Gallifrey One, 2025 (also the Getty Museum and the Last Bookstore)

So, on my way back from Gallifrey One, the top Doctor Who convention in the world, having had as usual a whale of a time. Though I will start with two less happy things. First, my back has been playing up for the last few weeks, so I was very careful not to overdo it, and napped during the day a bit more than usual (to compensate for sleeping worse). In 2009 and again in 2013, I had back problems which were serious enough to keep me off work for ten days each time, so I know the danger signs and am religiously doing my stretches.

The second less than happy thing was the announcement that the 2028 Gallifrey One will be the last. Mostly the same team have been running it since 1991, and they prefer to conclude the series rather than hand over the reins. Understandable, but there was a palpable air of sadness and shock in the hall as the announcement was made. Apparently there are moves to assemble a replacement structure, and with four years to go, there is time. Meanwhile we are all grateful for the immense amount of work put in by the team over the decades.

A lot of other things went well. For the first time since 2012, I got a room at the conference hotel, and that makes a big difference to lugging things around. Though the escalators between the lobby and the ballroom floors were out, so we got used to the labyrinthine alternative routes.

Outside the hotel, I had breakfast most days at Denny’s about half a mile away, and that was tremendously good value, setting me up well so that I didn’t need as much of the hotel’s somewhat inflated bar food. Other places I ate:

  • The Getty Museum Cafe, for lunch on Thursday, which was fine
  • Jino’s Pars, for dinner on Saturday with Jon Arnold, about a mile from the Marriott, yummy Persian food
  • Blu Jam Cafe, in Downtown LA on Monday morning, a substantial brunch which was too substantial for me to finish
  • Wolfgang Puck in Terminal 7 at LAX for a late lunch as we left, where they charged me $33 for a small sad overcooked chunk of salmon which took over half an hour to arrive. When I complained they refunded half the price.

Also apparently there were two earthquakes in Malibu late Friday and early Saturday, but I must admit I failed to notice.

One other thing that went well, not especially related to the convention: I got an eSIM for my phone, and that meant that i had cheap data for he entire trip. Based on the recommendation of my former colleague Robert, I went with Airalo, who also offer coverage in China where I will go next month. I’m sure there are others available, but I was very satisfied with what I had.

So: H and I travelled on Wednesday this time, to have got over the jetlag by the time the convention started on Friday morning, and I had a very pleasant Wednesday evening in the bar with Nicola Bryant, Andrew Smith (writer of Full Circle), Big Finish writer Lisa McMullin and others.

Formal shot with Nicola Bryant – many more photos but all in my shipped baggage as I write from Heathrow
Andrew Smith signs the novelisation of Full Circle, published 42 yeas ago when he was 20.

I took fewer cosplay photos than in previous years, but as usual the effort put in was impressive.

Amy and Vincent
Time Lord
A Silent
Doctors & co
K-9 variations
Dodo
The unseen villain of Rogue. Fluent in many languages and scolds you for not doing your homework, before eating you.

The great set-pieces of the convention are the presentations by the stars, and I got to most of them, back permitting. Sylvester McCoy, in an amazingly high energy performance from a man who has recently turned 80, wandered around the audience in his session, and H got this great photo of me asking him about Vision On, to which he gave a good five-minute answer.

H got to do a script reading with Colin Baker:

Wendy Padbury and her daughter Charlie Hayes were an effective double-act, Charlie threatening to ask her mother to tell us everything she knows about astrophysics.

Louise Jameson was also charming, but complained facetiously when her Leela clothing got a round of applause: “Upstaged by a costume!”

The headline star this year was not either of the Doctors present (Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy) but Steven Moffat, who did a solo Q&A, commented on a showing of Boom!, crashed Jenna Coleman’s Q&A, did a small group analysis of The Girl in the Fireplace and signed my copy of the novelisation of The Day of the Doctor.

As well as seeing lots of old friends I made new friends as well. Here Ruadhri from London, who was doing a series of mini-interviews with participants for later publication, has the tables turned on him by Jack from Boston.

Altogether I had a really good time and hope that I can make it to the last three, in 2026, 2027 and 2028.

On the Thursday before it all started, I decided to go to the Getty Center, a half-hour’s drive north – I had planned to do that last year, but it is closed on Mondays so I went to LACMA instead that time. I am therefore now equipped for many weeks of my #Thursdayart posts, which you may have seen on my social media channels. The Getty Villa is still closed after last month’s fires, but its sister institution is fine; head literally in the clouds on a very rainy day.

After the Rijksmuseum, which we had visited only a few days before, the Getty is rather exposed as what it is, the perpetuation of a rich man’ whims rather than the nation-building project over in Amsterdam. But there is plenty of good stuff; the five I picked for social media posts were:

Van Gogh’s Irises, very much the star of the show

I was fascinated by the human detail in The Bird Catchers, painted by by François Boucher in 1748.

I envied the relaxation of Princess Leonilla of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, painted by Franz Xavier Winterhalter in 1843:

And finally here’s a bust of Felix Mendlesohn, from 1848 (just after his death) by Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel.

But plenty more where all of that came from.

Yesterday, for my last morning, I braved the public transport system (cheaper now that I am over 55!) and ventured downtown to The Last Bookstore. I didn’t actually buy anything, but I always find bookshops good for recharging.

It too has unusual artworks. Going up the stairs you will meet Nuestra Señora La Reína de la Librería Última de Los Ángeles:

And at the top you will see “Diagnosis” by Jena Priebe and David Lovejoy.

Got back to the hotel in time to chat with my old friend D, who then dropped me to the airport. And 14 hours of travel and 3 hours of sleep later, here I am in Heathrow. See you soon.

Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Ryan C. Parrey and Kevin S. Decker (and Toby Whitehouse)

This was a two-part Twelfth Doctor story from Series 9 in 2015, set in the early 22nd century in a base under a Scottish reservoir, and also in 1980, in the abandoned village that was there before the reservoir was built. I don’t appear to have written it up at the time – I was a bit sparing when the last name on the screen was my first cousin, which may have been too cautious of me.

The TARDIS, with the Twelfth Doctor and Clara on board, arrives in the year 2119, in an underwater base under siege from ghosts, which appear linked with a mysterious alien vessel at the bottom of the lake. The crew of the base start getting picked off one by one. The Doctor goes back to 1980 to try and sort things out, but apparently returns as a ghost. The trouble is being caused by a semi-dead alien called the Fisher King, but I confess I did not really follow that part. Eventually all is resolved with the use of time paradoxes – the Doctor has a breaking-the-fourth-wall conversation with the viewer about who really wrote Beethoven’s music. There are some very good shots of Capaldi in particular.

Notably, Cass, the woman who takes command of the crew for most of the story (after the original commander is an early victim) is deaf, played by deaf actor Sophie Leigh Stone, and communicates with everyone else by signing through an interpreter.

I also noted with interest that two characters played by actors of Asian heritage, Zarqa Ismail and Arsher Ali, are given the thoroughly Anglo names Tim Lunn and Mason Bennett. (I don’t think we ever find out Cass’s first name.)

The writer was Toby Whitehouse, who also wrote School Reunion, one of my favorite New Who episodes; Greeks Bearing Gifts, one of my favourite Torchwood episodes; the series Being Human; and the New Who episode The God Complex, which I didn’t rate as highly and have written up here along with its Black Archive.

Rewatching Under the Lake / Before the Flood, I would rank it as average or slightly below. Over on X/Twitter, it did better, at 120th of 309 Who stories in @heraldofcreatio’s poll. Anne could not remember having seen it first time round. I find the plot decently sfnal and the base well realised, but the energy somehow not quite there, and the means and motivation of the alien menace obscure. Full marks of course for the portrayal of Cass’s disability, which we’ll get back to.

Ryan C. Parrey and Kevin S. Decker have done a solid though relatively short Black Archive on the story. The first chapter is an introduction which briefly touches on bases under siege, evil capitalism, and the reversed sequence of the narrative.

The second and longest chapter, “The Bootstrap Paradox”, goes in detail into the exploration of time paradoxes in this story and in other Doctor Who stories, and the extent to which they also carry the freight of moral dilemmas.

The third chapter, “‘Only Room for One Me’”, looks at Clara’s arc overall in the wider Doctor Who narrative. Its second paragraph is:

“This two-part story contributes important elements to Clara’s arc during her time with the 12th Doctor, an arc that begins before Danny’s death and that sees Clara act on her fascination with the Doctor’s power and responsibility. Making a conscious decision to leave certain inhibitions behind after Danny dies, she experiments here and elsewhere in series nine with, in effect, becoming the Doctor.

Incidentally I am writing this at Gallifrey One, where Jenna Coleman as usual is charming the participants.

The very brief fourth chapter, “Ghosts in the Machine”, looks at the ghosts in the story as compared to other Who stories, and unpacks how they are not really ghosts.

The fifth chapter, “New Waste Lands”, which is also short, looks at the alien Fisher King and successfully explained to me what is actually going on in the story, better than the script did.

The sixth and best chapter, “The Case of Cass”, looks at the varying ways that disabled people are portrayed in the media, especially in Doctor Who, coming to the conclusion that Cass is uniquely well depicted in this story. Hard to disagree with that, and it’s well argued.

The seventh and concluding chapter takes us back to ethics and invokes Jean-Paul Sartre.

I rate this about average of the Black Archives, but with significant bonus points for the discussion of disability. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The key maintains a direct link with the TARDIS at all times. Even if the TARDIS is isolated by a temporal disturbance the key should be able to summon it back (see Case Study, page 32). Conversely, the TARDIS can be concealed, a second out of sync with your current time zone, using the key as an anchor.

This is one of those really lovely BBC spinoff books, looking in detail at the TARDIS, presented as an operator’s manual and pulling together all the TARDIS lore from the first 55 years of Doctor Who (it features Jodie Whittaker but not any of her stories). None of this is new, but it’s put together very imaginatively and entertainingly. I had forgotten that many of the early stories include a TARDIS malfunction of some kind, and the authors heroically retcon everything together, even the Eye of Harmony from the TV movie. A lovely effort. You can get it here.

Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Most people called it the Jewelled City, because they had no imagination of their own and just picked up on what some down-market visnews journalist correctly thought would make a catchy slogan. The planet had originally been colonised as a source of jethryk, but the mining boom had long since died out, and it reverted to being just another human world. Nowadays there were no more jewels around than there were in any other colonial capital.

I never had the pleasure of meeting David McIntee, but we were Facebook friends for years, and like many others I was shocked and saddened when he died last December, two weeks before his 56th birthday. He wrote twelve Doctor Who novels between 1993 and 2004, one of which (Autumn Mist) is among the very few Doctor Who stories set in Belgium. My favourite is The Face of the Enemy, set while the Doctor and Jo Grant are off in Peladon, so that UNIT has to bring in the Master and some bloke called Chesterton and his wife to help out.

Mission: Impractical is the last of the Sixth Doctor novels that I read a decade ago, failed to write up at the time and have now reread again. It’s a comedy heist story, not usually one of my favourite sub-genres, but done very well here. The cast of characters includes Sabalon Glitz and his sidekick Dibber, who appeared in a couple of TV stories, and Frobisher, originally a DWM comic strip companion, who is a shape shifting alien Whifferdill and prefers to take the shape of a penguin. There are also Ogrons and an ancient artifact which is the McGuffin. McIntee had a good ear for dialogue and robustly characterizes both the continuity characters and the bad guys who turn up in this story, and the settings are vivid. So I am ending this mini-project on a high note.

The purchase link says it’s out of print and that Amazon doesn’t know of any second-hand copies. But who knows, you may be lucky?

I find that I also never wrote up some of the early Bernice Summerfield books, so I will do them next, possibly alongside the early Big Finish audio adaptations.

The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Richard Dinnick et al

Second frame of third section:

Three stories here. The title story by Andy Diggle and Craig Hamilton brings Lady Christina de Souza back for a space heist with the Doctor, Amy and Rory, and raised a smile or two. The second, “Space Oddity” by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Horacio Domingues, is an excellent tale of the Vashta Nerada and an early undocumented Soviet space mission. The third, “Time Fraud” by Richard Dinnick and Josh Adams, has bird-like aliens and fake Time Lords. You can get it here.

Next in this series is Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle, Eddie Robson and Andy Kuhn

The Companion Chronicles: The First Doctor Vol 1: The Sleeping Blood by Martin Day, The Unwinding World by Ian Potter, The Founding Fathers by Simon Guerrier, The Locked Room by Simon Guerrier

Big Finish had a First Doctor sale last month, and I took advantage of it to get hold of some of the audios I would have liked to have caught at the time. This is the first of three quartets of First Doctor Companion Chronicles, each featuring an original series actor and a guest performer, in this case released in October 2015 (so I am some way behind).

The Sleeping Blood, by Martin Day, has Carole Ann Ford as Susan travelling with her grandfather before they arrive on Earth, and looking for medical treatment when the Doctor is struck down by a mysterious infection. She ends up at a medical facility where the local security team are fighting off a mysterious terrorist (both the terrorist and the head of security are played by Darren Strange). It’s a smart Doctor-lite script, exploring truth and trust and the use of violence, and giving Ford a bit more space to perform than she really got on screen.

The Unwinding World, by Ian Potter, has Vicki telling the story of how she, together with the Doctor, Ian and Barbara, are stuck doing grunt work on a boring but repressive planet. This is framed as a conversation between Maureen O’Sullivan and Alix Dunmore, who plays the all-powerful computer and a couple of other female parts. I started off wondering exactly what was going on, but then realised that a nicely constructed plot – expressed basically as a dialogue – was coming to a clever and satisfactory conclusion.

The Founding Fathers is one of two stories in this set by Simon Guerrier, sequels to The War to End All Wars, with a framing narrative where Steven Taylor, having retired as king of the planet of the Elders/Savages, is engaged in long conversations with the copy of the Doctor’s brain made by Jano long ago. The main plot element is a flashback to a Doctor-and-Steven trip to Paris in 1762, where they encounter Benjamin Franklin and give him pointers on the future governance of the American colonies and also electricity. But there’s a subsidiary plot set on Steven’s planet, where his granddaughter Sida (played by Alice Haig, now Alice Tate, who does all the female characters) is listening and learning.

Finally, in Simon Guerrier’s The Locked Room, we get not only the First Doctor returning in the flesh, but also the Vardans, of all monsters, to trouble Steven and Sida on their home world, which is of course itself in the middle of a huge political crisis involving them both in different ways. The soundscape of all of these is vey good, but I felt this was particularly impressive, where two actors in adjacent sound booths summon up an entire planet under threat. Peter Purves’ version of Hartnell is uncanny as ever.

So, basically my mini-project of catching up with Big Finish’s First Doctor stories is off to a good start. You can get this set here.

Wednesday reading

Current
Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott
Five Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
War Childhood: From Sarajevo to Syria, Memories of Life and Hope, by Jasminko Halilović

Last books finished
A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell
The Professor in Erin, by L. McManus [Charlotte Elizabeth McManus] (did not finish)
Drowned Country, by Emily Tesh
Inside the Stargazers’ Palace, by Violet Moller
Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee
TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker
Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells
Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Kevin Decker and Ryan Parrey

Next books
The Secret Places of the Heart, by H.G. Wells
DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee
“Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang

The Lights Go Out in Lychford by Paul Cornell

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Then she heard applause. The applause of centuries.

This is the fourth book in the Lychford series, where once again the village is under attack from hostile magical forces and the three women who have become the central characters of the series have to try and stop it. It’s lyrically done, with the old world’s natural crumbling being given extra momentum by the external threat; characters float in and out of different stages of awareness – there’s a sympathetic portrayal of dementia – and it all comes across beautifully. Quite a short book but it packs a lot into its 162 pages. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham.

How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling

Second paragraph of third chapter:

A Portuguese slogan had been painted on the side of the plane: “We carry not only passengers but solidarity”. Indeed, about half the passengers were from aid organisations. People were flooding into Mozambique and we pompously called ourselves ‘solidarity workers’.

This is the autobiography of Hans Rosling, the Swedish scientist whose Factfulness was my book of the year for 2018. I must admit that I had given no thought at all to how one might become a guru of data visualisation, so it was fascinating to read of his career in public health in Sweden and the developing world.

The moral core of the book are the third and fourth chapters, recounting his experience of working as a District Medical Officer in northern Mozambique, in a situation where to describe resources as scarce and medical facilities as overstretched is something of an understatement. I must say that the end of the third chapter made me cry on the train, which I don’t often do.

Apart from that, it’s a good account of a professional doctor shuttling around the world and accommodating himself to different cultures, and to the rapid changes in societies (including Sweden) brought about by economic growth and technical innovation. There is a very entertaining encounter with Fidel Castro in Cuba. And then thanks to his son’s software skills, he found that he was famous, and his medical career turned into something quite different. He doesn’t go on about his success of middle age; he knew we would be much more interested in how he got there.

I had high expectations of this and they were more than fulfilled. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next on that pile is the English translation of The Burgundians, by Bart van Loo.

The Atlas of Unusual Languages, by Zoran Nikolić

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The Hadza or Hadzabe people (meaning ‘people’) have inhabited the area around Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, south of the Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater, for tens of thousands of years. Archeological findings show that this area has been inhabited by hunter-gatherers, such as the Hadza, for at least 50,000 years, while the Bantu people came to this region much later, about 2,000 years ago. There is a (not widely accepted) theory that the entire human race consists of three ‘branches’: the Hadza people, the Jul’hoan people of Namibia, and all other people. This idea is based on the fact that the Hadza and Jul’hoan use clicks in their speech, as well as having the most divergent known mitochondrial DNA of any human population, indicating that they are descended from those that first separated from the rest of the human ‘tree’.

Along similar lines to the same author’s Atlas of Unusual Borders, this brings together trivia about language isolates from all over the globe. It’s much the same story over and over again, for 230 pages, but the message is clear: language diversity is part of human experience, and that can include ancient languages which are just about hanging on in their native places, but also new-ish creoles which have been created to help communication.

There were a lot more cases that I had not heard of here than in the same author’s Unusual Borders book. Most of these would be well enough known in their own countries (most Poles know about Kashubian, for instance). But almost every country seems to have some linguistic quirk hidden in a corner. (For instance, the Germanic section ends with French Flemish.)

I did wish Nikolić had gone a little more into unusual grammar or phonology. The front cover of my copy of the book references the ǃXóõ language of Namibia, which has the most phonemes of any known tongue – 87 consonants, half of which are clicks, 20 vowels, and two tones by one count. There must be a few more like that. Information is of course difficult to come by.

Some of the languages are illustrated with a paragraph from The Little Prince, which does help a little with getting a sense of the structure. Again, I’d have liked to see a bit more here, for instance emphasising the words for “sunrise” would give you a better feeling for how the language works.

However, I don’t know of any other book quite like this and I’m glad to have it. You can get it here.

In the north – Leiden and the Rijksmuseum

An early Valentine’s weekend up north (sorry, Dutch-based chums, this was a just-us romantic weekend and we didn’t see anyone else) to visit a few museums.

Accommodation: IBIS Leiden Centre, cheap and cheerful.

Friday lunch: Tapa Thai, Stationsweg 3, Leiden; decent value, rice a bit dry.
Friday dinner: Surakarta, Noordeinde 51-53, Leiden; very satisfactory Indonesian, helpful explanations of unfamiliar food.
Saturday lunch: The Rijksmuseum Cafe; friendly service and filling victuals
Saturday dinner: Verboden Toegang, Kaiserstraat 7, Leiden; hearty stuff, good service, better value than I would get in PLux.
Sunday lunch: Pieterskerk Cafe, quiet and healthy.

The National Museum of Antiquities: the Bronze Age

This was what sparked the idea for our trip, a big exhibition about the Bronze Age in Europe, bringing together some prize exhibits from other museums, and basically selling the message that the Europe of 3000 years ago had intense internal cultural links and also communications deep into Asia.

The hit of the exhibition is is the Nebra Sky Disc, from 1600-1800 BC, the oldest known visual representation of the universe from anywhere in the world. Found by illegal treasure hunters in East Germany in 1999, sold by them as soon as they dug it up, recovered by Swiss police in a raid in Basel in 2002, now permanently on display in Halle (but on loan to Leiden). Some of you may have seen it in the British Museum last year.

It’s a truly striking artefact. You know exactly what it is meant to be. The makers have communicated their interest in the night sky to you directly, 3,600 years on.

There are a couple of other personal artefacts that spoke to me. The Mold gold cape, for instance, from about the same time as the Sky Disc but found at the far end of the trade routes, in Wales, on loan from the British Museum:

Or the Schifferstadt Sun hat, one of four such hats found in France and Germany, perhaps for celebrants to wear at ceremonies welcoming / summoning the return of the Sun?

Just a week ago, on 2 February, worshippers paraded around our local chapel bearing candles to celebrate the arrival of spring. I bet that ceremony has been going on longer than Christianity in our part of the world.

Another stunning display has six ceremonial (magic?) swords, made in the same East Anglia workshop, found separately in England, France and the Netherlands, brought together here for the first time.

They are not practical for combat, but instead were all found ritually placed into damp ground and abandoned; one of them (the second from the right) was carefully and perhaps ritually warped before the deposition. A sacrifice of weapons, specially commissioned from Norfolk, to show unity with the land? Though I cannot be the only visitor who thought of Monty Python:

We tend to think of Bronze Age archaeology as concerned with beautiful material artfacts, like the gold and weapons above and the torcs and bracelets below. And they are lovely.

But a couple of other exhibits really got me.

It’s a stone from a grave in Anderlingen, Germany, with three figures on it. One has outstretched hands, one has an axe, one has a robe. Are they fighting? Dancing? Worshipping? All three? Something else?

But what got to me most was the reconstruction of women’s clothing from grave goods.

On the right, we are told, is the oldest dress in the Netherlands, from 800 BC near Eindhoven. Enough survives to be sure that there was a check pattern coloured by cochineal and wode; this high status woman was buried in her favourite clothes..

But on the left we have the Egtveld Girl, found in Denmark with her clothes in good preservation. She wore a belt with a big gold disc, and a short corded skirt. She was only a teenager, but had moved around a lot in her short life. Her skirt is surely made for dancing; to move from the sublime to the ridiculous, here are my own colleagues performing “Hips don’t lie” by Shakira:

Anyway, it’s a tremendous exhibition, and you have five more weeks to go to it.

The National Museum of Antiquities: the rest

To be honest, we didn’t see a lot of the permanent collection, but this piece really jumped out at me, at the end of a small gallery of cameos:

It is the Gemma Constantiniana, created by the Senate of Rome as a trophy for the Emperor Constantine in 315 after he vanquished his rival emperor Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. Drawn by (male) centaurs, trampling Maxentius, Constantine and his fmily ride to glory and accept a triumphal wreath from an angelic figure.

What happened to it in the next 1,300 years is obscure, but it came into the hands of the Dutch East India Company in 1628, possibly via the collection of Pieter Paul Rubens. They decided to sell it to the Mongol Emperor Jahangir, who was a big collector, and packed into the cargo of the East India Company’s biggest ship, the Batavia. However, the Batavia was wrecked off the coast of Australia, and the surviving passengers held hostage by mutineers until reinforcements arrived a year later.

The Gemma Constantiniana was successfully salvaged, but Jahangir had died (he had actually died before the Batavia left) and his heir Shah Jahan (builder of the Taj Mahal) was less interested in that kind of thing, so it returned to the Netherlands and is now on permanent display in Leiden.

Two other great cameos survive, one of Augustus in Vienna and one of Tiberius in Paris. They have less exciting histories.

The Rijksmuseum

We had missed out on the Rijksmuseum on our 2023 trip to Amsterdam due to poor planning on my part. But it’s less than an hour by train and we grabbed the opportunity yesterday.

Wow. The Rijksmuseum is very big. We stayed in it for almost five hours (including a lunch break) but it still wasn’t enough. Despite knowing the Netherlands well, I think it may have been my first visit. I hope it will not be my last.

Starting with the Night Watch – carefully protected from the public, which is probably just as well as it allows you to take it all in. But I guess I hadn’t realised that it is in a genre of squad portraits. Here is another by Bartholomeus van der Helst, the Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster, from 1648:

On the cuirasse of the large chap on the right, you can see the reflections of three of his neighbours.

Also up in that gallery there is a little Vermeer alcove with seven of his household scenes. There’s something very attractive and eye-catching about his use of light. The Milkmaid is (by a small margin) my favourite.

Much much food for future #ThursdayArt posts here (I do this occasionally on most of my social media channels). Three other things at the Rijksmuseum that made me stop in my tracks:

This isn’t Great Art, but it’s the transom of the English navy’s flagship, the Royal Charles, captured by the Dutch in 1667, in full sight of the impotent English leadership. When he heard the news, Samuel Pepys lamented, “I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone…” and warned his family that he himself, as a senior naval administrator, might be the target of political violence. It was the worst ever defeat for the English navy in home waters. The Dutch used the captured flagship as a party boat for a while, but scrapped it a few years later, saving the stern for public display.

Both Anne and I stopped and went ‘gosh’ when we saw this 1815 portrait of Emma Jane Hodges, daughter of the Anglo-Dutch painter Charles Howard Hodges. She was born in 1791 (so is 24 here) and lived to 1868; she did not marry, and left her collection of her father’s paintings to the Rijksmseum. Something about the use of light and the expression on her face really grabbed us.

And the third thing that grabbed me goes without saying. Most of the Van Goghs in Amsterdam are (unsurprisingly) in the Van Gogh Museum, but the 1888 Wheatfield really calls out to you across a crowded room.

Other things that caught our eye in the Rijksmuseum:

Lots of model ships!

In the navy – Yes, you can sail the seven seas
In the navy – Yes, you can put your mind at ease
In the navy – Come on now, people, make a stand
In the navy, in the navy

Two different but similar treatments of St Ursula with her virgins.

One of several magnificent doll’s houses (the Dutch royals are really into them).

Also a brilliant exhibition of American photography, and much else that I ran out of energy before recording.

I should say two more things. First, the 18th-century art is really not a patch on the 17th-century Golden Age stuff. It picks up again during and after the Napoleonic wars, but it’s as if the artistic impulses were exhausted after Remrandt, Vermeer and all those folks.

Second, there was a very interesting section about art and Dutch colonialism in Asia and the Americas (apart from the Caribbean and Suriname, I had forgotten that they occupied a large chunk of Brazil for 24 years). The commentary is frank about the nature of colonial exploitation and the human damage done by the enterprise.

Wereldmuseum Leiden

We had been to what used to be the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden back in 2021, but returned to it for a temporary exhibition on gold. Lots of gold to see here, including these reliquaries:

And Thom Puckey’s sculpture, The Wife of the Alchemist, dedicated to the legend of Perenelle Flamel.

Also one can never get enough of the Buddha Room.

The Observatory and Hortus Botanicus

Not the best of weather for the Leiden botanical gardens, but the observatory had a nice little art exhibition about time and science and plants.

Here at the entrance is a fantastic rotating assembly of lenses with spotlights shining through them, by Jos Agasi.

And this is very simply the decay of a shoe over the ages, by Oscar Santillán.

The Pieterskerk

The deconsecrated Pieterskerk was the last of our tourism stops; it has a nice corner dedicated to the Pilgrim Fathers who worshipped there.

And then home. It’s a bit more than two hours to drive for us; for those of you coming from further away, there’s a direct train connection to Schiphol airport, and plenty to see (and eat and drink). Recommended!

The best known books set in each country: Canada

See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Canada, as explained further below. This is a case where the winner is way ahead of the field, and also where the winner is really not in the least surprising.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
Anne of Green Gables L.M. Montgomery 1,043,51931,851
HatchetGary Paulsen421,24218,861
Station ElevenEmily St. John Mandel 563,79012,703
Anne of Avonlea L.M. Montgomery 211,41213,333
The Blind AssassinMargaret Atwood 159,38916,932
Anne of the Island L.M. Montgomery 183,09011,460
The Shipping NewsE. Annie Proulx148,86613,786
Still LifeLouise Penny 266,0707,059

L.M. Montgomery does pretty well here. I was looking back to see if we have had any other countries so far with seven out of eight books by women writers, and to my surprise the answer is yes, there have been four of the previous 38: South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran. Which might not be the four you would have guessed.

The top two books tagged “Canada” by LT and GR users by score were The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, neither of which is set in Canada at all as far as I remember. The setting of Room, by Emma Donoghue, is not specified geographically as far as I can tell, and I thought quite carefully about whether to qualify it or not; but it’s based on events in Austria, and although the film was made in Canada, it is explicitly set in Ohio. On the other hand, my memory of Station Eleven is that most of it is set on what is now the Canadian side of the lakes, so I let it through.

Two more Margaret Atwood novels, Oryx and Crake and The Testaments, are set or mostly set in what is currently the United States, but who knows where we may be in a few weeks’ time? That still leaves her The Blind Assassin, which is explicitly set in Ontario. Alias Grace missed the cut by a hair’s breadth.

Next up: Poland, then Morocco, Angola and Ukraine. But I’m going to skip next week as I’ll be at Gallifrey One.

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

Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Key sections of the lengthy technical document focussed on a comparison between setting up a Stormont-run RHI scheme, or a grant-based scheme, called a challenge fund. The challenge fund would competitively allocate the available funding from the Treasury each year, allowing the market to provide the most cost-effective means of using the money. Once the funding ran out each year, it would shut, making it impossible to overspend. The alternative, an RHI scheme, would by contrast provide ongoing payments over 20 years to each boiler owner, with the payments linked to how much heat they produced. Having examined the numbers, it was clear to CEPA that the challenge fund provided vastly superior value for money.

This is a tremendous expose of the colossal scandal that brought down the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive government in early 2017, taking another three years before it was restored (and then it was gone again in two years, being restored only a year ago). The guts of the story are that a subsidy for using renewable heat sources for commercial purposes was perversely structured so that the state effectively paid users to burn biomass; “cash for ash” as it was dubbed.

McBride was at the forefront of breaking this story through the News Letter, and the BBC was also particularly strong on the case (to the point that when I bumped into Arlene Foster in 2019, with a BBC journalist by my side, she chatted pleasantly with me while totally cutting my companion). It still doesn’t get to the bottom of the question – did anyone consciously legislate for this bottomless subsidy to arise? – but there is one obvious key beneficiary.

Once it became clear that far from subsidising the vast cash giveaway, the UK government was going to claw it back from the Northern Ireland budget, the shit hit the fan and politicians and ministers began manoeuvring not just to avoid blame but also to extract the maximum amount of money from the system before it was closed. As a BBC journalist put it:

‘Those ongoing costs are likely to be at least £400 million. That could have paid for the new Omagh Hospital, the dualling of the A26 at Frosses [between Ballymena and Ballymoney], the York Street Interchange and the Belfast Rapid Transit System. With £15m left over.’

McBride despairs over the incompetence of the Civil Service in allowing the system to have arisen in the first place, and the incompetence of ministerial oversight. Jonathan Bell, the DUP minister who actually exposed the scandal in the first place, is himself exposed as bad-tempered and over-indulging in alcohol, under-briefed and displacing responsibility. Arlene Foster, on whose watch the scheme was set up and who then became First Minister, seems to have been curiously indifferent to the potential problems.

If Arlene Foster had followed the example of Peter Robinson, and stepped aside for a few weeks for a preliminary investigation to clear her of personal misconduct, devolution would have continued and the DUP would likely still be the largest party in Northern Ireland. As it was, she let ego override strategy, not for the first or last time. Sinn Fein also come in for criticism for their management of the financial side, and for the fact that ministerial decisions are still apparently being signed off by non-elected individuals.

I won’t embarrass them, but I am glad that the two people who I know best out of the whole disappointing story, a senior DUP special advisor and a senior civil servant (now retired), come out rather well; my DUP friend was only peripherally involved by all accounts, and my civil servant friend was one of the first to realise how badly things had gone wrong and, crucially, to accept responsibility.

I felt at the time that it was actually quite healthy for a Stormont government to fall over an actual issue of governance, rather than something related to the Norn Iron Problem – the only precedent is the deposition of John Miller Andrews in 1943. McBride however shows that the Norn Iron Problem includes the problem of a very small pool of political and administrative talent in a territory with such a small population, and this was one of the factors in the RHI scandal.

This is something that I have observed in my dealings with other small states. The issue isn’t whether the polity is economically viable, it’s whether there are enough smart people around to run it properly. I think the critical mass is probably around 2 million, the size of Slovenia, unless you have positive immigration boosting the numbers (eg Luxembourg). Northern Ireland, at 1.7 million, isn’t quite there yet.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2019; you can get it here. Next on that pile is A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell.

Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain

Second frame of third chapter:

End of this very enjoyable series of graphic novels, which tells the story of the reawakening of King Arthur as an evil undead monster and the efforts of our plucky heroes (grandma, grandson, grandson’s girlfriend) to contain the situation. Loads more archetypes from English cultural history get thrown in here, notably King Lear and T.S. Eliot, and the ending is suitably dramatic and more or less final. It’s nice to see a project like this reach a satisfying ending. You can get it here.

Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard

Second paragraph of third chapter:

As to the others… Bảo Duy was endearing but reckless, and Lành was extremely difficult to deal with or protect, which added to the annoyance.

A lovely dark story about four women from different Vietnamese spacefaring clans, who get thrown together to ward off an unspeakable horror which threatens them all, with undercurrents of deadly inter-clan politics and internal romance. The protagonist is subtly coded as autistic as well. The novella is often the ideal length for a story like this, allowing the writer to put in enough world-building and characterisation and yet not get lost in too long a plot. You can get it here.

Wednesday reading

Current
A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell
Inside the Stargazers’ Palace, by Violet Moller
Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee

Last books finished
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells
Ithaca, by Claire North
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin 
De bondgenoten 1, by Brecht Evens
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Richard Dinnick et al
Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh

Next books
Doctor Who: TARDIS Type Forty Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson
Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells
Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott

The Ultimate Earth, by Jack Williamson

Second paragraph of third section:

“Sandor’s Tycho Memorial!” Pepe jogged my ribs. “There’s the old monument at the American capital! I know it from Dian’s videos.”

This won the the 2001 Best Novelette Award in both the Hugos and the Nebulas, the author having been born in 1908, making him certainly the oldest person to win either award in, I suspect, any category (Retro Hugos aside). These were the only final ballot places for fiction that Williamson ever got in his long career (his autobiography won a Hugo for Best Nonfiction Book sixteen years earlier, in 1985).

I wrote at the time of the Hugo final ballot that although I preferred Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” and Greg Egan’s “Oracle”:

None of the others were real turkeys though. “The Ultimate Earth” didn’t have a very satisfactory ending but that seems to be standard for stories about nanotechnology.

“The Ultimate Earth” came eighth in the Locus poll, which normally hews closer to the Hugo and Nebula rankings, and only fourth in Analog‘s own readers poll of novellas of 2000. (The Locus poll was won by “Radiant Green Star” by Lucius Shepard, and the Analog poll by “A Roll of the Dice”, by Catherine Asaro, both of which were also Hugo and Nebula finalists.) Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” surely has shown more staying power; likewise Greg Egan’s “Oracle”.

Looking back now, it’s clear that the Hugo and Nebula voters of the day were honoring Williamson’s career rather than the qualities of this particular story, which is rather old-fashioned despite the use of nanotechnology.

After disaster strikes Earth, a group of clone children who have been raised on the Moon steal a spaceship to go back to the home planet. They find it is not what they expected (this is where the nanobots come in) and head off into the stars. Not very new ideas, and not really done in a new way. But you can get it here.

The Hugo for Best Novel went to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; the Nebula to Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose, neither of which are brilliant choices. There is better luck in some other categories – Dave Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness” is a jewel of a short story Hugo winner, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won both Hugo and Nebula

Next in this series of joint Hugo/Nebula winners will be “Hell Is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang. After that, I will skip American Gods and Coraline and go straight on to Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde

Second paragraph of third chapter:

But now I have to say, just to clear my conscience, that sometimes I was in charge of the installations-strong technologies made for the insides of boys’ heads. Every batch was mass-assembled somewhere in [redacted], and when Èkó had marked them, had storied them in full, we inserted the chips pre-loaded with information on how boys would and should be. I watched the new skulls move through the conveyor belt in a cyclical choreography—perfect carbon copies. Some of us messengers were responsible for coding these cultures in the lab; others of us were in charge of delivering them, of fixing them in boys’ heads as soon as we were sure they’d at least live long enough to become men.

Interesting to come to this soon after Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, which is also sf (well, fantasy really) set in Nigeria. There are big differences, though; the protagonist(s) of Freshwater move back and forth across the Atlantic, whereas the vagabonds of Vagabonds! are swimming around the murky middle and lower reaches of society in Lagos.

I made a mistake in reading it, in that I did not realise that it was more a collection of linked short stories than a novel, and got frustrated that later chapters introduced new characters without giving closure to earlier plot lines. That’s partly on me (though to an extent also on the publisher for describing it as a novel on the dust jacket). But I think the writer can sometimes demand too much of the reader in discerning the book’s structure.

It’s a very intense description of life at the margins, especially the queer margins, in a developing city economy. The deities Èkó and Tatafo guide us through the narrative (which is why the Clarke jury felt that it fell on the fantasy side of the line), but they don’t intervene much, allowing humans to make their own mistakes. The book is fuelled by an energising rage against injustice. It’s passionate and well-described; but as mentioned, I felt the last couple of steps to make it fully coherent were missing. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on that pile is DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee.

The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue paper.

Another in my dwindling pile of minor Wellsiana, this 1917 novel concerns the Reverend Edward Scrope, Bishop of Princhester, whose faith is challenged by its irrelevance to the people of his industrialised diocese and by the horrors of war. Scrope deals with this difficulty by falling under the influence of an attractive and rich parishioner, and taking mind-altering drugs. He resigns from the Church completely, goes through further spiritual wrestling and finds his own accommodation at the end, though one feels that his wife is unenthused by the new state of affairs, never mind their five daughters.

One of the few unexpected things I learned about the English way of life when I went to study at Cambridge aged 19 is that there are a lot of people, if a minority, who take the Church of England seriously, something that was not apparent from the popular culture that I had absorbed growing up in Belfast. Wells isn’t quite sure how funny he should be here. He finds the Church itself ridiculous, but wants to make us sympathise with the bishop’s spiritual torment (which is expressed at length). The story ends up falling between two stools, and has been justifiably forgotten over the last 108 years. But you can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is another H.G. Wells novel, Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump.

The Atlas of Unusual Borders, by Zoran Nikolić

Second paragraph of third Unusual Border:

Brezovica Žumberačka has only a few houses, with thirty or so inhabitants, occupying an area of less than two hectares, but with the ‘neighbouring’ Slovenian village, Brezovica pri Metliki, it forms one place. Interestingly, it seems that the Croatian and Slovenian authorities are not entirely sure exactly where the border line is. It is even possible that there are currently a few more miniature enclaves and exclaves. Although this situation is less of an issue now that Slovenia and Croatia have entered into the European Union, a bizarre possibility is the fact that one house, together with the land around it, does not belong to either country. This would make it the so-called terra nullius, namely, no man’s land. This has created an opportunity for the proclamation of an independent country, which was exploited in a virtual way. A website for the newly formed Kingdom of Enclava emerged on the Internet, though it had nothing to do with the inhabitants of the house itself. After the Slovenian government officially declared it to be their territory, the Enclava moved to one of the disputed islands in the River Danube, on the border between Serbia and Croatia.

This is a very attractive book listing 47 cases of unusual borders around the world. As a map geek myself of many years’ standing, I was aware of most of these (and sorry that a couple of my favorites were missed, the Iliemi Triangle, the Drummully salient, and the now resolved case of the Chiṭmahals), but they are all sensitively explained and well illustrated. There is lots of potential for trivia here: where, for instance, is there a direct land frontier between the Netherlands and France? (In the Caribbean.) It would also be interesting to know what daily life is like in a situation like Baarle. Anyway, it’s a lovely production, and you can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Yemen

See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Yemen, as explained further below.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
I Am Nujood, Age 10 and DivorcedNujood Ali 23,6271,231
Salmon Fishing in the YemenPaul Torday 16,4611,631
The Panther Nelson DeMille 23,1581,125
The Monk of MokhaDave Eggers 20,958754
SoldZana Muhsen 7,759464
Henna HouseNomi Eve 4,266215
Motoring with MohammedEric Hansen1,611343
The Woman Who Fell from the SkyJennifer Steil 1,432153

Yemen has not been well served in the literature available in the West. Two of the above are about child slavery and sexual abuse (I Am Nujood and Sold) and the rest are all by foreigners (Jennifer Steil’s memoir of teaching journalism sounds particularly dire).

I excluded a lot of books which cover Yemen along with other places. Three of these were fiction: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (mainly set in Ethiopia), The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, which is set all over the Indian Ocean (but with Oman rather than Yemen as the heroine’s home base), and Black Mamba Boy, by Nadifa Mohamed, which starts in Yemen but is mostly set in East Africa.

The rest were non-fiction; War on Terror punditry (The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright; Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill), regional travelogues (Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger; Baghdad Without a Map, by Tony Horwitz), and general reporting (Our Women on the Ground, ed. Zahra Hankir). I am also sad to have to disqualify Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767, by Thorkild Hansen, which looks fascinating, but only 90 pages out of 370 are actually set in Yemen.

One case of huge divergence between Goodreads and LibraryThing: The Handsome Jew, by Yemeni writer Ali al-Muqri, has 2,955 raters on GR, but only 8 owners on LibraryThing, which clearly has failed to penetrate the Yemeni market. The more traditional travel books score comparatively better on LT.

Next up: Canada. This will not be at all surprising.

BSFA Long Lists – the Goodreads / LibraryThing stats #BSFAAwards2024

The BSFA long lists are out again. Some of them are longer than others. As usual, I’ve run them through the Goodreads and LibraryThing catalogues to see which of the longlisted works have scored on the two biggest book reviewing websites.

Not very surprisingly, this doesn’t work for the 23 longlisted works for Best Artwork, nor for the 26 longlisted works for Best Short Non-Fiction, none of which have been logged as separate publications by GR or LT users. For the other categories, the highest and median numbers for each system are as follows:

CategoryGR highestGR medianLT highestLT median
Best Novel102,9563981,43235
Best Fiction for Younger Readers88,111428.587830
Best Shorter Fiction5,26071861
Best Collection5,253111584
Best Non-Fiction (Long)1292311
Best Short Fiction1640100
Best Original Audio Fiction53030

Unlike last year, thee of the eight long-listees for Best Original Audio Fiction do feature on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. All three are Big Finish audios.

Title AuthorGRLT
Doctor Who: The Quin DilemmaChapman, Valentine, Rayner533
Torchwood: The Hollow ChoirMarshall, Devlin272
Torchwood: Bad ConnectionAaron Lamont232

The Best Short Fiction longlist features no less than 80 stories, of which I was able to find three which have been published separately and thus feature in the online catalogues.

Title AuthorGRLT
SpillCory Doctorow16410
Evan: A RemainderJordan Kurella782
Unquiet on the Eastern FrontWole Talabi152

Ten of the seventeen long-listed works in the Best Non-Fiction (Long) category are on either Goodreads of LibraryThing or both. Two of the other seven are podcasts, which wouldn’t usually score anyway. The ten which do feature are:

Title AuthorGRLT
Everything Must GoDorian Lynskey12931
Speculative WhitenessJordan S. Carroll234
Track ChangesAbigail Nussbaum85
Spec Fic for Newbies Volume 2Angus, Nolan53
The Book BlindersJohn Clute33
Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative FictionEugen Bacon (ed)23
Urban FantasyStefan Ekman21
Utopia on the TabletopJo Lindsay Walton02
The Boom and The BoomGuanghzhao Lyu10
Three, Two, One, Let’s Jam! Satoru Stevenson10

I was able to find 48 of the 51 long-listees for Best Collection on one system or the other.

Title AuthorGRLT
Your UtopiaBora Chung3140158
She’s Always HungryEliza Clarke525362
Mystery LightsLena Valencia53240
New Adventures in Space OperaJonathan Strahan (ed)19631
Convergence ProblemsWole Talabi20928
The Inhumans and Other StoriesBodhisattva Chattopadh(ed)4822
I Want That Twink ObliteratedChris McCartney4113
North Continent RibbonUrsula Whitcher339
A Jura for JuliaKen Macleod1114
Pick Your PotionEphiny Gale503
Deep DreamIndrapramit Das (ed)147
To the Stars and BackIan Whates (ed)147
Calvaria FellSparks & Warren127
Limelight and Other StoriesLyndsey Croal382
Elephants in BloomCecile Cristofari710
Back Through the Flaming DoorLiz Williams88
Discontinue if Death EnsuesGyzander & Taborska (eds)173
The Butterfly DisjunctStewart C. Baker411
Nova Scotia Volume 2Williamson & Wilson (eds)66
HeartwoodDan Coxon (ed)311
Laughs in SpaceDonna Scott (ed)74
The Utopia of UsTeika Marja Smits (ed)55
Drive or be DrivenAliya Whiteley38
The Mad Butterfly’s BallGrassman & Kelso (eds)73
Our Savage HeartJustina Robson210
Bestiary of BloodJamal Hodge (ed)141
Different Kinds of DefianceRenan Bernardo141
Egypt + 100Ahmed Naji (ed)141
All Tomorrow’s FuturesBenjamin Greenaway (ed)43
Schrodinger’s Wife (And Other Possibilities)Pippa Goldschmidt52
Little Sisters & Other StoriesVonda N. McIntyre33
GallusFaulds, Milton & Williamson (eds)42
A Stitch Between WorldsFrazier Armitage71
Cursed ShardsLeanbh Pearson (ed)32
Human ResourcesFiona Moore14
Three Curses & Other Dark TalesLeanbh Pearson11
The NeurodiverseiverseFrancis & Olmsted (eds)180
A Night so Dark and Full of StarsNikky Lee120
Fight Like a Girl 2Clarke & Hall (eds)80
Offshoots: Humanity TwiggedJuliana Rew80
The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2023)Ekpeki & Eziaghighala (eds)70
A Place Between Waking and ForgettingEugen Bacon50
Extrasensory OverloadChun Hyon Lee (ed)30
Sunflowers in the SnowDawn Bonnano30
Different Times and Other PlacesJuliet Mckenna10
Out of the Window Into the DarkMarian Womack10
Triangulation: HospitiumBrandon Ketchum (ed)01
Weathering YouthDawn Vogel10

In the Best Shorter Fiction category, 23 of the 41 long-listed works feature on LibraryThing and 25 on Goodreads; almost all of the rest are periodical or website publications.

Title AuthorGRLT
The Butcher of the ForestPremee Mohammed5,260186
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s OverAnne de Marken4,733122
The Imposition of Unnecessary ObstaclesMalka Older2,090159
The Practice, The Horizon and the ChainSofia Samatar1,455102
Lost Ark DreamingSuyi Davies Okungbowa98258
Saturation PointAdrian Tchakovksy1,45934
Navigational EntanglementsAliette de Bodard48064
CountessSuzan Palumbo34135
Unexploded RemnantsElaine Gallagher20130
The Dragonfly GambitA.D. Sui13512
A Cursed HuntRebecca Grey964
12 HoursL. Marie Wood424
Charlie SaysNeil Williamson283
Elephants in BloomCecile Cristofari710
Songs for the ShadowsCheryl S. Ntumy134
Ghost ApparentJelena Dunato511
The Year of ReturnAkotowaa Ivana Ofori411
No SympathyEoin Dooley321
The Last to DrownLorraine Wilson291
Star Pattern TravellerJoyce Ch’ng64
LunaAllen Stroud102
Waypoint SevenXan van Rooyen61
The Runemaster’s DaughterLawrence Schoen21
JezeroAllen Stroud70
ChimeraChinaza Eziaghigala10

All fourteen of the long-listed works in the Best Fiction for Younger Readers category score on both systems.

Title AuthorGRLT
Somewhere Beyond the SeaT J Klune88,811878
Immortal DarkTigest Girma11,881462
SnowglobeSoyoung Park4,177163
Blood at the RootLaDarrion Williams2,767112
SonglightMoira Buffini1,34467
Until We ShatterKate Dylan94685
The Dividing SkyJill Tew49128
RedsightMeredith Mooring36632
Doctor Who: CagedUna McCormack16113
Benny Ramirez and the Nearly DepartedJose Pablo Iriarte11311
BraidedLeah Cypess534
WayfindersBryan Chick593
Rebel DawnAnn Sei Lin402
The Rarkyn’s FallNikky Lee161

And finally, with apologies for the length of this post, all 61 of the works long-listed for Best Novel are on Goodreads and/or LibraryThing. (59 on GR and 60 on LT.) On the version of the long-list I was working from, one novel was actually listed twice, but I’ve only listed it once here (and there’s another which also features in the Best Shorter Fiction list).

Title AuthorGRLT
The Ministry of TimeKaliane Bradley102,9561,432
Emily Wilde’s Map of the OtherlandsHeather Fawcett64,5691,022
A Sorceress Comes To CallT. Kingfisher25,913716
An Education in MaliceS. T. Gibson16,561400
The Teller of Small FortunesJulie Leong11,357521
The Book of LoveKelly Link7,027378
Someone You can Build a Nest InJohn Wiswell8,063278
Alien ClayAdrian Tchaikovsky6,253218
AbsolutionJeff Vandermeer4,517279
FathomfolkEliza Chan3,341365
Private RitesJulia Armfield5,658155
Floating HotelGrace Curtis2,790177
The Mars HouseNatasha Pulley2,666167
House of Open WoundsAdrian Tchaikovsky2,347163
Machine VendettaAlastair Reynolds2,978128
Womb CityTlotlo Tsamaase2,193132
The Principle of MomentsEsme Jikiemi-Pearson1,209200
The Great WhenAlan Moore1,196195
The Briar Book of the DeadA G Slatter2,163105
The BezzleCory Doctorow1,789125
RakesfallVajra Chandrasekera62291
Deep BlackMiles Cameron1,28341
AsunderKerstin Hall79557
The Wings Upon Her BackSamantha Mills61573
Lady Eve’s Last ConRebecca Fraimow59469
Navigational EntanglementsAliette de Bodard48064
CalypsoOliver K. Langmead42247
The Legacy of Arniston HouseT. L. Huchu52636
On Vicious WorldsBethany Jacobs58824
The Last ShieldCameron Johnstone39831
RedsightMeredith Mooring36633
Beyond the Light HorizonKen Mcleod41527
The Siege of Burning GrassPremee Mohammed28137
Lake of DarknessAdam Roberts23532
The Collapsing WaveDoug Johnstone36117
Three Eight OneAliya Whiteley20130
The NightwardR. S. A. Garcia16136
Archangels of FunkAndrea Hairston14735
MorphotrophicGreg Egan20311
The Book of GoldRuth Frances Long10121
ArchipelagoH. R. Hawkins2017
Ninth LifeStark Holborn10311
The Tapestry of TimeKate Heartfield10610
ExtremophileIan Green9411
The Green Man’s WarJuliet Mckenna1088
Grim RootBonnie Jo Stufflebeam1217
Sleeping Worlds Have No MemoryYaroslav Barsukov918
We Are All Ghosts in the ForestLorraine Wilson926
The Heart of WinterShona Kinsella856
ConquistDirk Strasser405
InversionsM.V. Melcer363
VigilanceAllen Stroud166
Dark ShepherdFred Gambino136
Rabbit in the MoonFiona Moore55
Her Gilded VoiceK.C. Aegis241
Three Men in OrbitSandra Bond46
WatermythAnita Harris Satkunan82
The HeadlandAbi Curtis101
The FactoryIhor Mysiak04
Dakini AtollNikhil Singh02
That Perfect WorldBXMN10

As I said last year, I don’t really know how useful a long-list of 51, 61 or indeed 80 can be. I appreciate that awards can call attention to otherwise overlooked work, but a) I’m not convinced that an award decided by popular vote, as the BSFA and Hugo Awards are, is the best vehicle for doing that and b) this is best done with a short list, not a long list where the most interesting stuff risks getting lost in the crowd.