Doctor Who, Series 2 / 15 / 41

Posted on 31 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Well.

THIS POST HAS SPOILERS FOR TONIGHT’S EPISODE OF DOCTOR WHO

May 2025 books

Posted on 31 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Non-fiction 9 (YTD 31)
Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint
Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith
Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum
Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay
The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans
Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins
Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson (did not finish)

Non-genre 2 (YTD 19)
thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold
The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West

SF 13 (YTD 57)
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly (did not finish)
These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe
On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner (did not finish)
Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 13)
Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones
Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher
Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead

Comics 4 (YTD 16)
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris
The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al

7,200 pages (YTD 35,300)
13/31 (YTD 52/138) by non-male writers (van der Lint, Blum, Ypi, West, Bradley, Cole, Donnelly, Jacobs x2, Kaner, Engle, Huang, Ferris)
3/31 (YTD 21/138) by non-white writers (Bradley, Cole, Huang)
2/31 rereads (Beyond the Sun, Doctor Who: Logopolis)

231 books currently tagged unread, down 20 from last month, down 78 from May 2024.

Reading now
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

Coming soon (perhaps)
Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone
Fear Death by Water, by Emily Cook
Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton

Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton
The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw
The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore

The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna
Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al
The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright
The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Final Cut, by Charles Burns
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson

Hugo Best Novelette

Posted on 30 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I felt that two of these were less good than the other four, but otherwise I found it difficult to rank them. However, you gotta start somewhere.

(Titles link to original publications where available.)

6) “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha. Second paragraph of third section:

We sat on a bench and watched the East River behind the slow-moving bodies on the walkway. I tried to show her the dead book, and she thumbed the margins before giving up when it wouldn’t brighten. It was clear she had no interest in the thing.

Books and technology and perceptions and truth. Didn’t quite have the emotional punch that I wanted.

5) “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed. Second paragraph of third section:

There was plenty of night left; she knew she too could go back to bed. Instead, she wrapped up in her biggest cloak and stomped outside to empty her mailbox. It was almost—almost funny the way it kept coming, like a magic cauldron in a fairytale following a poorly worded command to make porridge, swamping the town. Finally she hauled the bag back inside and spread it out in front of the fire. Outside, the storm grumbled, receded, returned, filled the entire cottage inside the cave with the echoing sound of rain.

Quite short; wizard and her apprentice awkwardly build a relationship and fight evil.

4) “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. Second paragraph of third section:

Antonis could not believe it. In fact, he had probably stopped listening to her rant right about when his werewolf neighbor had sent him a new wallpaper pattern. A thank you gift for watering the roses outside the werewolf’s castle. Antonis said that he’d prefer to be paid in teeth, the currency of TinyCastle™, but as he had explained to Nefeli, you have to roll with the game, that’s half the fun.

Splendidly creepy story of the protagonist (and eventually others) becoming gradually cut off from the rest of humanity, in parallel timetracks, with good sense of place.

3) “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie. (Title story of a collection which you can get here.) Second paragraph of third section:

“A dangerous time,” whispered one mother to the next. “Especially
for the old.” And the whisper scurried through the village.
And close behind it, a day or so later, another whisper, that Darter
Spine’s molt was not going well, and that many had over the years
wondered about Darter Spine’s soul, soul mark or no soul mark.
That elder had always been peculiar, so the mothers and mothers’
mothers had said. “What if ?” the mothers whispered. A good person,
who made beautiful gardens and was kind to all in the village,
but peculiar. “What if ? What if Darter Spine’s soul has died. What
if this elder dies and a soul does not emerge? This elder will be lost!”

This was the first of the novelettes that I read, and I was sure I was going to vote for it, so am slightly surprised to find myself putting it only third. Very well drawn story of a rather merciless alien society, whose first contact with humans brings change, but perhaps not enough.

2) “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker. Second paragraph of third section:

“Hot stuff!” Her truck drifted in my car’s direction as she eyeballed it, then overcorrected. “No wonder you had trouble.”

Tremendous tale which starts off looking like it’s just a matter of a dysfunctional relationship between two sisters finding some common landing point after decades of estrangement, and then turns into something completely different. Loses a quarter of a point for last four paras, which are an unnecessary epilogue.

1) “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer. Second paragraph of third section:

I looked at the lease again and noticed something else: it was the simplest lease I’d signed since that sublet agreement in college that we’d made because everyone’s parents said we needed to “get things in writing.” Leases are usually full of rules and caveats—how to give notice at the end of term, how much you’ll owe if you damage something, whether you’re allowed to have a pet. This lease just said it ran from September through June, how much we were paying per month, and that we’d be paying utilities. The lead-based paint disclosure and the move-in checklist were paperclipped to the back.

Tremendous story of selkies, feminism, toxic relationships and the academic research treadmill. Charming and righteously enraging, with strong sense of the Massachusetts coast. Gets my vote.

Beyond The Sun, by Matthew Jones

Posted on 29 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I ran a finger down the side of his face and he shuddered and wrinkled his nose as if trying to discourage an insect. And then he turned on to his back and began to snore loudly.

When I first read this in 2009, I wrote:

I only realised after reading this that I had already heard the excellent audio adaptation which includes Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills. The original book is very good too, and I think would be reasonably penetrable for someone who hadn’t previously followed the Bernice Summerfield stories. Nicely observed emotional politics between and among Benny and her students, and the various aliens with whom Benny’s ex gets them involved. To a certain extent I felt it was the story that Colony In Space should have been. A good one (only the second Benny novel I have read, the first being the equally enjoyable Walking to Babylon).

I reread it in 2015, but in the midst of Clarke and other obligations didn’t write it up that time. My original plan was only to revisit the Bernice Summerfield novels that I have never written up at all, but then I thought, I actually enjoyed this and I wonder if a return visit will work? And it did; as well as the nicely judged emotional and physical perils of Benny and her students, there’s a particularly wacky alien reproduction process which often results in hot-looking humanoids, and a deceptive Ancient Weapon. One of the good ones. You can (probably) get it here.

I had written of the audio in 2007:

Beyond the Sun is another archaeological dig-goes-wrong story but introduces the character of Jason, Benny’s ex-husband, and lots of emotional angst as well as the actual plot. I was completely absorbed in it, and yet failed to spot the voices of Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills until I read the sleeve notes afterwards.

I spotted Anneke Wills this time, but failed to spot Sophie Aldred, who is actually a very versatile actor. But the star is Lisa Bowerman, really getting into her stride here as Bernice, with sarcasm and emotion, helping us through what’s actually a rather convoluted plot. The only one of the first season audios not adapted by Jac Rayner but by Matt Jones, the original author. You can get it here.

Hugo Best Related Work 2025

Posted on 28 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

6) The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion, by Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford

What? I hear you exclaim. Given my own record on speaking out against the abuses of the Hugo process carried out by the organisers of Chengdu Worldcon, how can I possibly be ranking the Barkley and Sandford Report, which blew the bloody doors off the whole affair in February 2024, last on my Hugo ballot this year?

There are several reasons, which I will go into at greater length in due course. Most important, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures. But also, this Report misses a couple of vitally important issues revealed in its own detail and compensates with rhetoric. So I’m not voting for it, but it may well win the award anyway.

5) The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel, by Jenny Nicholson.

This is a four hour long video report on a bad investment decision by Disney, to create a Star Wars hotel in Walt Disney World in Florida. It looks nice, but I honestly think that the story is not worth four hours of vidding, let alone watching.

4) r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge

I think it’s brilliant that Reddit users got together to challenge each other to read more broadly, and the enthusiasm for this project is great. I just prefer my Best Related Works to be written commentary.

3) Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics, by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones

Now this is more like it, cold hard numbers demonstrating why the published statistics from the 2023 Hugos simply cannot be trusted. I was relieved but not surprised to see that the statistics from the years that I myself was involved generally do pass the mathematical smell test. Lots of beautiful numerical details here, which I’ve been chewing on occasionally ever since it was published.

As noted above, though, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures, so it’s not in my top two in this category.

2) Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll

Second paragraph of third chapter (actually Chapter 2, “Whitey on the Moon”, counting the introduction as the first chapter):

[Richard B.] Spencer expounded upon this idea at length in an early podcast that explicated Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) with alt-right essayist Roman Bernard. Interstellar caused a big stir among alt-right intellectuals because it expressed the widespread reactionary sentiment that the United States had undergone a serious social and technological decline. The country’s malaise, they suggested, could only be reversed by intrepid white explorers taking up where the Apollo missions left off. In the film, the United States has shifted all resources away from technological innovation and into food production after an environmental catastrophe reduces the planet to a dustbowl. Even as the government denies the possibility of spaceflight—they claim the moon landing was an expensive hoax—a secret NASA program strives to save humanity by sending settlers to colonize another planet.

A short, fascinating analysis of the extent to which the alt-right has drawn inspiration from science fiction, often from authors and works who would have been horrified that they were being used for these purposes. Alas, a very timely book given what has been happening in the USA of late. You can get it here.

1) Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum.

As its title suggests, 2312 is a novel driven less by story or characters, and more by the desire to capture a certain (fictional, futuristic) moment of human history. Robinson accomplishes this by trotting out all the best-known (and often-derided) tools of science-fictional worldbuilding, but also by referencing much of the work that has come before him. So 2312 often seems as much a commentary on visions of the future as one of its own.

Tremendous assembly of a body of work by the excellent Abigail Nussbaum, whose thoughtful dissection of form and substance is always a delight, and she is usually right about the books as well (ie often agrees with me). Gets my vote with enthusiasm. You can get it here.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 28 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans

Last books finished
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner (did not finish)
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West
Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi

Next books
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo

City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on 27 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Langrice had shrugged. “Magister.” Speaking Pel easily because running the Anchorage meant you needed to be good with languages. “No Ilmari will work for me. It’s bad luck. Only the desperate will even come buy a drink from me. Or those who need to leave Ilmar the least convenient way.” She’d shaken her head ruefully, as though she’d give up the Anchorage and its trade in a moment if only there was someone else. “They won’t even take my money from my hands. I have to send my staff to market, or else pay some middleman. So why, exactly, would I not work with you Palleseen?”

Won the BSFA Award for Best Novel two years ago, against The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift and The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard, both of which we shortlisted for the Clarke Award that year, and Stars and Bones by Gareth L. Powell and The This by Adam Roberts, which we didn’t. City of Last Chances was also submitted for the Clarke, but is pretty clearly fantasy rather than sf, so I put it on one side for later. (To remind you: we gave the Clarke to Venomous Lumpsucker, the Nebula went to Babel and the Hugo, officially at least, to Nettle & Bone.)

I don’t think I voted in this category, and if I had a vote now I’d vote for The Coral Bones and The Red Scholar’s Wake ahead of City of Last Chances, but this is nonetheless a very good book, set in a fantasy city which has recently been occupied by invaders, where the various ancient civic institutions, including the magical ones, continue to function despite the change of rules, and further potential social ferment is brewing. There is a particularly effective twist in the middle, and a slightly discarded deity who attaches himself to one of the main protagonists. It is, er, a bit long at 496 pages. You can get it here.

I’ve run out of Tiptree and Clarke winners to read, so there are only two left in this sequence which I started with Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop back in 2012; a twelve and a half year reading project comes to an end. I think I’ll replace it with a project of reading a book by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who was not a white man; there are 29 of them by my count. It’s good to have a target.

Lodestar Award 2025

Posted on 26 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Moonstorm, by Yoon Ha Lee. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Most of her classmates zeroed their rifles only when Instructor Kim reminded them. Hwa Young took the training more seriously because of her ambitions. The rest of them could coast on their family connections. She didn’t have that option.

Withdrawn by the author after it became known that this year’s Worldcon had been using ChatGPT to vet programme participants, a revelation that had certain other consequences too. It’s a shame because I rather enjoyed it, a narrative of a young soldier with decidedly mixed loyalties in an interplanetary conflict. You can get it here.

5) The Feast Makers by H.A. Clarke. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dead ahead the Delacroix House exploded upwards and outwards in intricate gingerbread frills. Old snow clung to it, and icicles long as my femurs. Colored lights bled through the windows. Irises clawed through grey slush on the lawn below. It was ostensibly closed for business today, but the look of it said otherwise—people teemed on the long porch in long fur coats and cowboy boots, smoking and bickering and embracing one another. It felt like a music festival or an artist’s funeral. Even from this distance I could hear acrid laughter, drunken singing, weeping, and blunt edged threats. Jing pulled into the lot, cut the music, and eased into one of the last available spots in a sea of variously glossy dark or rust-fucked cars.

A sequel to a book I have not read, and I could not understand what was going on. You can get it here.

4) Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When I land, the impact shatters me to pieces. I am a wreckage of garbled limbs and protruding bones. My heart and lungs struggle behind fractured, exposed ribs.

I am one of the three people in fandom for whom this series hasn’t really gelled, which is a shame as the author comes across as a committed and engaging personality both online and in person. You can get it here.

3) So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dinner had been served. Usually, her parents would wait for the whole family to be home before even setting the table, but not when she was here. When Aveline Renard Castell, the gods-blessed ruler of San Irie, arrived in Deadegg to visit the Vincent family, they brought out the good plates and their best manners. Which was annoying, because she was, well, the absolute worst.

Story of magically gifted teenage girl military leaders, which interestingly is a sequel to an unpublished adventure but works regardless. Lots of high politics and dragons. You can get it here.

2) Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Then, one chilly winter morning, Grandpa Louis wasn’t present anymore.

Prequel to the author’s Elatsoe, which most people loved, but I had reservations. Sheine Lende however is a different matter, nicely and tenderly done story of a girl and a ghost dog, and the forces of evil (both human and supernatural) in 1970s America. You can get it here.

1) The Maid and the Crocodile, by Jordan Ifueko. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Cold leeched from their windowless plaster walls, even in the blazing Oluwan heat. On each front door hung a single adornment: the head of a crocodile, glossily preserved in resin.

Set in the same world as Raybearer, but I felt that the world-building kinks that bothered me about the previous book had been ironed out here; a great tale of gods and (human) monsters, bad parenting and disability, and political liberation – a story for our times, perhaps. You can get it here.

This collage of covers was constructed by hand using PowerPoint and Paint, without use of AI.

The best known books set in each country: Nepal

Posted on 25 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Nepal.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster	Jon Krakauer	543,638	14,827
The Snow Leopard	Peter Matthiessen	19,544	2,844
Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal	Conor Grennan	23,134	1,102
The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest	Anatoli Boukreev	17,718	1,189
Breathless	Amy McCulloch	25,286	563
Annapurna, First Conquest of an 8000-Meter Peak: (26,493 Feet)	Maurice Herzog	10,203	1,078
Touching My Father’s Soul: A Sherpa’s Journey to the Top of Everest	Jamling Tenzing Norgay	2,703	372
Annapurna: A Woman’s Place	Arlene Blum	2,941	256

Into Thin Air is the most popular book on either LT or GR on any of these individual national lists since Night by Elie Wiesel, thirteen countries ago.

Only two of these eight books are fiction. I have not been tracking systematically, but that seems low.

Despite that fact that it has a population of over 30 million, there is only one activity in Nepal that is of interest to most writers. Three of these eight books are about Everest (including the only one by an actual Nepalese writer), two about Annapurna, and one (Breathless) about a fictional mountain peak.

I wasn’t completely sure about We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, which begins in Tibet and ends in Canada, but as far as I can tell the sections about being a Tibetan refugee in Nepal amount to more than half of the book. (Just to make it crystal clear: Tibet is an “Autonomous Region” of the People’s Republic of China, but Nepal is an independent state.)

I excluded nine books for being insufficiently Nepalese in setting, and in most cases they are very firmly set elsewhere, but close enough for readers to get confused. The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, is mostly set in India. So is Sold, by Patricia McCormick. The protagonist of Peak, by Roland Smith, climbs Everest from the Tibetan side. Tintin in Tibet, by Hergé, speaks for itself. Himalaya, by Michael Palin, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, by John Wood, and Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, by Pico Iyer, all cover numerous countries including Nepal. Colin Thubron starts in Nepal but leaves just before the half-way point of To a Mountain in Tibet.

Coming next: Venezuela, Niger, Australia and North Korea.

The WSFS Consultative Votes: the Retro Hugos and the Artist categories

Posted on 24 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Now that I’m no longer involved with the WSFS process this year, I can tell you what I think about the two consultative votes that are running on proposed changes to the WSFS Constitution. The votes are open to all WSFS members of this year’s Worldcon, and run until today week, 31 May. We ran the equivalent exercise much later in the summer last year, so in part this is an experiment to see how big a difference the timing could make.

The votes themselves are purely consultative, of course; the Business Meeting alone has the power to decide the fate of the proposals. The point of the exercise is to see how a consultative vote actually works before anyone starts hardwiring it into the Constitution.

Last year’s Business Meeting passed a total of nine constitutional amendments which must now be ratified by this year’s to take effect. Some of these are minor and/or technical. The two that were felt to be most interesting for the public were the proposed abolition of the Retro Hugos, and language to tighten up the definitions of the Professional Artist and Fan Artist categories. I do have views on all the others, and will come back to them in due course.

I do not love the Retro Hugos. I wrote in Uncanny Magazine earlier this year:

I used to really like this idea [the Retro Hugos], but I went off it after running the Retro Hugos in 2019 and 2020 when it became clear that winners and finalists did not really reflect the spirit of Worldcon as it has become, that voters were voting on the future reputations of the nominees rather than their work in the year in question, that the heirs of the winners were difficult to track down to send the awards to, and that participation was declining.

I don’t strongly feel that it’s of vital importance to ban future Worldcons from running them, but since my opinion is being solicited, I will vote to abolish them.

The other proposal causes me more reflection, not least because I have been calling for these two categories to be reformed for years, and I think that some of the current proposed wording is actually mine, emerging from the Hugo Awards Study Committee in 2022.

I have come to realise that I mistakenly accepted the logic proposed by some of the louder voices on the Hugo Awards Study Committee that we should define all genre-related activity as either Fan or Pro, and then define the awards accordingly. In fact Pro Art and Fan Art have been historically very different things, and what we should be talking about is how to change the definitions of both to reflect how the production and consumption of art has changed over the years.

The definition now proposed makes the mistake of concentrating purely on the economics of the transaction – if the art is paid for, it would be considered professional art; if not, it would be considered fan art. It’s my mistake and I have to admit it. It’s the wrong line. The Hugo for Best Professional Artist recognises, and should recognise, art created as part of the professional enterprise of science fiction and fantasy, and the Hugo for Best Fan Artist recognises, and should recognise, art that is created as fannish activity.

The current definitions are much closer to the spirit of the awards and to the expectations of voters than are the proposed new definitions. They do need to be updated to include the new means of publication of Professional and Fan Art, but the fact is that a lot of Fan Art is paid for, and the point about Professional Art isn’t that it’s paid for but that it’s created in relation to the wider industry.

So I don’t think the current proposal is the right answer, and I’m voting against it.

More on the other proposals at a later date.

The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James

Posted on 23 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third story (Convention Special):

I had planned to read the Eleventh Doctor album Dead Man’s Hand next in my sequence of DW comics, but discovered that as such, it was not in fact in the Humble Bundle that I purchased some years back. However three compilations of compilations were, and the third includes the stories Sky Jacks!, which I read last month, Dead Man’s Hand, two shorts for the 50th anniversary, and also Paul Cornell’s lovely The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who.

Dead Man’s Hand, which is the one I was looking for, is a rather fun Wild West story where the Doctor and Clara team up with Calamity Jane and the visiting Oscar Wilde to fight off alien invaders, with due attention to setting and character. Great fun.

Convention Special is a rather cliched story of aliens invading San Diego Comic Con; it has been done before.

Birthday Boy has a flimsy plot excuse for the Doctor to encounter many of his past companions. Unfortunately they are not drawn very well, which weakens the impact.

But it’s worth it for the three longer pieces. You can get it here.

Hugo Graphic Story or Comic 2025

Posted on 22 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Very clear winner for me.

6) Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed

Second frame of Chapter 51 (the third in this compilation):

I’ve totally lost track of what’s going on with the plot of this series.

You can get it here.

5) My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2

Second frame of what looks like it might be the third section:

Superlative graphic novel, but I am not at all convinced that it is sff.

You can get it here.

4) We Called Them Giants

Only frame of third page:

And then I woke up and found everyone really had [left me].
HELLO?!

Mysterious dark story of the disappearance of most of humanity, and the giants that come instead.

You can get it here.

3) The Hunger and the Dusk: Vol. 1

Second frame of third part:

The poets say, “Call them not dead who lay down their lives for their people.”

Orcs and humans have made peace; but something worse is coming.

You can get it here.

2) The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag

Not sure if there are sections, but this is the second frame of the third page.

Lovely LGBTQ+ coming-of-age story, with a monster in the basement.

You can get it here.

1) Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way

Second frame of third page:

LIGHTS ARE NOW OFF
Mariner: Spock Clock, cancel all alarms for the day.
Clock: Acknowledged. Sleep long and prosper, Lieutenant Junior Grade Mariner.

Just a total joy. Beautifully consistent with the TV series, yet warping the format of a choose-your-own-adventure story to challenge the reader.

You can get it here.

thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold

Posted on 21 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

light squeals in red and white flashes

Intense story of a gay man who serves in Vietnam and becomes a biker. Graphic and lyrical language; mercifully short. Not really sure what more to say. You can get it here.

I thought that this was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves, but it turns out to be non-genre. Next on the unread SF pile is Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 21 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner

Last books finished
These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe
On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher
Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead
The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček
Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay
The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane

Next books
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

The Peladon audio plays

Posted on 20 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

For reasons that I may or may not divulge, I have been listening to the Big Finish plays set on the planet Peladon. There are six of these: The Bride of Peladon, a main sequence Fifth Doctor story from 2008; The Prisoner of Peladon, a 2009 Companion Chronicles story starring David Troughton as King Peladon again; and a four-story box-set from 2022, set at different points in Peladon’s history and with a largely different cast for each play.

The first of these is more than two hours long, and all the rest are over an hour, for a total listening time of the guts of nine hours. I found them very rewarding, especially (shout-out in advance) The Death of Peladon by Mark Wright, the third of the four-fold sequence. Robert Valentine, as script editor for the 2022 stories, drew up a timeline for Peladon’s history, so you can experience the stories in historical order if you like (though I’m writing them up here in release order):

Valentine explained on Twitter/X that the events of the Gary Russell novel Legacy got eaten in the Time War, so the audio sequence should not be understood to be in the same continuity as the book.

In 2009, I wrote:

I loved The Bride of Peladon: OK, a substantial amount of it is a retread of The Curse of Peladon, but that is probably my favourite Third Doctor story so it’s not a bad start; and then we have the Osirans as in Pyramids of Mars, as well as Ice Warriors, Alpha Centauri, Aggedor, Arcturans and all. Erimem’s departure is as you would expect (though we have some good misdirection) and Peri promises that she will not leave the Doctor to marry an alien king. I laughed so loud at that line that passers-by were very startled. But you also have Phyllida Law as the royal grandmother, and Jenny Agutter as the baddie, and it’s generally excellent.

Sixteen years later, I agree with myself. It’s a tremendous ensemble piece, one of my favourite Big Finishes. I should have said that Caroline Morris as Erimem, the Egyptian princess who is a companion for the Fifth Doctor in a dozen Big Finish plays, and Nicola Bryant as Peri, both put in great performances and have very sparkly chemistry in their last appearance together. It’s a bit odd that the dodgy McGuffin can tell who has royal descent by sniffing their blood though. You can get it here.

Also in 2009, I wrote:

The Prisoner of Peladon, by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, is the latest in the Big Finish series of Companion Chronicles, although this time the story is told by a non-companion who appeared in only one story in 1972, King Peladon of the eponymous planet (played by David Troughton, son of Patrick, who has also of course appeared in other Who stories both Old and New and recently took on the cloak and dead bird of the Black Guardian for Big Finish). Troughton is, as ever, great, and Nicholas Briggs is, as ever, good as the monsters (Ice Warriors this time, of course). The concept is very interesting – Peladon has taken in large numbers of Ice Warrior refugees after an internal conflict, with the result that Ice Warrior politics spills catastrophically over to the host planet; the Third Doctor arrives to sort things out, of course, but – and this is the bit I really liked – the King gets a brilliant rant about how badly Three behaves to people, to which the Doctor has no answer. Scott and Wright would not have got away with it if Pertwee was still alive, but it gladdened my heart. (This was directed by Nicola Bryant who herself visited Peladon as Peri in a Fifth Doctor audio last year.)

I should make it clear that this was a format of Big Finish plays where there were only two actors, Troughton (jr) and Briggs with Troughton doing the narration and most of the voices. Listening to it again, I stand by all of the above, and it is really remarkable how prescient the refugees plotline turned out to be – this was in 2009 when the flows from Iraq and Afghanistan had slowed to a trickle, the Syria war had not yet begun, and the wave of economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa was also yet to become a thing. You can get it here.

The four-volume box set from 2022 features Jane Goddard as Alpha Centauri in three of the four episodes, but different rulers of Peladon in each. (And unseen growling Aggedors throughout.) This brief promotional video name-checks the other big stars, but also showcases Howard Carter’s tremendous moody interpretation of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” (aka “Klokkleda, Partha Mennin Klatch”) which is a unifying theme tune for all four plays.

The first of the four stories is The Ordeal of Peladon, by Jonathan Barnes and series script editor Robert Valentine. This brings back David Troughton as King Peladon in old age, dealing with a wandering prophet and a cosmic inspection by the Federation. The plot takes us on a journey across Peladon for the first time – up to now we have only seen the citadel itself and the Ice Warrior refugee camps – and gives a strong sense of a world with gross inequality and structural stress, setting the scene for the next three plays. Both the prophet and his acolyte are played by Black actors (Ashley Zhangazha and Moyo Akandé), which of course has further resonances. There is a well-judged cameo from Qnivq Graanag nf gur Sbhegrragu Qbpgbe at the end.

The Poison of Peladon, by the normally reliable Lizzie Hopley, was probably the one of the four that worked least well for me. River Song is posing as a high priestess at the court of Queen Thalira (played here by Deborah Findley); Ribble the Arcturan (Justin Salinger) is posing as a friend but actually fomenting revolution; Chancellor Gobran (Aaron Neil) is spreading literal poison; there is a villainous Earth priest played by Ariyon Bakare (recently the evil Barber in The Story and the Engine). A lot of moving plot parts that didn’t gel as much as I’d have liked. (Also, for me there is only one Ribble.)

On the other hand, the Death of Peladon by Mark Wright is a taut and well-structured political drama, with an all-female guest cast. A hundred years on from The Poison of Peladon and fifty years on from The Bride of Peladon, Queen Minaris (Sara Powell) and her disaffected daughter Isabelda (Remmie Milner) face both a dissatisfied population led by insurgent Helais (Liz White) and environmental disaster from the (now exhausted) trisilicate mines. The Sixth Doctor and Mel tumble into this but it’s mainly up to the Pels to sort themselves out.

Finally, The Truth of Peladon is more or less a two-hander between Paul McGann and Meera Syal, the latter playing expert seamstress Arla Decanto, who the Doctor persuades to become a rebel by showing her the dark side of Peladon’s society, rather like the Three Ghosts and Scrooge. Jason Watkins gets a look in as evil Chancellor Barok, and Nicholas Briggs turns up again too. Syal is always great, but I did not quite understand why the Royal Seamstress in particular needed to have her eyes opened.

I thought this was a very decent box set. As I said, the third episode was exceptional, and even the second is far from dreadful. You can get it here.

Hugo Novels 2025

Posted on 19 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Now that I am just another punter, I can reveal my votes in this (and other) categories. I found this a much easier ranking than in some years.

6) Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Some past interaction had resulted in the inspector’s cheek and the side of his neck being torn open, revealing plastic bones and the ducts of his hydraulics. For a moment Charles’ proprietary centers prompted him to deny access to Master on the basis that the inspector was improperly dressed, and to ask him to return when his face had been repaired. Police authority overrode him, though. Now that the inspector had arrived, Charles could not impede the investigation. Which was only fair, given that he was the murderer.

I’m sorry, I just don’t like the travails of anthropomorphic robots and their makers as a storyline, and that’s what this book is about. Shortlisted for the Clarke Award. Locus Top Ten (SF).

You can get it here.

I like all the rest though.

5) Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘What did I do?’ I demand, and by the second time it’s more pleading and begging. There aren’t many good reasons to be hauled off to see the big man. And I can’t see why they’d need to make an example of someone right now, given all the varied examples that our delivery method provided us with, but that’s the only thing I can think of. They’re going to dangle me from the scaffolding just to make sure everyone else is sufficiently educated as to the way things are run around here. A final irony, the career academic ending his life as a lesson.

Well imagined, plot-twisty take on exploration of an alien planet, where the scientists themselves are under the control of a brutal autocratic regime and the planet’s environment is horrifyingly hostile. Shortlisted for the BSFA Award but withdrawn. Locus Top Ten (SF).

You can get it here.

4) Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. Second paragraph of third chapter:

And they never once thanked her for it.

Fantasy novel told from the point of view of the anthropophagous monster, which falls in love with a human girl whose family are horrendously abusive. Lots here about disability. Shortlisted for the Nebula Award. Locus Top Ten (First Novel).

You can get it here.

3) A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:

At first her sleep-fogged brain thought that it might have been a sound. Had there been rain? Had she woken because the drumming on the roof had stopped? No, there wasn’t any rain last night, was there? It was clear as a bell and chilly from it.

Another fantasy story with a protagonist whose best friend betrays her early in the book and whose abusive mother has evil plans which need to be thwarted. Shortlisted for the Nebula Award. Locus Top Ten (Fantasy).

You can get it here.

2) The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. Second paragraph of third chapter:

This meant the Empire always had better soldiers than most other fighting forces, certainly. But the beating heart of the Empire were the Sublimes: the cerebrally suffused and augmented set who planned, managed, and coordinated everything the many Iyalets of the Empire did.

Murder investigation in a richly imagined fantasy empire which is beset by adversaries without and within. Locus Top Ten (Fantasy).

You can get it here.

1) The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Second paragraph of first part of third chapter:

Debility, Stanley had said. Well, they all knew what that meant. Scurvy. Men ruptured by melancholy, bleeding from their hairlines. Teeth loose in the head as a blown rose’s petals. Weeping for home— more so than usual. Aching at the joints. The smell of an orange, it’s said, could drive a debilitated man to derangement. The word “Mother” is like a lance to the ribs. Old wounds reopen.

The narrator is assigned to help a member of the Franklin expedition, rescued from 1847, integrate into contemporary British society (where the government has secretly discovered limited time travel). But the project turns out to be much more than she could have anticipated, in several ways. Ticked a lot of my boxes and gets my vote. Shortlisted for the Clarke Award. Locus Top Ten (First Novel).

You can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Cameroon

Posted on 18 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Cameroon.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
How Beautiful We Were	Imbolo Mbue	18,281	726
The Informationist	Taylor Stevens	11,303	950
A Zoo in My Luggage	Gerald Durrell	5,281	959
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut	Nigel Barley	3,375	623
The Bafut Beagles	Gerald Durrell	2,022	709
Les impatientes	Djaïli Amadou Amal	8,714	105
Houseboy	Ferdinand Oyono	2,295	372
The Overloaded Ark	Gerald Durrell	1,418	472

This was one of the easiest runs I have had for a while. Gerald Durrell does well, and I remember reading those books when I was 13 and loving them; and I also remember really enjoying The Innocent Anthropologist when I was a bit older. But I’m glad that the top spot goes to a Cameroonian woman writer, and I’m interested that a novel by another Cameroonian woman writer, that hasn’t even been translated into English, also makes the top eight. I must add also that The Informationist sounds like great fun.

I’m used to a certain fluctuation between the popularity of books on both systems, but the relative LibraryThing invisibility of Les impatientes by Djaïli Amadou Amal is remarkable. It’s the third most widely owned of these books on Goodreads, and not even in the top fifteen on LT.

I disqualified two books, neither of which was a difficult decision. Behold the Dreamers, also by Imbolo Mbue, is about Cameroonian immigrants in New York, and seems to be set entirely in the USA. The Marco Effect, by Jussi Adler-Olsen, is a Danish crime novel with a subplot set in Cameroon, but it’s much less than half of the book as far as I can tell.

Other countries where I only disqualified two books: China, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa.
Countries where I only disqualified one book: India, the USA, Nigeria, Russia, Iran, the UK, Spain, Iraq.
Countries where I have not disqualified any books: Japan, Egypt, DRC, Vietnam, Colombia.

Coming next: Nepal, Venezuela, Niger and then Australia.

My great-great-grandfather’s non-appointment as Assistant Secretary of War of the United States

Posted on 17 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I have been digging a bit more into a letter from my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Morris Wickersham (1819-1894), to his wife Fanny, dated 25 October 1866, so a year and a half after the end of the Civil War. The letter says, simply,

I have just been tendered the appointment of Asst. Secretary of War & asked for my acceptance. What say you? Mr. Stanton retires & Gen. Sherman takes the position of Secretary of War & ’tis under the new Secty that the offer is made to me.

History records, however, that Edwin Stanton, appointed Secretary of War by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, continued in that position under Andrew Johnson after Lincoln’s assassination until 1868; and the Assistant Secretary of War, Thomas Eckert, who had been appointed only a few months earlier in July 1866, continued to serve until February 1867 and was not replaced when he resigned, and the post of Assistant Secretary was then abolished for over 20 years.

In fact, there was a major clash between President Johnson and Secretary Stanton, with Johnson taking a more accommodating attitude to the defeated South and Stanton taking a harder line on Reconstruction. July 1866 saw temperatures rising, with 46 African-Americans massacred in Memphis, Tennessee, at the start of the month, three of Johnson’s cabinet resigning, and then another massacre of dozens of African-Americans demonstrating for their rights in New Orleans on 30 July.

Congress was dominated by Radical Republicans who supported Stanton as Secretary of War and suspected Johnson (correctly) of being too soft on the Southerners. Johnson fought back by holding a National Union Convention in August, trying to forge a new political movement which would support his presidency, and then mounting a campaign tour, the “Swing Around the Circle“, from late August to mid-September, which took in most of the industrialised North (except, I note, New England).

My attempt to draw the “Swing Around the Circle”, though of course Johnson would have travelled by train and these are the modern roads.

The Swing Around the Circle backfired. Johnson’s stump speeches were portrayed in a hostile media as undignified and irrational; his well-known problem with alcohol fed the image of a President who had lost the plot and needed to be restrained and constrained by Congress. It must have looked different to Johnson himself; he enjoyed public speaking, he was normally good at it and he was surrounded by sympathisers. As the mid term elections of 1866 drew near, he anticipated a groundswell of public opinion in his favour which would weaken the Radical Republicans and enable him to get rid of Stanton.

Election Day was staggered across the states in those days, and in the early returns it was not obvious that Johnson’s position was going to be weakened. Five states went to the polls on 9 October, and while Johnson lost three of his supporters to the Republicans in Pennsylvania, he actually picked up a seat in Indiana. Twelve more states were to vote on 6 November, and to us psephologists looking at the early trends, the result looks pretty obvious in advance, but the phenomenon of wishful thinking by a doomed leader is not unique to that particular time and place.

So, the idea that Johnson might have hoped to get rid of Stanton and replace him with General William T. Sherman is not at all surprising – indeed it is part of the standard narrative of the period, which culminated in Congress passing a law forbidding Johnson to fire cabinet members without its approval, Johnson going ahead and firing Stanton anyway, his impeachment by the House of Representatives and survival of the trial by the Senate by a single vote.

But the idea that he would also have wanted to replace Stanton’s Assistant secretary, the super-competent telegraph expert Thomas Eckert, with Samuel Morris Wickersham, an iron broker from Philadelphia whose military service during the war consisted of chasing the defeated rebels back south from Gettysburg, is a bit more surprising. However, I have one important piece of evidence that supports this narrative.

As it happens, the last stop on Johnson’s Swing Around the Circle was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is remarkable for only one thing: it is the state capital. The governor since 1860 was Andrew Gregg Curtin, who was term-limited as governor and was campaigning for the U.S. Senate (in those days, senators were elected by the legislature). Samuel Morris Wickersham was friendly with Curtin, but also not a fan of the radical Republicans; I wonder if it was Curtin who put a word in the president’s ear about a potential Assistant Secretary? Or indeed if the entire affair was in Curtin’s own head, and he mentioned it to Wickersham without Johnson’s knowledge?

In any case, it didn’t matter; when the election results came through the following week, Johnson’s authority was dealt a fatal blow by the voters, who gave the Radical Republicans two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress, and left him in office but not in power until he was replaced by Ulysses S Grant in 1869. This was probably a Good Thing, and although Reconstruction was brought to a halt in 1877, if Johnson had prevailed it never have got started. So on the whole I am glad that my great-great-grandfather avoided being on the wrong side of history in 1866.

Four decades later, his son became Attorney-General of the USA under President Taft, but that’s another story.

Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith (and Kevin Clarke)

Posted on 16 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I am getting to the end of the Black Archives! At the time of writing, there is only one more to go after Silver Nemesis, though I expect that there will be another in June.

I missed this story on first broadcast in 1988. When I finally saw it for the first time, twenty years later, I was unimpressed.

People had warned me that Silver Nemesis was pretty rubbish, and I’m afraid it is. One of my frequent complaints about bad Who, and indeed bad sf, is that all too often the means and motivation of the bad guys make no sense. In Silver Nemesis, the means and motivation of the hero make no sense: how and why did the Doctor launch the rocket into space in 1638??? The basic plot of three different sets of baddies (Cybermen, Nazis and Lady Peinforte) trying to get the McGuffin is comprehensible, but little else is. Am I unusual in finding Fiona Walker’s performance as Lady Peinforte rather poor? She was way better in CLAVDIVS. And the bit with the Queen is pretty silly.

I was a bit more positive on my rewatch three years on:

I can’t quite be as positive about Silver Nemesis [as I was about The Happiness Patrol], though again I liked it more than I had expected to. It is the first time we have had a contemporary English setting since, errr, the last Cybermen story three years ago, but it doesn’t really make enough of the normality such a set-up offers, setting us up with real (Courtney Pine) and fake (the Queen) celebrities and then bringing in Lady Peinforte and De Flores through literal and metaphorical timewarps, with added Cybermen. A lot of the bits work well, including the increasing sense of the Doctor as someone with a number of devious plans which we don’t know about (and Fiona Walker’s delightfully psychotic Lady Peinforte) but it doesn’t quite add up together.

Watching it again for this post, I felt a bit more negative. The unrealistic firefights between the Nazis and the Cybermen (often a problem with Who, see also here) are symptomatic of the problems of directing the story, which James Cooray Smith goes into in depth, as discussed below. I did not realise until I read the Black Archive after rewatching it that there are several different versions of the story which have been released on video. Eventually I will shell out for the Blu-Ray and discern between them all.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Kevin Clarke’s novelisation of his own story is:

Such was the visitors’ interest that the materialization of the TARDIS a few yards away passed unnoticed. The Doctor and Ace stepped out. Ace sniffed the damp air as she looked around.

I wrote in 2008 that:

Clarke used the opportunity of adapting the script for novelisation to put back some of the material which apparently ended up on the cutting-room floor, but the result is if anything even more confusing. Where the TV series can just about get away with characters being darkly mysterious, the written word demands a bit more clarity (thinking especially of the portrait of Ace in Windsor Castle, never explained). Fails the Bechdel test, unless the cook who Mrs Hackensack’s ancestor bribed away from Lady Peinforte was a woman. (Hackensack is a much less likely name than the TV series’ Remington for a 17th century English aristocrat; but then, so is Peinforte.)

Not much to add to that. You can get it here.

So, the previous Black Archives that I have read by James Cooray Smith were cases where either I agreed with him that the story is good (The Massacre, The Night of the Doctor) or less good (The Ultimate Foe, The Underwater Menace). In this case, I don’t have a very high opinion of Silver Nemesis, but Cooray Smith mounts a bravura defence of the story as a major classic of the Cartmel / Nathan-Turner era. I’m still not at all convinced, but I admire the passion that he brings to it, as well as the forensic detail in his research.

The first chapter, “‘Meteor Approaches England'”, looks at the context from within DW of Andrew Cartmel’s arrival as script editor in 1987, after the great cancellation crisis of 1986, and his work to assemble a team of writers who could deliver the necessary scripts. He makes the interesting point that in 1987 there were very few experienced Doctor Who writers available; Robert Holmes had recently died, and most of the other veterans were busy with other projects, or had fallen out with John Nathan-Turner, or both.

The second chapter, “The Arrow”, looks at Kevin Clarke’s career – of the newly recruited writers, he was the most experienced on paper, but that is not saying much (and the details say even less). It then looks at how the concepts of Silver Nemesis came together; the Cybermen were there from an early stage, and the weird bit with the Queen was originally intended to be the real Prince Edward, who was active in TV drama at the time; but he said no.

The third chapter, “The Statue”, looks at the difficulties of recording, mainly at the physicakl challenges of getting everything filmed combined with the problem that the two stars, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, were very under-rehearsed due to their busy schedule working on other stories. It starts by noting that most of the guest actors were third or fourth choices for their roles. The second paragraph is:

De Flores was turned down by Charles Gray, while Anna Massey and Sarah Badel declined the opportunity to play Lady Peinforte, as did Penelope Wilton. Even the single-scene role of the mathematician was turned down by Geoffrey Bayldon, Richard Vernon and others before being accepted by Leslie French. It would be tempting to conclude that these refusals reflected Doctor Who’s declining prestige in 1988, but they are in fact common throughout the programme’s history. It’s an example of one of the usual compromises of programme-making.

The fourth chapter, “The Bow”, looks at some of the subtle allusions in the script – the fate of the muggers is a reference to the tarot, Lady Peinforte’s reference to The Winter’s Tale rewards closer analysis, and there’s a lot to say about jazz (I had not realised that Courtney Pine composed new music specially for the story).

The fifth chapter, “Critical Mass”, is the defence that I mentioned previously. Cooray Smith loves this story and is surprised that other people don’t. “Frankly, this writer genuinely struggles to understand what is not ‘explained’ in Silver Nemesis, except that which is left ambiguous for dramatic effect”. As will be apparent, I am not in agreement with Cooray Smith here, but I admire the passion of his argument.

The sixth and final chapter, “‘Re-Form'”, defends the legacy of elements from Silver Nemesis extending into New Who, and also goes into the (fairly substantial) differences between the different commercial releases of the story, including the novelisation.

An appendix lists the known script drafts for each episode, and another the scene breakdown for the first episode.

At 188 pages, this is rather a long Black Archive, but Cooray Smith has a lot to say, and says it well. You can get it here.

Incidentally, as I said last time, the Seventh Doctor has been very well served by the Black Archives; fully two thirds of his stories, and more than 70% of his episodes, are now covered by the series. Leaving aside the special cases of Withnail and I, the closest competitors are the Fourth Doctor, for whom the newly published BA on Logopolis takes his story count to over 30%, and the Thirteenth, 46% of whose episodes have been covered (though only 25% of her stories).

Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint

Posted on 15 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (which is presented bilingually in the original text):

Hoe bijzonder het precies is dat Jardin d’émail als monumentale tuin gerealiseerd is, is moeilijk te bevatten. Natuurlijk, het was Dubuffet die het kunstwerk schiep, eerst als een Édifice van twee bij drie meter met de titel Jardin d’émail. Maar het is museumdirecteur Oxenaar die zorgt voor de ‘vergroting’ van het idee, zoals Dubuffet dat in een brief verwoordt. Binnen het oeuvre van Dubuffet wordt Jardin d’émail gerekend tot de belangrijkste voorbeelden van zijn L’Hourloupe-architectuur samen met Closerie Falbala en de Groupe de quatres arbres, een groep van vier bomen voor een bankgebouw in New York en gemaakt in opdracht van de Amerikaanse bankier Rockefeller. (afb. pp. 38-39)

It is difficult to comprehend how amazing it is that Jardin d’émail has been realized as a monumental garden. Of course, it was Dubuffet who created the artwork, initially as an Édifice measuring two by three metres and with the title Jardin d’émail. But it is the museum director Oxenaar who enables the ‘enlargement’ of the idea, as Dubuffet puts it in a letter. Within Dubuffet’s oeuvre, Jardin d’émail is considered one of the most important examples of his L’Hourloupe architecture, together with Closerie Falbala and the Groupe de quatres arbres, a group of four trees for a bank building in New York, commissioned by the American banker Rockefeller. (image pp. 38-39)

The Jardin d’émail (Enamel Garden) is one of the most striking sculptures in the Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo, in the Netherlands. It’s twenty metres by thirty, a stylised garden made not of enamel but of concrete, epoxy resin, polyurethane and paint. It’s probably the biggest single artwork in the whole museum.

We went to see it in 2005 and again in 2022. Here’s my attempt to recreate the same scene twice.

And here’s me beside the central butterfly:

This short book about it by art historian Roos van der Lint describes it as “deeply embedded” in the Dutch national consciousness, and goes into the story of Jean Dubuffet’s career (originally in the family wine shipping trade, but became an artist during the second world war) and how museum director Rudi Oxenaar was impressed by a smaller version, two metres by three, and commissioned the larger one for the Kröller-Müller Museum, built between 1968 and 1973. It also explains the extensive process of restoration in 2020 – it certainly seemed in much better shape the second time we went.

It’s possibly the single most interesting object in the entire Dutch province of Gelderland, and if you ever have a chance to see it, you should take it. Otherwise you can get this little book here, for only €12,50 plus postage, which I think is a real snip.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 14 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs

Last books finished
The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James
So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole
Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum
Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly (did not finish)

Next books
Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi

Clarke shortlist, Goodreads/LibraryThing stats

Posted on 14 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Clarke shortlist has been out for a couple of days, but I’ve been quite busy so am posting the ownership stats for the six lucky books only today. I’m also noting the ranking of each book in the equivalent table for the long list.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

			Goodreads		LibraryThing
			raters	rating	owners	rating
(1)	The Ministry of Time	Kaliane Bradley	139,555	3.59	1,976	3.71
(5)	Annie Bot	Sierra Greer	52,555	3.83	529	3.74
(13)	Service Model	Adrian Tchaikovsky	11,505	4.04	350	3.83
(21)	Private Rites	Julia Armfield	8,632	3.68	213	3.81
(60)	Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock	Maud Woolf	642	3.69	27	3.75
(79)	Extremophile	Ian Green	139	3.90	16	–

None of these was in the top quintiles of reader ratings from the long list. The last two seem to have made a big impression on judges despite low print runs.

I’m planning to be at the ceremony on 25 June – see you there perhaps.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple

Posted on 13 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over. ‘But mostly it is horrible. The farmers here, they are not like the boys of Bombay.’

One of William Dalrymple’s lyrical explorations of India, this tells the stories of nine people with roles in Indian religion – mostly Hinduism, though the point is well made both by Dalrymple and by several of his interlocutors that it’s all a bit syncretic, and drawing strict boundaries between different faiths is not a good path to understanding.

People who think that all religion is bollocks won’t find much to like in this book. But if you are interested in the belief and faith systems of the largest country in the world by population, this is a very enlightening guide to what nine of the 1.4 billion think, at least as reported by one observer. (No doubt, like any good writer, he has combined material from a number of sources to create nine good stories.)

There’s the Jain nun. There’s the prison warder who becomes a dancing god for two months a year. There’s the singer of epic poems which take five days to recite. There’s the woman Sufi mystic. There’s the maker of bronze idols. There’s the tantric guardian of the cremation grounds. There’s the blind bard of Bengal. Dalrymple respectfully gives them all their voices

And saddest of all is the Devadasi, the temple prostitute who has been servicing worshippers sexually since she was a young girl. Supposedly this practice was made illegal by both the British and by independent India, but it has simply gone underground, with even less protection for the women and girls who get involved. In general my instincts are for the legalisation of sex work where all involved are consenting adults, but that’s not what is going on here, and the story of Rani Bai is heart-rending.

Anyway, well worth getting, and you can get it here. This was the top unread non-fiction book on my shelves; next is the English translation of The Burgundians, by Bart van Loo.

Hugo Novellas 2025

Posted on 12 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Now that I have been unexpectedly liberated to discuss my Hugo votes, here they are in the first category that I completed. These are all good, by the way, and I found it quite difficult to rank them. (This is not the case for every category.)

6) The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Okay,” said Dr. Marjorie. “That’s it. You’re on your own.”

Generation starship where slaves v masters plays into a brutal take on academia. Get it here.

5) The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“People report different things. Some say they feel nothing at all. Others say the scan brings up memories. That it somehow brushes up against them and brings them back to consciousness. They see their lives. Memory by memory, before them.”

Mammoth researchers upload the mind of a long-dead mammoth expert into the brain of a resurrected mammoth. Get it here.

4) What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:

It occurs to me that you may think that I am making a great deal of nothing about traveling, granted that I had spent much of my youth gallivanting across Europe, sometimes while being shot at. Possibly you’re right. All I can say in my defense is that while I was in the army, no matter where we went, we had a routine. We got up, we ate bad food, we complained, we tended the horses, we were extremely bored, we ate again, we went to sleep. Occasionally we would go somewhere else and be bored there. Once in a very great while, we would spend an absolutely nerve-wracking few hours, and afterward we would be shaky and bored, but in general, the routine reigned supreme.

Haunted holiday cottage in fictional but richly realised European country. Get it here.

3) The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Oh, get up, get up, please,” Nhung begged.

Something sinister is up with the arranged wedding that Cleric Chih gets involved with. Get it here.

2) The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“No,” Veris said, glancing back at the handful of guards waiting silently in the front garden. A few had also crept to the back, she knew, to guard the door in case she still, unthinkably, tried to escape.

Only the heroine can rescue two children who have been kidnapped by a monster. Get it here.

1) 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 young women thrown together to ward off the unspeakable. In space. Get it here.

I intend to do these collages of covers for each of the relevant Hugo categories. I do them by hand using PowerPoint and Paint, without use of AI.

The best known books set in each country: Côte d’Ivoire

Posted on 11 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Côte d’Ivoire, also known in English as Ivory Coast (personally I take the position that you call people and countries by the names they wish to be known by).

I have not been to Côte d’Ivoire myself, though I have advised its government on a couple of occasions.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Aya	Marguerite Abouet	6,986	664
The Bitter Side of Sweet	Tara Sullivan	3,646	277
Aya of Yop City	Marguerite Abouet	2,421	260
Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing	Wess Stafford	1,142	505
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village	Sarah Erdman	1,784	312
Aya: Life in Yop City (Aya #1-3)	Marguerite Abouet	1,683	166
Aya: The Secrets Come Out	Marguerite Abouet	1,331	154
Aya: Love in Yop City (Aya #4-6)	Marguerite Abouet	885	127

So, I confess I had not heard of the popular graphic novel sequence by Marguerite Abouet about her heroine Aya, set in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1970s, but I’ll have to look out for them now. It’s also nice to see a success for the bande dessinée genre.

If I count correctly, this is the sixth country where seven of the top eight books are by women, joining Canada, South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran.

I disqualified eleven books. For about half of them, this was because they were set in or about a number of countries including Côte d’Ivoire, but much less than half set there. This knocked out Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert, The Fortunes of Africa by Martin Meredith, Dictatorland by Paul Kenyon, Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus by David Quammen, and Africa Is Not a Country by Margy Burns Knight.

I really hesitated with The Suns of Independence by Ahmadou Kourouma, which is set between two fictional countries, the Socialist Republic of Nikinai and Ebony Coast. Kourouma himself was firmly Ivoirian, but in the end I feel he deliberately set the book in a fictional place which is as closely related to Côte d’Ivoire as, say, the Shire is to England.

There were a couple with very little Ivoirian material, and I fear that people tagging them on LT / GR get mixed up between West African countries. Tété-Michel Kpomassie, author of An African in Greenland, is from Togo. Allah Is Not Obliged, by Ahmadou Kourouma, does start in Côte d’Ivoire but is mostly set in Liberia. The Dragons, the Giant, the Women by Wayétu Moore is set in Liberia and the USA. Standing Heavy, by Gauz, is set among Ivoirians in Paris. Arab Jazz, by Karim Miské, is set among Arabs in Paris; Miské was born in Côte d’Ivoire, but identifies as Mauritanian-French.

Next up are Cameroon, Nepal, Venezuela and Niger.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s ‘Indian’ uncle

Posted on 10 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Content warnings: racism, spousal abuse, child marriage

Rosemary Sutcliff notes that her aunt Edith married

…Archie, weak-willed and amiable, who did not tell her beforehand that he was a quarter Indian — his mother being the product of an Indian Army colonel and a rajah’s daughter — what would have happened if he had told Aunt Edith before it was too late, there’s no knowing. Maybe she would still have married him, but I very much doubt it. As it was, finding out afterwards, she refused to have children — I very much doubt if she even allowed him into her bed! — and set out to make his life a cold hell to his dying day. I have been there at some family gathering myself, puzzled as a dog may be by stresses in the air, the electric discharge of things I did not understand, when he came into the room…

For many years, the family were quite seriously prepared for Uncle Archie to murder her one day, and prepared, if he did, to go into the witness-box on his behalf and swear that he did it under unendurable provocation.

This is an uncomfortable passage about the racism of her aunt, and the readiness of the rest of the family to turn a blind eye to both the aunt’s racism and the potential for her to be murdered by her husband. Sutcliff attempts to play both for laughs, but I doubt if it went down well in the 1980s when the book was published and it certainly doesn’t work for today’s reader.

‘Race’ is a social construct anyway, but NB that if Uncle Archie’s grandmother was a rajah’s daughter, but had a European mother (as is implied), Archie himself would have been an eighth of Indian heritage rather than a quarter.

I decided to check up on the details of the story, and found some interesting data. “Aunt Edith” is Edith Fanny Sutcliff (1871-1960), who in 1897 married “Uncle Archie”, Archibald Gordon Selwood Langley (1872-1943), son of Charles Archibald Langley (1841-1877) and Sarah Elizabeth Hewett (born 1850, married Charles on her 20th birthday, lived to at least 1901). Sarah is reported as being the daughter of Colonel William Selwood Hewett (1824-1889) and Frances Elizabeth Hall (1835-1865). All were born in India. Sarah’s birthdate is recorded as 5 December 1850, and her parents’ wedding as 30 October 1849. Frances’ birthdate is recorded as 14 September 1835, so she was married six weeks after her 14th birthday and gave birth to Sarah a couple of months after her fifteenth birthday. Errm…

Frances herself was the daughter of James Frederick Hall (1809–1837) and Ann Clifford (1816–1865). She was the third of her parents’ four children, born between 1832 and 1837, and her mother then had another seven children with her second husband. James and Ann married in 1831, when Ann was still 14, so errm once more. Again, this is all happening in (British) India. But this doesn’t fit Sutcliff’s story, which is that Archie’s maternal grandmother (Frances) was a rajah’s daughter; unless the suggestion is that Ann had an extramarital relationship with a rajah in her late teens, a couple of years after her marriage to James.

But maybe the story got confused down the generations. James Fredrick Hall’s parents were born in England, but I note that the records of Ann Clifford’s parents are sparse; her father John Clifford is known to have died in 1830, a year before her early marriage, and the only information we have about Ann’s mother, Archie’s great-grandmother, is her first name, Elizabeth. It could have been Elizabeth who was begotten by an Indian father in the closing years of the eighteenth century. This would have made Uncle Archie technically only a sixteenth Indian rather than a quarter or an eighth, but prejudice is rarely interested in the facts. (Or indeed Elizabeth herself might have been the daughter of two Indian parents, and then become known by an English name.)

And Aunt Edith still sounds horrifying, no matter what her husband’s ancestry was.

Pope and church thoughts

Posted on 9 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I am at home today, and gave a lecture on global politics at the Irish College in Leuven this morning. I do that kind of thing fairly often, but today I had to change my usual script to take account of yesterday’s events.

Pope Leo XIV comes to power at a moment when the right wing of the Catholic church in the USA is being instrumentalised as part of the Trump MAGA movement, and some are choosing to interpret the papal election in that light. Cardinal Prevost was probably the least American of the American cardinals, and his social media record is one of clapping back at J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. But that really isn’t the place to start, and it probably isn’t even the important part.

What struck me, the moment that the new Pope opened his mouth, is that his Italian is fluent and (as far as I could tell) without an American accent. A little digging and I found that his paternal grandfather, Jean/John Prevost (1876-1960) was born in Turin, Italy, and ran a language school in Chicago; his grandson was only four when he died, but the Pope’s father Louis Marius Prevost (1920-1997) was also a teacher and school administrator. Perhaps in the multicultural neighbourhood of Denton, there was an opportunity for a bright kid to pick up on languages.

The Pope’s paternal grandmother Suzanne Louise Marie Fontaine (1894-1979) was from Le Havre in France. She and Jean were already married at the point that Suzanne moved to the United States in 1917, and moved to Chicago before the Pope’s father was born in 1920. Some sources suggest that Suzanne’s mother’s maiden name was also Prevost, which suggests that she and her husband Jean/John were related (and the fact that he was known as “Jean” suggests close French ties) but the evidence is circumstantial and ambiguous.

The Pope’s mother, Mildred Agnes Martinez (1911-1990) is described in press reports as of Spanish descent. This is not the whole truth. Her father, Joseph Norval Martinez (1864–1926), was born in Haiti shortly before his family moved to New Orleans, and her mother Louise Baquie (1868–1945) was a Seventh Ward Creole; both are recorded as “mulatto” along with the rest of their families in the 1870 census, but as “white” in the 1880 census, which demonstrates the social construction of race. “Martinez” is obviously a Spanish name, so describing Mildred’s ancestry as Spanish is convenient shorthand.

So although the Pope’s parents were both born in Chicago, his four grandparents were born in four different countries. That in itself doesn’t guarantee anything of course (Donald Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, and his father’s family were all first or second generation German immigrants) but it’s an interesting start.

(Also I wonder who the last Pope with a degree in mathematics was.)

But even before the new Pope opened his mouth to speak fluent Italian (and Spanish), an important signal came from his choice of name. People have been having a lot of fun with the more dubious historical popes who took the name Leo, notably Leo IX who is generally regarded as responsible for the Great Schism of 1054, and Leo X whose sale of indulgences for the construction of St Peter’s was one of the triggers of the Reformation. (Add also Leo VIII, who was Pope twice, though is officially regarded as having been an antipope first time round.)

The new chap is too smart not to be aware of these, but for today’s Vatican the most recent Leo is the most important. Leo XIII became Pope just before his 68th birthday in 1878, and ruled for 25 years. Leo XIV is 69 and looks in good shape, and one message from his choice of name is that he expects to be around for a good while. I myself just turned 58; it’s weird to think that the next Pope will probably be younger than me. (And the one after certainly will be.)

Leo XIII pulled the church past the traumas of the unsuccessful conservatism of Pius IX, who had catastrophically lost the Papal States to the new Kingdom of Italy. He reopened the Vatican observatory and insisted that science and religion should coexist. But he is particularly remembered for Rerum novarum, the 1891 encyclical which commits the church to the amelioration of “the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.”

Leo XIII was not a socialist – indeed Rerum novarum was very much an anti-socialist document. But it was a conscious effort to position the church on the progressive side of political discourse, and it’s the intellectual basis for the more centrist European tradition of Christian Democracy (which has been rather weaker of late). I think it’s fair to describe Leo XIII as the least right-wing Pope since the term “right-wing” acquired political meaning. The new guy’s choice of the same name is a strong indicator that he’s heading in a similar political direction.

These things are relative of course. Leo XIII criticised Irish Nationalism, which certainly puts him on the wrong side of history. Leo XIV is, to put it politely, on a personal journey with regard to LGBTQ+ issues; though better informed observers than me find the initial signs encouraging.

Incidentally the speed of the election shows that the media narrative of the strength of the hard-line right-wing factions among the College of Cardinals was overblown. There is no way that Leo XIV can be regarded as anything other than the continuity candidate for Francis, breaking the traditional cycle of alternation between moderates and conservatives. The cardinals would have been very aware that voting for the man who selected Francis’s bishops was not going to turn the clock back, and it took them roughly 24 hours of actual voting time to get there.

One other thing to mention is that a couple of years ago I connected with my second cousin once removed Christopher Lamb, whose great-grandmother was my grandfather’s sister. He is now CNN’s Vatican correspondent, so he’s had three of the most significant weeks of his career since Easter Monday.

For myself, having been brought up Catholic, I have very much drifted away from the church in recent years. However I did attend the 1 May service at our local chapel last week. This place of ancient devotion celebrates just four masses a year, on 2 February, 1 May, 15 August, 1 November and 25 December; the ancient quarter days (Lammas shifted by a fortnight) and Christmas. The May ritual is dedicated to the Mother of Christ, whose statue miraculously appeared on the site in the late middle ages (and was stolen in 1974). Its replacement presides over the open air Mass (in good weather, which we had last week). Devotional hymns are sung.

The chapel is located right beside a holy well, and across the valley from two once-grand Bronze Age burial mounds. 1 May is Beltane in the old Celtic calendar, or Walpurgis Night here, when fires were lit to ward off evil and greet the turning of the seasons. So the candles lit by the congregation last week, and the procession around the Zoete Waters (sadly drained dry for maintenance at the moment), were part of a cycle of annual commemoration on or near that spot that probably goes back well before Christianity. I enjoyed the feeling of connection to the history of this place and this time of year.

Unexpectedly the service was a moment of geographical as well as historical connection. Under the late Pope Francis, the People’s Republic of China and the Church negotiated a reset of relations, though the process of appointing bishops is still a matter of dispute. (Hmm, and remind me who was staffing the Vatican side of that dispute until yesterday?) I know I keep saying this, but the rise of China is the central geopolitical fact in today’s world. Leuven has a long connection with China going back to Ferdinand Verbiest, and twenty visiting Chinese priests were in the congregation along with us locals. During the procession they belted out Chinese hymns.

The church’s central problems remain the same – falling numbers of worshippers, decreasing relevance, appalling failure to come to terms with the abuses of the past. I tend to think that if the answers can be found, it will be by looking forward and outward rather than backward and inward; and I am pleasantly surprised to find that the College of Cardinals (or at least two thirds of it) takes the same view.

Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan

Posted on 8 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Sam’s eyes snapped open, and half the class burst into laughter. “Very funny,” he said. “But you’ve only got ten minutes left, so you should probably save the jokes until then.”

Another of the short works that I have been saving up from the 2020 Hugo packet, this is about a contemporary world where people start to live on different sleeping schedules from each other, and how we can cope; and whether this is in fact something that needs to be corrected, or whether society needs to make accommodations for those who are different. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 7 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James

Last books finished
Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint
Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris

Next books
Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones
Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco

Blue Remembered Hills, by Rosemary Sutcliff

Posted on 6 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

In the vile weather and the unaccustomed seaways, the White Russian prince mislaid Marseilles altogether, and finally, answering calls for professional help from the bridge, my father brought the Lublyana into harbour himself.

As a child and teenager, I enjoyed a lot of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels – I particularly remember the Eagle of the Ninth trilogy, The Hound of Ulster, and Warrior Scarlet. I picked up this autobiography a few Eastercons ago without really looking at it, and plucked it off the shelves at random the other day, interested to get to know more about a much-loved writer. (She lived from 1920 to 1993.)

My first surprise, once I actually looked at the front cover, was to see that it has an introduction by Tom Shakespeare. I knew Tom vaguely when we were students at Cambridge, and he once managed to get a front page photograph in the Guardian by eating fire on King’s Parade in protest at the government’s student loans proposals. We’ve exchanged the odd note over the last few years. He has achondroplasia, the most visible symptom of which is dwarfism, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the politics of disability.

Why, I wondered, would he write a foreword to Rosemary Sutcliff’s autobiography? I supposed that he might have shared my youthful enthusiasm for her writing, possibly even more so (he started Cambridge with the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic course, before switching to Social and Political Sciences). My copy of the book, which features a head-and-neck photograph of Sutcliff, failed to give me the vital clue that the two earlier editions would have done as soon as I looked at them.

Rosemary Sutcliff had Still’s Disease, systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and suffered various medical treatments and operations which were deemed necessary by the doctors advising her parents. (Tom Shakespeare points out that “orthopaedics” literally means “putting children right”.) She spent long periods in hospitals, isolated from her family and her few friends. (She was an only child; a sister had died before she was born.) As an adult, she used a wheelchair (after the death of her mother, who refused to allow her to have one). Writing cannot have been comfortable for her; but at her peak, she wrote 1800 words a day, by hand.

Once you know all this, a lot about her writing makes more sense. Tom Shakespeare lists nineteen of her novels where a major character has either a congenital or an acquired physical disability, and comments, “I cannot think of another writer who has done more or better.” And her disabled characters are not defined by their disabilities. They are simply people getting along as best they can in challenging circumstances. And it makes sense to choose Tom Shakespeare as the writer of the introduction to the book.

Sutcliff’s father was in the Navy, her mother was difficult (possibly bipolar) and her childhood was one of bouncing around between different ports, including Sheerness, Chatham and more exotically Malta. She was very slow to learn to read and write, left school at fourteen and worked as an artist until she rather suddenly became a full-time writer at the age of twenty-nine.

Having said all of that, it’s not a sad book. We live the life we get to live, and Sutcliffe makes the most of it, with occasional shafts of real humour. “I have always been sorry for children born more than two hundred years ago, and therefore denied the pleasure of popping fuchsia buds.” (This got some extraordinary responses when I posted it to Facebook.) She has a great eye for the countryside, and depicts friends and pets with love and candour. It’s a portrait of a particular time from a particular viewpoint, but it’s very nicely done.

In the last couple of chapters, she tells of her romantic relationship with Rupert King, a year younger than her but already separated from his first wife and the father of two sons. Eventually he decided to marry someone else, and she decided that she could not bear to be the third person in that relationship. It’s an intense and ultimately unhappy story, but she clearly feels that this thwarted romance was good for her in the end. I did a bit of my own delving on Rupert, using the online genealogy resources; he was married four times in all, with three more children on top of the two from his first marriage, and ended up in Australia. I don’t think he’d have made Rosemary happy in the medium to long term.

Anyway, brief, punchy, evocative, well worth it; you can get it here.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Monthly Archives: May 2025

Doctor Who, Series 2 / 15 / 41

May 2025 books

Hugo Best Novelette

Beyond The Sun, by Matthew Jones

Hugo Best Related Work 2025

Wednesday reading

City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Lodestar Award 2025

The best known books set in each country: Nepal

The WSFS Consultative Votes: the Retro Hugos and the Artist categories

The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James

Hugo Graphic Story or Comic 2025

thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold

Wednesday reading

The Peladon audio plays

Hugo Novels 2025

The best known books set in each country: Cameroon

My great-great-grandfather’s non-appointment as Assistant Secretary of War of the United States

Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith (and Kevin Clarke)

Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint

Wednesday reading

Clarke shortlist, Goodreads/LibraryThing stats

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple

Hugo Novellas 2025

The best known books set in each country: Côte d’Ivoire

Rosemary Sutcliff’s ‘Indian’ uncle

Pope and church thoughts

Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan

Wednesday reading

Blue Remembered Hills, by Rosemary Sutcliff