September 2024 books

Non-fiction 8 (YTD 63)
South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton
Truss at 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez
Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston
The Happiness Patrol, by Mike Stack
Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards
A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes
Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. Jennifer FitzGerald

Non-genre 3 (YTD 25)
Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
Shame, by Annie Ernaux
Pook at College, by Peter Pook (did not finish)

SF 11 (YTD 72)
Titan, by John Varley
A Crack in Everything, by Ruth Frances Long
The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo
The Running Man, by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline Macdonald
Desdemona and the Deep, by C.S.E. Cooney
“They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete
Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals, by Diane Duane

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 26)
Grave Matter, by Justin Richards
Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt
Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol, by Graeme Curry

Comics 1 (YTD 22)
The Sapling: Roots, by George Mann et al

6,700 pages (YTD 52,200)

11/26 (YTD 98/214) by non-male writers (Ramirez, FitzGerald, Ernaux, Long, Wynne Jones, Bulawayo, Macdonald, Cooney, Damián Miravete, Duane, Rumfitt)
1/26 (YTD 26/188) by a non-white writer (Bulawayo)
3/261 rereads (Steppenwolf, Grave Matter, Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol)

282 books currently tagged unread, down 18 from last month, down 70 from September 2023. At this rate I’ll have cleared the unread shelves in four years’ time.

Reading now
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow
Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop
The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al

Coming soon (perhaps)
Burning Heart, by Dave Stone
Doctor Who: 73 Yards, by Scott Handcock
Midnight, by Philip Purser-Hallard
New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyes and Suzy Jagger
Ireland under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley
Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell
The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald
The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch
Monica, by Daniel Clowes
Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman
The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck
Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang
The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy
Marriage, by H.G. Wells
How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling
What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman

The best known books set in each country: Tanzania

See here for methodology; I am excluding books not actually set in Tanzania.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
Green Hills of AfricaErnest Hemingway12,2872,315
The LionessChris Bohjalian23,336463
ParadiseAbdulrazak Gurnah10,774664
AfterlivesAbdulrazak Gurnah11,782481
We All Went On SafariLaurie Krebs6601,081
Hard RainIrma Venter4,002140
Golden BoyTara Sullivan2,227223
Elizabeti’s DollStephanie Stuve-Bodeen320540

I had to exclude a lot of books here which only briefly touched on Tanzania (eg Going Solo, by Roald Dahl) or are largely about somewhere else entirely (eg The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński). Not completely certain about She, by H. Rider Haggard, which could really be set in any one of a number of African locations.

Dismaying that the top two books here are about Americans on safari, but very glad to see local Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah putting in a strong showing.

Next up, while I’m in the neighbourhood, is South Africa.

India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan

Comet-spotting

I had one of those nights last night, and as I browsed the internet insomniacally, I came across some striking pre-dawn photographs of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS taken by one of my cousins in Hawaii. I checked and it seemed possible that I might be able to see it from the Torenvalk watchtower six km away from us, so got up at 6 and drove over.

Unfortunately the light pollution in our part of Belgium, one of the most densely populated parts of Europe, is too great. I got a nice photo of the Moon with Earthshine, and Regulus visible below it, but that’s all I was getting. The comet is lost in the haze on the horizon; the diffuse streak across the picture is a light beam from a streetlight, and the small streak on the left is an aeroplane trail.

You may not be familiar with the magnitude scale of brightness in astronomy. The human eye responds logarithmically to light, so a first magnitude star is 2.512 times brighter than a second magnitude star, and a second magnitude star is 2.512 times brighter than a third magnitude star. (And a first magnitude star is exactly 100 times brighter than a sixth magnitude star, because 2.512 is the fifth root of 100.) Most people can see stars down to sixth magnitude in a nice dark sky far from any other light source, once their eyes have adjusted.

The earliest record we have of a classification of the magnitudes of stars is by Ptolemy in about 150 AD. His judge-it-by-eye measurements turn out to be pretty robust when compared with modern scientific measurements, and when an nineteenth-century astronomer called Norman Pogson proposed the ratio of 2.512 because it fitted Ptolemy’s classification rather well.

The brightest star in the night sky is Sirius, at magnitude -1.46 (the lower the magnitude, the brighter the star). Venus can get as bright as -4.9. The Full Moon is -12.7 and the Sun around -26.8. Those are fairly meaningless numbers; I find it easier to remember that Arcturus and Vega are almost exactly magnitude 0.0, Aldebaran and Spica around magnitude 1, and the six brighter Big Dipper stars between 1.8 and 2.4, with Mizar (the middle star of the Big Dipper’s handle) dead on 2.0 (though in fact it’s a much more complex system than appears to the naked eye).

This morning, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS’s brightness was 2.6 according to the most optimistic sources, and when I arrived at the observation tower, I could clearly see Regulus, which at magnitude 1.4 is three times brighter, and indeed the Big Dipper. But as dawn arrived, the Big Dipper was long gone, Regulus faded into the surrounding sky, and I could see that the sky where the comet should have been was even brighter, so I came home and went back to bed.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is predicted to be really spectacular in the evenings of the second week of October, starting from Wednesday 9th through the weekend. That’s something to cheer us up in the Northern Hemisphere as the evenings start to draw in. Keep an eye out for it!

Ernest Wante’s paintings in the Church of St Boniface, Ixelles

Yesterday I found myself lunching (for the second time in a few days) at one of my favourite Thai restaurants, La Deuxième Élément in Ixelles, and after lunch I spotted that the Church of St Boniface, which looms over the square, was open. One of the cultural loose ends that I have been thinking about chasing for a while is a report in Dutch Wikipedia that the church contains some of the work of fin-de-siècle artist Jean Mayné, so I seized the chance to go in and have a look.

There are four large paintings on the ends of the transepts in the church, and another in the Lady Chapel, all sadly somewhat dingy and in need of restoration. (Which may be tricky, as they are canvas glued to the wall.) The altarpiece is also flanked by two painted wooden panels which looked like they might be by the same hand.

Frustratingly, the church has a mini-exhibition about the stained glass windows, which have recently been restored, but there was nothing about the paintings or the altarpiece – nor are they mentioned in the bilingual leaflet you can get online, though I found an older pamphlet with more info.

I took photos of them all, hoping that they might turn out to be obscure works by Jean Mayné. But a bit more research this morning revealed that they are actually by a different fin-de-siècle artist, Ernest Wante, who was much more into religious art. Next time you are enjoying La Deuxième Élément’s yummy Keng Kaï Noh Maï (my personal favourite), do take a moment afterwards to pop across the road and look around.

(Also – it became clear in my research that the St Boniface here is the 13th-century Brussels bishop, not the 8th century martyr.)

Jesus heals the paralytic (1923). Strictly speaking this should be an indoor scene. Note the chap brandishing his crutches in joy, though the guy in front of him with a walking stick seems less sure.
“Suffer little children to come unto me” (1923). Interestingly multi-ethnic crowd. The young woman at the front looks to me like she is wearing a fin-de-siècle dress.
The Adoration of the Shepherds (1910). Accompanied by angelic choir, sheep, ox, ass and goat. When I went back for another look I realised that someone has squiggled over the baby with green felt tip pen.
Shows how St Boniface tested out a supposed fragment of the True Cross at the abbey of Hooidonk, by seeing if it sank in water. It did, and started shedding drops of blood. Boniface actually recorded this himself. (1909)
The angels come to help St Boniface serve Mass. Oddly enough he didn’t leave us personal documentation of this incident.
The Wedding at Cana (altarpiece, 1910)
Doubting Thomas (altarpiece, 1910)

The stained glass windows looked interesting too, but I was in a bit of a rush to get back to the office and will have to return for another look. And I’m still wondering about the rumoured work of Jean Mayné. Maybe it was just a mistake by whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry.

Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt

Second paragraph of third chapter:

He wasn’t entirely sure if Ruby was listening to him. She was standing still with the toes of her shoes touching the edge of the cliff, completely enraptured by the dinosaurs. Of course she was! Who wouldn’t be?

When I wrote up the most recent season of Doctor Who, I commented of this story:

The actual premise of Space Babies is very silly indeed, but was executed with poker faces by all concerned. The flaw in the plot (alas, not the last time I will use that phrase) is that if Jocelyn has been hiding in a storage room all along, why did she not make herself known earlier?

I watched it again before reading the book and writing this post, and what struck me is the mismatch between, on the one hand, brilliant effects and performances, and on the other, a really poor story concept. Nothing about the situation makes sense, and re-watching it only draws your attention more firmly to the plot flaws. No doubt this is why they slipped it out as part of a double on the same night as Eurovision.

I ranked it second last of the eight stories broadcast (so far) this year, and the Twitter #DoctorWhoRanking2024 rated it 312th of all 321 Doctor Who stories ever, which may be a little harsh.

Alison Rumfitt is new to Who writing but has a couple of horror novels under her belt. This is a decent novelisation, adding a little top-and-tail narrative about a child and a monster, and digging a bit more into Ruby’s background and the resonances of the babies for her. There are also a couple more poo jokes, I think (I didn’t go back and check.) It may be difficult for an established writer to stamp their own authority on a Doctor Who story that they did not actually write, but I guess that wasn’t the point, and it’s perfectly serviceable. You can get it here.

Shame, by Annie Ernaux

Second paragraph of third section:

Les deux grandes villes de par chez nous, Le Havre et Rouen, suscitent moins d’appréhension, elles font partie du langage de toute mémoire familiale, de l’ordinaire de la conversation. Beaucoup d’ouvriers y travaillent, partant le matin et revenant le soir par « la micheline ». À Rouen, plus proche et plus importante que Le Havre, il y a tout, c’est-à-dire des grands magasins, des spécialistes de toutes les maladies, plusieurs cinémas, une piscine couverte pour apprendre à nager, la foire Saint-Romain qui dure un mois en novembre, des tramways, des salons de thé et des grands hôpitaux où l’on emmène les gens pour les opérations délicates, les cures de désintoxication et les électrochocs. À moins d’y travailler comme ouvrier sur un chantier de reconstruction, personne ne s’y rend vêtu en « tous-les-jours ». Ma mère m’y emmène une fois par an, pour la visite à l’oculiste et l’achat des lunettes. Elle en profite pour acheter des produits de beauté et des articles « qu’on’ ne trouve pas à Y. ». On n’y est pas vraiment chez nous, parce qu’on ne connaît personne. Les gens paraissent s’habiller et parler mieux. À Rouen, on se sent vaguement « en retard », sur la modernité, l’intelligence, l’aisance générale de gestes et de paroles. Rouen est pour moi l’une des figures de l’avenir, comme le sont les romans-feuilletons et les journaux de mode.The two big cities from around these parts, Le Havre and Rouen, arouse less suspicion; they are inscribed in the linguistic memory of all families and belong to ordinary conversation. Many factory hands work there, leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening on the micheline, a small local train. In Rouen, the larger city, closer to us than Le Havre, they’ve got everything you need – department stores, specialists for every type of complaint, several cinemas, an indoor pool for learning how to swim, the Saint-Romain festival lasting the month of November, tramways, tea rooms and huge hospitals where people are taken for major operations, detoxification programmes and electroshock treatment. Unless you happen to be a labourer working on a building site, you would never go there in your ‘everyday’ clothes. My mother takes me there once a year to visit the eye specialist and buy me a pair of glasses. She takes advantage of the trip to purchase beauty products and other articles ‘you can’t get in Y’. We never feel quite at home there because we don’t know anyone. People appear to dress and speak better than in the country. In Rouen, one always feels slightly ‘at a disadvantage’ – less sophisticated, less intelligent and, generally speaking, less gracious in one’s body and speech. For me, Rouen symbolizes the future, just like serialized novels and fashion magazines do.
Translated by Tanya Leslie

Out of curiosity, because Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, I went to Filigranes near my office and got hold of this – I think because it was the cheapest on the shelf of English translations of her work. It’s a very intense story of a teenager in provincial Normandy in 1952 and the poisonous relationship between her parents – the very first sentence is “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” The environment is dominated by social inequality and unthinking piety, not a million miles or a million years from the Catholic Belfast where I grew up. Clearly autobiographical, and I understand it’s rooted in Ernaux’s bigger project of re-examining her entire life in fictional form. But I suspect this is a good taster, at only 85 pages. You can get it here (and here in French).

A Crack in Everything, by Ruth Frances Long

Second paragraph of third chapter:

His instincts stirred, the deep-seated ancient knowledge of hunter and hunted, intuitive and primal. Standing still as a statue, the late afternoon crowds flowed around him. Light broke through a far off gap in the clouds and fell on her. She glowed with it – special. He couldn’t shake the sense that she was special. And that discomfited him more than he could say. Mistle had already noticed her, after all, and it took something mighty special to get him to crawl out of whatever bottle he was currently drowning himself in.

Fantasy novel set in Dublin – very much in Dublin, firmly moored to the city’s landmarks, and yet also a Dublin that exists in parallel to the supernatural world of Dubh Linn where the Sidhe keep an eye on us mortals and often intervene. Our teenage protagonist discovers that she is connected to both worlds and has a destined role to play in the battle between evil and not-quite-so-evil factions on the supernatural side. Well observed, in terms of both human and physical geography. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018 and also the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. (Sorry Ruth!) Next on the former pile is Yes Taoiseach, by Frank Dunlop; next on the latter is Lost Objects, by Marian Womack, but it will have to wait until I have finished all my 2018 books.

Tuesday reading

Current
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow
The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline MacDonald
Desdemona and the Deep, by C. S. E. Cooney

Last books finished
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo
Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards
A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes
The Running Man, by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Pook at College, by Peter Pook (did not finish)
Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. Jennifer FitzGerald

Next books
The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al
Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop
“They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete

Grave Matter, by Justin Richards

Second paragraph of third chapter”

‘I think you could do with a good stiff lemonade,’ the Doctor told Peri gently.

My rereading of Who books which I failed to blog on first reading them a decade ago has thrown up some interesting finds, and this is one of them: the Sixth Doctor and Peri land on a Scottish island where something is up, specifically the islanders are turning into mind-controlled zombies; Doctor Who meets The Wicker Man meets Night of the Living Dead. The setting is very vividly evoked, and the solution to the mystery gradually revealed; but it’s the portrayal of a small isolated community under siege from ‘orrible forces that really sits with me. A good ‘un. You can get it here, at a price.

Next up: Burning Heart, by Dave Stone.

Version 1.0.0

Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse

Second paragraph of third section:

Der Steppenwolf hatte also zwei Naturen, eine menschliche und eine wölfische, dies war sein Schicksal, und es mag wohl sein, daß dies Schicksal kein so besonderes und seltenes war. Es sollen schon viele Menschen gesehen worden sein, welche viel vom Hund oder vom Fuchs, vom Fisch oder von der Schlange in sich hatten, ohne daß sie darum besondre Schwierigkeiten gehabt hätten. Bei diesen Menschen lebte eben der Mensch und der Fuchs, der Mensch und der Fisch nebeneinander her, und keiner tat dem andern weh, einer half sogar dem andern, und in manchem Manne, der es weit gebracht hat und beneidet wird, war es mehr der Fuchs oder Affe als der Mensch, der sein Glück gemacht hat. Dies ist ja jedermann bekannt. Bei Harry hingegen war es anders, in ihm liefen Mensch und Wolf nebeneinander her, und noch viel weniger halfen sie einander, sondern sie lagen in ständiger Todfeindschaft gegeneinander, und einer lebte dem andern lediglich zu Leide, und wenn Zwei in Einem Blut und Einer Seele miteinander todfeind sind, dann ist das ein übles Leben. Nun, jeder hat sein Los, und leicht ist keines.And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one. There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog or the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and the fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one even helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to such enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or the ape in him than to the man. So much for common knowledge. In the case of Harry, however, it was just the opposite. In him the man and the wolf did not go the same way together, but were in continual and deadly enmity. One existed simply and solely to harm the other, and when there are two in one blood and in one soul who are at deadly enmity, then life fares ill. Well, to each his lot, and none is light.

My record-keeping is not always perfect, and I discover now that I actually read this back in 2007. I wrote then:

It’s fundamentally a depressing German psychological-mystical novel, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. I was very much drawn into the narrator’s story of reconciling what he imagines to be the two sides of his own nature, and coming to terms with music, dancing and sex while remaining true to himself. The ending is a bit peculiar but that is in keeping with the tone of the rest. As I look back at my entries about Nobel prize-winners I see that I’ve ended quite a lot of them with the feeling that I might read more by that author, but this time I really mean it!

In the following 17 years my tolerance for whiny male protagonists has decreased, and I’m afraid I found this very unsatisfactory on a reread. I found the protagonist dull, self-obsessed and needlessly unpleasant to other people. It is mercifully short at least. You can get it here.

I (incorrectly) thought that this was my top unread book acquired so far this year, and my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on both of those lists is The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck.

Decision time: local elections 2024

We had three elections back in June, and we have another two next month: on Sunday 13 October we will choose the members of our local council and the council of the province of Flemish Brabant.

As my long time reader knows, I like to put questions to the candidates in each election before the vote comes up, picking an obscure but crucial issue and asking their views. Last time around it proved a very helpful tactic.

This time around it has been less helpful. The storm in a teacup exercising us locally is whether or not a supermarket should be built on the land behind the recycling bins 500m from our house. A couple of NIMBYs have managed to block it so far, to the annoyance of those of us who would prefer not to have to trek a couple of miles up or down the road to the nearest shop.

I wrote to the four groups who were standing in the election as of last weekend, and three of them wrote back to me saying that they were strong supporters of the need for a supermarket, in terms which really left little to choose between them. The fourth, the nationalist NVA, did not reply, but I was not going to vote for them anyway. (The three who replied were a coalition led by the liberal Open VLD party, the Christian Democrats, and the Green party in coalition with the Socialists.)

Since then, a fifth faction has entered the fray, a splinter group from the NVA led by a former mayor. I really can’t bring myself to consider voting for the NVA, a nativist populist party who hate migrants (such as me). They’re not as bad as the extreme Vlaams Belang, who are not standing here, but that’s not saying much. The fact that the former mayor has split from them is the best thing about him.

In the last election, the NVA were the biggest party locally, but three of the other four ganged up against them and out local administration has been led by the CDA (Christian Democrats) in partnership with the Greens and Socialists. (Apparently three of the seven elected NVA councillors have since left the party.)

The numbers on the left in the lower table refer to the order of the parties on the ballot paper.

This time around, a couple of things have changed, partly as a result of new legislation aroudn the local council elections. First of all, the party with the most votes automatically gets the position of mayor. Second, voting is no longer compulsory. Third, the Greens and Socialists are running a joint slate here called “Samen” (“Together”). In the last election, they had 34% of the votes between them and would have won 8 seats as a bloc, due to the way the voting system works. (The Imperiali method, if you’re interested.) As it was, the Socialists lost out on a second seat in 2018 by a mere three votes, and the Greens won five.

As I mentioned previously, we had elections for the European Parliament, the Belgian Chamber of Representatives and the Flemish Parliament back in June. The results are published at municipality level, and in our area they were as follows:

EU ParliamentBelgium ChamberFlemish Parliament
NVA23.51%29.74%28.46%
Socialists13.28%15.17%14.98%
Green18.21%12.90%13.88%
Christian Democrats16.4%15.01%13.72%
Open VLD (liberals)11.13%10.27%11.31%%
Vlaams Belang11.11%10.12%10.83%
PVDA (hard left)3.67%4.29%4.56%
Voor U (minor right)1.03%1.14%1.05%
Volt (EU federalist)1.66%0.37%
Others1.36%0.82%
Socialist + Green31.49%28.07%28.86%

For the European and Flemish elections, the combined Green/Socialist vote exceeded that for NVA, and they weren’t that far behind in the election for the Belgian Chamber either.

In a municipal election there’s not all that much to choose between the candidates, and I’m broadly content with the current administration’s performance. My personal priority is to prevent NVA coming top and claiming the position of mayor, and it’s pretty clear that the best way to do that is to vote for the ‘Samen’ joint ticket of the Greens and Socialists. So that’s what I intend to do.

(I’ll actually be away on election day, so will either vote early or by proxy.)

As for the provincial elections, I’ll vote for one of the parties that wants to abolish the provinces; I don’t see the point of having them.

The best known books set in each country: the UK

See here for methodology.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s StoneJ.K. Rowling10,371,677137,024
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of AzkabanJ.K. Rowling4,340,803109,647
Harry Potter and the Chamber of SecretsJ.K. Rowling4,061,552112,957
1984George Orwell4,784,31683,782
Harry Potter and the Goblet of FireJ.K. Rowling3,815,466104,567
Harry Potter and the Deathly HallowsJ.K. Rowling3,807,94898,539
Pride and PrejudiceJane Austen4,369,16182,844
Harry Potter and the Order of the PhoenixJ.K. Rowling3,480,151103,139

I normally list the top eight books set in each country. There is no prize for guessing what the ninth book would have been.

The first time that I have read all eight!

I disqualified The Hobbit, though it is arguable that Tolkien intended a continuity between the Shire and England.

I might do Wales and Northern Ireland separately when I get to that stage of the population rankings.

Next up is Tanzania.

India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan

Liz Truss and Northern Ireland: Examining Anthony Seldon’s narrative

I very much enjoyed Sir Anthony Seldon’s book on Liz Truss’s brief and disastrous term as Prime Minister of the UK. But one point really jumped out at me as extraordinarily inaccurate. He reports that her engagement with the EU, while prime minister, opened the way to the eventual Windsor Framework signed between her successor, Rishi Sunak, and the EU the following year, and indeed highlights this “pathbreaking work” as the sole foreign policy success of her premiership.

Like much of Seldon’s book (including many of the best bits), this is probably based on an assertion from a single source, and I think Seldon could usefully have questioned it. It very much clashes with the received narrative of Truss’s relations with the EU in relation to Northern Ireland.

The best quick summary of that received narrative, i.e. what we all thought had happened, is laid out by Truss herself in her own book. She discusses the topic in a short section at the end of Chapter 8, her experience as foreign secretary (rather than as Prime Minister). She tells how (despite discouragement from “lots of people”) she decided to take over the EU dossier from David Frost when he resigned in December 2021 and “put in a call to Boris and expressed my thoughts on what we should do to take on the EU over the unworkable and damaging Northern Ireland Protocol”.

In her version, Johnson duly gave her the role of dealing with the EU, but negotiations with the EU got nowhere, so “I then prepared a law to put through Parliament with Attorney General Suella Braverman. This became the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill and used the doctrine of necessity to overcome international law issues.”

The Bill got through the House of Commons before Johnson’s resignation, and he and Truss then planned to use the Parliament Act to force it through against the House of Lords. “It never got to that point, as my successor withdrew it. Yet the Windsor Framework that he installed in its place simply does not resolve the issues. Too much was given away to the EU. That is why I could not support it.”

I don’t agree with most of Truss’s political judgements, but I also don’t dispute any of the historical facts that she states. (The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill did make some progress in the House of Lords before it was withdrawn by Sunak, but Truss can be forgiven for missing it.)

Seldon’s version is very much at variance with the historical facts as I understand them to have been and as Truss reports them. He introduces the topic in Chapter 5, on Truss’s foreign policy as prime minister. He starts by framing the issue tactically, as one where Truss could gain the support of “the ‘no-surrender’ ERG MPs”. Seldon describes the Northern Ireland Protocol as “stuck together by Johnson in 2019 to replace May’s ‘backstop’ to ensure Northern Ireland would remain aligned with the rest of the UK post-Brexit” which is inaccurate on several points, most notably that the Protocol ensures that Northern Ireland will remain aligned with the EU, not the UK.

Seldon goes on, “For two years, inertia had reigned while hardline Brexit minister David Frost had been overseeing it. But possibilities for progress were suddenly opened up when he resigned from Johnson’s government the weekend before Christmas in 2021.” It’s a peculiar positioning of blame for the failure of the EU-UK negotiating process in 2020 and 2021 on Frost. First of all, even unsympathetic observers would cut Frost a little slack due to the global pandemic. Secondly, the perception in Brussels at least is that Frost was only channeling his master’s voice, and that Johnson was the real problem.

Seldon: “Johnson alighted on the Foreign Secretary as the ideal figure to take on the matter. Truss had no delusions that the master schemer was offering it to her knowing it would be ‘a poisoned chalice’, a clever wheeze his team had concocted to trip up a rival whose star continued in the ascendant… Her team fully intended it would rebound against No. 10.” This is completely at variance with Truss’s account of her volunteering for the task, eyes wide open. They cannot both be right. Possibly Seldon’s (justifiable) contempt for Johnson is misleading him here.

Seldon: “Their rivalry reached a high point in March when a paper she had placed in his PM box was leaked to the Sunday Telegraph. The press report, which painted her as trying to stop Johnson from invoking Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, provoked fury against her among Brexiteers. ‘It was not true, and they knew it. It was No. 10 making mischief so Johnson could be seen to be tougher on Northern Ireland than Liz, and good in the eyes of the right wing,’ said an aide. Truss was furious; ‘We’re not going to submit anything on paper to No. 10 ever again,’ she fumed. She stormed into No. 10 to see Johnson on Monday 28 March, the day after the article appeared. ‘Right, we’re going to legislate on this, no compromises,’ she told the PM, one aide recalled. They agreed that any hope of support from the EU was forlorn, and from their deliberations emerged the hardline Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which ground through the system until Johnson resigned in July, for her to pick up when she became PM.”

There are a number of inaccuracies here. The leak that annoyed Truss appeared on 13 March, not 27 March as Seldon implies (it is dated 12 March on the Telegraph website). The lede is that Truss had “set out plans to put the potential triggering of Article 16 on hold because of the Ukraine crisis and instead help Northern Ireland businesses with an ‘economic stimulus’ package including tax cuts.” It also quotes “Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, [who] warned that it would be ‘risible’ to shelve the triggering of Article 16 until later this year because of the war in Ukraine.”

What did appear on 27 March was an interview with Truss where the Telegraph noted that “she does not deny having shelved the idea of triggering Article 16 any time soon, because of the need for a united EU front in the face of Russian aggression”. The problem was not the leak, but the fact that she did not push back firmly enough in the interview on the suggestion that she was wobbly on bashing the EU; not for the first or last time, she lost control of the message, and blamed it on someone else (Johnson in this case). In Seldon’s version, it was from this moment on that Truss and Johnson determined to align on Northern Ireland and legislate to break their previous commitments and international law. I wrote in May 2022 about the foolishness and short-sightedness of their position.

Seldon comes back to the topic when he brings Truss, by now Prime Minister, to New York for the UN General Assembly, in a rush after the Queen’s funeral in September 2022. “Truss’s political team said she should go, and she herself was anxious to have her planned bilateral with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the Northern Ireland Bill… She ended up seeing von der Leyen twice and she proved key to unblocking the impasse. Their meeting secured agreement for back channels to open up, and for ideas to be explored and tested. After the Mini-Budget[,] momentum was lost, and it was left for Sunak to pick up the pieces. The result was the Windsor Framework of February 2023, a legal agreement between the UK and the EU to adjust the Northern Ireland Protocol, bearing more than a passing reference to the ideas that Truss had promoted the year before.”

(Seldon then spends some time on Truss’s meeting with President Biden, which was also coloured by the Northern Ireland issue, but I don’t have space for that here. I am trying to track down an amusing report that Truss instructed the British ambassador in Washington to complain to Biden’s chief of staff that he was listening too much to his advisers Jake Sullivan and Amanda Sloat on Ireland; Biden’s team apparently told the ambassador to get lost. I happen to know Amanda Sloat, who has spent more time in Northern Ireland than the entire Truss government combined. Or the Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak or Starmer governments, for that matter.)

I don’t find any contemporary reference to Truss and von der Leyen having had more than one meeting in New York on 21 September, or any other meeting anywhere else at any other time (they don’t seem to have interacted at the Queen’s funeral), and the statement post-meeting (and press briefing around it) suggests that they mainly talked about Russia. Truss and von der Leyen probably did agree back-channel communication to de-escalate tensions – it rings absolutely true for both of them – and of course one would not expect to see that in any contemporary reporting. Truss had already had a calm meeting with then Taoiseach Micheal Martin on 18 September, in the margins of the Queen’s funeral, leading to lower-level meetings on 6 and 7 October; but neither she nor Seldon mentions the Irish government at all in their books – it is of no importance to either narrative.

The one intervention that really did make the difference in terms of mood music during Truss’s premiership was the heartfelt apology to Ireland from Steve Baker, former Brexit hardliner turned Northern Ireland junior minister, during the Conservative Party’s annual conference. Baker was undergoing his own struggles at the time, as we now know, and Truss said that he was “speaking for himself”; but it made much more difference to the atmosphere than anything Truss did in public. The Irish Times ran a piece on 5 October (in advance of the 6/7 October talks mentioned above) wondering if the new mood music could be taken seriously, hopefully citing Martin’s conversation and also sources close to von der Leyen. Of course, the writing was already on the wall for Truss’s premiership by then, so it hardly mattered much. Perhaps it did matter a little.

I am particularly puzzled by Seldon’s assertion that the Windsor Framework of February 2023 bears “more than a passing reference to the ideas that Truss had promoted the year before”. The word “reference” here is presumably a mistake for “resemblance”. The puzzling question for me is: what ideas had Truss promoted the year before? The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which is the only such idea mentioned in Seldon’s earlier chapter and the only one mentioned by Truss herself in her book, was a unilateral revocation of parts of the Brexit withdrawal agreement; you cannot draw a straight line between it and the Windsor Framework, which is a rather modest, mutually face-saving adaptation of the original Protocol. Truss herself certainly didn’t see them as related; she spoke out against the Windsor Framework, voted against it when it came to the House of Commons, and as noted above criticizes it again in her book.

POLITICO published an in-depth account of how the Windsor Framework was negotiated on 28 February 2023, the day after it was signed. The lion’s share of the credit is given to three British officials, Tim Barrow, Mark Davies and Brendan Threlfall; but I’ll admit that the article does give some mild kudos to Truss, basically for not being Boris Johnson and therefore changing the atmosphere of UK/EU relations for the better. (Other people given more credit than Truss in the piece include Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly and King Charles III.) Even so, the piece says that Truss “soon became ‘very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU’.” I suspect that this is standard Truss language for people who won’t do what she wants; she makes similar comments about others in her book.

So, coming back to Seldon: it is decidedly odd that he gives Truss credit for the Windsor Framework, when it is clear that she herself thinks that the Framework is a dud and that Sunak threw away all her hard work. The consensus from other sources is that under Truss, relations with the EU improved simply because she was not Boris Johnson. I find it difficult to give her much credit for this – it’s not as if she had any choice in the matter. It’s a shame that Seldon allowed himself to be mesmerised by his anonymous source, without checking the details a bit more carefully.

As always, if you read a book on a topic you don’t know all that well, and there is a bit in the book about a subject you do happen to know something more about, and that bit of the book is wrong, it’s a healthy warning about how seriously the rest should be taken. I’m still recommending Seldon’s book, which you can get here – just not as heartily as I would have liked.

Truss at 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The Prime Minister has to be both manager of their team as well as the captain on the pitch. ‘Hero Prime Ministers’ who try to do too much themselves, like Chamberlain in the Munich Crisis or Eden during the Suez Crisis, and who become detached from their Cabinets, become unstuck. This is what happened to Blair over Iraq, or Thatcher over the poll tax at the end of her premiership. Spurned Cabinets will eventually bite the Prime Minister. Hero premiers never end well.

This 384-page book covers the 49 days of Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership in intense detail. It’s the latest in a series of books by Seldon on British Prime Ministers, looking at the qualities which make for good (and bad) leadership, and how Truss’s ascent and downfall illustrate those characteristics.

The fundamental of the story is that Truss launched both a plan to help households with the cost of energy bills, and a bigger plan to cut taxes, without offering any hint about how the books would be balanced, indeed insisting that there would be no cuts to public spending. The Treasury, whose job it is to point these problems out, had been muzzled by the sacking of its chief official on Truss’s first day in office. In her own memoir, Truss is fixated on a particular set of financial instruments that she had never heard of and which started going wrong as the crisis spread, and blames other people for not briefing her.

But the fact is that there was never any plan for funding either the energy payments or the tax cuts, and Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng were completely unable to give a straight answer to the question of where the money would come from, making them look financially illiterate. (Because they were.) The disintegration of the government rapidly followed. Truss blames the ‘deep state’ for her downfall; Seldon sees the problem as ‘deep incompetence’.

One of the headlines from media coverage of the book is that Truss supposedly considered cancelling cancer treatments by the National Health Service. This is not quite reported in the text; on 12 October, the day when reality broke in and the Truss team started frantically looking for £70 billion in savings, Shabbir Memali and Adam Memon, respectively economic advisers to Truss and Kwarteng, told Alex Boyd, Truss’s energy adviser, “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” (Boyd is obviously Seldon’s source.) It’s not a direct quote, barely even an indirect quote; my suspicion is that someone somewhere said, “Oh fuck, £70 billion is what the NHS spends on cancer” and the inference was drawn. Honestly, it’s clear that Truss had no specific ideas at all – which was part of the problem – and would not listen to anyone who told her this could be an issue – which was also part of the problem.

Another part of the problem was her leadership style, and given that Seldon and Meakin’s technique is to interview those close to the action and take those accounts as gospel, this is the part of the book that really does excel, even though I think some of the data could have been queried a bit (more on this tomorrow). In particular, Seldon finds her wanting in the skill of appointing good people and listening to them.

A point he doesn’t dwell on, but that is obvious to even the most casual observer, is that Truss is a very poor communicator. The local radio interviews after her mini-budget were the beginning of the end, really early in the game (29 September, in fact). The final blow, which fell suddenly and unexpectedly, was a completely avoidable breakdown in communications between Truss and her Chief Whip about a House of Commons vote on a relatively minor issue. She’s just not very good at people.

The best bit of writing in the book, however, is about an event that Truss had absolutely no control over: the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Truss had been briefed when she went to Balmoral for her formal appointment as PM that the end was much closer than most people knew. But when the moment came, she and a few aides crowded into the Downing Street flat for Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, to get the news from his palace equivalent, Sir Edward Young. It’s certainly an event that will be remembered much more vividly than any other moment of her premiership.

This is not a perfect book; Seldon has an axe to grind about the extent to which Truss proves or disproves his own theories of good prime minister-ship, and grinds it hard; he takes his sources too seriously; he under-rates the importance of communication as a skill; he is very wrong about Northern Ireland, so wrong that I’m going to write another whole blog post about it. But all in all, it’s an engaging and fascinating account of an extraordinary political car crash, and you can get it here.

South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When the gale cleared we found that the pack had been driven in from the north-east and was now more firmly consolidated than before. A new berg, probably fifteen miles in length, had appeared on the northern horizon. The bergs within our circle of vision had all become familiar objects, and we had names for some of them. Apparently they were all drifting with the pack. The sighting of a new berg was of more than passing interest, since in that comparatively shallow sea it would be possible for a big berg to become stranded. Then the island of ice would be a centre of tremendous pressure and disturbance amid the drifting pack. We had seen something already of the smashing effect of a contest between berg and floe, and had no wish to have the helpless Endurance involved in such a battle of giants. During the 3rd [March 1915] the seal meat and blubber was re-stowed on hummocks around the ship. The frozen masses had been sinking into the floe. Ice, though hard and solid to the touch, is never firm against heavy weights. An article left on the floe for any length of time is likely to sink into the surface-ice. Then the salt water will percolate through and the article will become frozen into the body of the floe.

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1915-18 ended in failure, but gloriously documented failure. Ernest Shackleton planned to lead a party across Antartica via the South Pole, from the Weddell Sea south of the Atlantic to the Ross Sea south of the Pacific, to meet up with a second group based there. Disaster struck; both ships got stuck in the ice and were eventually destroyed; Shackleton led his own crew to precarious shelter on Elephant Island, off the Antarctic coast, and then undertook a 1300 km journey in an open boat to South Georgia to secure rescue; amazingly, all of the Weddell Sea group survived. (All of the humans, that is; the dogs and the ship’s cat were not so lucky.) Another rescue party then had to go and find the Ross Sea party, three of whom had died in the meantime. They returned to civilisation to find that the war, which had broken out just before their departure with promises that it would end quickly, was still raging, and most of the expedition members dispersed to join the forces.

The 100th anniversary edition of Shackleton’s expedition report is beautifully illustrated with the many photographs taken on the spot, including the poignant moment when the Edncurance slipped below the ice of the Weddell Sea (to be found 106 years later). Shackleton’s diaries, always intended for publication, are vivid about the difficulties faced by his group, and the extraordinary challenges of the punishing environment. The Ross Sea group’s records are less detailed, and it’s pretty clear that Aeneas Mackintosh, the leader, lost his nerve at quite an early stage, and eventually died in a futile attempt to cross the ice of McMurdo Sound. But these were very tough circumstances.

What really struck me was the confidence that Shackleton in particular had about navigation. The South Pole is really just a dot on the map, but he was sure that if he had landed he would find it, and there was no doubt in his mind that he would find the Ross Sea team once he crossed the continent. He writes of supply depots left by previous expeditions that he locates and uses. In particular, I’m stunned by the navigational feat of finding South Georgia in the vast ocean.

One does have to wonder what it was all for? The scientific advances made were minimal, and the expenditure of resources huge, not to mention the fact that lives were lost. Fifty years later, the space race attracted greater resources and press coverage, but one senses the same kind of drive for exploration behind it. Shackleton himself died on South Georgia in the early stages of another expedition in 1922 aged 47, of a heart attack brought on by stress. I guess the story of the expedition, doomed as it was, is a compelling record anyway. You can get it here.

When I was a student in Cambridge in the 1980s, I used to visit Ray Adie, head of the Scott Polar Research Institute, whose wife was a distant cousin of mine. He achieved notoriety as a young geologist by proposing that the Falkland Islands had once been part of Africa that had split off and rotated by 180 degrees, a wild idea in the 1950s which is now widely accepted. He had helped prepare Vivian Fuchs for the successful Trans-Antarctic expedition forty years later. I wish I had asked him more about it.

South was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman.

Set in 2025 #3: Titan, by John Varley

Second paragraph of third chapter:

No one had ever tried to orbit a toroidal body. Themis was 1300 kilometers across and only 250 kilometers wide. The torus was flat along the outside, and 175 kilometers from top to bottom. The density of the torus varied radically, supporting the view that it was composed of a thick floor along the outside, an atmosphere about that, and a thin canopy arching overhead holding the air inside.

When I started my research on science fiction books set in 2025, this was one of the first that emerged. The date in the first two chapters is specified as May 2025, but we are told that the end of the book is set eight months or so later, so I guess it eases into 2026. I am still counting it for 2025.

This is John Varley’s best known book, as measured by Goodreads and LibraryThing readership. Published in 1979, it’s a clear riposte to Ringworld (1970) and Rendezvous with Rama (1973), in that the protagonists discover a vast alien structure, but it’s permanently in our solar system (orbiting Saturn as a more obscure moon) and also sentient, a huge wheel with individual segments of the rim each having their own micro-environment. Our protagonists, a group of sexy astronauts, go through the usual quest to find out what is really going on and make discoveries about themselves as well as about the world. I must say that I enjoyed it a lot. You can get it here.

As with the last two sf stories set in 2025 that I sampled, there is an interesting look at reproductive rights. When the crew first land, the women all discover that they have been made pregnant by the entity behind it all, and the medical chap on the crew terminates the pregnancies without a fuss. There aren’t a lot of sf books that deal with abortion.

Next in my list of books set in 2025 is The Running Man, by Stephen King.

Set in 2025:
Television: The Outer Limits: The Duplicate Man (1964)
Film: Endgame (Bronx lotta finale) (1983); Future Hunters (1986); Futuresport (1998); Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003)
Novels: 334 (1972); Titan (1979); The Running Man (1982); The Lake at the End of the World (1988); Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals (1998); A Friend of the Earth (2000); The Peshawar Lancers (2002)
Comics: The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap (1986); Superman & Batman: Generations III #2: Doomsday Minus One (2003)

Tuesday reading

Current
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo
A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes
Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards
The Running Man, by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

Last books finished
Shame, by Annie Ernaux
Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt
The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez
Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston
Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol, by Graeme Curry
The Happiness Patrol, by Mike Stack

Next books
The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline MacDonald
Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. Jennifer FitzGerald
Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The Sapling: Roots, by George Mann et al

Second frame of third story:

Next in the sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics featuring companions Alice Obiefune and The Sapling, a sentient tree-like being. I found this one a bit episodic, four different stories none of which really advanced the arc for any of the main characters. The best is the first one with the Ood, by James Peaty with art by Ian Culbard (who never disappoints). You can get it here.

All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She [Polly] had been kneeling in front of the lavatory having been wrenchingly sick, as she had been every morning for the last week. It was a very old-fashioned lavatory and she had to pull the chain twice. She bathed her face in cold water and washed her hands just as it was reluctantly turning tepid. There wasn’t time for a bath. There was the children’s breakfast to make – the nauseating smell of eggs frying came immediately to her, but the children could make do with boiled ones.

This is the climax of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s superb Cazalet series of books, published in 1983, 18 years after the previous four (which came out in 1990-95) and set ten years after the end of the Second World War which dominated the previous books.

It shows an upper class family in the grip of social and economic change, with the entire basis of their world up-ended by the transformation of post-war Britain. The book starts with the death of the matriarch of the Cazalet family, and ends with a set-piece Christmas celebration in their family home, which they must now leave; in between we see the further development of the well established emotional patterns of behaviour between the Cazalet siblings and their spouses and lovers, and how the next generation starts to make similar mistakes.

At over 500 pages, it seems invidious to single out any plot line, though the same-sex relationship between Rachel Cazalet and her lover Sid is perhaps the most striking (with plenty of competition). I have really enjoyed the five volumes – The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and now All Change, and strongly recommend them to anyone looking for a 2600-page reading challenge. You can get All Change here.

The best known books set in each country: Thailand

See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in Thailand. Also I should probably have posted this earlier, since some current estimates give Thailand a higher population than France of Germany.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
The Windup Girl Paolo Bacigalupi 75,7846,325
The BeachAlex Garland89,7245,048
Cockroaches Jo Nesbø 59,8722,342
Bangkok 8 John Burdett 10,7511,876
The Bridge Over the River KwaiPierre Boulle9,9281,484
Bangkok TattooJohn Burdett 5,4291,021
Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden TriangleDorothy Gilman5,181852
FieldworkMischa Berlinski 4,421763

An unusually close race at the top, with The Beach only 6% behind The Windup Girl in aggregate rating. John Burdett’s series of thrillers set in Bangkok sound interesting.

A very white and mostly male take on Thailand here, as rated by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. The top book by an Asian writer is Hush! A Thai Lullaby by Minfong Ho, who is Chinese but was brought up in Thailand. The top book by a writer of Thai origin is A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat, who however was born in the USA and has lived there most of her life. Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of the short story collection Sightseeing, was born in the USA to a Thai family and brought up in Bangkok.

I disqualified five other books which had been frequently tagged as set in Thailand by LibraryThing and Goodreads users. They were This Is How It Always Is, by Laurie Frankel (seems to be mostly set in Seattle); The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan (seems to be less than 50% in Thailand, with significant chunks in Australia and also Japan); The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner (set in many countries, including Thailand); Platform, by Michel Houellebecq (mostly set in France); and The Orchid House aka Hothouse Flower, by Lucinda Riley (mostly set in England).

Next up is the United Kingdom.

India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan

Jane McNeill – the missing link between C.S. Lewis and Helen Waddell

I’ve just finished reading the first Helen Waddell biography, Mark of the Maker by Monica Blackett, and I was again struck by the fact that she doesn’t seem to have had much to do with C.S. Lewis, who like her was from Northern Ireland (indeed, also from County Down, though from a different corner of the county), and like her made his name in England, as an expert on literature and religion.

There were of course differences between them: Helen Waddell was a decade older, her emphasis was more on literature while Lewis’s was more on religion, she never got a tenured academic job while he was at Oxford from his teens, she split her time between London and County Down as an adult while he rarely if ever went back to Belfast. In his memoirs, David Bleakley, who I remember well as a fading political figure in the 1990s, gives an insight of conversations with Lewis at Oxford in the late 1940s:

I was disappointed that he could not be drawn on Helen Waddell, whose “star” was high and with whom he had much in common. Helen was a great favorite back home, where she was held in high esteem at Queen’s University.

Helen Waddell never mentions C.S. Lewis as far as I can tell, and Lewis’ most substantial reference to her is in a letter dated 16 February 1921 (when he would have been 22 and she 31), and then nothing else afterwards, even though their paths must have run close together. In 1921 he wrote to his father of an Oxford dinner party:

I met a friend of the said Tchainie’s the other night at the Carlyles, a girl called Helen Waddell whom you may have heard of. When last I saw her she was lying face downward on the floor of Mrs McNeill’s drawing-room, saying rather good things in a quaint Belfast drawl.

‘Tchainie’ Is Jane Agnes McNeill (1890-1959), a schoolmate of Helen Waddell’s at what is now Victoria College. Jane’s father, who died in 1907, was the first headmaster of Campbell College, the Belfast school which Lewis later attended. Jane and her mother took Helen Waddell on a trip to France in 1924, during which Helen Waddell wrote this poem:

JANE or The Perfect Traveller

She likes to travel in the train.
She never smells an open drain.
On boats she talks to stewardesses,
And gives advice in their distresses.
She is not sick in any swell,
But only in each new hotel.
And even in Paris summer heat
She wears goloshes on her feet.

Jane McNeill was also close to C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren, and one gets the impression that they had spent a lot of youthful hours at her mother’s house in Belfast. Both of them dedicated books to her – in Warren’s case, his second book, published in 1955, The Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Duc de Maine (his first book, The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV, was dedicated “To My Brother”).

Ten years earlier, in 1945, C.S. Lewis dedicated That Hideous Strength to “J. McNeill”. Following Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, it is the third of his Space Trilogy, whose central character, Elwin Ransom, is based on J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewisian lore has it that Jane did not like That Hideous Strength, and did not really appreciate the dedication.

When Jane McNeill died in 1959, four years before C.S. Lewis and six years before Helen Waddell, Lewis wrote in The Campbellian, the magazine of his old school where her father had been headmaster:

Molliter Ossa Cubent
[‘May Her Bones Lie Softly’, a quotation from Ovid meaning ‘Rest in Peace’]

Of Miss McNeill the charitable lady, the teacher, the member of committees, I saw nothing. My knowledge is of Janie McNeill; even of Chanie, as we sometimes called her, for she had the habit, common in some Scottish dialects, of ‘unvoicing’ the consonant ‘J’. Obviously there is a great deal I never knew. Someone writes to me describing her as a mystic. I would never have guessed it. What I remember is something as boisterous, often as discomposing but always as fresh and tonic, as a high wind. Janie was the delight and terror of a little Strandtown and Belmont circle, now almost extinct. I remember wild walks on the (still unspoilt) Holywood hills, preposterous jokes shouted through the gale across half a field, extravagantly merry (yet also Lucullan) lunches and suppers at Lisnadene, devastating raillery, the salty tang of an immensely vivid personality. She was a religious woman, a true, sometimes a grim, daughter of the Kirk; no less certainly, the broadest-spoken maiden lady in the Six Counties. She was a born satirist. Every kind of sham and self-righteousness was her butt. She deflated the unco-gude with a single ironic phrase, then a moment’s silence, then the great gust of her laughter. She laughed with her whole body. When I consider how all this was maintained through years of increasing loneliness, pain, disability, and inevitable frustration I am inclined to say she had a soul as brave and uncomplaining as any I ever knew. Few have come nearer to obeying Dunbar’s magnificent recipe (she knew her Dunbar):

Man, please thy Maker and be merry
And give not for this world a cherry.

The two descriptions, thirty-five years apart, give an intriguing picture of a woman who was a close friend to two people who were not friendly with each other. I see that the New York C.S. Lewis Society published an essay on “Jane McNeill and C.S. Lewis” by Mary Rogers in 1979, but cannot access it from their website. Maybe I’ll do some further research some day.

The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell, by Monica Blackett

Second paragraph of third chapter (from a letter by Helen Waddell):

It’s wet, and the candle is blowing at the open window and there is a corncrake out in the dark. And I have felt human again for the first time. My mother died last Friday in her sleep. I found her, in the chair.
[actually it was her stepmother]

This was the first biography of Helen Waddell, published in 1973, eight years after her death. It doesn’t go into the same depth as Felicitas Corrigan’s excellent book, but it really scores by simply letting Helen Waddell’s voice speak for herself, with many extracts from her letters conveying her emotions (mostly, but not only, joy in the act of literature), and with a concentration on her home life – in particular Blackett singles out the demands of keeping a decaying house in London as one of the big distractions from Waddell’s creative work, but also refers often to the deep roots that Waddell felt in County Down and at her sister’s home, Kilmacrew near Banbridge. There’s a lot of name-dropping, but it is made up for by the enthusiasm.

Blackett herself appears occasionally in the narrative, but always in the third person, as recipient of several of Waddell’s letters. This is laudably modest; I am sure that she had some stories of her own to tell as well. She was the sister of Sir Basil Blackett, also a friend of Helen Waddell’s, and lived from 1888 to 1976; she married James Lamplugh Brooksbank in 1912 (divorced in 1942) and they had three children, one of whom died as recently as 2018.

One weird point of trivia. On 9 July 1943 Helen Waddell had lunch at the Savoy with General de Gaulle and a large group including also Lord Sempill; she comments in a letter written that day that Lady Sempill was the daughter of Sir John Lavery, who I personally always thought of as an Irish painter until I discovered in the Kelvingrove last month that the Scots think he was one of theirs. But actually it was Sempill’s first wife who was Lavery’s daughter, and she had died in 1935, eight years earlier; Cecilia Dunbar-Kilburn, who he married as his second wife in 1941, was a sculptor in her own right. Perhaps Helen Waddell just got confused in the family details; it can happen.

This is a mostly cheerful and pretty intense book about someone whoi think is interesting but you may not care very much about, but if you want to give it a try, you can get it here.

This was both the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2018, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles are Church and State in Tudor Ireland, by Robert Dudley Edwards, and Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, edited by Jennifer FitzGerald.

The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, by Kamala Harris

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She [Harris’ mother] would be the first to point out the practical considerations that it was a smart investment. But it was so much more than that. It was about her earning a full slice of the American Dream.

This was Harris’s manifesto for her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, which of course ended with her being selected as Vice-President by Joe Biden, after the book had been published (the cover blurb of my 2021 printing has been updated). It’s an interesting contrast with Trump’s Great Again, which I read back in 2017, in the sense that The Truths We Hold is far better written, more coherent, and more convincing in terms of actual execution of policy ideas.

Harris frames her story as swinging between the details of her upbringing by a single immigrant mother, and her rise up the California legal profession to the point where she became attorney-general and then senator. It’s a very convincing book, looking at the big problems facing the USA – opiate addiction, health care, national security, economic insecurity – and also giving examples of her own ability to cut through the system and get things done.

I must say that I found it very encouraging. One of my disappointments with the Biden presidency (as with the new Starmer premiership in the UK) has been the feeling that there isn’t a core vision other than not screwing up as badly as the previous guys. Harris wants to transform society, and sees government as a means of effecting positive change. She has no time for culture wars and just wants to get on with doing things. It’s consistent with the picture we got from Tuesday night’s debate. I’m aware that her record is not beyond question, but I’m very reassured by the overall picture. You can get it here.

Incidentally, some trivia from my Presidential spouses page. The oldest President or Vice-President at the time of their first marriage is none other than Kamala Harris, who married Doug Emhoff two months before her 50th birthday (beating Grover Cleveland, who married 21-year-old Frances Folsom eleven weeks after his 49th birthday, just over a year after he became President for the first time). The oldest person to marry a President or Vice-President as their own first marriage was Melania Trump, who married Donald nine months after her 34th birthday (she beats Bess Truman, 34 and four months old when she married Harry). The President / Vice-President to have lived longest after the death of their first spouse is Joe Biden, whose wife Neilia died in a car crash in December 1972. (Biden of course has remarried. Martin Van Buren and Thomas Jefferson both lived as widowers for over 43 years without remarrying. Like Biden, both served as Vice-President and then President.)

This year’s vice-presidential candidates, J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, both married within a couple of months of their 30th birthdays, and both married women two years younger than them; neither of these points is staistically unusual. If elected, Vance will be the third youngest Vice-President on inauguration day, and Walz the twelfth oldest. Here’s hoping.

Set in 2025 #2: 334, by Thomas M. Disch

When I first read this, exactly ten years ago, I wrote:

I must say that it wasn’t a brilliant choice of holiday novel; the disjointed narrative failed to engage me, and I felt that the stories never quite concentrated sufficiently on either near-future world-building or interesting characterisation. It was interesting that Disch correctly saw the politics of reproduction as being so prominent in the twenty-first century, although the detail has turned out rather differently.

My concentration was at a low ebb in August 2014 because of my role at that year’s Worldcon, and I think that I was unfair. It’s not actually a novel; it’s a group of six short pieces, with a shared setting and some shared characters, all set in and around 334 East 11th Street in New York, so I was demanding more coherence than necessary. Within each story, the characterization makes sense. And I’ll get to the world building.

I have come back to it as one of the relatively small number of books set in 2025, looking at next year as science fiction saw it. Actually only one and a half of the six shorter pieces that make up the book is explicitly set in 2025, and the longest piece (which shares the title “334”) has 43 sections, all dated to the years 2021, 2024 and 2026, so none of them in 2025. I missed that when I did my 2021 and 2024 write ups.

It’s interesting that the politics of reproductive health is one of the themes of the book. The 2020s of Disch’s world are over-populated and subject to government regulation, particularly in deciding who gets to have children. The first story is about a young man whose social rating is too low to allow him to become a parent, and his efforts to overcome that. Another is about a couple who do qualify for children, and decide that the male partner will be the one who actually becomes pregnant.

Otherwise, it’s a typical late 60’s / early 70’s story, set in a rather grim dehumanising dystopian society, where advances in technology haven’t brought much improvement for most people and the smart people exploit the cracks in the system. Somewhat depressing. You can get it here.

Set in 2025:
Television: The Outer Limits: The Duplicate Man (1964)
Film: Endgame (Bronx lotta finale) (1983); Future Hunters (1986); Futuresport (1998); Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003)
Novels: 334 (1972); Titan (1979); The Running Man (1982); The Lake at the End of the World (1988); Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals (1998); A Friend of the Earth (2000); The Peshawar Lancers (2002)
Comics: The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap (1986); Superman & Batman: Generations III #2: Doomsday Minus One (2003)

Tuesday reading

Current
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez
The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt
Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston

Last books finished
Truss at 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin
Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
Grave Matter, by Justin Richards
A Crack in Everything, by Ruth Frances Long

Next books
Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol, by Graeme Curry
Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo

Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was rare for him to be home in the Persian heartlands of his youth. In the last two decades he had spent most of his time on horseback in far-flung places acquiring lucrative territory. But, for now, Cyrus was pleased to be at Pasargadae. Spring was the right time to be there and he was delighted to see how, over the years, his fine garden had matured with tall cypress trees running in straight avenues alongside bubbling streams which passed through endless stone water channels and little pools. Flowerbeds burst with the colour of exotic flora imported from each part of the empire, and every now and then Cyrus saw the red hash of a rooster’s coxcomb as the haughty bird strutted through the garden, its feathers shimmering black-blue-gold. Cyrus had a dozen cockerels, an unexpected gift of the Indian ambassador. Bas-bas they were called in Persian. They were angry and aggressive and Cyrus was shown by the ambassador how, in India, they were trained and used for sport. Consequently, he and his best friends wagered fortunes on cock-fights. But this particular cockerel did not fight. He was allowed to wander the gardens of Pasargadae and service the fat brown hens who gave Cyrus eggs on a daily basis – a new phenomenon for a society that knew only the seasonal hatchings of geese, swans, and ducks. His chickens were precious birds and Cyrus entrusted them to the safe keeping of their own warden, the Master of the bas-bas.

This book is about the Persian empire of the Achaemenids, starting with Cyrus II in the sixth century BCE, with the explicit intention of redressing history’s bias towards the Greeks whose side of the story has become the standard account.

I regret to say that I gave up on it before finishing the second chapter. I found the style too novelistic – how on earth can a historian tell us what was going through Cyrus’ mind at crucial stages, or give us details of what he was wearing on a particular day? This might have been excusable if the writing was sourced through footnotes or even GRRRRR endnotes, but there are none apart from a list of further reading.

Very disappointing; I had been looking forward to a proper analysis of a part of history I don’t know much about, but this ain’t it. You can get it here.

Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World & How to Stop the Next One, by Devi Sridhar

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The government [of South Korea] seemed to do the impossible, which was to ‘crunch the curve’, rather than just flatten it, and to do it without a lockdown. This model would go on to influence other countries across the world that had to make rapid decisions on what to do, and could follow a tried and tested East Asian 2020 playbook.

A book about public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, written in late 2021 so at the point that things were dying down, though still in the heat of the moment. The author is professor of global public health in Edinburgh, and was also one of the key advisors to Nicola Sturgeon during the pandemic.

The book carefully but passionately looks at the responses of many different governments to the pandemic, singling out South Korea and New Zealand for praise. She is very critical of the US and UK responses, or rather of the leadership of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, neither of whom took the crisis seriously early enough to mitigate huge damage to their respective societies. In both cases she also sees a failure to look at what other countries were doing successfully, and learn from them. She has little time for the UK’s SAGE group of experts who were, in her view, fighting the wrong war.

At the same time, she deals efficiently with the myth that the lockdowns caused more harm than good – the fact is that Sweden, which tried the lockdown-lite approach, eventually had to do the same as all other European countries. The real problem was a lack of clear strategy and failure to mobilise resources properly (oddly enough borne out by recent comments from Dominic Cummings). She also deals briefly with the ‘lab leak’ theory of the virus’s origin, noting that the DNA evidence is against it.

She also writes about the sheer nastiness of some of the media commentary and the personal attacks on her on social media. It all takes a toll, and I don’t think that the government advisers during the flu pandemic of 1919 faced the same problems.

It’s a humane and approachable book, and you can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: France

See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the territory of today’s French Republic.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
A Tale of Two CitiesCharles Dickens961,98837,439
All the Light We Cannot SeeAnthony Doerr 1,739,16419,400
The Count of Monte CristoAlexandre Dumas934,92926,139
Les MisérablesVictor Hugo807,66026,774
The NightingaleKristin Hannah 1,489,53910,328
Madame BovaryGustave Flaubert342,49626,697
Perfume: The Story of a MurdererPatrick Süskind485,93218,443
The Three MusketeersAlexandre Dumas330,38521,755

I only had to disqualify three books this time – The Da Vinci Code (more than half of it is set in the UK), The Little Prince (none of it is set in France) and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (on a quick glance, less than half seems to be set in France).

When I did this in 2015, A Tale of Two Cities also topped the poll of books more than half of which were actually set in France (though also beaten by two of the disqualified books).

I am struck that two novels published in the last ten years have soared into the top ranks – All the Light We Cannot See (2014) and The Nightingale (2015). I may give both of them a try.

Next up: Thailand. (Possibly should have been done sooner – I am finding some big discrepancies in different population tables.)

India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan

The 2024 Consultative Vote on Two New Hugo Categories

The report below is published in our personal capacity  by Nicholas Whyte, WSFS Division Head, and Rosemary Parks, Consultative Vote Administrator. It does not reflect any official position by Glasgow 2024: A Worldcon For Our Futures, the 2024 Worldcon.

Introduction

Suggestions that significant WSFS decisions could be taken by a vote of WSFS members, rather than at the Business Meeting, have been circulating for some years. The Business Meeting tends to absorb much time and energy from Worldcon participants for the sake of debate which can often seem technical and inward-looking. A direct consultation with membership has the potential appeal of directness and clarity.

We began considering the merits of a trial consultative vote on any Business Passed On from the 2023 Business Meeting after a September 2022 discussion on File 770. We assumed confidently that the Business Meeting at the Chengdu Worldcon would give us some material that we could work with; in fact no fewer than twelve constitutional amendments were passed in 2023, for ratification in Glasgow in 2024. 

We felt that most of these were unsuitable for a trial of the consultative vote concept. We decided to concentrate on changes to the Hugo rules. The four Hugo Award rule changes passed by Chengdu included two minor technical fixes, and more substantially an amendment to the Best Fancast category, and the proposal to introduce two new Independent Film Hugo categories. We selected the last of these as likely to generate the most interest, and secured the agreement of the proposers to the idea of making it the subject of the consultative vote trial.

Although the Independent Film proposal would have created two new Hugo categories, it was a single proposal and we treated it as a single measure.  

Implementation

We decided to run the vote between the close of Hugo final ballot voting on Saturday 20 July and the start of the convention on Thursday 8 August. The number of WSFS members of the convention would then be at its maximum, and the WSFS Division leadership would (in theory!) be relatively clear of other distractions.  We settled on Monday 22 July to Monday 5 August, to allow members two full weeks with two full weekends for the vote.

Initially we planned that the consultative vote, given that it was a trial, would take place purely online, though we changed our minds on this once it became clear that it was not technically difficult to provide a paper ballot to print out and mail. In the event, just one paper ballot was received.

Just before we opened the consultative vote, a large number of WSFS memberships were found by the Hugo administrators to have been fraudulently acquired, and the votes cast by 377 memberships for the Hugo Awards were disallowed. None of the memberships in question attempted to participate in the consultative vote. If they had, we would have disallowed their votes.

We are extremely grateful to Chris Rose for creating a module within the NomNom system to enable the consultative vote to take place. A technical glitch meant that we were unable to open the vote on Monday 22 July as planned, and instead it was launched on Thursday 25 July, exactly two weeks before the opening of Glasgow 2024. Initial interest was strong, with more than 550 votes recorded in the first twenty-four hours. A reminder was sent out about fourteen hours before the vote closed, and another 400 voted in that final period. The overall response demonstrates a high level of member interest. 1,260 members voted in total: 533 (42.3%) in favour, and 727 (57.7%) against.

In order to create a fair and comprehensive ballot, we sought statements for and against the proposed Independent Film categories from, respectively, Tony Xia and Louis Savy, who had made the original proposal, and Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk, who had blogged robustly against it. With the overall appearance of the ballot in mind, we held both sides to a 200 word limit, without sight of each others’ arguments. We are very grateful to all four contributors for producing a balancing pair of statements, which reflected considerable thought. For the record, the two statements were as follows:

Statement in Favour:

In the spirit of the fan community, we believe the respected Hugo Awards should ratify the two new dramatic presentation categories. While the literary awards cover a broad range of works from independent and self-published creators, the Dramatic Presentation awards (film and TV) primarily recognize major studios. This overlooks fan creations and smaller independent films that contribute significantly to the genre. 

Recognising independent films is crucial, as myriad high-quality productions have emerged thanks in part, to new technology and film education, bringing diversity and energy to science fiction moving image. These creators deserve visibility alongside independent fanbased writers, podcasts, and magazines and so on. 

Highlighting independent works would introduce both the voting community and a wider audience to material they might not otherwise encounter. Additionally, this recognition could foster greater engagement, with filmmakers likely embracing the Hugo Awards and promoting them within their community. Independent filmmakers are also more likely to respond enthusiastically to nominations and attend WorldCons, unlike the often-detached approach of major studios. 

Adopting these categories will not only honour the innovation of independent creators but also broaden the Hugo Awards’ legacy, ensuring a vibrant, inclusive future for science fiction film. 

(Louis Savy and Tony Xia)

Statement Against 

There are three main reasons to reject this proposal: lack of clarity, lack of availability, and lack of necessity. 

Firstly, what counts as ‘Independent Cinema’? The proposal states: “The films should not be funded by a major studio or distribution label/platform/streamer,” but fails to state what this means. Do A24 or Lionsgate count as major studios? This lack of clarity about what “major” means would be a significant challenge for Hugo administrators and nominators. 

Secondly, are these movies available to nominators? Many independent movies are only available at festivals, or in a handful of cinemas. They are unavailable to most Hugo voters until it’s too late to nominate them. 

Finally, is this category actually necessary? Last year’s winner Everything Everywhere All At Once was produced by the independent IAC Films, and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Independent Film. If these types of movies are already being shortlisted and winning Hugo awards, a new category is not necessary. If anything, adding the categories might serve to ghettoize instead of celebrate this important area of film-making. 

In summary, this  proposal’s administration would be problematic, features works that would be unavailable to Hugo voters, and for which there is fundamentally no need. 

(Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk) 

When the proposed constitutional amendment came before the Business Meeting, nobody could be found to speak in its favour, though two people spoke against it, and it was heavily defeated after seven minutes of discussion. The Chair of the Business Meeting informed attendees of the result of the consultative vote at the beginning of the debate.

Feedback on the consultative vote

Buzz online indicated the WSFS community anticipated the vote and were invested in its outcome.  The initial December announcement that the Consultative Vote was in the works generated positive comments on BlueSky: “I’m very pleased to see that this experiment will be run,” and, “This is pretty exciting and potentially important for SFFH fans! Glasgow Worldcon is holding a consultative ONLINE vote…Feels like a positive step, in that it’s at least something to try and widen engagement.

While the vote was open there was quite a lot of activity.  This comment appeared on an online forum: “whether you favor or oppose the proposal, I hope #WSFSmembers will take part in this online advisory vote, which will facilitate more worldwide participation and may help lead the way to more inclusive WSFS Business decision-making in future.” 

The vote inspired a blog post, which included the following: “…adding an online voting component absolutely seems appropriate to me. Participation in this nonbinding vote will help bring that future possibility closer…On a personal note, I’ll certainly be participating in this vote. I’d been planning to attend the Glasgow Worldcon this summer, and participate in the business meetings [sic]…Now I’m [unsure], but at least my opinion will be seen online.”

Other comments included: “Let’s see if my no vote online counts for anything,” “Hopefully the Business Meeting follows the majority opinion here,” and, “… the level of drama should this vote and the business meeting disagree will likely be quite something.”  The social media reminders to vote in the final days were reposted multiple times.

A participant messaged us wishing that there had been an option to refer the matter for further consideration in addition to the straight yes / no options. It is a fair point that the existing mechanism for constitutional change does allow for the refinement of a proposed amendment in the course of ratification, by amending to have the effect of a “lesser change”, and it is difficult to envisage how this could operate in a member-wide vote.

An external commentator condemned the 2024 consultative vote as “a stunt to further the agenda of people who want to add online voting to the functionality of the Business Meeting”. This is incorrect, though it is a confusion we have noted elsewhere. Our intention was always to run a process separate from the Business Meeting, which does not have a mandate to manage consultative votes. (Though frankly we do not see what would be so bad about adding online voting to the Business Meeting.)

A separate proposal for popular ratification was put to the 2024 Business Meeting. It was referred to a committee on reform of the Business Meeting for further consideration, after a ten-minute debate.

Conclusion

We consider this trial to have been a successful proof of concept. The conduct of the vote was not a significant time or monetary cost for the convention. The 1,260 participants in the vote are a significant multiple of those who attended the Business Meeting in Glasgow (which may have peaked at around 150 in the room at any one time, though the full number of those who attended at one time or another will have been much greater). 

If such popular votes are included in the WSFS decision-making process in future, we have the following recommendations:

  1. The voting period should be short, and should be close to the time of the convention. More than 75% of all votes were cast in either the first 24 hours or the last 24 hours of the ballot being open. An extended voting period will not change that, and risks getting the process lost in the weeds. The process needs to be long enough to allow for paper ballots to be received, but no more than that.
  1. We are not convinced that all constitutional amendments are suitable for a popular vote. For instance, should the membership as a whole expect, or be expected, to have a meaningful view on whether or not Hugo administrators can establish a conversion ratio between word counts in English and another language, which was one of the amendments up for ratification this year? Perhaps there could be or should be a fast track for less controversial changes.
  1. Some considerable thought went into the crafting and presentation of the statements pro and contra the proposed changes. Our instinct is that the Constitution and rules should provide general guidance to the administrators of future votes in this regard, and avoid being over-prescriptive. Less controversial issues, if they are ever put to a membership ballot, may not need statements pro and contra to be published at all.
  1. Any future consultative vote mechanism should be part of the WSFS Division of the administering Worldcon, but run separately from the other WSFS areas of responsibility, ie the Business Meeting, the Hugos, and Site Selection. The organisational burden is not onerous, but it is significant enough to require extra human resources. That probably does not need to be hardwired into the Constitution, but it is our recommendation for good future practice.

Members are rightly demanding more transparency and participation in WSFS decision-making, and the suitability of the Business Meeting’s format has increasingly been a subject of discussion. Now, at least, we have some real data about how a popular vote might work.

Nicholas Whyte, WSFS Division Head
Rosemary Parks, Consultative Vote Administrator

Ljubljana and Bled

Anne and I spent last weekend in Ljubljana, in advance of my return to work on Monday after six weeks off – a return to work which was actually two days at the Bled Strategic Forum up in the mountains. I know Ljubljana fairly well, and have been there maybe half a dozen times starting in 1980 when I was 13, and most recently in 2014; it was Anne’s first time exploring the city.

Basics
Ljubljana hotel: B&B Park, just east of city centre, very comfortable, ecological, beehives on the roof, decent continental breakfast.
Friday dinner: Gostilna Sokol, Ljubljana, yummy traditional Slovenian fare, interesting frescos.
Saturday lunch: Oštarija Peglez’n, Bled, fish specialists, charming waiter.
Saturday dinner: Vodnikov Hram, Ljubljana, more traditional fare, dining area has Roman-era walls.
Sunday lunch: Rikša curry & wok, basic Asian.
Sunday dinner: Tokyo Piknik, more fancy Asian.

(Pronunciation: [ljuˈbljàːna] – the letter combination ‘lj’ is pronounced like the middle consonant cluster in ‘William’ if you say it quickly; there are three syllables, not four, so it’s lyoob-lyAA-na, not looby-anna.)

It was an interesting contrast with Prague, which we visited in January. Prague is a major European city, which has been home to significant figures in science and culture. Ljubljana is the capital of a small country which more or less had independence thrust upon it, and where to be honest not a lot has ever happened. All the major currents of Central European culture paused briefly, left some tide marks and then moved on.

I find it very interesting that the city has a memorial to the Unknown French Soldier, “tombé pour notre liberté”, “who fell for our freedom” during the Napoleonic wars, when Ljubljana became the capital of the Illyrian Provinces and Slovenian became an official language. There are not a lot of monuments of gratitude to bigger countries. (Though the French have another one in Belgrade.) I am struggling to think of another country where Napoleon is unambiguously regarded as a Good Thing. (I think France itself is somewhat ambiguous.)

Sous cette pierre
nous avons deposé
tes cendres
soldat sans nom
de l’armée
Napoleonienne
pour que tu
reposes
au milieu de nous
toi qui en allant
à la bataille
pour la gloire
de ton empereur
es tombé
pour notre
liberté

Under this stone we have placed your ashes, nameless soldier of the Napoleonic army, so that you may rest among us, you who, going into battle for the glory of your emperor, fell for our freedom.

Weirdly, the last King of France is buried in Slovenia. (Yes, I know, the guy who ruled France after him was also a king, but he took the title “King of the French” not “King of France”.)

Enough about France. If you dig deeper, there is a tension between the more Slovenian nationalist Catholic political tradition and the edgy lefty tradition which is a little Yugo-stalgic (though also rooted in the more complex Neue Slowenische Kunst movement). We went to two different places which sat firmly in one or the other tradition. On the Christian side, we went to the national shrine of Mary, Help of Christians at Brezje near Kranj. The last two Popes came here, and there is a statue of St John Paul II outside. It was not crowded on a summer Saturday, but it was set up to receive large crowds.

On the other side politically, the Museum of Contemporary Art was very close to our hotel, and featured a lot of reflections on society and conflict; I detected a certain level of comfort with the old Yugoslavia, while acknowledging that it has gone. This is Konstantin Zvezdochiotov’s installation, “Clock Tower”, reflecting on the conflicts of the 1990s.

And this is a satirical take on the rationing coupons issued in Serbia during the era of hyperinflation:

We also were fascinated by a documentary about the “Sunshine railway”, the north-south connection across Bosnia built in 1947 by young volunteers, who I later discovered had included Pierre Trudeau, Olof Palme and the historian E.P. Thompson. I have got hold of a collection of essays about it by Thompson, which I’ll write up here in due course. Here’s a trailer for the documentary.

Going back a lot further, we really enjoyed the Roman Trail through the remains of Emona, the Roman town on whose ruins the southern part of Ljubljana’s city centre is built. (NB that in Elizabeth Kostova’s dull vampire novel The Historian, she uses the name Emona for the present-day city, presumably so as not to frighten readers less familiar with foreign names.) The main tourist office knew nothing about the Roman Trail, but the City Museum was able to sort us out.

As well as fragments of wall and so on, there are two open air exhibits, one a town house with the usual traces of foundations:

And the other seems to be an early Christian place of worship, with a font for adult baptism, surrounded by a mosaic in which the names of the sponsors are commemorated so that we are still talking about them 1600 years later.

A section of the southern town wall still stands, adorned with a pyramid designed by Slovenia’s master architect Jože Plečnik.

My friend V took us up to the Alpine resort of Bled on the Saturday – I was spending Monday and Tuesday at the annual security conference there but this was a chance to look around properly with Anne.

We took a boat out to the island in the middle of the lake where there is an ancient church of the Assumption; apparently if you succeed in ringing the bell, your wish will be granted. V was gleeful about her success.

And we had lunch in a restaurant that was so nice that I went back to it for dinner after the big Bled conference finished on Tuesday, accompanied by two Serbian ladies and two former foreign ministers.

Just a few more random bits of Ljubljana city art to finish with. First, two fountains, “Narcissus” by Francisco Robba in the old City Hall, and “Core” by France Rotar, in Tabor Park next to the hotel.

Frescoes in the Sokol restaurant.

Wildlife – the Tivoli Fish on the east bank of the river, and one of the dragons on the Dragon bridge.

Anne in the City Hall. I have a photo somewhere that I took standing in roughly the same spot in 1985, when I was 18.

Recommended.