CIGARETTE GIRL. Not enough sound. They’re making it a college picture—glee clubs. COAT CHECK GIRL. That was this morning. It’s French Revolution now. CIGARETTE GIRL. Yah? There ought to be something in that for me. COAT CHECK GIRL. Sure! There’s a call out for prostitutes for Wednesday. CIGARETTE GIRL. Say, I’m going out there! Remember that prostitute I did for Paramount? COAT CHECK GIRL. Yah, but that was silent. This is for talking prostitutes.
You Can’t Take It With You also passes easily, with the opening lines featuring two women characters talking.
ESSIE. (fanning herself). My, that kitchen’s hot. PENNY. (finishing a bit of typing). What, Essie? ESSIE. I say the kitchen’s awful hot. That new candy I’m making—it just won’t ever get cool. PENNY. Do you have to make candy today, Essie? It’s such a hot day. ESSIE. Well, I got all those new orders. Ed went out and got a bunch of new orders. PENNY. My, if it keeps on I suppose you’ll be opening up a store. ESSIE. That’s what Ed was saying last night, but I said no, I want to be a dancer. (Bracing herself against the table, she manipulates her legs, ballet fashion) PENNY. The only trouble with dancing is, it takes so long. You’ve been studying such a long time. ESSIE (slowly drawing a leg up behind her as she talks). Only—eight—years. After all, Mother, you’ve been writing plays for eight years. We started about the same time, didn’t we? PENNY. Yes, but you shouldn’t count my first two years, because I was learning to type.
The Man Who Came to Dinner was a bit more of a challenge, given that it is about a monstrous male egotist who dominates all around him. But just over half way through I found an exchange that definitely passes.
MAGGIE. That’s quite a gown, Lorraine. Going anywhere? LORRAINE. This? Oh, I just threw on anything at all. Aren’t you dressing for dinner? MAGGIE. No, just what meets the eye. (She has occasion to carry a few papers across room at this point. LORRAINE‘s eye watches her narrowly) LORRAINE. Who does your hair, Maggie? MAGGIE. A little Frenchwoman named Maggie Cutler comes in every morning. LORRAINE. You know, every time I see you I keep thinking your hair could be so lovely. I always wanted to get my hands on it. MAGGIE. (quietly.) I’ve always wanted to get mine on yours, Lorraine. LORRAINE. (absently.) What, dear?
The other two Bechdel-passing scenes were cut or trimmed for the screen, but I’m glad to give you this one in full with Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (there is fantasy here, but not of the genre kind). Next in that sequence is The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond.
Second and third frames of third page, in original and English:
At the turn of the year F and I went to a Tintin interactive exhibition in Brussels, where we sat and watched montages from the comics set to various trippy music tracks.
I picked up a couple of the albums that I had not read for a long time, to practice my French.
Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, known in English as Land of Black Gold, has an extraordinary publication history. The first half of it came out in 1939-40, but since the villain of the story is a sinister German, the story abruptly stopped when the Nazis invaded Belgium, leaving Tintin stranded in a sandstorm in the Palestinian desert.
Eight years later with the war safely over, Hergé started publishing it again from the beginning in Tintin magazine. He then took three months off in the middle of the process, without telling anyone in advance; he found the forced pace of creativity stressful, but his unplanned absences infuriated colleagues. The full 62-page album was published in 1949.
But it doesn’t end there. More than two decades later, in 1971, the English-language rights had been acquired by Methuen, who gently suggested to Hergé that it might be a good idea to change the setting from British-mandate Palestine and maybe take out the bit where Irgun mistake Tintin for one of their own agents and kidnap him (and also perhaps remove the British army officers). So Hergé shifted the Arabian settings to the fictional county of Khemed, working in some Belgian humour (more on that below), and the Khemed version rather than the Palestine version is now the standard text in all languages.
Despite its pervasive very dubious Orientalism, the story has some great parts. The opening pages in Belgium see an epidemic of explosions in cars and cigarette lighters due to contaminated petrol. But war clouds are gathering and Captain Haddock gets mobilised into the navy. Tintin learns that the problem with the petrol is happening at its source in Khemed, and undertakes a perilous journey to investigate. Having arrived, he gets entangled in a power struggle between the emir and a rebel leader, with the evil Dr Müller behind the sabotage. Despite the antics of detectives Thomson and Thompson, and with the aid of Captain Haddock, Tintin defeats Müller, rescues the emir’s obnoxious son Abdallah, and returns in triumph.
There’s some very good visual stuff here, especially the scenes on the boat across the Mediterranean, in the desert, and in the underground dungeon where Abdallah is imprisoned. Thomson and Thompson mistakenly consume Dr Müller’s chemicals and start sprouting blue hair and frothing at the mouth. The obnoxious Abdallah is well depicted with few words. But the end is a bit rushed and infodumpy, with text occupying almost 50% of the final page. And the plot does not cohere as well as in some of the other albums, no doubt due to the peculiar process of composition. This is oddly reflected in a recurrent Captain Haddock gag – several times he starts to explain how he has happened to arrive on the scene in the nick of time, but keeps getting interrupted and we never find out.
It is well worth reading in French, if you are so inclined. There’s an amusing and untranslatable riff on Charles Trenet’s classic song “Boum!” on the first page. Some of the Khemed names are taken from the Brussels dialect of Flemish – most obviously the capital Wadesdah is a riff on “wat is dat”, “what’s that”, and the oil wells are located in Bir El Ambik, referring to the Brussels lambiek beer. In a nod to French, the emir’s military adviser is Moulfrid, ie “moules-frites”, “mussels with chips”. And you can’t beat the original version of Captain Haddock swearing. “Anacoluthe! Ectoplasme! Oryctérope!” (That last is the standard French word for “aardvark”.)
Total Bechdel fail. Apart from Bianca Castafiore singing on the radio, the only women who we see are the Simoun switchboard operators and a nurse; they are not named, they talk only about men, and they do not talk to each other. The population of Khemed appears to be entirely male.
Here’s an old joke: fisherman sits in his boat, hooks a fish. As he reels it up and up, his friends sit in the boat with him and laugh. “Water’s fine today,” he says.
An urban fantasy with a difference; the fantasy city is a port threatened by pirates from without and religious fanatics from within. Our protagonist is a gay policewoman who survives murder and gets caught up in a plot to destroy the city. I seem to have read a lot of books like this lately, but this held my attention for the duration. You can get it here.
Bechdel pass: the protagonist is rescued by two women smugglers. (Not counting her earlier flirtation with a singer, because the singer is not named.)
This won the Sir Julius Vogel Prize presented at the fateful plague-struck New Zealand WorldCon in 2020. It was my top unread book acquired in that year (as part of the Julius Vogel packet, I think). Next on that pile is The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz.
Usually in leap years I change the day of my weekly book roundups at the very end of February. But I was on a transatlantic flight last night, so missed my Monday write-up yesterday, and I think I will just switch to Tuesdays two weeks earlier than I had planned. (Two transatlantic flights in a week are good for the booklog…)
Current The Sunmakers, by Lewis Baston
Last books finished The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman Three Girls in a Flat, by Enid Yandell and Laura Hayes Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, by Simon Guerrier Sferics 2017, ed. Roz Clarke Kill the Moon, by Darren Mooney Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, by Terrance Dicks The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond
Next books Bletchley Park Brainteasers, by Sinclair McKay The Wheels of Chance, by H.G. Wells Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
My plan was to blog an intense account of everything I did at Gallifrey One this year. But you know what? I ran out of time. So here’s a gallery of the best moments.
Matthew “Adric” Waterhouse. “Now I’ll never know if I was right!”Matthew Waterhouse script reading. He is playing the Doctor, and the cosplayer is playing Adric.Billie Piper explains that she wanted to move on to more edgy and less well-behaved roles after Doctor Who“Hello, sweetie!”Derek Jacobi mortified with embarrassment as they play an old recording of him singing “Home on the Range”Οὐδεὶς δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν· Nobody can serve two Masters.Annette Badland, Shaun Dingwall, Jacqueline King, Camille Coduri, Fraser Hines and Matthew WaterhouseJenna: Where are you going? Cally: I’m going to clear the neutron blasters for firing. Jenna: Well, what are you going to fire at? Cally: Anything that moves.
(plus the second Travis)
Cosplay
Hannah, my partner in crime, as the 8th DoctorNine and Ten.The definite article, you might say.Leela cosplayThe Meeping Angel.Cally. (Previously Leela.)Annoyed that this ended up out of focus but maybe it’s more atmospheric that way.Robot Santas. Or something.Meep: “Will you be my friend?” Me: “No.”The littlest cosplayer.
Ribbons
Our contribution to the cult of ribbons.
My ribbon collection.
Writers
Writers panelLots of writersSimon’s book (review coming soon)Sunday dinner with Simon, John and España
A fantastic weekend while other things were on fire. No actual Doctor, but maybe that made it more relaxed. Hope to come back again next year.
Second frame of third part (“What He Wants”, by Rob Williams):
First of the 2014 line of Eleventh Doctor comics by Titan, this introduces a new companion, Alice Obiefune from Hackney, as a regular Tardis traveller along with invisible musician John Jones and an alien entity called ARC. I like the new dynamic between the primaries, but the other two companions seem a bit superfluous, and the historical story set in the segregated Deep South pulls its punches. Pleasing enough, good art, and you can get it here.
I remember watching The Talons of Weng-Chiang when it was first broadcast in 1977, and loving it; the years since then have sensitised me to the racism in the story, but it retains a problematic attraction. I saw it again on videotape twice in the 1990s, and next time I saw it in 2007 I wrote:
The Talons of Weng-Chiang, from 1977, is the climax of the great Holmes/Hinchcliffe era of Doctor Who (also the last directed by the superb David Maloney), and is as good now as I remember it being when I was nine. (I admit I have also seen it a couple of times since, once in the company of a girl from Manila who giggled pleasingly at the line about the Filipino army advancing on Reykjavik.) Thanks to my background reading I was now alert to look out for a particular shot at the start of episode 4 which had escaped my notice previously (on the DVD commentary track, Louise Jameson laughs loudly). There is so much great stuff here: Leela and the Doctor are both alien to Victorian London, so Jago and Litefoot are effectively the viewpoint characters; Deep Roy, later to play hundreds of Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, turns in a great Mr Sin. Yes, the ethnic stereotypes are rather regrettable (and quite apart from the Chinese, I would draw the attention of Irish viewers to Chris Gannon’s Casey), but the setting and drama are just fantastic.
When I came to it in my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:
I always loved The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and rewatching it made me realise once again how brilliant it is. (I know, I said this about The Deadly Assassin too, but it’s true in both cases.) There are two big problems with the story: the fairly useless and unterrifying giant rat, and the racism including having the lead Chinese role played by a non-Chinese actor. However, the settings are beautifully done, the plotting is tight enough, Magnus Greel’s distorted face is truly horrible, and everyone takes it seriously and does it well. The script has some particular delights: “I can play the ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ in a bowl of live goldfish”; “sleep is for tortoises”; etc.
I know it by heart, so this time I watched it with the cast commentary and the production subtitles. Still enjoyable, except that the racism really does make you cringe. It’s also a total Bechdel fail. Apart from Leela, there are hardly any women characters, and they do not talk to each other.
As it happens, I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel at exactly the same time as rewatching the show and reading the books, and if you don’t mind connecting the sublime and the ridiculous, that’s a really interesting pairing. You can get the DVD here.
Since I have it, I also went back and reread the Robert Holmes script, edited by John McElroy. The opening of the second scene of the third episode is:
2. PROFESSOR LITEFOOT’S DINING ROOM.
(LEELA peers out of the window. She hears the front door shut, then turns around.) LITEFOOT: Nobody out there now! Fellow must have got wind of .. . (He breaks off mid-sentence with a groan. There is a rustling sound in the hall.) LEELA: Professor? (She goes towards the door.) Are you there, Professor? (She is almost at the door when it swings open. MR. SIN is standing there, a knife glinting evilly in his hand. He moves purposefully towards LEELA. For a moment she is frozen with fear, then she grabs a carving knife from the side-table. As MR. SIN moves stiffly towards her, she hurls the knife at him, with expert precision. It thuds into MR. SIN‘s throat but, to LEELA‘s amazement, it seems to have little effect. The weird little mannequin continues to shuffle towards her.)
The script, published in 1989, is really for completists only, but I would say two things: first, two of the most problematic elements of the TV series – the use of a white actor to play Li H’sen Chang, and the rather poor implementation of the giant rat – are of course invisible in the script (the racism, alas, survives); but second, so is the gorgeous staging which made it such a vivid experience when I was nine. A nice bit of nostalgia which you can get here.
Not much to add to that.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the Terrance Dicks novelisation is:
Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang also loses out in the visual stakes, but gains a bit with occasional tight-third narrative from Leela’s point of view, which accentuates one of the successful aspects of the story, the confrontation between her primitive experience and the Victorian era.
The one difference I picked up on this time is that Teresa, one of Greel’s victims, is clearly coded as a sex worker in the TV story but is a gambling hostess in the adaptation. You can get it here.
With the publication of Dale Smith’s monograph on The Talons of Weng-Chiang, the Black Archive covers six consecutive Tom Baker stories and 26 consecutive episodes, which is their longest run of any era. I think that underlines the consensus that the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era, which ended with Talons, was a true high point of the show.
Smith’s monograph is actually quite short by Black Archive standards, at 137 pages. It has just five chapters.
The first, “Foe from the Future”, looks at the story’s roots in the Jack the Ripper murders, Fu Manchu and The Phantom of the Opera, and also reviews the production process which was deeply exhausting for Holmes.
The second chapter, “The Talons of Victoria”, looks at the affinity that Doctor Who has with the Victorian era, and explores the role of science and the narrative of colonialism (also very much applicable to Leela).
The third chapter, “The Time-Traveller and his Savage Companion”, looks at the many double-acts in the story – not just Jago/Litefoot but also Doctor/Leela and Greel/Chang and even Greel/Mr Sin – and also at the extent to which it really does draw on Fu Manchu, The Phantom of the Opera and indeed The Island of Doctor Moreau. Its second paragraph is:
Holmes was undoubtedly a master of dialogue, creating characters painted with broad enough strokes to be immediately recognisable, but giving each of them the ability to say just the right things to give us a clear picture of who they are. Jago’s couplet of ‘You’ve been drinking’ / ‘Well, it’s time you started’ isn’t just a funny joke3: it gives us a clear picture of what is going through his mind, what he wants and how he intends to get it. But dialogue isn’t the only thing that Holmes uses to give his characters life and depth, and his ability with double acts shouldn’t be reduced to just having a way with words. Holmes had a way with every tool in the writer’s toolkit, and the best way to demonstrate that would be to look at one of the other double acts that Holmes peppered Talonswith. 3 Episode 1.
The fourth chapter, “‘Die, Bent Face!'”, looks at Greel’s disfigurement and at disability in fiction in general and Doctor Who in particular, a theme that suddenly caught fire for about 48 hours last year.
The fifth and longest chapter, “Of Its Time, and Ours” addresses the crucial issue of race and racism. I think this is one of the best such analyses I’ve read by a white guy, addressing a largely white audience. We can love things that are problematic, but it’s really important to understand why and how they are problematic. Smith very briefly reviews the history of British engagement with China in the nineteenth century (it was, again, refreshing that I had just read Kuang’s Babel) and also the history of discrimination against London’s Chinese population, led by the trade unions. (He doesn’t mention the issue of Chinese slave labour in South Africa which became one of the themes of the 1906 general election, but there is plenty else to choose from.) He makes it clear that the question of whether Talons of Weng-Chiang is a racist story isn’t a matter of debate; what is up for debate is our response.
We know this is a bigger issue than just whether one story broadcast in 1977 contains racism. Talons isn’t just a product of the 70s – that young proto-fan can find it just as easily as they would find any of Christopher Eccleston’s stories. It is impossible for anyone to watch anything in the context it was made: everything is watched within an elastic context of ‘now’, and Talons is quite literally a product of now. It is easy for someone to get down their Blu-ray and settle down to watch it, to buy books about how it was made or listen to sequels that ape its atmosphere. The same can’t be said for The Black and White Minstrel Show. That’s why we feel uncomfortable when it is raised, why the urge to minimise and argue is so strong: we have watched this story and enjoyed it, and we are not racists so something else must be wrong.
But it isn’t. We are.
If we were educated through the British school system; if we have engaged with British culture; if we have lived in this country for any length of time. If we are white. It would be impossible for us to eliminate every unconscious racist assumption we have been taught to make. That is why the onus is on those of us who are white Doctor Who fans, to listen when people raise the issue of the racism in Talons. We have to educate ourselves about what that racism is and how it displays itself, and ultimately we have to decide how we as people are going to respond to it. Because it is too easy for us to push back, to force the people that racism targets to carry out the emotional and physical labour involved in educating white people. Because racism is a white problem. We benefit from it every day. It is up to us to solve it.
As this story demonstrates, Doctor Who has not always been good to China, but I’m glad to say that China has a thriving Doctor Who fanbase, as I discovered in October. After a couple of weeks when the Chengdu Worldcon has been excoriated in public and in private (including by me) I’ll take a moment to remember the positive.
This is one of my favourite New Who stories. I wrote of my 2011 Hugo votes:
1) Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor. Yes, I do plan to give my first preference to the writer of The Tall Guy, Blackadder, Mr. Bean, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and The Vicar of Dibley. (Not forgetting his first great work with The Heebeegeebees.) I thought this was the outstanding Who episode of last year, the best since Blink, and my biggest difficulty in deciding which others to nominate for the Hugos was a fear that if I nominated any of them, Vincent might be crowded out. But luckily we got through that stage OK; hopefully the Alternative Vote will see the award go where it ought.
Rewatching it again for this exercise, I still loved it a lot. It looks gorgeous, it sounds gorgeous, the acting is spot-on and the script sparkles. I have two reservations: the actual monster bit is slightly surplus to requirements, and at the end, the exhibition of van Gogh’s work would certainly have displayed his dates of birth and death rather prominently. I’ms also still irritated that a teaching moment in Dutch phonology was missed. As I wrote at the time, in the name “van Gogh”:
1) the ‘a’ is very short and low, heading towards a short ‘o’ in English. 2) both the ‘g’ and the ‘gh’ are pronounced as a softer version of ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch’. 3) ‘Vahn Goff’ is completely and utterly wrong. (And if you thought it was ‘Van Go’, I don’t ever want to talk to you again.)
I like his art, and we saw some at the Kröller-Müller Museum a year and a half ago. I’ve also read two biographies in graphic novel format. He’s a fascinating character who left us an evocative legacy, and Richard Curtis pushes it just far enough in Vincent and the Doctor.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid; the two title characters are both men, and apart from Amy there is no named female speaking part. (We are told Giselle’s name after she is dead.)
Paul Driscoll’s Black Archive monograph is one of the longer and more substantial ones. Like the last one I read, on The Haunting of Villa Diodati, it links a historical story about real-life historical creators to the actual biographies and works of those creators. I found it much more successful, I think partly because I like the story much more but mainly because Driscoll has written a better book.
The first chapter, “The Voice of the Writer”, looks at the career of Richard Curtis and how Vincent and the Doctor flows from a lot of his previous themes, and also the very personal one of his sister who he lost to depression a year before the episode was written. I’ve seen less than half of the films and stories referenced, but I am convinced of a linear narrative thread connecting Vincent with About Time and Blackadder: Back and Forth. It’s detailed and well argued.
The second and longest chapter, “The Voice of the Artist”, starts by looking at other screen treatments of van Gogh’s life and death, then looks at how the episode treats him as tortured genius vs visionary artist, and finished by looking at van Gogh’s own letters for indications of how he himself saw his art.
The third chapter, “The Voice of the Monster”, looks at the monster as a metaphor for mental illness and considers how Doctor Who portrays trauma more generally. Its second paragraph is:
In a lengthy scene cut during post-production, the Doctor tells Amy that artists often see real things that nobody else notices. As they prepare to head off in the TARDIS to meet Vincent for the first time, he shows her various examples from Fuseli, Bosch, Munch and De Goya3. The Doctor’s point is that nightmares and monsters cannot always be dismissed as flights of fantasy on the part of the artist. The monster in The Church at Auvers (1890) painting reminds him of a fairy tale he’d read as a child. He cannot be sure, but he sets off on the presumption that the creature is real and not a product of Vincent’s imagination. 3TCH [The Complete History] #65, p94f.
The fourth chapter, “The Voice of the Paintings”, looks first at how little the visual arts feature in Doctor Who outside the Moffat era and then at how much Moffat emphasised them, and then looks at several specific van Gogh paintings and the way in which they are used in the episode.
A brief conclusion considers the story as a fairy tale.
An appendix lists 46 (!) different van Gogh paintings that appear in or are referred to in the episode.
As I said, this was a long but meaty Black Archive, and I recommend it. You can get it here.
It didn’t work out that way. For one thing, I overslept and felt terrible when I got up. I had forgotten what a long, sleepless journey can do to your system. For the past five years I had done less and less traveling, and I was getting soft. For another thing, the rain had changed to sleet during the night and was driving down in freezing gusts. The wind was blowing briskly from the east, in off the sea. Bill and I sat at the battered wooden table in the farm kitchen, while Mrs. Trevelyan pushed bacon, eggs, homemade sausage, bread and hot sweet tea into me until I showed signs of life. She was a spry, red-cheeked lady in her middle sixties, and if she was surprised that Bill had finally brought someone else with him to explore Little House, she hid it well.
When I was doing my first run through stories that won both the Hugo and Nebula in 2004, I wrote:
Back in the summer of 1991 I was finishing up my M Phil in Cambridge, and dropped in one day on my supervisor, who at the time was the curator of the history of science museum. He welcomed me into his office, shuffled through some papers with strange cylindrical diagrams on them, and flourished them at me: “These,” he said, “are Charles Babbage’s original blueprints for the Difference Engine.” He had a tendency to do that. I remember one seminar on Newton where he brought in an authentic 17th-century widget, “just like Newton would have had”, and showed the original owner’s notes of how it had been used, almost casually indicating at the end that the original owner in this case had in fact been Isaac Newton. We would occasionally see the current Lucasian Professor, a post previously held by Babbage and Newton, trundling through the cobbled streets in his battery-driven wheelchair.
Babbage was all the rage in those days, it being the bicentenary of his birth, and with no less than three sf novels published the previous year in which Babbage’s difference engine was actually built (Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind, S.M. Stirling’s The Stone Dogs, and William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine), and thus the computer was brought into being a century and a half before Bill Gates. Apart from those three novels and Sheffield’s novelette, which is dated as having been finished on December 31, 1991, there aren’t many stories with that theme, though steampunk as a genre keeps on going. In all three of those novels, the difference engine is at least partly responsible for revolutionising society.
Sheffield, however, takes it in a different direction: what if it were simply built in 1850 as a project of an eccentric couple in the farther flung reaches of the British Empire, and then forgotten? His unnamed narrator and his old New Zealander friend Bill Rigley team up to find out the truth behind the manuscripts located on a farm at the back end of nowhere. In fact, the largest surviving fragment of Babbage’s analytical engine was indeed discovered, along with various papers now in the Wanganui Museum, on a farm in New Zealand in the late 1970s by Garry Tee, to whom “Georgia On My Mind” is dedicated and who “is no more Bill Rigley than I [Charles Sheffield] am the narrator of this story.” However, in our timeline the Babbage material reached New Zealand via Australia in the hands of Babbage’s son and grandson when they emigrated, rather than being constructed from scratch.
Tee made his real-life discovery about the time that Charles Sheffield’s first wife died, in 1977, and the narrator of “Georgia on My Mind” has had a similar recent loss. The theme of nostalgia and loss runs strongly and powerfully through the story, permeating the excitement of the two friends as they look through the papers of Luke and Louisa Derwent from over a century before. Anyone who has ever been bereaved will sympathise with the narrator’s sharp intake of breath as a picture of Louisa reminds him of his dead wife. The setting of New Zealand is also richly portrayed, in the days before Peter Jackson made it as iconic as it now has become. And so we are not really prepared for what happens next.
It seems that the Derwents – a married couple, exiled from England because they were also, scandalously, half-brother and half-sister – had made contact with aliens – or at least intelligent non-humans – on Macquarie Island. One last letter written in 1855 reveals that Luke and the dying Louisa set off to the permanent base of the “heteromorphs”; there is just about enough information in the manuscripts to enable the identification of the site of that permanent base as being South Georgia, in the Atlantic Ocean. (The story’s title has nothing to do with the U.S. state of Georgia, let alone the former Soviet Republic of the same name, where I will be this time next week as I write these words.)
And so, just as the Derwents’ story finishes with preparation for a long and dangerous journey, “Georgia On My Mind” ends with our narrator and Bill Rigley preparing to follow the Derwents to South Georgia. But they will not be alone; word has leaked out, and a host of people from MIT, Livermore and the hard science fiction community are rumoured to also be converging on the island. For some readers, this somewhat recursive twist at the end spoils the story. Not for me. I read it as a tribute, 14 years on, to the support Sheffield drew from his professional and literary colleagues at the time of his bereavement, and a good end to a story whose plot was never intended to be fully resolved.
I should say that Garry Tee of the University of Auckland, on whom the character of Bill Rigley is based, found this review soon after I had posted it in 2004 and we maintained a friendly correspondence until he retired in 2018. If he is still around, he will turn 92 next month, so I do not feel offended that I have not heard from him in a while.
Edited to add, June 2024: Nigel Rowe emailed me to say that in fact Gary Tee died on 18 February 2024, only a few days after I had published this blog post. He was 91. There are two lovely obituaries here and here. Thank you, Gary, for your friendly correspondence with a random chap on the other side of the world.
Coming back to it two decades later, I still loved this story for bringing me back to my history of science days, the most intellectually interesting work I have ever done in my life. I wondered also if E.J. Swift was slightly inspired by it for The Coral Bones. And I think we can all do with a hidden history occasionally.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid; the two women characters are Mrs Trevelyan and Louisa Derwent, who live more than a century apart.
The story has not been reprinted in English since 1998, in The New Hugo Winners, Volume IV where I first encountered it. You can also get it in:
Analog January 1993 (which also included Hugo-wining novella “Death on the Nile” by Harry Turtledove)
“Georgia on my Mind” won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novelette presented in 1994 for work published in 1993. “The Franchise” by John Kessel was also on both final ballots. The Nebula ballot also included two other Hugo winners due to varying year / word count qualifications.
The other Hugos in the written categories went to Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (Novel), “Down in the Bottomlands” by Harry Turtledove (Novella) and “Death on the Nile” by Connie Willis (Short Story). The Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo went to Jurassic Park. The other Nebula winners were Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (Novel), “The Night We Buried Road Dog” by Jack Cady (Novella) and “Graves” by Joe Haldeman (Short Story).
Next up in this sequence: “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” by Mike Resnick.
Second page of third chapter (which is in English in the original – I checked):
Someone commented on social media that this isn’t my usual reading fare, and it’s true. Back in November I was at Brussels Comic Con, and also needed a new phone case; and I spotted a stall selling manga-style artwork including this rather striking young warrior woman. So I bought it.
I thought it must be just something that the stall-holder had invented, but young F was certain that it was a canonical manga, and after a bit of crowdsourcing with his friends, confirmed that it is Rukia Kuchiki from the BLEACH by Tite Kubo. So I invested in the first volume, Strawberry and the Soul Reaper, to become better informed.
It’s a fairly basic story of Ichigo Kurosaki, a kid with red hair (unusual in Japan, to say the least), who finds himself drawn into the grand supernatural battle between the good guy Soul Reapers and the evil spirits called Hollows. Rukia Kuchiki, the character on my phone case, is one of the immortal Soul Reapers (based on the traditional Japanese shinigami, only cuter), but ends up giving her powers to Ichigo and having to become a normal(ish) schoolgirl.
I wasn’t blown away by it, though I can see why the core audience (which I’m not in) would like it. I would have liked to see more sensitive exploration of Ichigo’s abusive family situation, and I was sorry that the promising character of Orihime was introduced and then apparently got dropped. (Though I believe she comes back in later volumes.) Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like. You can get it here.
Even though it’s about a teenage boy with magical powers, I did find a scene where Rukika and Orihime are talking to each other about Orihime’s injured leg. Ichigo is in the vicinity but not in the conversation. (Read right to left.)
The end of story about the phone case is that less than three months after buying it, I found that I needed to upgrade to a new iPhone in order to be able to run my Apple Watch. So if you’d like the Rukika phone case, it’s surplus to my needs right now.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer, and also my top unread comic in English; next on those piles are Babel, by R.F. Kuang, and Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray.
Current Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, by Simon Guerrier
Last book finished Lizard Radio, by Pat Schmatz
Next books Kill the Moon, by Darren Mooney Sferics 2017, ed. Roz Clarke Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien
Since 2007 I’ve been the Northern Ireland arm of the analysis of UK parliamentary constituency changes by Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings. The latest version, taking into account the new boundaries that will take effect from the next election (be it Westminster or Assembly) was published a few weeks ago; it’s been a busy period for me, but I have now taken the time to write up the changes to each of the 18 Northern Ireland seats.
Media coverage coverage of the changes focussed on the effects in England, Scotland and Wales, and frankly that was the right call; the changes in Northern Ireland are the least dramatic since the 1970s. The 1983 review added five new constituencies, taking the total from 12 to 17; the 1996 review added another, making a total of 18; and the 2007 review expanded the Belfast seats outwards with knock-on effects all around the map.
There were also two failed reviews, one in 2013 which fell victim to the internal politics of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, and one in 2018-20 which was quashed by the Belfast courts for failing to adequately consider public opinion at the final stage of revision (and the whole thing was then killed off by Boris Johnson).
So this is the first change to the Westminster constituencies for 17 years, the longest gap since the 1950-70 period. In Northern Ireland the Westminster boundaries are also used for Assembly elections, and indeed in 1973 and 1996, regional level elections used the new boundaries first. Personally I think that the Assembly constituencies should be linked to the Local Government Districts rather than the Westminster seats, but that’s for another day.
Every seat is changed this time, but few of the changes are drastic. In the list below, I’m going from the most changed to the least changes constituency, showing my working for each of them. Notional votes are a bit of a mug’s game, but I’m confident that these numbers correspond closely to whatever the reality might have been if the 2019 general election votes had been cast on the 2024 boundaries.
Going from most to least changed, the biggest effect is on the constituency where I grew up, South Belfast, now renamed to South Belfast and Mid Down. It loses 10% of its electorate to East Belfast, but gains a bit more than that from Strangford and Lagan Valley, and a few scrapings from West Belfast. (By the way, I have an idiosyncracy of calling the Belfast constituencies “X Belfast” rather than “Belfast X”. It seems to me that “South Belfast and Mid Down” sounds better than “Belfast South and Mid Down.)
Projecting the 2019 election onto the new boundaries, I see about 850 more Unionist votes, 550 more for Alliance and 1650 fewer for the SDLP, with another 250 Nationalist votes coming in from West Belfast. Claire Hanna won the seat with a majority of over 15,000 in 2019; this would be reduced by 2,000, but the SDLP still win more than half of the votes in the constituency.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Con
APNI
Gr
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
70134
11678
1259
6786
27079
550
From
To
24.7%
2.7%
14.3%
57.2%
1.2%
SB
SBMD
63029
9786
1055
6028
25136
550
SB
EB
-7096
-1890
-204
-758
-1939
SB
WB
-9
-1
-3
-1
Str
SBMD
6078
1634
372
136
981
73
207
LV
SBMD
2161
611
276
31
320
34
22
WB
SBMD
710
56
20
67
32
225
18
Total
71978
12087
1703
167
7348
73
67
25409
247
568
25.4%
3.6%
0.3%
15.4%
0.2%
0.1%
53.3%
0.5%
1.2%
Change
+0.7%
+0.9%
+0.3%
+1.1%
+0.2%
+0.1%
-3.9%
+0.5%
–
DUP
UUP
Con
APNI
Gr
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
Sinn Fein did not contest the 2019 Westminster election, but they could take almost half of the SDLP vote and Claire Hanna would still win the seat. She bantered with me on social media about looking forward to the challenge.
At Assembly level, Unionists combined were just short of 2 quotas in South Belfast in 2022, and these numbers would put them just about in position to regain the second seat lost in 2017.
Strangford
Neighbouring Strangfordloses 6,000 voters, mainly in Saintfield, to the new Belfast South and Mid Down, but gains 9,000 around Downpatrick from South Down.
This results in the biggest shift in party support in any constituency.
Roll
DUP
UUP
UKIP
Cons
APNI
Gr
SDLP
SF
Aontu
66990
17705
4023
308
1476
10634
790
1994
555
From
To
47.2%
10.7%
0.8%
3.9%
28.4%
2.1%
5.3%
1.5%
0.0%
Str
Str
60899
16068
3651
308
1340
9651
717
1787
555
Str
SBMD
-6078
-1634
-372
-136
-981
-73
-207
Str
ND
-10
-3
-1
-2
Str
S
-3
-1
SD
Str
9171
60
26
800
2215
2462
193
Total
16128
3677
308
1340
10451
717
4002
3017
193
40.5%
9.2%
0.8%
3.4%
26.2%
1.8%
10.0%
7.6%
0.5%
-6.7%
-1.5%
0.0%
-0.6%
-2.1%
-0.3%
+4.7%
+6.1%
+0.5%
DUP
UUP
UKIP
Cons
APNI
Gr
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The DUP majority over Alliance here is reduced from 7,000 to 5,700, and if you squint you could just about see a unified non-Unionist candidate defeating a split opposition at a Westminster election; but it’s not very likely. From the Assembly point of view, the Nationalist vote increases by more than 10% and is now over a quota. At every Assembly election since 1998, the SDLP have been runners-up here; whichever of the Nationalist parties can get ahead of the other now has a good chance of gaining a seat here.
South Down
Staying in the neighbourhood, the calculations for South Down were much the most complex. It swaps bits of territory with three of its neighbours, most notably donating the voters around Downpatrick to Strangford, and also makes a gain from Upper Bann (my ancient homeland of Loughbrickland).
Although the shifts are geographically complex, the electoral impact is muted.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
SDLP
SF
Aontu
79295
7619
3307
6916
14517
16137
1266
From
To
15.3%
6.6%
0.0%
13.9%
29.2%
32.4%
2.5%
SD
SD
68646
7417
3219
5987
12032
13374
1049
SD
Str
-9171
-60
-26
-800
-2215
-2462
-193
SD
N&A
-1458
-140
-61
-127
-267
-297
-23
SD
LV
-20
-2
-1
-2
-4
–4
UB
SD
1960
574
174
152
83
221
N&A
SD
1058
143
55
55
123
264
21
LV
SD
105
27
12
1
18
2
2
Str
SD
3
1
Total
71,772
8162
3460
1
6212
12240
13861
1070
18.1%
7.7%
–
13.8%
27.2%
30.8%
2.4%
+2.8%
+1.0%
–
-0.1%
-2.0%
-1.6%
-0.2%
DUP
UUP
Cons
APNI
SDLP
SF
Aontu
SF won this seat with a 1300 majority in 2019, and I don’t see much change to that in my notional result. The overall Nationalist vote share decreases by 3.8% and the overall Unionist share increases by the same amount. This is still not enough to put Unionists in play for a second Assembly seat.
Lagan Valley
Rounding off the middle of County Down, Lagan Valley loses Drumbo to South Belfast and Mid Down, and more significantly Dunmurry to West Belfast, while gaining the eastern fringes of Lurgan from Upper Bann.
Again, it looks bigger on the map than it actually is.
Roll
DUP
UUP
UKIP
Cons
APNI
SDLP
SF
75884
19586
8606
315
955
13087
1758
1098
From
To
43.1%
19.0%
0.7%
2.1%
28.8%
3.9%
2.4%
LV
LV
68948
18020
7910
315
878
11793
1441
900
LV
WB
-4330
-840
-370
0
-41
-898
-272
-170
LV
SBMD
-2161
-611
-276
0
-31
-320
-34
-22
LV
SA
-340
-88
-39
0
-4
-59
-8
-5
LV
SD
-105
-27
-12
0
-1
-18
-2
-2
UB
LV
7364
1818
550
0
0
571
410
1090
SD
LV
20
2
1
0
0
2
4
4
Total
76,332
19840
8460
315
878
12365
1855
1994
43.4%
18.5%
0.7%
1.9%
27.1%
4.1%
4.4%
+0.3%
-0.4%
+0.0%
-0.2%
-1.8%
+0.2%
+1.9%
The DUP’s 6,500 majority over Alliance in 2019 increase to 7,500 (what you might call the Dunmurry effect), and the total non-Unionist vote upticks very slightly. At Assembly level, Nationalists were able to win a seat in Lagan Valley in a good year, and these changes make good years more likely, though Alliance would still have a good chance of holding their second seat.
West Belfast
Looking north of Lagan Valley, West Belfast loses a few nibbles around the edges but gains 9,000 voters from Dunmurry at one end and the Shankill at the other.
Neither of the newly added patches of territory is great for SF, but they are pretty far ahead anyway.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Cons
APNI
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
65761
5220
1882
6194
2985
20866
1635
From
To
13.5%
4.9%
16.0%
7.7%
53.8%
4.2%
WB
WB
62538
4084
1813
6058
2919
20408
1599
WB
NB
-2393
-1071
-45
-57
-28
-195
-16
WB
SBMD
-710
-56
-20
-67
-32
-225
-18
WB
SA
-120
-10
-3
-11
-5
-38
-3
NB
WB
5044
2,863
348
–
–
208
–
LV
WB
4330
840
370
41
898
–
272
170
–
SB
WB
9
1
1
–
3
–
0
Total
71921
7789
370
41
3060
6058
3195
20786
1599
18.2%
0.9%
0.1%
7.1%
14.1%
7.4%
48.5%
3.7%
+4.7%
+0.9%
+0.1%
+2.3%
-1.8%
-0.2%
-5.3%
-0.5%
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
This is the second biggest shift of party support in any constituency, but I don’t think SF will be awfully troubled by the prospect of their 14000 majority over PBP at Westminster being reduced to a 12000 majority over the DUP; the seat is safe as houses anyway. Unionist candidates were runners-up here in every assembly election since 1998, with the exception of 2003 when Diane Dodds actually won. There is now a clear prospect of a safe(ish) Unionist seat at the next Assembly election.
Upper Bann
As noted already, Upper Bann loses Loughbrickland to South Down and its eastern fringes to Lagan Valley, but gains parts of the apple country of North Armagh. It was the most bloated constituency on the old boundaries.
The result looks big on the map but has little net electoral impact.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
SF
Aontu
83028
20501
6197
6433
4623
12291
From
To
41.0%
12.4%
12.9%
9.2%
24.6%
UB
UB
73704
18109
5474
5711
4130
10980
UB
LV
-7364
-1818
-550
-571
-410
-1090
UB
SD
-1960
-574
-174
-152
-83
-221
N&A
UB
3265
822
314
169
221
474
38
Total
76969
18931
5788
5880
4351
11454
38
40.8%
12.5%
12.7%
9.4%
24.7%
0.1%
-0.2%
0.1%
-0.2%
0.1%
0.1%
0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The DUP majority at Westminster drops from just over 8000 to just under 8000. The last Assembly seat here in 2022 was won by Alliance with a 376 vote margin over SF; that would look vulnerable under these changes.
East Belfast
This is very straightforward, with a loss to North Down in one direction and gains from South Belfast in the other.
This does bring in notional South Belfast SDLP votes (the SDLP did not stand in East belfast in 2019).
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
66273
20874
2516
19055
From
To
49.2%
5.9%
44.9%
0.0%
EB
EB
62980
19726
2378
18232
EB
ND
-3293
-1148
-138
-823
SB
EB
7096
1890
204
758
1939
Total
70076
21616
2581
18990
1939
47.9%
5.7%
42.1%
4.3%
-1.3%
-0.2%
-2.8%
4.3%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
The DUP’s majority in 2019 was 1800, and the changes expand that to 2600. But those 1939 notional SDLP votes could go a long way to making up the difference in one of the tightest results. I don’t see any direct impact on Assembly representation; there is still nowhere near a Nationalist quota.
North Belfast
Jumping across the river now, we have some tinkering around the margins of North Belfast; the biggest changes are the smallest on the map, to West Belfast on the Shankill and to and from South and East Antrim in Newtownabbey.
These changes basically don’t help the DUP to regain the seat lost in 2019.
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
21135
4824
23078
From
To
72332
43.1%
9.8%
47.1%
NB
NB
66711
18103
4437
22686
NB
WB
-5044
-2863
-348
-208
NB
SA
-577
-169
-38
-184
WB
NB
2393
1071
45
57
28
195
16
SA
NB
1926
157
132
563
192
267
0
EA
NB
342
89
29
5
54
5
11
0
Total
71372
19419
161
5
5099
57
225
23158
16
40.3%
0.3%
0.0%
10.6%
0.1%
0.5%
48.1%
0.0%
-2.8%
0.3%
0.0%
0.8%
0.1%
0.5%
1.0%
0.0%
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
SF’s 1900 majority in 2019 expands to 3700. And it’s difficult to see any change in Assembly representation either.
East Antrim
Continuing up the coast, we reach East Antrim which swaps large but sparsely populated territory with North Antrim.
It doesn’t make a lot of difference to the results though.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
Green
SDLP
SF
64907
16871
5475
1043
10165
685
902
2120
From
To
45.3%
14.7%
2.8%
27.3%
1.8%
2.4%
5.7%
EA
EA
62640
16282
5284
1007
9810
685
870
2046
EA
NA
-1045
-272
-88
-17
-164
0
-15
-34
EA
SA
-880
-229
-74
-14
-138
0
-12
-29
EA
NB
-342
-89
-29
-5
-54
0
-5
-11
NA
EA
7036
482
1342
0
583
0
553
1057
SA
EA
260
55
45
0
30
0
8
18
Total
69936
16818
6671
1007
10423
685
1432
3120
41.9%
16.6%
2.5%
26.0%
1.7%
3.6%
7.8%
-3.4%
+1.9%
-0.3%
-1.3%
-0.1%
+1.1%
+2.1%
The DUP’s actual majority of 6700 over Alliance is reduced to a notional 6400, which won’t cause sleepless nights. There are clearly two non-Unionist quotas for the Assembly, and equally clearly Nationalists will struggle to get one of them.
Newry and Armagh
Back to the south of Northern Ireland again, where Newry and Armagh, the second most bloated seat under the old boundaries, loses most of the apple country to Upper Bann and Fermanagh-South Tyrone, and tidies up its eastern boundary.
The territory lost is at the more Unionist end of the constituency.
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
SF
Aontu
11000
4204
4211
9449
20287
1628
From
To
81329
21.7%
8.3%
8.3%
18.6%
40.0%
3.2%
N&A
N&A
73,127
9275
3545
3786
8753
18792
1508
N&A
FST
-3879
-760
-290
-201
-353
-757
-61
N&A
UB
-3265
-822
-314
-169
-221
-474
-38
N&A
SD
-1058
-143
-55
-55
-123
-264
-21
SD
N&A
1458
140
61
127
267
297
23
Total
74585
9415
3605
3913
9019
19088
1531
20.2%
7.7%
8.4%
19.4%
41.0%
3.3%
-1.4%
-0.5%
0.1%
0.8%
1.0%
0.1%
SF’s 2019 majority increases from almost 9300 to over 9600. For the Assembly, a second Unionist seat slips a little further away.
North Antrim
Back up to the north again as North Antrim swaps territory with East Antrim and comes out a bit smaller.
Changes that look big on the map don’t always have much effect on the ground.
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
77156
20860
8139
6231
246
2943
5632
47.4%
18.5%
0.0%
14.1%
0.6%
6.7%
12.8%
NA
NA
70120
20378
6797
5648
246
2390
4575
NA
EA
7036
-482
-1342
-583
-553
-1057
EA
NA
1045
272
88
17
164
15
34
Total
71165
20650
6885
17
5811
246
2404
4609
50.8%
16.9%
0.0%
14.3%
0.6%
5.9%
11.3%
3.5%
-1.5%
0.0%
0.2%
0.0%
-0.8%
-1.4%
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
I see the DUP’s notional majority here increasing slightly from 12,000 to 13,000. From three quotas they should notionally get three Assembly seats, but Jim Allister was not a candidate in 2019.
Fermanagh and South Tyrone
Out West now, where the maths is fairly simple but the politics complicated. Fermanagh and South Tyrone was pretty close to the required size, but because of other changes must gain some net territory from Newry and Armagh, and lose a bit to Mid Ulster.
On paper, the differences are not huge.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
Aontu
72945
21929
2650
751
3446
21986
0.0%
43.2%
5.2%
1.5%
6.8%
43.3%
0.0%
FST
FST
69887
22722
2761
751
3608
23017
FST
MU
-3058
-793
-111
-162
-1031
N&A
FST
3879
760
290
201
353
757
61
MU
FST
877
136
32
44
79
255
Total
74643
896
21458
2784
751
3717
21968
61
1.7%
41.6%
5.4%
1.5%
7.2%
42.5%
0.1%
1.7%
-1.6%
0.2%
0.0%
0.4%
-0.8%
0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
Aontu
But this was the tightest result in Northern Ireland in 2019, SF beating the UUP by a mere 57 votes. The notional majority is now 510; but there are 896 notional DUP votes in the mix. So Northern Ireland’s closest race may actually have got a bit closer.
Mid Ulster
This was one boundary change that I called completely incorrectly. I had expected that Mid Ulster would stretch north towards Dungiven, as had been the case in the previous quashed proposals. But in fact it takes a chunk of Coalisland from Femanagh and South Tyrone, which losing a large but sparsely populated chunk to West Tyrone.
It doesn’t make a lot of difference.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
70501
10936
2611
3526
690
6384
20473
24.5%
5.9%
7.9%
1.5%
14.3%
45.9%
MU
MU
67036
10566
2523
3284
690
6031
19342
MU
WT
-2588
-234
-56
-198
-273
877
MU
FST
-877
-136
-32
-44
-79
255
FST
MU
3058
793
111
162
1031
Total
70094
10566
3316
3395
690
6193
20372
23.7%
7.4%
7.6%
1.5%
13.9%
45.7%
-0.8%
1.6%
-0.3%
0.0%
-0.4%
-0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
SF’s 9,500 majority extends to a notional 9,800, and the needle is not really moved for the Assembly seats.
Foyle
A little trimming at the edges to East Londonderry and West Tyrone.
The changes are minor, and although more Nationalist than Unionist voters are moved, the Unionist vote share is hit worse.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
74431
4773
1088
1267
1332
26881
9771
2032
From
To
10.1%
2.3%
2.7%
2.8%
57.0%
20.7%
4.3%
Foyle
Foyle
69890
3852
878
1189
1251
25785
9372
1949
Foyle
ELy
-2854
-691
-157
-49
-51
-591
-215
-45
Foyle
WT
-1687
-230
-53
-29
-30
-505
-184
-38
69890
3,852
878
1,189
1251
25785
9372
1,949
8.7%
2.0%
2.7%
2.8%
58.2%
21.2%
4.4%
-1.4%
-0.3%
0.0%
0.0%
1.2%
0.4%
0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The SDLP’s 17,100 majority in 2019 is reduced to a mere 16,400 which I don’t think will trouble them unduly. The DUP won the last Assembly seat here by a margin of 95 votes over the UUP, the closest result of the 2022 election, and on the above swing it would be vulnerable, but the picture is very much blurred by tactical voting.
West Tyrone
Simply takes in adjacent chunks from Mid Ulster and Foyle.
These are small territories, sparsely populated, and don’t make a lot of difference.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Green
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
66339
9066
2774
3979
521
0
7330
16544
972
22.0%
6.7%
9.7%
1.3%
0.0%
17.8%
40.2%
2.4%
WT
WT
66339
9066
2774
3979
521
0
7330
16544
972
MU
WT
2588
234
56
198
0
0
273
877
0
Foy
WT
1687
230
53
29
0
30
505
184
38
Total
70614
9530
2882
4206
521
30
8108
17604
1010
21.7%
6.6%
9.6%
1.2%
0.1%
18.5%
40.1%
2.3%
-0.3%
-0.2%
-0.1%
-0.1%
+0.1%
+0.7%
-0.1%
-0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Green
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The SF notional majority increases from almost 7500 to almost 8100. No impact on the Assembly result.
South Antrim
Getting near the end now, with South Antrim by far the most annoying to calculate: lots of little changes that don’t add up to anything much, the biggest being chunks of Glengormley going to North Belfast.
A real pain to work out these very small notionals!
Roll
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
71915
15149
12460
8190
2288
4887
35.3%
29.0%
19.1%
5.3%
11.4%
SA
SA
69729
14937
12283
7597
2088
4603
SA
NB
1926
-157
-132
-563
-192
-267
SA
EA
260
-55
-45
-30
-8
-18
EA
SA
880
229
74
14
138
12
29
NB
SA
577
169
38
184
LV
SA
340
88
39
4
59
8
5
WB
SA
120
10
3
11
5
38
3
Total
71646
15432
12396
18
7836
11
2113
4858
3
36.2%
29.1%
0.0%
18.4%
0.0%
5.0%
11.4%
0.0%
+0.9%
+0.1%
–
-0.7%
–
-0.4%
–
–
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
In a good year, the UUP could overtake the DUP here, and in a much much better year the same is true for Alliance. But the boundary changes have little impact on the Westminster or Assembly outcomes.
North Down
Takes in a small sliver of Strangford and a larger sliver of East Belfast.
The Alliance Party’s strongest seat takes in 3000 voters from the Alliance Party’s second strongest seat.
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
15390
4936
1959
18358
67,109
37.9%
12.1%
4.8%
45.2%
ND
ND
67,109
15390
4936
1959
18358
EB
ND
3,293
1148
138
0
823
Str
ND
10
3
1
0
2
Total
70,412
16541
5075
1959
19182
38.7%
11.9%
4.6%
44.9%
0.8%
-0.3%
-0.2%
-0.3%
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
Alliance’s Westminster majority is reduced from almost 3000 to just over 2600, so the seat remains competitive but they are starting ahead. The shifts are so small that it’s difficult to see much impact on the Assembly.
East Londonderry
Gains a ward from Foyle.
Small numbers make for small differences.
DUP
UUP
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
69359
15765
3599
5921
6158
6128
1731
40.1%
9.2%
15.1%
15.7%
15.6%
4.4%
ELy
ELy
69359
15765
3599
5921
6158
6128
1731
Foy
ELy
2854
691
157
49
51
591
215
45
Total
72213
16456
3756
5970
51
6749
6343
1776
40.0%
9.1%
14.5%
0.1%
16.4%
15.4%
4.3%
-0.1%
-0.5%
+0.1%
+0.8%
-0.2%
-0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The DUP’s Westminster majority is unchanged. It’s difficult to see much impact on the Assembly election, especially if independent MLA Claire Sugden remains active.
So there you have it. A Westminster election is likely before the end of the year. It may well see some changes of seats, but the new boundaries are unlikely to make the difference.
A grim question for the next time you are setting a general knowledge quiz: How many European Commissioners have died in office?
The answer is three, in 1958, 1981 and 1987.
Michel Rasquin was the very first European Commissioner for Transport and the first Commissioner from Luxembourg, appointed to the Walter Hallstein Commission in 1958. He lasted less than four months, dying on 27 April aged 58. Born in 1899, he was a journalist before the Second World War and the first leader of the Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party after the war. He was Luxembourg’s minister for the economy from 1951 until he became a European Commissioner.
Finn Olav Gundelach was the very first Danish Commissioner, appointed in 1973 under François-Xavier Ortoli as Commissioner for the Internal Market and the Customs Union, re-appointed as Vice-President for Agriculture and Fisheries in the Roy Jenkins Commission, and demoted to mere Commissioner for Agriculture under Gaston Thorn. However he lived only a week into his third term, dying aged 55 on 13 January 1981. Born in 1925, he was a career diplomat who had served as Danish ambassador to the UN and the EU, and also vice-president of GATT.
Finally (and let’s hope it stays that way), Alois Pfeiffer was appointed as Commissioner for Economic Affairs and Employment in the first Jacques Delors Commission in 1985, as one of the two German commissioners. He died on 1 August 1987 aged 62. Born in 1924, he was a forester and then a trade unionist, and was nominated by the SPD. He never held elected public office, and was seen by some in Germany as a bit too European and not sufficiently German.
All three of them were simply replaced by nomination by their home government. These days a new Commissioner has to go through hearings in the European Parliament as well. (We’ve had four resignations out of 27 from the current crew, all replaced in that way.)
There is a much more recent case with some similarities: the most recent President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, died a week before the end of his term in January 2022 aged 65. Born in 1956, he was a print and TV journalist in Italy until becoming an MEP for the centre-left Democratic Party in 2009. When he emerged as a front-runner to head the Parliament in 2019, there was a lot of head-scratching. He performed perfectly well in office, however, until falling ill in 2021. His immediate successor in an acting capacity was the First Vice-President, Roberta Metsola, who was then elected to the job at the scheduled election a week later, and is still there until the elections this summer. Presumably if a vacancy occurs a bit earlier in the term, there would need to be a full election process, but it was hardly worth it for seven days.
Mrs. Kelsey was settling into her house at Alwiyah, and I was glad to be able to take a few things off her shoulders.
This came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago, and I realised that I have it in my vast store of unread Agatha Christies, and pulled it out to see for myself. It was not one of the Christies that I had consumed as a teenager. It’s mainly remembered for the story behind the story; the first murder victim is based strongly on the real-life Lady Katherine Woolley, wife of Sir Leonard Woolley who led the 1930s excavation at Ur where Agatha Christie met her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan.
Massive spoilers: The various European and American characters in the book are vividly drawn. But the murder part of the plot is frankly ridiculous. It requires the first victim to have forgotten crucial details of her own previous marriage, and also requires that she remains strangely silent at the crucial moment of being murdered. The second murder is very poorly planned and could easily have failed. The murderer is very lucky that they actually off their victims. They are unlucky that Poirot is there to catch them out.
Despite my frustrations with the narrative, I found the context really fascinating. It’s a thoroughly racist book – Iraq was basically under British military occupation at the time, and the Arabs get barely a mention – and certainly not a positive one – in the narrative.
It was the workmen that made me laugh. You never saw such a lot of scarecrows – all in long petticoats and rags, and their heads tied up as though they had toothache. And every now and then, as they went to and fro carrying away baskets of earth, they began to sing – at least I suppose it was meant to be singing – a queer sort of monotonous chant that went on and on over and over again. I noticed that most of their eyes were terrible – all covered with discharge, and one or two looked half blind. I was just thinking what a miserable lot they were when Dr. Leidner said, “Rather a fine-looking lot of men, aren’t they?”
I was struck by a couple of other points too. The narrator’s name is Amy Leatheran; that surname simply doesn’t exist in real life. (She pops up again in the 1970 Agatha Christie novel Passenger to Frankfurt, nursing the narrator’s great-aunt, but does not appear to have aged 35 years in the meantime.) I’m wondering what significance the name has. If you swap “leather” for “mallow”, you get A. Mallowan, which was Agatha Christie’s married name, but maybe that’s stretching a bit.
I love lists of books, and here Poirot looks at the victim’s bookshelves and draws some drastic conclusions:
“In her bedroom I noticed the following books on a shelf: Who Were the Greeks?Introduction to Relativity, Life of Lady Hester Stanhope, Back to Methuselah, Linda Condon, Crewe Train. “She had, to begin with, an interest in culture and in modern science – that is, a distinct intellectual side. Of the novels Linda Condon, and in a lesser degree Crewe Train, seemed to show that [the victim] had a sympathy and interest in the independent woman – unencumbered or entrapped by man. She was also obviously interested by the personality of Lady Hester Stanhope. Linda Condon is an exquisite study of the worship of her own beauty by a woman. Crewe Train is a study of a passionate individualist. Back to Methuselah is in sympathy with the intellectual rather than the emotional attitude to life. I felt that I was beginning to understand the dead woman.”
I thought it worth seeing which of these books, familiar to a fictional 1930s Belgian detective, has stood the test of time, and apply my usual test of Goodreads and LibraryThing users. It turns out to be about half and half. (I’m assuming that Max Born’s book on relativity is meant, rather than any other.)
Bechdel pass – the narrator is a woman and has been hired to look after a woman, and their first conversation is mainly about the latter’s health (the husband is mentioned a couple of times but he is not the main subject).
This is a grim and also funny book about the lifestyle of a bestselling author. The protagonist, June Hayward, watches her successful writer friend Athena Liu die in an accident in the first chapter, then takes her unpublished manuscript and successfully sells it as her own. June makes some awful decisions and is repeatedly confronted with the consequences of her actions; there’s also some wickedly vicious commentary on the perception of Chinese culture and especially Chinese history in today’s America (and I don’t think that other Western countries would be very different). It’s a short but compulsive read; you can’t quite believe that June has got herself into a position where her career success depends on a gruesome lie, but you can absolutely believe the contortions that follow. You can get it here.
For some bizarre reason this book was on the BSFA Long List for Best Novel. It has no sfnal content. June thinks that she sees Athena a couple of times after her death, but I don’t think we are meant to think that it is “really” her. If it is on the BSFA short list, I will not vote for it, even though I think it is a brillliant book.
Easy Bechdel pass – in the very first chapter, before Athena dies, she and June are talking to each other about their writing and men are barely mentioned.
This was my top unread non-genre book. Next on that pile, on a rather different level, is Moonraker’s Bride by Madeleine Brent.
—My mother, who was sitting by, look’d up,—but she knew no more than her backside what my father meant,—but my uncle, Mr. Toby Shandy, who had been often informed of the affair,—understood him very well.
So, my local interest in Tristram Shandy is this. (Actually, it’s very respectful to the spirit of the book to start my review in the middle, as it were. The whole point is not to get to the point too quickly.) My daughters live close to the small village of Neerwinden, which is the site of the battle usually known as the Battle of Landen which took place in 1693. Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby’s manservant, Corporal Trim (pay attention there in the back) was wounded in the knee at that battle and exclaims in Chapter 19 of Book 8:
Your honour remembers with concern, said the corporal,the total rout and confusion of our camp and army at the affair of Landen; every one was left to shift for himself; and if it had not been for the regiments of Wyndham, Lumley, and Galway, which covered the retreat over the bridge Neerspeeken, the king himself could scarce have gained it – he was press’d hard, as your honour knows, on every side of him.
Neerspeken is obviously a mistake for Neerhespen, which I often drive through when I take my oldest back from a visit to the Beemden nature reserve in Landen. We usually stop off at the Chapel of the Holy Cross. (In the spirit of Tristram Shandy, I should record that I usually go to Landen by the more southern route via Eliksem and Laar.)
I first read Tristram Shandy when I was 23, more than thirty years ago, and still have the slightly mildewed paperback that I picked up off a Cambridge bookstall one day in late 1990. I can’t honestly tell you what happens in it; I can’t find any particular lines that resonate or are very quotable; the most memorable moment is when our hero’s penis gets caught in the windowframe in Book 5 Chapter 17. (Sorry for the spoiler.)
And yet somehow I love it. It’s rambling, self-indulgent, full of references to things I know nothing about; and at the same time the stream-of-consciousness narrative, the refusal to make many concessions to the reader who wants to know what is actually going on, are part of the charm. It’s clearly an inspiration for Joyce, Woolf, and lots of the modernist writers who I really like; but it’s a book of its own time, requiring friendly engagement and repaying that engagement with warmth and humour. You can get it here.
Total Bechdel fail. The most prominent female character, Tristram’s mother, spends most of the book giving birth to him, so her conversation is necessarily about her motherhood. The other women are all defined by their relationships with the male characters.
This was my top book acquired last year; next on that pile is Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.
“Tanis and Sera are due back on the ship in another day,” she said. “Their negotiations with Scipio are over, we’re preparing to leave the Bosporus system.”
I think I bought this by accident. It is the fifth book in a series of thirteen, and I found it impossible to get into the space opera plot. I put it down after 60 pages. You can get it here.
Easy Bechdel pass, as the very first chapter has two women characters debating the politics of the empire with each other.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is SFerics 2017, edited by Roz Clarke.
As the show itself was transforming on screen so the exhibition began to blossom as a tourist attraction. Peripheral events such as the switching on of the illuminations in 1975 and the Blackpool Centenary celebrations in 1976 helped to cement the exhibition’s place as an exciting and worthwhile visitor destination.
A 600-page sequel to the Blackpool Remembered volume, also going back to memories of the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool which ran from 1974 to 1984, but this time also with material on the Doctor Who museum that was open in the same town from 2004 to 2009, and an account of some of the spinoff merchandise that was available to fans in the Good Old Days.
Like the previous volume, it’s a beautifully assembled set of photos with literate commentary. Every corner of both the earlier exhibition (again) and David Boyle’s Doctor Who Museum is described in loving detail. There is a feature on Boyle’s life and career, including some very sad photos from his final years of ill health. He was also the maker of the Dapol models which were the authorised miniatures of characters from the TV series. Short sections also look at Jon Pertwee’s Whomobile, and at Maginty, the Blackpool double of the Doctor’s car Bessie. Again, the perspective is very male and white, which is unfortunate; but it’s a labour of love, and there’s a lot of love here. You can download it for free from here (600 pages, 140ish MB).
Current Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North Lizard Radio, by Pat Schmatz The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman
Last books finished The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, by Hergé The Odyssey, by Homer, tr Emily Wilson After Life, by Al Ewing et al The Fire Starters, by Jan Carson A Life in Questions, by Jeremy Paxman
Next books David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, by Simon Guerrier Sferics 2017, ed. Roz Clarke Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien
Lost of good stuff to choose from, but my longlist votes go to:
Julia Lloyd, cover of Descendant Machine Leo Nickolls, cover of The Surviving Sky Raphael Lecoste, cover of The Terraformers Elena Betti, cover of Danged Black Thing.
Like many of you, I was very sad to learn this morning that Christopher Priest has died at the age of 80. I first met him on the printed page, as a teenager in Belfast, where his novels were one of my main escape routes from the Northern Ireland of the day. Inverted World and Fugue for a Darkening Island were favourites then, and the former is a favourite still. Later, when I first started bookblogging, The Separation was the best of the books that I read in the closing months of 2003. I very much enjoyed his Guest of Honour speech and other presentations at Interaction, the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow. Nineteen years on, we are preparing another Glasgow Worldcon and we’ll be thinking of him.
In 2007, we became friends. We met in person at the 2007 Beneluxcon which was conveniently for me in Leuven, and started a correspondence which continued for a decade and a half. He filled me in on the story of how he didn’t write for Doctor Who, and we reflected on Brexit and other political disasters together. And I continued to enjoy his writing, both new and old.
In August 2016 I happened to be passing through Devon, and we met up in Burrington, where he and Nina Allan were living at the time, and went for a very pleasant lunch in The Grove Inn, the only pub in the area, in the next door village of Kings Nympton. He and Nina loaded me with books to take away. (They subsequently moved to Scotland.)
The last time we saw each other was at Novacon in Buxton in 2021, where as it turned out I contracted COVID (but he fortunately did not). Fanboyishly (if that is a word) I brought over a small part of my Chris Priest collection, and he signed them all for me after breakfast. (He had already signed the ones he gave me in 2016.)
He was funny, passionate, incisive and (I have to be honest) not always kind. He was hugely entertaining to spend time with and I felt that my teenage enthusiasm for a writer I never expected to meet was ripely repaid a quarter to a third of a century later. Paul Kincaid’s brilliant book, The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, will give you a very good idea of what he was like and what he was trying to achieve as a writer. I feel privileged that I knew him as a person as well. My condolences to Nina, and to the rest of their families.
From the upper windows of the Golden Court, Brunhild saw not just the river Moselle and the bridge spanning it. She could also see straight down into a small amphitheatre inside the city walls. Gladiator games had long been outlawed, but exotic animal hunts and bear baiting were still held there. These, sadly, seemed to be the main entertainment. The new queen quickly discovered that even what luxuries the Merovingian courts offered left something to be desired. There were mimes and actors in residence for instance – predecessors of the minstrels and jesters later found in medieval courts – but mostly, these performers recited long-winded national epics.
This is a book about two queens of the sixth century, both probably born in the early 540s: Fredegund of Neustria (died 597) and Brunhilda of Austrasia (died 613). You may not have heard of Neustria or Austrasia; these were old kingdoms of the pre-Charlemagne era, the tail end of the Merovingian dynasty founded by Clovis, King of the Franks, in the late 5th century. This is a period which we learned nothing at all about at school in Belfast, and if your native language is not French, Dutch or German, you’re probably in the same boat. My previous exposure to it amounted to a 2021 exhibition of Merovingian metalwork in Mariemont, off to the south of Belgium.
Neither of the two queens was in fact a Merovingian by birth, but they married two brothers, grandsons of Clovis, who ruled between them large chunks of what are now northern France, central Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of the Netherlands, with Burgundy also in the mix at various times.
Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess from Spain, who married Sigebert of Austrasia (the eastern bit) in 567. He was murdered, probably on her orders, in 575 and she ruled in Metz off and on, in her own right and as regent for the next generation, for four decades. Fredegund was a slave girl from the western chunk, Neustria, ruled from Soissons; she caught the eye of Chilperic, the local overlord, and replaced his wife (Brunhilda’s sister) as queen.
Brunhilda and Fredegund feuded bitterly until Fredegund’s death in 597, but eventually in 613 Chilperic and Fredegund’s son Clotaire managed to conquer both kingdoms, and Brunhilda (who must have been well into her 60s at this point) was executed by a gruesome method which remains obscure but definitely involved horses.
Both women have been largely written out of history. Clotaire emphasised his own legitimate descent from Clovis, not his usurping aunt or indeed his low-born mother. No men wanted to commemorate women who had survived and ruled for many years. The major contemporary witness, Gregory of Tours, is very partisan and clearly incomplete. Fredegund’s tomb has an image of her whose face has been erased. Brunhilda’s tomb has been lost, apart from two chunks of marble.
Shelley Puhak has done an entertaining job of pulling together the threads of history and legend to tell the story of the two women. She occasionally falters under the weight of detail, and at other times is forced to adopt a very chatty style to compensate for the absence of reliable sources, but one feels that she has done her best with what is available. I got what I wanted from The Dark Queens; you can get it here.
The largest menhir in Belgium is known as the Pierre Brunehaut; I visited it in February 2021. It is near to one of the many old roads known as chaussées Brunehaut in northern France and southern Belgium.
The Pierre Brunehaut near Tournai, which I visited in February 2021 with my friend J, who gives it a sense of scale.
Some speculate that the chaussées Brunehaut are the paths supposedly taken by the horses participating in her execution, but there are too many roads for that; I prefer to think that in her many years as queen, she dedicated state resources to the upkeep of the transport infrastructure, and (rather like Mussolini making the trains run on time) this has been dimly remembered by local lore. There are worse possible memorials.
[Chris] Whitty had reason to be worried. Some months earlier a highly infectious disease called Ebola had started to sweep through Britain’s former colony of Sierra Leone and neighboring Liberia and Guinea. Groups such as the World Health Organization and Medecins Sans Frontieres had rushed to halt the contagion. So had the UK, French, and American governments, Barack Obama’s American administration had even sent four thousand troops to Liberia. The world’s best medical experts at places such as Harvard were hunting for a vaccine, and computer scientists were using Big Data tools to track it.
Gillian Tett and I were contemporaries as undergraduates at Clare College, Cambridge, in the 1980s; she studied archaeology and anthropology, and I studied natural sciences (specialising in astrophysics in the end). We did not know each other well, though we lived on the same staircase in our first year. I’ve seen her precisely twice since then, when she gave a presentation on the causes of the 2008 crisis in Brussels in 2009 and when we caught up at a college reunion in 2022 and found we had both been working on Ukraine. She is now the Provost of King’s College, next door.
Before becoming a Financial Times journalist, Tett was an anthropology student whose doctorate examined Islam and Communism in rural Tajikistan. I came to anthropology a bit later in my life – for bureaucratic reasons, my PhD, which was in the history of science, was administered in the Social Anthropology department at the Queen’s University of Belfast. I developed a deep respect for that discipline, and I’ve written about this here in the context of the House of Lords and, er, England. In my day job as a public affairs consultant in Brussels, it seems to me that I get a much better understanding of what is going on and what is likely to happen by applying anthropological analysis of human behaviour and organisational culture than by the traditional methods of political science, let alone philosophy.
Tett doesn’t make quite such grand claims for her discipline in her book Anthro-Vision. She argues merely that it would be good to take an anthropological perspective into account in making important decisions, as well as the legal, economic, political etc points of view that already are well represented around the table. Among the topics she examines are the response to the 2013-14 Ebola outbreak in West Africa; the failure of bankers to spot the risks in their own behaviour that caused the 2008 financial crisis; the appeal of Donald Trump; the difference between remote and office working; and the intriguing rise of environmental, social, and corporate governance as a serious concern in the top boardrooms of the private sector.
I think that she undersells the case for anthropology. As I said above, I think it is actually superior as an analytical framework, perhaps precisely because it is insufficiently used. On the other hand, she also frames herself as a feminist outsider who has a healthy scepticism about the claims of capitalists; but can a Financial Times journalist truly be a mere observer of the world of high finance? With that slight pinch of salt, I strongly recommend the book as a refreshingly different look at what is really going on in the world, and how important (and often bad) decisions get made. You can get it here.
The first person she met, was the Viscount of——a young Man, no less celebrated for his Accomplishments & Virtues, than for his Elegance & Beauty. She curtseyed & walked on.
There’s not really much here!
Bechdel pass (if being generous) in the very last chapter (it is specifically stated that she does not have a conversation with either of two women characters mentioned earlier):
She entered it & was pressed to her Mother’s bosom by that worthy Woman. Cassandra smiled & whispered to herself ‘This is a day well spent.’
This was the shortest of the unread books that I had acquired in 2018. Next on that list is SFerics 2017, edited by Roz Clarke.
Michel Rasquin was the very first European Commissioner for Transport and the first Commissioner from Luxembourg, appointed to the Walter Hallstein Commission in 1958. He lasted less than four months, dying on 27 April aged 58. Born in 1899, he was a journalist before the Second World War and the first leader of the Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party after the war. He was Luxembourg’s minister for the economy from 1951 until he became a European Commissioner.
Finn Olav Gundelach was the very first Danish Commissioner, appointed in 1973 under François-Xavier Ortoli as Commissioner for the Internal Market and the Customs Union, re-appointed as Vice-President for Agriculture and Fisheries in the Roy Jenkins Commission, and demoted to mere Commissioner for Agriculture under Gaston Thorn. However he lived only a week into his third term, dying aged 55 on 13 January 1981. Born in 1925, he was a career diplomat who had served as Danish ambassador to the UN and the EU, and also vice-president of GATT.
Finally (and let’s hope it stays that way), Alois Pfeiffer was appointed as Commissioner for Economic Affairs and Employment in the first Jacques Delors Commission in 1985, as one of the two German commissioners. He died on 1 August 1987 aged 62. Born in 1924, he was a forester and then a trade unionist, and was nominated by the SPD. He never held elected public office, and was seen by some in Germany as a bit too European and not sufficiently German.
There is a much more recent case with some similarities: the most recent President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, died a week before the end of his term in January 2022 aged 65. Born in 1956, he was a print and TV journalist in Italy until becoming an MEP for the centre-left Democratic Party in 2009. When he emerged as a front-runner to head the Parliament in 2019, there was a lot of head-scratching. He performed perfectly well in office, however, until falling ill in 2021. His immediate successor in an acting capacity was the First Vice-President, Roberta Metsola, who was then elected to the job at the scheduled election a week later, and is still there until the elections this summer. Presumably if a vacancy occurs a bit earlier in the term, there would need to be a full election process, but it was hardly worth it for seven days.
