Hugos have been a distraction – I read fewer books this month than in any month since March 2019 and March 2017, the two previous times that I was supervising the close of Hugo nominations as Administrator.
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 15) Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, by Isabel Hardman Ex Marginalia: Essays from the Edges of Speculative Fiction, ed. Chinuo Onwualu A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan Paradise Towers, by John Toon
Non-genre 2 (YTD 11) Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Those Pricey Thakur Girls, by Anuja Chauhan
SF 4 (YTD 15) Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi Airside, by Christopher Priest Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 4) Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by Frazer Hines Doctor Who – Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt
Comics 1 (YTD 6) Serve You, by Al Ewing, Rob Williams et al
3,200 pages (YTD 13,700) 6/13 (YTD 22/54) by non-male writers (Hardman, Onwualu, Speller/Allan, Howard, Chauhan, Butler) 3/13 (YTD 6/41) by a non-white writer (Onwualu, Chauhan, Talabi) 1/13 rereads (Doctor Who – Paradise Towers)
321 books currently tagged unread, up 12 from last month (thanks to shortlists and Eastercon purchases), down 74 from March 2023.
Reading now De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison, by Niall Harrison
Coming soon (perhaps) Doctor Who: Kinda, by Terrance Dicks Kinda, by Frank Collins Return, by Simon Fraser et al 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 Moroda, by L.L. McNeil 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 Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt “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 Hard to be a God, by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
It is ten years ago this month that I first posted what has now become a regular habit – the second paragraph of the third chapter of every book that I read. (which needs a bit of wiggle room for comics, plays and most poetry.) I have found that it often gives a brief (sometimes not so brief) flavour of the book as a whole, and of course it proves that I did read beyond the first two chapters.
The very first book that I gave this treatment to was Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice; the second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I unrolled the bundle of clothes I had bought for her— insulated underclothes, quilted shirt and trousers, undercoat and hooded overcoat, gloves— and laid them out. Then I took her chin and turned her head toward me. “Can you hear me?”
I did it for the month of March 2014, then dropped it for two years, then picked it up again in March 2016 with Mother of Eden by Chris Beckett, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:
I was already sitting there when my cousin Dixon came over to me. About half the Kneefolk had already arrived, and the others were coming in.
I think I must have checked the second paragraph of the third chapter of well over 2,000 books by now. I got the idea from my dear friend H, who had spontaneously adopted it as one of the data points of comparison between Lifeblood, by N.J. Cooper, and Book of Souls, by Glenn Cooper, neither of which I have personally read.
My experience is that it’s rather a variable measure in terms of getting the sense of a book. It’s more likely to work for non-fiction than for fiction, simply because with fiction books there is always the risk that the second paragraph of the third chapter will be a single word of dialogue, for instance with the Doctor Who novel Illegal Alien, by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry:
On the other hand, the longest I can recall, over 500 words in both English translation and the original Spanish, was from Luis Leante’s See How Much I Love You. I won’t copy it here.
Anders Johannsen, captain of the first human starship, tossed and turned in bed trying to find the sleep he so desperately needed, after days of insomnia and stress. Losing the battle as the shouts of his bridge crew reverberated through his mind.
Se ei tunnu sairaalta, ei ollenkaan, vaikka sen turkki pölisee jatkuvasti synkeänä pilvenä Electroluxin letkussa.
He doesn’t seem ill at all, though the shreds of his coat are a dismal sight in the Electrolux [vacuum cleaner].
Sometimes this leads to discoveries: the English translation of Waste Tide, by Chen Qiufan (who I met in Paris in November; he has rebranded as Stanley Chen) turns out to have rearranged the text so that the second paragraph of the third chapter in the Chinese original is some way into the third chapter in English.
If there are footnotes, I like to include them as well, including all seven footnotes to the second paragraph of the third chapter of Brian Griffin’s Cycling in Victorian Ireland:
2 Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: for the Year 1869 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1869), p.1400; Irish Cyclist, 26 March 1890. 3 Irish Wheelman, 25 September 1894. 4 Irish Cyclist, 7 May 1890. 5 Icycles, December 1880; Irish Cyclist, 21 May 1890, 2 July 1890. William Bindon Blood was the club president; William Persse Blood was its secretary, and Louis Meldon, — a solicitor, and brother of Dr Austin Meldon — was its captain. 6 Irish Cyclist, 11 June 1890. For accounts of the Dublin University Bicycle Club and of cycling at Trinity College Dublin in the nineteenth century see Kenneth Bailey, A History of Trinity College Dublin 1892-1945 (Dublin:The University Press, 1947), pp 130-33, 164; Trevor West, ‘Football, Athletics and Cycling: The Role of Trinity College, Dublin in the Evolution of Irish Sport’ in Sarah Alyn Stacey (ed), Essays on Heroism in Sport in Ireland and France (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), pp 141-142. 7 Bicycling News, 20 September 1878. 8 Morning Mail, 14 September
For comics, I take either the second frame of the first page of the third chapter if it’s a work with chapters, or the second frame of the third page if it’s a more unitary text. I can vary this if necessary as with Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir where I used both the second and third frames of the third page.
With comics it’s generally a bit more hit and miss than with prose. By the third page, the story is barely getting going. Though sometimes it works; here’s the second frame of the third chapter of Jaren van de Olifant, by Willy Linthout, whose protagonist is coming to terms with his son’ suicide:
The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete. There were no windows, just two narrow shafts Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
Plays and scripts are much more difficult, and after some unsatisfactory initial experimentation I’m now just giving the opening of the third scene. I make an honourable exception for Christopher Marlowe, who is usually pithy, for instance in The Jew of Malta:
ABIGAIL: Now have I happily espied a time To search the plank my father did appoint; And here, behold, unseen, where I have found The gold, the pearls, and jewels, which he hid.
At the end of 2021 I did a roundup of the second paragraphs of the third chapters of (most of) the books I had read so far that year. I might do the same again this year (the two years in between got complicated by Clarke submissions, some of which I have yet to post notes on here). I’ll finish this post with my top C3P2 from that selection, a sad little story from A Buzz in the Meadow by Dave Goulson:
From a very young age I kept newts and common toads in tanks in my bedroom, and this went atypically well. The toads in particular made great pets, seemingly taking to captivity and providing great entertainment by hoovering up mealworms with their extending, sticky tongues. When I grew bored of them, or ran out of mealworms from the supply that I bred in a box under my bed, I could simply release the toads back into the garden. However, I longed to have some more exotic amphibians, and eventually I badgered my parents into buying me a pair of North American leopard frogs for Christmas: attractive, bright-green frogs with (as you might guess from the name) a profusion of black spots. I filled one of my glass fish tanks with piles of stones, peat, some plants and a small pond, to make an attractive home for them. It looked great and the frogs settled in well, but after just a few weeks their energetic hopping about caused one of the piles of stones to topple; I came home from school one day to find them both squashed.
As you may be aware, we launched the Hugo ballot earlier today.
Having had a certain amount of foreknowledge, I crunched the numbers for the Goodreads and LibraryThing raters in several categories last weekend, and came up with the following stats. This is of course no more than a reflection of the tastes of the user base on both systems; it may (or may not) be useful to assess how far each of the finalists has penetrated the market.
Best Novel
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
raters
rating
owners
rating
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty
37750
4.3
1077
4.34
Starter Villain, John Scalzi
34356
4.2
772
4.05
Witch King, Martha Wells
14651
3.72
888
3.78
Translation State, Ann Leckie
8360
4.13
444
4.2
Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
6789
4.06
463
4.08
The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera
1346
3.72
160
3.48
Unusually, a clear leader on all four metrics.
Best Novella
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
raters
rating
owners
rating
Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher
20078
4.05
543
4.14
The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older
4833
3.66
279
3.84
Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo
3704
4.27
148
4.36
Rose/House, Arkady Martine
1548
3.8
97
3.46
(Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers)
22
3.41
2
–
The last of these is the anthology in which the missing two finalists were both published, which has not really penetrated the mass market.
Best Graphic Story or Comic
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
raters
rating
owners
rating
Saga, Vol. 11
4456
4.26
132
4.02
Bea Wolf
2234
3.46
204
4.15
Shubeik Lubeik / Your Wish Is My Command
2531
4.52
127
4.41
Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons
858
4.5
64
4.35
The Witches of World War II
158
3.09
17
2.64
三体漫画:第一部 / The Three Body Problem, Part One
–
–
–
–
More people nominated The Witches of World War II for the Hugos than own it on LibraryThing. Which possibly indicates the sad decline of LibraryThing.
Best Related Work
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
raters
rating
owners
rating
A City on Mars, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
2070
4.12
211
4.24
The Culture: The Drawings, Iain M. Banks
54
4
47
3.36
A Traveller in Time, Maureen Kincaid Speller
6
4.5
6
–
All These Worlds, Niall Harrison
4
4
5
–
中国科幻口述史, 第二卷, 第三卷 / Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, vols 2 and 3 杨枫 / Yang Feng
–
–
–
–
雨果X访谈 (Discover X), 王雅婷 (Tina Wong)
(video interviews)
The last of these is not going to register on any book logging system, and the second last hasn’t made a mark in the West – so far. Having said that, only one of the Western finalists has achieved much market penetration as yet; again, a lot more people nominated both A Traveller in Time and All These Worlds than own either on either book-logging system.
Lodestar Award for Best YA Book
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
raters
rating
owners
rating
The Sinister Booksellers of Bath, Garth Nix
4948
4.06
310
3.91
To Shape A Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose
4866
4.19
251
4.15
Unraveller, Frances Hardinge
2167
4.12
157
4.08
Abeni’s Song, by P. Djèlí Clark
380
3.97
50
4.00
Promises Stronger than Darkness, Charlie Jane Anders
313
4.21
49
3.94
Liberty’s Daughter, Naomi Kritzer
198
4.12
41
4.11
Unusual to have two finalists close at the top in terms of both GR raters and LT owners.
As I said, this number-crunching has proved a good guide to the outcome rather less than half the time in the past; so I take it as I find it.
It was being a thoroughly grown-up evening, and she [Clary] didn’t want him [Archie}to think that she didn’t know about conversation – particularly as Polly wasn’t helping at all: she simply smiles and chose things to eat and ate them. She looked awfully pretty in a pale yellow dress with a lace collar and a little black taffeta bow with streamers.
Third in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s brilliant family saga of the Cazalets, set during the Second World War, with the young and middle-aged women who are the central characters falling in love and having plenty of (off-stage) sex, not always with the right people or the same people. I almost feel that we had 900 pages of set-up in the first two volumes, which then explodes into lots and lots of plot here, which is maybe a little unfair as the first two were hardly without incident. Howard’s own gruesome first marriage (to Peter Scott) is unsparingly mined for material, with two particularly memorable passages involving very small babies.
Along with the turbulent love lives of the various viewpoint figures, there are some gems of observation about women’s roles in the society of 1940s England, and a quietly devastating subplot about the Holocaust and the uncovering of the concentration camps. Howard is tremendous at showing a society on the verge of tremendous change – mostly of course from the viewpoint of the privileged, but you write about what you know. And again there is an unlooked-for twist at the end which has my appetite whetted for the fourth volume.
Easy Bechdel pass – in the first chapter Polly and Clary talk about the afterlife and Polly’s dead mother.
I also listened to the middle part of the excellent BBC radio adaptation, which went out as a series of fifteen-minute episodes in 2013 (ten for each of the five books). The BBC moved around some of the internal narrative – the lesbian subplot is much earlier, and the twist at the end signalled much more in advance – but it’s faithful to the spirit of the original. Everyone is good but I was particularly impressed with Alix Wilton Regan, playing Louise, the character closest to Elizabeth Jane Howard herself. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third essay (“Oja Oyingbo: Centering the Fringes”, by Ayọ̀délé Ọlọ́fintúádé)
My grandfather was the best of them, a wonderful storyteller who wove tales from Ifa with the contemporary. Not only was he a storyteller, he read widely and had a library full of rare books and literature from the Far East. It was in his library that I read my first works of speculative fiction in Yoruba. They were a series of textbooks titled Aláwìíyé (1-6), written by J.F. Odunjo, and the novels of D.O. Fágúnwà, which he made me read aloud because he was visually impaired. It wasn’t until I turned thirteen and gained access to my brother’s library of erotica that I encountered speculative fiction from the Global North.
Back at the start of this month, I foolishly thought that I might be able to get through all of the BSFA finalists for Best Novel and Best Non-Fiction (Long) before voting closes on Saturday. Well, I forgot just how much time the Hugos absorb at close of nominations – and this year was special for several reasons – so I didn’t get very far down either list. However I had a strong start with this collection of essays about SF seen from the perspective of the formerly colonised.
The 21 essays here are all very short, but I learned a lot from them. About half of them are about Nigeria, which is fair enough considering its regional and linguistic dominance. But the standout for me was “Writing Outside the Frame: A Homeland Called Palestine”, by Ibtisam Azem, which briefly but very eloquently puts the case for a society under threat of literal erasure. Much to think about. You can get it here.
Current De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison
Last books finished Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan Doctor Who – Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt
Next books Doctor Who: Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Once upon a time, your constituency was just the seat whose name you bore when you spoke in the Chamber. MPs could get away with barely visiting the seat they represented in Westminster. Duncan Sandys, MP for Streatham and Norwood on and off between 1935 and 1974, boasted of his annual trips over the river to visit it. Winston Churchill rarely visited his constituencies either.
An interesting and gloomy reflection on the deficiencies of the British political system by a close observer.
I knew a fair amount of this, having hung around with politicians for most of my career, but there were some things I had not really thought of before – the sheer economic cost of running for parliament, putting your life on hold for a desperate contest that you may not win, and the toll that serving as an MP puts on your family life and mental and physical health, are really extreme. The path to Westnminster is a grim and terrible winnowing process which rules out many people who are not young-to-middle-aged men with a particular set of personality neuroses.
The interlinkage of executive and legislature then works to actively discourage good policy-making. Opposition MPs have no power at all, obviously; but most government MPs are struggling to get on the greasy pole of preferment, and therefore have no incentive to criticise, even constructively. There are a few exceptions – well known mavericks, and the chairs of Select Committees – but essentially, to make your mark in the House of Commons you need to abandon your political ambitions.
Hardman has some modest thoughts on how to improve things. She (rightly) discounts electoral reform, which was lost for at least a generation by the botched 2011 referendum. But reduction of the government payroll, and enhancement of the scrutiny powers of the Commons, could both serve to rebalance the system in a healthier way. She also discounts the complete division of the legislature and the executive, pointing at the deficiencies of the U.S. system of government; but the American way is not the only way, and Belgium, for instance, makes ministers leave parliament while remaining accountable to it.
None of this is going to happen, of course. The surgery that is needed requires either a fresh mandate from an energised reforming new government, or a carefully developed cross-party consensus that Something Must Be Done. The incoming Labour government will have many other fish to fry than constitutional tinkering; and MPs and peers at present can’t even agree on the basics of how to fix the crumbling physical infrastructure of the Palace of Westminster, let alone how to improve the way it makes laws. But if you want to get better informed, you can get this book here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next on that pile is The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century, by Robert D. Kaplan. I should add that although I bought the 2016 edition in 2018, my Kindle edition automagically updated with the author’s comments on the May and Johnson administrations, which gave her much extra material to illustrate her arguments.
Lisa: “It’s just my life… a story of how I changed. And… the hardest thing is to start. Where do I even begin?”
First in a series of volumes about the loving and kinky relationship between Alison and Lisa, and Alison’s friend Alan who builds her equipment. Not especially explicit, but very sexy. You can get it here.
In 2016, the combined ages of the two front-runners in the American presidential election, at 139, was the highest ever – Donald Trump turned 70 a few months before the election, and Hillary Clinton a few months after. That was ten years more than the previous record, Reagan (73) and Mondale (56) in 1984 (total 129).
In 2020, the combined ages of the two candidates was 151 – the election was a few months after Donald Trump’s 74th birthday, and very soon before Joe Biden’s 78th. And this year, with the same two candidates, we can add another four years to each, for a total of 159, twenty more than in 2016 and thirty more than in any previous year.
Only twice before had both main candidates been over 60 – the obscure elections of 1848, when Zachary Taylor (63) beat Lewis Cass (64), and 1828 when Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams (both 61). Only three times prior to 2016 had even one candidate been over 70 – in 1984, 1996 and 2008 (all Republicans). To have both over 69 was really unprecedented back in 2016; on election day in 2024, one will be two years short of his 80th birthday and the other almost two years into his ninth decade.
In the list below, I’ve put the 18 elections since 1952 (starting with 1956) in red; the 16 elections before 1852 (ending with 1848) in blue; and the 26 elections from 1852 to 1952 inclusive in green. This year sees the 60th of the quadrennial elections, so I have grouped them in tens.
It’s clear that the middle period saw younger candidates, with those 26 elections supplying 22 of the bottom half of the table, and 4 of the top half – in fact, none of the middle 26 are in the top 30% of the table, and the high-water mark is the comparatively youthful matchup between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden in 1876. Of the seven elections where the top candidates’ combined ages totalled less than a century, the most recent was in 1960 and the second most recent in 1908.
The earlier period was also elderly, with only two elections (one of which was not really competitive) of the first 16 in the lower half. And all six elections since 2000, and all but two of the twelve elections starting with 1980 (in darker red), including 2024, are in the oldest third of the table.
Note on methodology: I’ve taken candidates’ ages in whole calendar years on election day. (Which for Warren Harding was his 55th birthday, for all the good it did him.) In 1800 I count Adams (65) not Burr (44) as runner-up since that’s who voters thought they were choosing between in November. For 1872 I’ve counted Greeley (61) as losing candidate even though he died shortly after the election; most of his electoral votes went to Thomas Hendricks (53) who went on to be Tilden’s running mate in 1876 (they lost) and Cleveland’s in 1884 (they won, but Hendricks died a few months after taking office). I have not counted third or lower placed candidates at all (thus excluding incumbent President Taft in 1912, when he was 55, a year older than Theodore Roosevelt and ten months younger than Woodrow Wilson).
Incidentally the older candidate has won 34 times, and the younger 25 times. But those 34 include three elections which were really acclamations (1788, 1792 and 1820) so the fact that the Adamses were younger than Washington or Monroe doesn’t really matter (indeed, there are good grounds for excluding those elections from my list entirely). The most recent period shows a shift of fortune toward (relative) youth; of the 18 most recent elections, the younger candidate has won nine and the older also nine; the younger candidate has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections (but lost twice in the electoral college).
Henry Gassaway Davis was the Democratic Party’s candidate for Vice-President in 1904; election day was shortly before his 81st birthday. He and his presidential candidate, Alton B. Parker, lost the popular vote to Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Fairbanks by a margin of 19% in the popular vote and by 336 to 140 in the electoral college. Until this year, he was the only octogenarian candidate to have been in either top spot. (He lived another eleven and a half years.)
Quick post after running three of the Nebula final ballot categories through Goodreads and Librarything.
Best Novel
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
raters
rating
owners
rating
Witch King, Martha Wells
14651
3.72
888
3.78
Translation State, Ann Leckie
8360
4.13
444
4.20
The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz
4664
3.39
389
3.43
The Water Outlaws, S.L. Huang
1827
3.84
198
3.91
The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera
1346
3.72
160
3.48
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi
454
3.74
66
3.56
Oddly enough the only one of these that I have read so far is the last, which is also up for the BSFA.
Best Novella
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
raters
rating
owners
rating
Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher
20078
4.05
543
4.14
Untethered Sky, Fonda Lee
7310
3.90
242
3.95
The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older
4833
3.66
279
3.84
The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill
5792
3.89
223
4.08
Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo
3704
4.27
148
4.36
Linghun, Ai Jiang
1301
4.04
49
4.40
The only one of these I own is the last, which I picked up at the Lovecraft bookshop in Providence.
Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
raters
rating
owners
rating
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose
4866
4.19
251
4.15
Liberty’s Daughter, Naomi Kritzer
198
4.12
41
4.11
The Ghost Job, Greg Van Eekhout
57
3.84
8
4.00
The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, J. Dianne Dotson
17
4.59
1
–
I’m a bit baffled by this – usually if a book scores low on Librarything users, I begin to suspect that the author may not exist, but in fact I had a very pleasant meal with J. Dianne Dotson in Los Angeles last month, so am well aware that she is perfectly real! Her Goodreads fans are enthusiastic.
Crouched on the other side of the bars, and still holding my hands, Nicholas Sabine gave a wry grin. ‘I know it’s not usual, Lucy, but there’s no law against it.’
I got this last autumn under the incorrect impression that it was set in Chengdu; in fact only the opening and the climax are set in China, and it’s near the fictional town of Chengfu, not the real city of Chengdu. (There is also a real Chengfu in Anhui Province, but it doesn’t fit the meagre description given.) So I put it aside, yet it bubbled to the top of my reading pile anyway. Destiny, or something.
It’s a romantic adventure story about young Lucy, abandoned in an orphanage in China, who finds herself sucked into a bizarre English feud between two neighbouring families over lost Chinese treasure. There are some vey effective fish-out-of-water moments for Lucy when she first arrives in England. The plot twists are pretty absurd, as hidden relatives turn up everywhere and Lucy returns to China to skip through the Boxer Rebellion, and yet I kept on being sucked back into it to find out what would happen next. I’m sure that the Chinese details are as wobbly as I know the English historical details are; but I admit that I was entertained anyway. You can get it here.
The author, “Madeleine Brent”, is a pseudonym for Peter O’Donnell, best known as the author of the Modesty Blaise series. I don’t think I have ever read any of them, but I might give them a try now.
Passes the Bechdel test easily in the first chapter, where Lucy is looking after the girls in the orphanage.
At the turn of the year this was my top unread non-genre book. Since then it has been way overtaken by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
It is undeniable that it became convulsed with the most violent emotions directly the Young Lady in Grey appeared. It began an absolutely unprecedented Wabble—unprecedented so far as Hoopdriver’s experience went. It “showed off”—the most decadent sinuosity. It left a track like one of Beardsley’s feathers. He suddenly realised, too, that his cap was loose on his head and his breath a mere remnant.
This is one of H.G. Wells’ earliest novels, published in 1896 between The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and I think his first non-genre novel. I thought it was a little gem. The protagonist, Mr Hoopdriver, working unhappily in a draper’s shop, goes on a cycling holiday across southern England, and finds himself acting as saviour to a teenage girl who has run away from home with a much older man. Often I find Wells’ portrayal of the lower middles classes annoying and patronising, but here I felt there was enough characterisation in the portrayal of Hoopdriver and self-deprecation in Wells’ own tone that the brief story hung together perfectly well. It’s not quite up to the level of Love and Mr Lewisham, the next non-genre novel that Wells wrote, but I enjoyed it all the same. You can get it here.
It would make a lovely short film or teleplay, and I’m surprised to find that it has been adapted for the screen only once, a silent film made in 1922.
Bechdel fail. It’s told from the point of view of Mr Hoopdriver, and when the girl finally is reconciled with her stepmother, there are always men present or being talked about.
Next on my Wells list is another early one, The Wonderful Visit.
I remember watching The Sun Makers aged ten when it was first shown in late 1977. It’s not the high point of Season 15 (that would be Horror of Fang Rock) but it’s not the low point either (that would be Underworld). Even at ten, however, I could feel that the show was trying not to lose its way; I did not know of course that new producer Graham Williams was fumbling to set his mark on the show, or that Robert Holmes stepped down as script editor halfway through the story.
I remembered The Sunmakers from its first broadcast in 1977, but had forgotten quite how good it is. In total contrast to The Seeds of Doom, here we have the Doctor fomenting a popular uprising against an oppressive regime. There are numerous classic sf tropes – the rag-tag rebels living in the bowels of the city, the drugs in the air supply – but also a couple of Robert Holmes touches, such as the repeated digs at the British tax system. The bad guys – Gatherer Hade and the Collector – are gratifyingly over the top, but at the same time the implied violence is pretty alarming – the Doctor almost gets his brains burnt out, Leela is almost executed by public steaming, both are threatened with ugly death by the suspicious rebels, and these seem like serious threats. Indeed I seem to remember reading somewhere that at one point there was a plan for Leela to be killed off in this story, which would certainly have been a more in-character departure than what actually happened (but would have deprived us of her in the much later Gallifrey audios). It is also, and this I think is very unusual, a good story for K9: he starts and ends by beating the Doctor at chess, and takes the initiative at several crucial points during proceedings. It seems almost churlish after all that to point out that the actual setting – humanity has been forcibly displaced to Pluto as a result of fiendish capitalist exploitation – is pretty implausible even for Who, and does great violence to any attempts to construct a future history of the Whoniverse.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
I have a feeling that last time I watched The Sun Makers, for some reason it was immediately after watching Underworld so it looked rather good in comparison. However, in sequence after the brilliance of Season 14 and the more modest successes of Horror of Fang Rock and Image of the Fendahl, it is pretty awful. I think I can establish several specific reasons for the awfulness, one of which was not really anyone’s fault, but the remainder of which could have been corrected.
The unchangeable factor is that the weather for the location filming was dull, so the story gets off to a tremendously dull start; it’s difficult to make the roof of a cigarette factory in Bristol look much like the top of a kilometer-high apartment block on Pluto, but it helps if the weather cooperates. I wonder if there’s also a bit of an unconscious assumption on my part that cuddly blurry film should represent contemporary Earth settings, and sharp-edged videotape the future; so the setting looks even more like Bristol than Pluto.
But the other factors were simply mistakes made by Holmes in the script and not sufficiently rounded off in the editing process. The story is simply very nasty. The rebels are really very unpleasant people, threatening to kill him and Leela; we don’t really see why the Doctor should choose to help such unlikeable (and otherwise unmemorable) individuals. The Company of course are even worse, which is OK since they are the baddies, but the attempted steaming of Leela is a really horrific prospect, much worse actually than any of the supposedly extreme violence of the previous season.
It does have its good points. The interplay between Gatherer Hade and the Collector is great fun (though again Holmes is usually smarter than to give all the good dialogue to the villains) and K9 gets to be very useful in his first proper story after joining the Tardis. Though even then, the framing narrative of the chess match in the console room doesn’t quite gel. I don’t think I’ll watch this one again, unless the DVD commentary is particularly good.
This time around, I felt myself falling between the two poles: yes, cracking satire by Holmes and good performances from the bad guys; but the rebels are really unpleasant and the violence very squicky.
It also struck me that the future of humanity on Pluto is rather white. There is one exception, an uncredited Work Unit who appears on the roof in episode 4:
Who was she? The surviving paperwork, supplied to me by Paul Scoones, has four extras with women’s names booked for the filming in Bristol on 19 June 1977, six months before the episode was shown.
The four names are Jennie Weston, Elizabeth Havelock, Angela Towner and Marion Venn. Surprisingly, I think I have tracked down three of them.
I find a Jennie Weston who in 2010 was reported to be a Drama and English teacher, who had worked for Radio Bristol in educational broadcasting; the picture supplied doesn’t look like the person I am interested in.
An Elizabeth Havelock does have a credited page on IMDB, including four speaking TV roles from 1977-79, but was born in 1926 so clearly too old (if it’s the same Elizabeth Havelock); and again there’s a photo which is clearly a different person.
A Marion Venn was swimming coach at Dean Close School in Cheltenham from 1977 (the year of filming) to 2000; I’ve found recent photos of her and she’s definitely not the person I am looking for.
So I think my mystery actor, possibly the only actor of colour in the whole of Season 15 of Doctor Who, is Angela Towner (The Complete History thinks it’s “Angela Tower”, but Paul Scoones was able to find legible paperwork in which the name is clear). This could well have been her only professional acting role, asked to stand around with a crowd on top of a factory in Bristol on an overcast and not very warm Thursday, before going on to a life doing something completely different. It’s entirely possible that her surname subsequently changed, which would make it much more difficult to track down her later performances if any.
Oh yeah, I reread the novelisation by Terrance Dicks as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
However, K9’s brand of logic, based on his recollection of past events, and an extrapolation of future probabilities, told him that the Doctor would land in trouble within a very short time of leaving the TARDIS. He would need K9’s remarkable powers to rescue him from the dangers into which his rashness had led him. It was therefore logical that K9 should exercise these powers as soon as possible.
Doctor Who and the Sunmakers is probably the best of these nine books [the Leela novelisations]; Dicks clearly appreciated Robert Holmes’ script and seems to have really got into the spirit of it. There is an interesting scene in the book but not in the TV series where Leela encounters some elderly workers waiting for euthanasia. Various other minor details are tweaked and basically improved in Dicks’ telling of the story.
Watching the series with the production subtitles switched on, I could see that Dicks was working from Holmes’ script as originally envisaged, and making the most of it.
Anyway. After my very grumpy post about the Black Archive on Kill the Moon, I’m very glad to say that Lewis Baston’s monograph on The Sun Makers was much more to my liking.
The first chapter, “‘An Unprofitable Operation, Hade’: The Sun Makers in context”, looks at the social and economic difficulties of the UK in general and of Robert Holmes in particular at the time the story was made.
The second chapter, “‘The Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe'”, convincingly analyses the extent to which The Sun Makers draws not from contemporary Britain but from the history of the East India Company.
The third chapter, “‘Sacrifices to Tribal Gods'”, announces up front that it examines Doctor Who’s treatment of economics in general, but it also veers into the steaming subplot and death as entertainment, re-done (not as well) in Vengeance on Varos a few years later, and the influence of the Aztecs (much less in the finished programme than was planned by Holmes). Its second paragraph is:
The Sun Makers came relatively early in Doctor Who’s late 1970s engagement with economics. Before then, the principal economic concern was energy, hence baleful consequences in Fury from the Deep (1968), Inferno (1970) and The Claws of Axos (1971) and the background to Terror of the Zygons (1975). The Doctor consistently takes a dim view of humanity’s fossil fuel dependence.
The fourth chapter, “Empire of the Iron Sun”, looks at imperialism as protrayed in science fiction, especially Doctor Who, and also considers the influence of The Iron Sun by Adrian Berry (later Lord Camrose), and the anti-Semitism in the portrayal of the Collector.
The fifth chapter, “‘The People Should Rise Up and Slaughter Their Oppressors'”, looks at the frankly revolutionary and Marxist agenda of the story. It doesn’t reflect, as I did, on how remarkable it is that this story should be written by a former policeman who fought in Burma in the second world war and whose other work is usually entertaining but not nearly as subversive.
The sixth chapter, “‘Praise the Company'”, moves on from 1977, reviews what has happened to us politically and economically since then, and comes to the gloomy conclusion that to an extent we all live in the Collector’s world now.
A brief conclusion ends with a pithy summing-up:
The Sun Makers, therefore, is a revolutionary, experimental tract that shows the signs of its origins as a piece of writing by Robert Holmes which was turned into television by the BBC in the late 1970s. It deals with big ideas, and it is full of allusions and tangents. It also fulfilled its role as entertaining Saturday evening television for a family audience as the nights drew in before Christmas 1977. And, perhaps above all, it is very funny.
I’d have liked a bit more on the parts of the story I didn’t like as much – the gratuitous violence and the poor production values – but this is a case where the Black Archive has achieved redemption for me: I think I like The Sun Makers a bit more, now that I have read this analysis of it. You can get it here.
Hugo vote counting time rather cuts into one’s reading…
Current De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan Those Pricey Thakur Girls, by Anuja Chauhan
Last books finished Airside, by Christopher Priest Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by Frazer Hines
Next books Doctor Who: Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Pershing picked a blood-fattened leech from the back of his hand. His sleeve had torn and thorns had pulled across his forearm until it looked as if it had been whipped; his legs ached from the effort not to loose his footing and all the water in his body was gushing from his open pores. The motion of his shirt had burst a boil between his shoulder blades.
This is the second of a near-future trilogy co-written by a future Foreign Secretary and one of the founders of Private Eye in the late 1960s, of which the third is Scotch on the Rocks. The scenario is simple: in the mid-1970s, China demands the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control twenty years early, and activates agents deep within the British establishment in order to stay on top of the UK’s nuclear bluff. There is a tremendously tense chase through the corridors of power and less salubrious parts of England, as vital communications in the days before mobile phones require in-person meetings. It’s not all that plausible but it’s well drawn.
I first read it in the 1990s, when Douglas Hurd was still in government and Hong Kong still under British rule, and was struck then by the hopelessness with which the British position is portrayed: the Hong Kong garrison might hold out for 48 hours against a Chinese attack if very lucky; popular sentiment in Hong Kong would certainly shift against the British immediately if withdrawal seemed a serious prospect; the nuclear submarine commander in the Pacific knows that he and his vessel will be destroyed in retaliation if they fire on China. The British establishment is generally weak and in disarray.
This time round, having been in China myself only five months ago, I was struck by the stereotyping of the Chinese leadership. Hurd (who turned 94 on 4 March) was posted to China early in his diplomatic career, soon after the Communist take-over at a time when the foreign ministry (as my friend Peter Martin has written) was probably at its least efficient. In real life, China was consumed with the Cultural Revolution in the period between this book being written and the time it is set. I would add though that the portrayal of Hong Kong is warm and surely based on personal knowledge.
An interesting speculation on a historical might-have-been. You can get it here.
Scrapes a Bechdel pass on page 90 when two (named) Chinese women discuss ways of getting into Hong Kong.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Doom 94, by Janis Jonevs.
The cult of St Patrick goes back to the fifth century, when he returned to Ireland (having spent time there as a child slave) as a missionary bringing Christianity to the island. The details are very obscure – we have a couple of documents actually written by him which however are frustratingly vague in places. However, his brand proved powerful, and by the seventh century he was accepted as the patron saint of Ireland.
Leaping forward a thousand years, after the disintegration of the old Gaelic political leadership in Ireland – culminating with the voluntary but permanent exile of two crucial noblemen in 1607 – the Irish College in Leuven became one of the centres of Irish culture and external political activity. Indeed, during the whole seventeenth century, the land we now call Belgium was the only country where books were published in the Irish language – it was illegal in Ireland.
From 1612 there are records of the Irish exiles in Leuven celebrating St Patrick’s Day, so the history of March 17 as a diaspora festival really starts here; when you are in the auditorium of the college, formerly the chapel, you really are in the room where it happened. And a couple of days ago (St Patrick’s Day being a Sunday this year), the Celticanto trio of singers performed this electrifying rendition of Danny Boy to a spellbound audience. It was pretty amazing.
As a footnote, Leuven did not in fact witness the first recorded overseas celebration of St Patrick’s Day. St Augustine, in Florida, is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the contiguous USA founded by Europeans, in 1565. It was a Spanish settlement, but in 1600 the parish priest was an Irishman, Richard Arthur, known as Ricardo Artur locally; and he invoked the protection of St Patrick (rather than St Augustine, after whom the town was named) for the settlers. Local historian Michael Francis has found records that Artur organised public celebrations of St Patrick on 17 March 1600 and 1601, including a public procession in 1601. It’s not quite St Patrick’s Day as we know it; there was not much of a diaspora in Florida, and the tradition ended when Artur left the town.
But no need to quibble; today is a day for celebration. Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh!
I got an interesting call from the Belfast Telegraph a couple of weeks ago. Northern Ireland’s major news last month was that a male stripper group had entertained customers at a Belfast pub by, you’ll never guess this, taking all their clothes off. Many people who felt that their opinions needed to be known took to the airwaves and the newspaper columns to express their views.
Personally I don’t have a problem with sex work, provided that basic lines of consent are protected for both providers and potential customers; it was completely decriminalised here in Belgium during the pandemic, and the country has failed to collapse into moral turpitude. (Or at least, I haven’t noticed if it did.) But the Belfast Telegraph did not seek my advice on that point.
Instead the question was about the location of the incident, the Devenish pub on Finaghy Road North: is it in West Belfast or South Belfast? Denizens of both South and West respectively insisted that the scenes of such depravity were not happening in their part of the city but on the other side of an invisible boundary. As I said to the reporter, “I can see how both South and West Belfast have rather different branding, and also the incident at the Devenish may not fit either branding particularly well.”
To go into the history of it. I grew up around the corner from the Devenish, but I don’t remember it being there when I was a child, and the Ordnance Survey map from around the time I was born marks the site as a “Nursery” – probably for trees rather than children. On the PRONI site you can track the history of the area back before the M1 motorway and even before the raileay.
Today’s Ordnance Survey map of the area north of Finaghy crossroadsProbably from the 1970s, before the Devenish was built; the site is marked as a nurseryBefore the motorway was built, and before most of the development north of the railway – the Ardmore estate was built in 1947Before the railway was built; though the line of today’s Ardmore Avenue is already visible as the lane around Finaghy Cottage
Finaghy Cottage, the house to which the future Ardmore Avenue led, belonged for many years to the confused poet Herbert George Pim, whose bizarre career I cannot possibly do justice to in the space I have here; let’s just say that it’s strangely appropriate that a scandal involving male strippers should break out less than five minutes’ walk from his former home. Edited to add: Disappointingly it seems that Pim’s “Finaghy Cottage” was on the Drumbeg Road near Dunmurry, not all that close to Finaghy in fact.
Anyway, the question is, what part of Belfast was the future site of the Devenish located in? The first part of the answer is that it wasn’t in Belfast at all until quite late in the day.
Map from Belfast: Approach to Crisis: A Study of Belfast Politics 1613–1970, by Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary (1973)
In this map from a history of Belfast civic politics, published in 1973, the future site of the Devenish is under the G in “Great Northern [Railway]” on the left, within the shaded area that Belfast Corporation were trying to annex from County Antrim after the second world war. But the city boundary actually ended farther east, at the King’s Hall to be precise; the showgrounds were just inside the city limits, and Finaghy outside. This was the boundary between the Ballyfinaghy and Malone Upper townlands.
Map from the 1917 Boundary Commission for Ireland’s report.
In parliamentary terms, the nine Belfast constituencies of the 1919 election were drawn by a Boundary Commission for Ireland in 1917. In 1920, using those same boundaries, they were merged to make four new parliamentary seats, returning to the old compass model, North, South, East and West. These were also the seats used for the first two elections to the Northern Ireland House of Commons. The boundary between South and West Belfast was the same as the boundary between the St Anne’s and Cromac seats of 1919, and the western half of the boundary was the railway line. And you can see that Finaghy, at the bottom left corner, is outside the city for parliamentary purposes.
The Belfast South and Belfast West constituencies remained unchanged until the early 1970s, when they were expanded outwards, Belfast South taking in the Rural District of Lisburn electoral divisions of Ardmore, Dunmurry, Finaghy, and Upper Malone, and Belfast West taking in the Rural District of Lisburn electoral divisions of Andersonstown, Ballygammon, and Ladybrook. (These Lisburn areas collectively had formed the short-lived Stormont seat of Larkfield.) We are interested in the Ardmore elecrtoral division, which was defined in 1963 as “That portion of the Townland of ‘Ballyfinaghy lying north of the centre line of the main Belfast/Lisburn Road”.
This map from the townlands database shows the townland boundaries of Ballyfinaghy, and the part north of the Upper Lisburn Road is the Ardmore electoral divison of the late 1960s. Immediately to the north again are the townland end electoral division of Ballygammon, in West Belfast from the early 1970s; but Ardmore (and indeed the whole of the Ballyfinaghy townland) is in South Belfast. So I was wrong when I told the Belfast Telegraph that the railway line had once been the boundary at Finaghy; the site of the Devenish has been in South Belfast since the early 1970s, and before that it was not in Belfast at all. It has never been in West Belfast, contra what I told the Belfast Telegraph. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Since 1983, the constituency boundaries have been based on the reformed local government wards, which defined the motorway as the boundary between Finaghy Ward and Ladybrook Ward in 1972 and since. I was correct on that at least, and it has survived several rounds of revision.
But basically, the disgruntled citizens of South Belfast will have to accept that the Devenish is part of the diversity of their quarter of the city, which is anyway the most multicultural area of Northern Ireland. For what that’s worth.
Second paragraph of third story (“Eachta an Fhir Ólta: CEOL!,” translated by Jack Fennell as “The Tale of the Drunkard: MUSIC!”; sadly the original Irish-language text is not available):
“What is the meaning of this? What’s wrong with you!” I said. “It’d be more in your line to be in bed, instead of staggering around drunk all over the city like this. You’d be better off if you turned your back on the drink, and your face to the fireplace—an intelligent, mild-mannered man such as yourself—and took up another hobby, like fretwork, or listening to the gramophone. . . .”
I got this in preparation for the Flann O’Brien panel at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon, but I confess that I only skimmed it then. It’s a short collection of short pieces by the great man. The most interesting stuff is at the beginning, where he pokes fun at Irish language enthusiasts in a couple of pieces originally written in Irish (and heavily footnoted to explain the humour). Most of the middle section is material being tried out for deployment elsewhere (the story about the young man who was born for Ireland gets used twice).
At the end, Jack Fennell presents a story which he is certain is by a 21-year-old Flann O’Brien, and published in 1932 in, of all places, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories – “Naval Control”, as by “John Shamus O’Donnell”. He has argued the case further in a recent Journey Planet, and I for one am convinced. How glorious, that Gernsback may have published the future author of The Third Policeman!
To be honest, I think this is really a book for Flann O’Brien completists, but there are a lot of us about, and it comes with a good foreword and scholarly apparatus. I don’t think any of the stories even clears the first step of the Bechdel test. But you can get it here.
This was my top book acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile is The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless.
I’m going to be blunt: Kill the Moon is not just my least favourite Peter Capaldi episode, it’s my least favourite episode of New Who since 2004. In case you have forgotten, the central plot point is that the Moon is not actually a ball of rock but a gigantic dragon’s egg, which hatches, and then the dragon flies off, first laying a new egg that has exactly the same size and appearance as the former Moon. This utter violation of basic astronomy threw me out of the story when I first watched it and threw me out again when I rewatched it for this post.
On top of that, the Doctor abandons Clara on the surface of the Moon to decide whether or not to blow it all up with nukes, in a move that is frankly both cruel and cowardly, and therefore goes against the fundamentals of the character. There are people out there who love this episode, but I find it an embarrassment close to Timelash levels. (Not quite Twin Dilemma levels, though, nothing can ever be that bad again.)
Darren Mooney has a different view, and in his Black Archive earnestly looks for the virtues of the story and claims to find them.
The first chapter, “‘Now We Can Do Something Interesting’: Kill the Moon as Self-Aware Television” argues that the story’s initial reception was very positive from critics (well, it wasn’t from me!) and that it is consciously re-shaping the show’s narrative as part of a master plan for the whole eighth series.
The second chapter, “The Moon’s an Egg’: Kill the Moon and the Tension between Science Fiction and Fantasy in Doctor Who”, argues that expectations of scientific rigour are misplaced as Doctor Who has never been a hard sf show, and references the Sad Puppies who emerged the following year as champions of hard sf. I think my record on the Puppies is reasonably clear, and I don’t think you have to be a raving traditionalist to find Kill the Moon‘s treatment of science offensively stupid..
The third chapter, “‘Second-hand Space Shuttle, Third-hand Astronauts’: The Curdling and Reignition of 60s Utopianism” looks at the cultural significance and interpretation of the historical Moon landings, especially in the Troughton era. Its second paragraph is:
Implicit in this observation is the idea that any expansion of humanity beyond the surface of the Earth will most likely treat the Moon as a stepping-stone. For much of its history, humanity was fascinated by the prospect of visiting the Moon. Stories about imagined lunar expeditions became tremendously popular during the 17th century, prompted by the research and theories of Galileo Galilei1. This fantasy of Moon exploration is inexorably tied into the history of SF as a genre. Released in 1902, Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is frequently identified as the first SF film2. 1 Seed, David, ‘Moon on the Mind: Two Millennia of Lunar Literature’, Nature, 9 July 2019. 2 See, for example, Luokkala, Barry B, Exploring Science Through Science Fiction, p2.
The fourth chapter, “‘We Have to Decide Together’: Scepticism of Simple Majoritarianism in the Work of Peter Harness”, points out that all three of Harness’s Who stories undermine the concept of a democratic vote, and links this to other New Who themes.
The fifth chapter, “‘…First Woman on the Moon’: Gender in Kill the Moon“, briefly looks at the story’s reference to abortion (in my view a clumsily handled and poorly executed minor theme) and then at the way in which the story subverts the gender roles of Doctor and Clara (which I don’t think it really does).
The sixth and final chapter, “‘That’s What We Call a New Moon’: Kill the Moon as an Argument for Optimism”, cheers the themes of death and rebirth in the story, which as noted above I find crass and unconvincing.
I am sure that Darren Mooney is a perfectly reasonable person, and reading the book it’s clear that we are coming from similar directions in a lot of ways. I opened his book wondering if he could persuade me out of my view that this is the worst Doctor Who story of the last forty years; and he did not. But you can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“Ivory Tower” by Amanda Kear):
He was idly watching the drones – several in the colours of local TV channels – gathering pictures of the traffic, when his phone morphed to the colour and ring-tone which indicated an urgent work-related call.
I got this because one of the six short stories in it was shortlisted for the BSFA Award in 2018, and back in those blessed days one could reasonably hope to read all of the BSFA nominees before voting. It didn’t win, but the anthology has been sitting on my electronic bookshelf for the last six years and I have finally read it.
It turns out that these are outputs from a writing workshop held at a small UK convention in 2015, so they’re a little raw. The best is not the BSFA-nominated “Angular Size”, by Geoff Nelder (though it is the only one that passes the Bechdel test), but “Ivory Tower” by Amanda Kear, telling a story of future ivory smuggling in Kenya. None of them is actively bad, though, and it didn’t cost me much. You can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2018, and the sf book that had lasted longest unread on my shelves. Next on those lists respectively are Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu, and De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhaut.
That same year, Helen and Richard [David Whitaker’s parents] moved into a flat in Tulse Hill, south London, on a much more modest scale than they’d been living in Knebworth. Robert [David Whitaker’s brother] said that shortly after this, still in 1930, ‘Richard’s leg caused a great deal of trouble and he went back to Roehampton where the limb was amputated/’ That use of ‘back’ suggests an ongoing problem with repeated visits to Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, south-west London. Established in 1915, this ‘quickly became known as one of the world’s leading limb-fitting and amputee rehabilitation centres’. Richard was likely in serious pain and unable to walk let alone work. Physical symptoms may also have been accompanied by mental distress, still barely understood by doctors – let alone wider society. Perhaps this was the cause of Richard and Helen’s earlier separation.
We got a lot fewer books last year to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who than we did for the fiftieth in 2013. But this really makes up for it. David Whitaker was one of the crucial figures in early Doctor Who – script editor at the very beginning of the show, author of the first Doctor Who books, writer of eight Old Who stories; but dead at 51 in 1980, and so missing the extra lease of life given to many former Who creators by the explosion in fan activity later that decade.
Simon Guerrier has done a great job of telling the story of those 51 years in 413 pages. He complains near the beginning that most previous published accounts supposedly (and even actually) by Whitaker about his own life have turned out on investigation to be substantially untrue; details are wrong, achievements exaggerated, essentially the fiction-writer’s skill deployed to his own autobiography.
But Guerrier has mined the archives, talked to relatives (though again, a lot of them died young too), and dug through the assembled Who lore of the past six decades to paint a sober and intriguing picture of a man who knew he wanted to write but didn’t quite know how to do that for a living. He also brings in some vivid social research about Whitaker’s family background and his first marriage, and looks at how the BBC in the 1960s struggled to set up a career structure that adequately rewarded creativity. (I suspect it hasn’t quite got there even today.)
The documentary and memory trail goes a bit thin at the moment when Whitaker and his first wife went to Australia, and he came back a couple of years later with his second wife. It’s also a bit scanty at the very end, when his health broke down (probably from too much smoking) and he was unable to get work. But this is understandable, and doesn’t detract from the attractiveness of the book.
Myself, I was struck on reading it by how little people actually recall about Whitaker. Accounts of meetings and conversations where we know he must have been present just don’t mention him, and the drama doc An Adventure in Space and Time wrote him out of history completely. It reminded me of the protagonist of Bob Shaw’s A Wreath of Stars, who considered himself the human equivalent of a neutrino, a particle able to travel through the Earth without disturbing any other particle. When he went fully freelance at what turned out to be the end of his life, I got the sense that he couldn’t get work because very few people remembered who he was. Awfully sad.
Anyway, this is strongly recommended just as a good read about a creator who had a big success in his mid-thirties and was never quite able to find the magic ingredients again. You can get it here if you are lucky – the first two print runs appear to have sold out.
Water evaporates, the heat pushing it higher and higher until suddenly it is too high, condensing around particles of soot and ash billowed into the heavens by the blaze.
Occasionally I hit a book by a favourite author that doesn’t quite work for me, and I’m afraid this is one of those times. I’m generally a big fan of North’s writing, and I’m also a big fan of A Canticle for Leibowitz, to which this is in part a response. It’s the story of a future scholar dedicated to retrieving past knowledge in a post-apocalypse society, where rival power structures have mutually entangled espionage networks and cosmic principles are embodied.
I didn’t especially like any of the characters, but what put me off more was that although the story is mainly set in the cities and countryside of a devastated Central Europe, there is very little sense of place; the cities are interchangeable and everyone seems to speak the same language. This detachment from geography threw me right out of the narrative. Most people seem to like it much more than me. You can get it here.
A Bechdel fail, I think; mostly first-person narrative and a male protagonist. But I may have missed an exception.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next on that pile is When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant, which I picked up at Novacon (where I also acquired COVID).
Marjorie rose with a most winning smile to greet—Mrs. Brown!
I dug this 1892 book out of the internets after getting the impression from Simon Guerrier’s biography of David Whitaker that it was the inspiration for the 1969-1971 BBC series Take Three Girls. In fact I was completely wrong, the book that I am writing up here is set in Chicago, while the TV show, set in London, was really inspired by another book of the same title by Ethel F. Heddle, also set in London and published three years after the Chicago one, in 1896. But I have my own interests in fin-de-siecle America and in modern sculpture, so I don’t regret reading this one.
It’s the story of three young women architects involved with preparing the World’s Columbian Exposition, aka the Chicago World’s Fair, in 1893 – and specifically with preparing the Woman’s Building, a really interesting project designed, managed and implemented entirely by women, showcasing women’s achievements in the arts in a way that seems strangely twenty-first century, at a time when only two states in the USA allowed women to vote. (New Zealand and Colorado both extended the vote to women in 1893.)
The book is probably mostly by Laura Hayes, who as well as being a trainee architect was the secretary of Bertha Palmer, the Chicago socialite who was the prime mover behind the initiative to have a Woman’s Building in the first place (at least her name is given as the copyright holder). Enid Yandell, who gets top billing on the title page, became a very well-known sculptor whose career started with the Chicago Exposition. The third credited author, Jean Loughborough, was another architect who designed the Arkansas building for the Fair.
The book is a brief and warm account of apartment life for young professional women in a city which was just getting used to that concept. It is beautifully illustrated – eight illustrators are credited and I suspect that the authors contributed some pictures as well; there’s something to look at on every page. What got me was the tremendous sense of optimism; America and the world as a whole were opening up, and the three young women are convinced that the future will be better than the past. You can get it for free off the internet here and here.
(And I think every one of the short chapters passes the Bechdel test.)
Second paragraph of third story (“No Stronger Than a Flower”):
Nesta had always been given to believe that, whatever they might say to one, it was a woman’s appearance that men really cared about; and indeed she thought that she well understood their point of view. So understanding had she been in fact, that she had long regarded herself as truly resigned to the wintry consequences in her own case. She would not, therefore, ever have accepted Curtis’s proposal of marriage, had she not greatly, though as yet briefly, loved him. She had a temperamental distaste for extreme measures.
This is a collection of eight spooky stories, with a foreword and afterword expanding on Aickman’s life and career. He has a particular gift for atmosphere, of making places that were slightly odd in the first place become more sinister and threatening. Two of the eight stories, to my surprise, are actually set in Belgium, one in the catehdral in Gent and the other in Brussels in the Wiertz Museum and surroundings (now the EU Quarter). I must go to the Wiertz Museum some time, it’s less than ten minutes’ walk from my office.
Peter McClean, to whom I am very grateful, sent me this book ages ago, with a strong recommendation which I can now endorse. I admit I had not heard of Aickman previously, but his modest output is clearly of very high quality. You can get this collection here.
I had to look quite thoroughly for a story that passes the Bechdel test, but Clarissa, the protagonist of “Bind Your Hair”, has a couple of conversations with the mysterious Mrs Pagani and also with a spooky little girl (who is however not named).
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is Why We Get the Wrong Poltiicians, by Isabel Hardman.
It takes a moment or two to appreciate how bad – and yet how good – British food used to be.
Autobiography of the UK journalist and quizmaster, with whom I had two close encounters in 1994 as captain of the unsuccessful Queen’s University of Belfast quiz team:
Yes, that is future Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng on the other team, and future minister and MP Stephen Farry on my team.
It’s an entertaining book, as you would expect from his public persona. Paxman was from gently decaying middle-class roots, but he got to Cambridge and, equipped with his M.A. Cantab, became the face of both Newsnight and University Challenge. He cut his journalistic teeth in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s, and paints a striking picture of the awfulness of official government policy, and the BBC’s difficulties in reporting on the situation properly – there were two striking incidents where he himself was centrally involved in clashes between the broadcaster and the government, but it doesn’t seem to have done his career much harm in the end.
Paxman doesn’t have a lot of self-doubt; this gives us an entertaining take on war reporting, writing books that nobody ever buys or reads, politicians in general and running a quiz show, but the deep reflection is more on the cogs and gears of politics, and why it is important to hold the ruling class to account, than on any deeper sense of society or indeed personal purpose. I enjoyed it a lot but slightly struggle to remember particular incidents, now that I’m writing it up a couple of weeks later. You can get it here.
It’s a man’s autobiography, so if the Bechdel Test were applicable to non-fiction it would not pass.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my pile. Next up there is Bletchley Park Brainteasers, by Sinclair McKay.
Current Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by Frazer Hines De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
Last books finished Moonraker’s Bride, by Madeleine Brent Sunstone, vol. 1, by Stjepan Sejić Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, by Isabel Hardman Ex Marginalia: Essays from the Edges of Speculative Fiction, ed. Chinuo Onwualu Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Serve You, by Al Ewing, Rob Williams et al Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi
Next books Doctor Who: Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Commercial aeroplanes leaving and landing at the City Airport continue to pass overhead. They’re unaware of Sammy and the shape he’s spelling out as he walks. He’s too small to be seen from the sky. He’s a grain of sand, a dot, a pin, a misplaced punctuation mark. Even God would have to squint. However, if he could be seen from such a height, if, for example, you were peering through binoculars or some other magnifying lens, your eye would be drawn to him, dragging his heels from one street to the next, kicking an empty Coke bottle as he goes. You would know that Sammy did not belong on these streets, drifting.
East Belfast, marching season, the present day (2019); two fathers concerned about their children. Ex-Loyalist Sammy suspects that his son is the masked social media influencer behind a wave of arson attacks. Trouble GP Jonathan’s daughter was begotten of a Siren who came and stayed in his bath and then disappeared back into the waves.
Most of the novel is gritty reality, so that you can almost smell the tarmac bubbling in the summer sunlight; but the parts with Jonathan and his daughter edge into magical realism with a particular Belfast idiom, where parents of strangely gifted children navigate both intrusive supernatural forces and the banal bureaucracy of health care and social security.
Often this sort of trope can feel bolted onto a conventional narrative, but Carson makes you feel that Belfast (East Belfast, very specifically) is the sort of traumatised place where reality starts to erode at the edges. It’s well-balanced, in the sense that a cyclist going at top speed over uneven terrain remains well balanced. Anyone expecting a standard urban grim novel will be surprised. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail. The book is either first-person from Jonathans point of view, or tight-third from Sammy’s, and they talk to very few women who in turn don’t talk much to each other, and if they do it’s about Jonathan or Sammy.
Over the last couple of years I have been deepening my knowledge of a couple of the early twentieth century abstract artists, one of them being Fernand Léger (1881-1955). I was initially struck by his “Jeu de Cartes” at the Kröller-Müller Museum up north in the Netherlands, when we went there in July 2022.
I have since encountered him at the charming museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis and in Brussels, and most recently in Los Angeles where LACMA has his “The Disks”:
I really like the way he plays with shapes to make us look at things in a different way.
At the same time, I’m gradually going through my American grandmother’s memoirs of her life, and have reached her stay in Paris at the age of 20 in 1919. She has the following interesting notes:
One thing that was very nice for me was that Gascon and Mariette Mills heard that I was in Paris and got in touch with me; Gascon’s cousin Rosalie Hinkley had married a cousin of mine, so that though there was no relationship there was a connection. The Millses had no children of their own and were very good to me, often having me to stay at their place at Rambouillet – a delightful hunting-lodge of the time of Louis XIV – quite a large house, really, where they had lovely parties. Through them I met many interesting people, mostly artists, Oleg Tripet-Skrypitzine and Picabia and Fernand Léger and Guy Arnoux and lots of others. Mariette herself was a good sculptor and did some fine work; Gascon went in for carpentry and with little assistance built a chalet in the grounds of their house.
So my grandmother knew Fernand Léger! Rather a thrill. More on the people mentioned below, but I also found online a French translation of the English-language memoir Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930, by Robert McAlmon (1895-1956) which includes the following snippet from 1921 (with my retranslation back into English, as I don’t have access to the original text):
Le lendemain, je partis pour la campagne, près de Rambouillet. Les Heyworth Mils avaient un château dans la petite commune où je m’installai, et dans un rayon de quinze kilomètres se trouvaient plusieurs charmants villages où l’on pouvait se promener, siroter un petit vin rafraîchissant, revenir pour le déjeuner et travailler l’après-midi. Le dimanche, mais souvent, aussi, les jours de semaine pour prendre le thé, Brancusi, Léger, Picabia et Blaise Cendrars venaient rendre visite aux Mills.
The next day I left for the countryside near Rambouillet. The Heyworth Mills had a château in that little town, where I settled in. Within fifteen kilometres there were several charming villages where you could go for a walk, sip a refreshing glass of wine, come back for lunch and work in the afternoon. Brancusi, Léger, Picabia and Blaise Cendrars would come to visit the Mills on Sundays and often on weekdays for tea.
It’s interesting that my grandmother and Robert McAlmon both namedrop both Fernand Léger and Francis Picabia as fellow guests of the Mills’. It is amusing to think of the two young Americans (McAlmon was 25) possibly at the same tea-party in Rambouillet, wowed by the French artists present and ignoring each other.
So, the people my grandmother mentions are:
“Gascon Mills” – Lawrence Heyworth Mills (1872-1943), born in Switzerland, an American citizen who lived most of his life abroad. He was the son of the Professor of Zend Philosophy at Oxford, also Lawrence Heyworth Mills (1837-1918). I don’t know the origin of my grandmother’s nickname for him of “Gascon” or “Gaston”, which she uses for him elsewhere. Robert McAlmon’s memoir also refers to him as “Le Gaston”.
Mariette Benedict Thompson (1876-1948), was Mills’ second wife (his first wife died in 1902). She was also an American expat, born in Paris, and was indeed a moderately well known sculptor. Unfortunately I haven’t found photographs of any of her work online, but there seem to be pieces in both the Musée d’Orsay and the Pompidou Centre. She is the only woman mentioned by either my grandmother or McAlmon.
Rosalie Hinckley (1887-1981) was Heyworth Mills’ first cousin once removed, the daughter of Rosalie Anne Neilson (1858-1939) and granddaughter of Caroline Kane Mills (1822-1891), whose younger brother was the Orientalist professor Lawrence Heyworth Mills; she was born and died in New York. Rosalie Hinckley’s husband Cornelius Wendell Wickersham (1885-1968) was my grandmother’s first cousin, the son of former Attorney-General George Woodward Wickersham (1858-1936).
Oleg Tripet-Skrypitzine must be Oleg-Eugène Tripet-Skrypitzine (1848-1935), who would have been 72 in 1920. He was the son of the French ambassador to St Petersburg and a Russian princess, and is particularly remembered for developing Cannes and the French Riviera, but some of his art survives as well. He had a son, François Oleg Tripet-Skrypitzine, but he emigrated to Canada in 1910 and does not seem to have been artistically inclined.
Francis Picabia (1879-1953) is a very well-known artist, one of the founders of Dadaism who then denouced it and switched to Surrealism in 1921 (the same year that he and my grandmother were entertained by the Millses). One of his notable works from 1921 is “Jumelle”.
Fernand Léger is probably the best-known of the artists named by my grandmother. He is usually bracketed with Bracque and Picasso as a pioneer of Cubism. Something about his art really grabs me and from surviving photos he looks like he was fun at parties, even tea-parties. This is his “The Breakfast”, also known as “Three Women”, from 1921.
Guy Arnoux (1886-1951) again had a very different style, much more of a cartoonist and illustrator – indeed he ended up making a nice career in illustrations for American newspapers and magazines, possibly helped by his connection with the Millses. Here’s his “La Robe de Chambre”, “The Dressing-Gown”, from 1921.
McAlmon also namechecks “Brancusi”, actually Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957) who is the best known of any of the artists here, though chiefly remembered as a sculptor rather than a painter. Mina Loy’s poem, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird“, was inspired by a sculpture that she probably saw at the Mills’ Paris house. His “Adam and Eve”, now in the Guggenheim, dates from 1921.
Finally, McAlmon also mentions Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), a writer and poet, rather than an artist, originally from Switzerland. He published a collection of African folk tales in 1921 (with unfortunately a racist title).
The BSFA Award short lists are out, and so my reading is set for the next month until voting finishes and the results are announced on (I guess) 30 March. Congrats to all who made the cut.
There are (almost) five categories out of ten where it’s possible to report on the presence of the shortlistees on the two main book-logging sites, Goodreads and LibraryThing, so below I am listing the number of people who have rated each book on Goodreads, the number who own each book on LibraryThing, and the average rating on both (as I did with the long lists). There are a few which have not yet been rated by anyone on LibraryThing. Within each category books are listed in descending order of the (geometric) average of raters/owners, and the categories themselves are listed similarly. Very high ratings sometimes reflect only that the book has so far been rated by just one or two enthusiasts!
Best Novel
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
Author
raters
rating
owners
rating
Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon
Wole Talabi
417
3.76
61
3.36
Descendant Machine
Gareth L. Powell
644
4.13
33
4.25
Airside
Christopher Priest
147
3.45
26
4.00
HIM
Geoff Ryman
149
3.83
23
3.67
The Green Man’s Quarry
Juliet McKenna
190
4.51
14
3.25
1635 pages in total
Of the 65 books on the Best Novel long list, these were respectively 40th, 38th, 47th, 51st and 50th in my previous ranking – none of them was in the top half of the table (the top book on my long-list table was not actually sf). This demonstrates only that BSFA second round voters are not very aligned with Goodreads and LibraryThing users.
Best Shorter Fiction
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
Author
raters
rating
owners
rating
And Put Away Childish Things
Adrian Tchakovsky
1202
3.82
49
3.90
I am AI
Ai Jiang
184
4.47
4
5.00
The Book of Gaheris
Kari Sperring
10
4.50
15
3.50
Europa
Allen Stroud
47
3.77
3
–
Broken Paradise
Eugen Bacon
5
4.60
3
–
765 pages total
Best Shorter Fiction is the only category which has the same book top out of five on both GR and LT. These were 3rd, 9th, 12th, 14th and 17th out of the 24 long-listees that I was able to rank by GR/LT ownership.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
Author
raters
rating
owners
rating
The Library of Broken Worlds
Alaya Dawn Johnson
154
3.19
66
4.13
A Song of Salvation
Alechia Dow
232
3.96
28
3.00
Mindbreaker
Kate Dylan
216
4.20
15
5.00
We Who Are Forged In Fire
Kate Murray
55
4.18
2
–
The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern
J Dianne Dotson
17
4.59
1
–
1786 pages total
The long list here for Best Fiction for Younger Readers was rather short, and these were 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th out of 8.
Best Collection
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
Author/Editor
raters
rating
owners
rating
No One Will Come Back For Us
Premee Mohamed
297
4.06
42
4.08
Best of World SF: Volume 3
Lavie Tidhar
9
4.33
75
3.58
The Best of British Science Fiction 2022
Donna Scott
18
3.94
19
4.25
Strange Attractors
Jaine Fenn
4
4.50
10
3.83
Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology
Wole Talabi
2
5.00
4
–
1922 pages total
These were 4th, 39th, 18th, 25th and 37th of the 51 Best Collection long listees. When I looked at the long lists five weeks ago, Best of World SF: Volume 3 had not yet been rated by anyone on Goodreads and had only nine owners on LibraryThing; it has picked up considerably in the meantime. I was concerned about the rather long tail of the long list, but it doesn’t seem to have transferred to the short list.
Best Non-Fiction (Long)
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Title
Author
raters
rating
owners
rating
Spec Fic for Newbies
Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan
11
4.36
8
5.00
A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller
Nina Allan, editor
6
4.50
5
–
All These Worlds
Niall Harrison
4
4.00
5
–
Ex Marginalia: Essays on Writing Speculative Fiction by Persons of Color
Chinelo Onwualu
8
4.13
2
–
The Female Man: Eastercon talk
Farah Mendlesohn
(lecture on YouTube)
1417 pages total
The books here were 6th, 11th, 10th and 14th of the 23 long-listees for Best Non-Fiction (Long) on GR and LT. The same book tops both systems, but one of the nominees is a talk rather than a publication, and the numbers are anyway thin, so the comparison is incomplete.
That’s a total of 7,528 pages; and there are five other categories as well. You have four weeks!
The second section of Book 3 of The Odyssey, as generally agreed, has the goddess Athena addressing Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. Here it is in the original, in Emily Wilson’s new-ish translation, in the T.E. Lawrence prose which I read in 2009, and in the classic first English translation by George Chapman (he of Flann O’Brien’s “Keats and Chapman” stories).
(Emily Wilson, 2018) “Do not be shy, Telemachus. You sailed over the sea to ask about your father, where the earth hides him, what his fate might be. So hurry now to Nestor, lord of horses. Learn what advice he has in mind for you. Supplicate him yourself, and he will tell you the truth; he is not one to tell a lie.”
(T.E. Lawrence, 1932 – prose) ‘Telemachus, here is no room for false modesty: no room at all. Have you not come oversea in quest of your father, expressly to learn where the earth is hiding him or what doom he has drawn upon himself? So you must go up straight, now, to this horse-proud Nestor, and make him yield to you the inmost secrets of his heart. Implore him, yourself, to speak perfect truth: and then he will not deceive us: for his mind is compact with wisdom.’
(George Chapman, 1616) “Now No more befits thee the least bashful brow; T’ embolden which this act is put on thee, To seek thy father both at shore and sea, And learn in what clime he abides so close, Or in the pow’r of what Fate doth repose. Come then, go right to Nestor; let us see, If in his bosom any counsel be, That may inform us. Pray him not to trace The common courtship, and to speak in grace Of the demander, but to tell the truth; Which will delight him, and commend thy youth For such prevention; for he loves no lies, Nor will report them, being truly wise.”
I got myself this as a late Christmas present, having read positive reviews and also having slogged through a couple of other translations. I was familiar with the high points of The Odyssey, which is fairly approachable, if oddly structured. But this is definitely worth getting. I really appreciated Wilson’s paring down of the language to take only as much space as the original words – most other English translators seem to have been rather verbose (cf Lawrence and Chapman above, three centuries apart).
As you would expect, given where Wilson is coming from, she boosts the voices of the women characters more than other translators do – and let’s bear in mind that Odysseus has love affairs with Calypso and Circe, and less explicitly with Nausicaa, while poor old Penelope has to stay faithful to him despite his years of absence. I also felt I got a much better sense of Telemachus here.
The book comes with an 80-page introduction and another 12 pages of preliminary notes, and it’s really worth it – a very good survey of both the society which the poem depicts, and the efforts that others have made to interpret the text for later times and places. And crucially the language is crystal clear. I have been told that this is now the standard translation used to teach The Odyssey, and I can see why. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail at the third step. There are plenty of named women, and they sometimes even talk to each other, but it’s always about a man (or men).
This was my top book acquired last year. Next on that pile is The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt.