Current The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins The Last Resort, by Paul Leonard Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen, by Alice Loxton
Last books finished Appointment With Death, by Agatha Christie Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al Firefall, by Beth Axford De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek
Next books The Tribe of Gum, by Anthony Coburn Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske
I truly do believe no maiden that will live To look upon the brilliance of the sun Ever will be contemplative Like this one.
‘I truly do believe no maiden that will live’ may simply mean: I think no girl will ever be as sophos (clever) as this one.’ However, ‘To look upon the sun’ (a stock epic and tragic phrase meaning simply ‘to live’) raises the register, and the lines may express admiration for a girl who has already come to appreciate all that the sun symbolizes in the preceding poem. The sun here contains, in the abstract, qualities of shiny luxury items – glitter and glamour.
Translated poetry is always a bit problematic; you just can’t get the nuances exactly as intended by the original writer – especially when the original writer wrote in a dead language more than two and a half thousand years ago, and most of her known poetry survives only in fragments. But Poochigan seems to me to have made a good effort here. I’m not familiar enough with other translations to make a firm judgement, but I also appreciate his explanatory notes for each poem.
Most of the fragments are short, and have been preserved because of a single arresting image or turn of phrase. A couple of the longer ones jumped out at me. There’s an intense moment of jealousy (pp 22-23 here) when she sees the girl she likes talking to (?flirting with?) a man, and her heart throbs and her tongue “shatters”. The next poem (pp 24-25) is a break-up story, of the last conversation with your lover when you both realise it is over. The langauge is ancient but the sentiments are eternal.
The (very short) book ends with two poems which were very recently discovered on scraps of papyri, one about Sappho’s brother not yet having returned from a sea voyage, one a brief entreaty to Aphrodite about love. Poochigan does not mention it, because the scandal had not yet broken, but both of these passed through the hands of the notorious Dirk Obbink, so their provenance is very murky indeed; on the other hand, scholars do seem united in believing that these are genuine Sappho texts. It is awful and shameful that Obbink muddied the waters so much, both in this case and in the more notorious cases of the New Testament manuscripts.
Second paragraph of third chapter (director Kevin Davies’ retrospective on the making of 30 Years in the TARDIS):
I had been entranced by Dr. Who and the Daleks since I was very young. I can remember cowering behind my father as a big red Dalek glided through Selfridges when we went to see the movie exhibition in 1965. The opening scene of the documentary shows the young boy looking up at one in awe, just as I did all those years ago. I was a skinny little lad, and as she watched it my mother spotted the reference immediately, assuming that I must have cast Josh Maguire because he looked so much like the younger me. Maybe I did, subconsciously. The whole project had been very dear to my heart right from the start…
I hadn’t been aware of the existence of this annual-sized publication to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Doctor Who (which then came out a bit late). But it’s a nice piece of work, with very short stories featuring all of the first seven Doctors by Mark Gatiss, Justin Richards, Gareth Roberts (yeah, I know, but this was 1994), Daniel Blythe, Steve Lyons, Simon Messingham and Andy Lane, with comic strips by Paul Cornell and Warwick Gray (now Scott Gray), when all of them were at or near the beginning of their Whovian writing careers. There are also personal reflections from Nicholas Courtney, Sophie Aldred and director Kevin Davies. It’s a great little package, and better than some of the more recent annuals. You can get the 1995 Doctor Who Yearbook here.
The Windup Girl won the Nebula for Best Novel in 2010, and was the joint winner of the Hugo for Best Novel along with The City & the City, by China Miéville. It also topped the Hugo nominations ballot.
This is the only tied result for the winner of any category for the regular Hugos since 1993. (In the forty years before that, there were eleven ties, including one for the then Campbell Award; but voter participation was much lower.) We also had a tie for the Retro Hugos in 2020; I remember vividly spotting it as I went through the results while driving through France (I was not at the wheel).
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Windup Girl is:
And then she wonders if she has it backwards, if the part that struggles to maintain her illusions of self-respect is the part intent upon her destruction. If her body, this collection of cells and manipulated DNA—with its own stronger, more practical needs—is actually the survivor: the one with will.
When I first read it, shortly after it won the Nebula, I wrote:
Emiko, the girl of the title, is an artificial human being of a near-future world ravaged by agricultural disaster, created as an escort for a Japanese businessman and abandoned by him in Thailand. She, like all her kind, is easily identifiable by her jerky body movements, and is subject to instant destruction at the whim of the law (not to mention the risks of metabolic overheating). Her personal dilemma, trading her body for self-preservation, intersects with a political and environmental crisis in Thailand, with fairly catastrophic consequences. It is a fast-paced book which beat out Miéville’s The City & The City for the Nebula, and I’ll find it difficult to choose; while Bacigalupi’s vision is less audacious, he carries it off rather more consistently. Some nasty sex and violence so not for all readers.
In the end, my thinking was matured by reading several feminist critiques of The Windup Girl, and I put it third on my ballot, behind both The City & the City and Palimpsest by Cat Valente (so mine was one of the 24 votes that transferred from Valente to Miéville on the third round). I also put it second last on my BSFA ballot the following year.
Rereading it now, I have to be honest, I really didn’t like it. The lushly imagined Thailand is rather Orientalist, and the protagonist is not just a whore with a heart of gold, she’s a robot whore with a heart of gold. (To be crystal clear: my objection is not to sex work, but to clichés.) There is a lot of sexual violence which doesn’t advance the story at all. Maybe it was just my jet lag in California, but I also found the plot difficult to follow. I’m dropping my opinion of it from mediocre to actively bad, as has happened occasionally in this sequence of reading.
Incidentally I have also found that it is the best-known book set in Thailand, as measured by LibraryThing. (The Beach by Alex Garland has a lead on Goodreads.)
That year, the Hugo for Best Novella went to “Palimpsest”, by Charles Stross; for Best Novelette to “The Island”, by Peter Watts; and for Short Story to “Bridesicle”, by Will McIntosh. This was the last time (so far) that the four traditional fiction Hugo categories were all won by white men.
The Nebula for Best Novella went to The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, by Kage Baker; for Best Novelette to “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast”, by Eugie Foster; and for Short Story to “Spar”, by Kij Johnson.
The following year, the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel both went to Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, but I am going to skip it as I wasted far too much time on reading it the first time round. That means that the next post in this sequence will be about Ken Liu’s short story “The Paper Menagerie”, Kij Johnson’s novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, and Jo Walton’s novel Among Others.
It was when he shifted his sight into the Dusklands that it became something else. A dolmen mound. A monumental structure, silvery and solid yet alive… set there by the Ancients, a crossing point between this world and the Underworld.
This is a massive book that kept me going all through my trip to Gallifrey (though in fact I had very little time for reading when on the ground there, it was more for the plane flights). It’s a fantasy of a contemporary England where our protagonists are two generations of two families of Aetherials, who come from the otherworld of Faerie, to which however the path is barred. It’s a bit of an Aga saga, but with magic and demons. I got very drawn into the family dynamics, though I groaned at one (early) revelation in particular. Lots of sex and drama, and agonized psychological traumas manifesting as politics in the human world. I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy it, but I did. You can get Elfland here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (another Eastercon purchase). The next on those piles respectively are The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres, and Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson.
Last week I got sucked into an internet slapfight on the naming of a science fiction award. This was sparked by the news on File 770 that at last weekend’s DeepSouthCon, the Phoenix Award, for the professional (writer, editor or artist) who has done the most for Southern Fandom, and the Rebel Award, for the fan who has done the most for Southern Fandom, were both presented. (Photo from ceremony on Facebook)
The name of the latter award jumped out at me. It’s kind of difficult to see the word ‘Rebel’ being used for a celebration relating to those who live in the former Confederacy, and not draw the obvious conclusion. I therefore asked,
The Rebel Award presumably commemorates the defenders of slavery?
This provoked a defensive and vituperative set of responses, mainly from a former winner of the Rebel Award, which really failed to convince me (and other commenters) that the name of the award was intended to have any other meaning than commemorating the defenders of slavery. (Although the case for changing its name was none the less conceded as having been made.)
During the discussion, my attention was drawn to a flier for DeepSouthCon III, held in the centenary year of 1965, where the Rebel Award was presented for the first time. The flier informs us that:
Any of the Trufen wishing to pay in Confederate money should apply to the Chairman for conversion rates between real money and that of the USA.
Ha ha, very funny.
Here is the membership badge for that DeepSouthCon III in 1965 (which by the way had only 19 attendees, so numbering the badges up to 74 was optimistic):
I think it is fair to say that there is a pictorial element of this badge which weakens the assertion that no reference to the defenders of slavery was intended, and I said so, provoking another vituperative response:
…even as late as the mid-1980s that flag was a key design feature of the paint scheme of the General Lee, the automobile that was an iconic image of the popular CBS prime time television show The Dukes of Hazard. It was after that when the flag became hijacked by racist white supremicists as their totem.
If it was only afterThe Dukes of Hazzard that the flag was hijacked by racist white supremacists, who was using it between 1861-1865? (Actually a question with a slightly more complex answer than might first appear, but not by very much.) And let’s not forget the Dixiecrats who won four states in the 1948 presidential election on an explicitly racist white supremacist platform, under this flag – and held their founding convention in Birmingham, Alabama, just seventeen years before DeepSouthCon III.
And as for The Dukes of Hazzard themselves, hmm, what was the name of that car again? General who? What was he fighting for, and in which army?
You can’t feature the flag of Dixie and not be about the South and race, like it or not, even if only by passively feeding into the argument that the flag is only about family pride, good ol’ boys and good ol’ times.
Anyways, here’s my thoughts on the Rebel award name. I think it is clear that the name is meant to reference Confederate iconography. It’s paired with the Phoenix award, which is another common Confederate symbol. It was adopted during the centenary of the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement when southern states started really leaning into the Lost Cause as a reaction to the gains made by blacks. I cannot claim to know the hearts and minds of the people who made these decisions more than a decade before I was born. But I think it’s unavoidable that this was an influence on their thinking. It may have meant pride in their heritage to them. But Confederate iconography and Lost Cause propaganda is harmful and has always been, even if not everyone realizes that.
I appreciate her honesty about what the name of the award clearly meant and means, and actually I did not expect to see the question extended to the Phoenix Award as well. It’s easy to see how the iconography of the phoenix could tie into the narrative of the Lost Cause, but I found it surprisingly difficult to identify real-world examples of this (internet searches kept bringing me instead to the handful of Confederate monuments near Phoenix, Arizona). However, I’m also certain that the Southern Fandom Confederation has done more research on this question than I have, so I will take their word for it.
I wish the Administrator and her colleagues well in the search for new and more acceptable names for the awards. For the other participants in the debate, perhaps a reminder that “Shut up, you fugghead!” isn’t the clincher argument that some of you seem to think it is. There are actually some interesting things to be said about how the Rebel Award came into existence, but you chose not to make those points, and I’m not going to make them here either.
See here for methodology (though NB I am now also taking Storygraph into account, as well as LibraryThing and goodreads). Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Papua New Guinea.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
This was one of the most fiendishly difficult of these lists to produce, because there are a lot of books set in western half of New Guinea, now part of Indonesia but formerly ruled by the Dutch, and to make matters more complicated the Indonesian part is also known as Papua (the names of the Indonesian provinces are Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua, South Papua, Southwest Papua and West Papua).
Tell me if I have got any wrong, but I have done my best to keep to books which are set in the borders of what is now the state of Papua New Guinea, formerly ruled by Australia, Britain and Germany. This includes the troubled autonomous island of Bougainville, which despite a strong independence movement remains under Papua New Guinean sovereignty. One helpful point that I had not previously realised is that the majority of the WW2 fighting in New Guinea took place in the eastern half, so in general, books about those campaigns qualify by my criteria.
No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison
Behrouz Boochani
9,095
495
1,274
Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas
Christian Kracht
4,412
384
516
Kokoda
Peter FitzSimons
1,922
315
92
A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea
Don Kulick
1,049
132
211
The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea–The Forgotten War of the South Pacific
James Campbell
1,327
290
57
The White Mary
Kira Salak
997
268
79
This week’s winner, Euphoria, is a novel about three anthropologists carrying out research in New Guinea in 1933, very much based on the real life of Margaret Mead. Anthropology pops up a lot in books about both parts of New Guinea.
This week’s LibraryThing winner, Mister Pip, is a novel about a schoolteacher and his class caught up in the conflict in Bougainville. I read it a few years ago and was very moved.
No Friend but the Mountains is an autobiographical account of being imprisoned in an Australian immigration detention camp on Manus Island, one of the off-shore islands of Papua New Guinea.
Imperium is based on the true story of August Engelhardt, who founded a German colony based on the principles of nudity and eating coconuts in the part of New Guinea under German rule at the start of the twentieth century.
Kokoda and The Ghost Mountain Boys are both about the Second World War fighting, the former about the Australians and the latter about the Americans, in both cases trying to secure safe routes across the island.
A Death in the Rainforest is an anthropologist’s account of the disappearance of a language and a culture in Papua New Guinea. The country is estimated to have over 800 languages, 12% of the world’s total, and this diversity is fragile. (This book’s relatively high Storygraph rating bumped another anthropology book, Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums and Penis Gourds, by Tim Flannery, off the list.
The White Mary is about a journalist who goes in search of her missing mentor in the jungle and Learns Things. It starts in America but as far as I can tell, most of it is set in Papua New Guinea.
All of the above are about and by foreigners. Papuan writers are few and far between. The top book I found by a Papua New Guinea-born writer is The Shark Caller by Zillah Bethell, but her family background seems to be British. The top book by a writer who was born and still lives in the country is Maiba, a Papuan Novel, by Russell Soaba. The top writing by Papua New Guinean women (if we don’t count Bethell) is My Walk to Equality: Essays, Stories and Poetry by Papua New Guinean Women, edited by Rashmii Amoah Bell.
The top book that I excluded because it is mainly set in the western half of the island (then Netherlands New Guinea, now Indonesia) is Lost in Shangri-la: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II, by Mitchell Zuckoff. It would have ranked below Imperium but ahead of Kokoda.
We have a run of European countries coming now: Sweden, Czechia, Azerbaijan and Portugal; indeed nine of the next twelve countries are European. I might pause for breath when we get to Switzerland, which is the
