I went to the National Gallery in London on Friday, and paid a tenner to go and look at the temporary exhibition of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby. I particularly love Wright’s work for its significance in recording the history of science and science education, and I was a little disappointed that the text around the exhibition puts the emphasis his technique of light and shade and use of candles, slightly excluding what it is that the paintings are actually about. (See also a critique by Rebecca Owen-Keats, who unlike me is an actual expert on Wright.)
But it is all great stuff. Here is a scientist pumping air out of a jar in which a bird is desperately fluttering; one of the little girls cannot look, while the other is grimly fascinated.
Here the kids are looking at an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system. I always wanted one of those. The two youngest are complete rapt in the turning spheres.
And three men look at an ancient Roman statue, one of them sketching it.
Two young men exploring a cave find a scraggy philosopher, looking for the meaning of life and death in a skeleton. He will not find it.
The full title of this painting is “The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers”. It does what it says on the tin.
Finally, Wright in his own self-portrait looks out at us from the shadows.
I bought the souvenir book of the exhibition, but have not read it yet; perhaps it will have more on the content as well as the style.
There is plenty else to see in the National Gallery, and my attention was caught by John Singer Sargent’s portrait of seven-year-old Victoria Stanley.
Dressed for hunting, she is clearly ready to have fun but also won’t take any nonsense from anyone.
I was delighted to find that there are two portraits of her from the 1920s, one by Sir John Lavery (in the collection of the London art dealers Colnaghi) and the other by Minnie Agnes Cohen (recently sold at auction). You can clearly see the little girl in the adult Victoria. There are plenty of photographs of her taken during her life, but none captures her character as these portraits do.
Victoria was the daughter of the Earl of Derby; her great-grandfather served three terms as prime minister. Her first husband was Neil Primrose, son of the former Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery and himself a Liberal MP. They married in 1915 and had a daughter a year later, but he was killed in 1917 during the Third Battle of Gaza. During her widowhood, her father was appointed British Ambassador to Paris and she became a fixture in the Anglo-French social scene. She then married Malcolm Bullock in 1919 and they had another daughter in 1920; he too served as an MP (but a Conservative) from 1923 to 1953.
Victoria became a leading figure in the world of horse racing and hunting. Her two daughters were among the first three women admitted to the Jockey Club, and her great-granddaughter Clare Balding is a well known sports journalist, particularly on racing. Her father, her mother, her first and second husbands and her daughters Ruth and Priscilla all have Wikipedia pages, but she does not.
When hunting at Lowesby Hall in Leicestershire on 25 November 1927, Victoria risked riding under a low bridge, and was fatally injured when she hit her head on the stonework. (See report by the local history society.) She was 35.
See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Sweden.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
This was pretty straightforward; there is not much doubt about what books are set in Sweden, and there was not really much doubt about which book was going to win.
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Jonas Jonasson
304,460
8,752
29,072
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry
Fredrik Backman
291,256
5,675
35,205
This week’s winner, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is the first of a trilogy published after the author’s death, about a punk computer genius who helps the viewpoint character Solve Crime. It’s violent, sexy and compelling. The other two books of the trilogy also make the list.
Fredrik Backmann’s books, four of which are on the list, are slice-of-life stories from contemporary Sweden, some of which I suspect may be funny.
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is another slice-of-life story with a humorous tone. I was not quite sure if it met my geographical criteria, but I got a friend who has a copy to count the chapters (thanks, Mike!) and indeed a majority of it is set in-country.
One surprising thing jumps out at me from this list. All eight of the books are by men, ironically for a post on International Women’s Day. Looking through my archives, this has happened four times before: Russia, South Africa, Colombia (a special case) and Spain. Also, for two of the countries where I was only able to compile a list of five rather than eight books, all five were by male authors: Uzbekistan and Guinea-Conakry. On the other hand, I’ve had seven countries where seven of the eight books were by women (nowhere yet has had a clean sweep on that side).
This turns out to be thanks to my including the StoryGraph numbers. On Goodreads and LibraryThing alone, Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren would have made the list; but My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, by Fredrik Backman, has more than twice as many owners on StoryGraph and nipped into the eighth place. Backman is relatively more popular with StoryGraph users; indeed his top two books are very close behind The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo there.
It’s also quite a turnaround from my previous research in 2015, where the only books that scored were the Stieg Larsson trilogy and Pippi Longstocking. Obviously the recent surge in popularity of Fredrik Backmann had not yet taken off at that point. Perhaps surprisingly, Henning Mankel was quite a long way down, both in 2015 and in 2026. The next highest woman writer after Astrid Lindgren was Camilla Läckberg.
For once, I did not disqualify any books – the top eight from my calculations are all set mainly in Sweden. Other countries where I did not disqualifiy any books: Japan, Egypt, DRC, Vietnam, Colombia.
Coming next: three more European countries – Czechia, Azerbaijan and Portugal – followed by Togo.
The BSFA shortlists are out! And my own nominations were not particularly in tune with those of other voters; I voted for two of the shortlisted books for younger readers, one each in the artwork, long-non-fiction, and short fiction categories, and none of the successful nominees in the novel, short non-fiction and shorter fiction categories (I didn’t vote in the rest). So it goes.
As usual, I’ll look at the ranking of the shortlisted books on Goodreads, LibraryThing and (new) StoryGraph, comparing also with my similar analysis of the long lists. I do this not to predict winners, but to assess the extent to which each book (of those which have been published individually as standalone volumes) is notable, to the extent that they have penetrated the market of GR / LT / SG readers.
(I have done this every year for a number of years; since the BSFA Award categories were increased in number, see 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.)
I’m taking this in descending order of the popularity of the top nominee in each category. None of the finalists in Best Audio Fiction, Best Artwork, Best Short Fiction or Best Non-Fiction (Short) has been logged on any of the three websites, which is not surprising. I note that the shortlist for Best Audio Fiction includes both a series and a single story from that series.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins
1,105,150
4,625
171,448
Secrets of the First School
T. L. Huchu
348
34
96
Doctor Who: Lux
James Goss
69
23
14
Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution
Una McCormack
49
23
11
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel
Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson
4
0
0
(ranks of the 17 books on the long list that I analysed: 1st, 8th, 10th, 12th, 16th)
Sunrise on the Reaping has more owners / raters / reviewers on the three websites than all of the other books in this post put together.
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel is one of several books that has made it to the shortlist despite not having a massive pickup on the ownership sites.
I am really puzzled by The Ghost Merchant, by Rick Danforth, which is also shortlisted in this category. When I did this analysis for the long-lists, I recorded that it had 72 ratings on Goodreads, 1 owner on LibraryThing and 24 reviewers on StoryGraph. Now I can’t find anyone listing it on any of the systems. It’s part of a larger publication, The Colored Lens, but it doesn’t have a lot of ratings either. It’s almost certainly my own mistake, but a strange one for me to have made.
Incidentally Rick Danforth has five short-listed works across four categories. Nobody else has more than three.
Best Shorter Fiction
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
The River Has Roots
Amal El-Mohtar
39,893
347
17,074
Cities are Forests Waiting to Happen
Cecile Cristofari
3
2
0
(ranks of the 32 long-listees that I analysed: 1st and 28th)
Only two of the five finalists have been published as standalone volumes, and only one of those has made much of an impact – but what an impact! Leaving aside Sunrise on the Reaping from the previous category, The River Has Roots has more owners / raters / reviewers on the three websites than all of the other books in this post put together.
Best Collection
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories
ed. Andre M. Carrington
84
40
54
Uncertain Sons and Other Stories
Thomas Ha
135
15
27
Who Will You Save?
Gareth . L Powell
28
6
8
Blood in the Bricks
Neil Williamson
7
16
2
Black Friday
Cheryl S. Ntumy
6
6
2
Creative Futures: Beyond and Within
ed. Allen Stroud
4
3
2
(ranks among the 41 long-listees that I analysed: 9th, 11th, 15th, 18th, 23rd, 25th)
A bit more of a spread here, with the winner on Goodreads coming in second on StoryGraph and third on LibraryThing. The top two books are in the same zone as the top two finalists for Best Novel.
Best Novel
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
When There Are Wolves Again
E. J. Swift
163
16
40
Project Hanuman
Stewart Hotston
78
23
31
A Granite Silence
Nina Allan
56
9
11
The Salt Oracle
Lorraine Wilson
36
3
19
Edge of Oblivion
Kirk Weddell
8
0
0
(ranks among the 82 novels on the long-list by my analysis: 59th, 58th, 66th, 70th, and 81st; all of the finalists were in the lowest third of the popularity rankings of the long-list.)
Again, there is a nominee on the ballot which has failed to make a mark with the users of two of the three book ownership sites.
Also I think that the Chair of the BSFA ought to recuse themselves from the awards, or perhaps even be barred by the rules. It is risky for them and for the awards. It’s not so long since the British Fantasy Award scandal. I am not in any way alleging misconduct, I am expressing an opinion about good practice. I expressed this view previously in private to the previous BSFA Chair, and now I am expressing it in public.
Best Non-fiction (long)
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Fantasy: A Short History
Adam Roberts
17
12
3
Writing the Magic
Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst
8
5
2
Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction
Paul Kincaid
6
5
0
That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American With Film
Payton McCarty-Simas
5
0
4
Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre
Joy Sanchez-Taylor
0
1
0
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914
Kate Holterhoff
0
0
0
(ranks among the 18 books on the long-list, by my analysis: 6th, 8th, 10th, 11th, 15th and joint last)
These are low numbers, and none of those who voted for Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914 seems to have logged it on Goodreads or LibraryThing, let alone StoryGraph, whose users seem uninterested in academic literary analysis in general.
I found Kindle prices on Amazon.com for sixteen of the 23 books listed in all the tables above (I didn’t check the three that I already own). Speculation and the Darwinian Method is the most expensive by far – Amazon gives me a price of $59 for the Kindle edition, more than twice the cost of any of the others. At 203 pages, that’s 3.5 pages per dollar. Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre is the second most expensive, both in absolute price and in value for length, $27 for 187 pages, 6.8 pages to the dollar.
At the other end of the scale, the Kindle edition of A Granite Silence by Nina Allan costs $4.52 for 350 pages, 74 pages per dollar, more than twenty times better value than Speculation and the Darwinian Method and ten times better than Dispelling Fantasies. (The median is 31 pages per dollar.)
Again, I am not suggesting malfeasance in any way. I have no reason to suppose that the rules have not been applied. But I think these numbers are a problem for the BSFA Awards. Do they, or should they, reflect the wider judgement of the BSFA membership and Eastercon community, let alone British SFF readers as a whole, about notability? Several of the books listed above objectively fail the notability test of measurable visibility on three popular library sites. If it becomes too easy to get your work on the ballot, the value of the award itself is diminished.
I don’t know to what extent the solution might be a change in marketing, a change to the rules or both. But that is a secondary question; if the BSFA does not think that there is in fact a problem, no action need be taken anyway.
One more data point. I am in London at the moment, for PicoCon today and work stuff on Monday. I popped into the Waterstone’s on Trafalgar Square yesterday, and could not find a single one of the books listed above on the shelves, not even the Suzanne Collins. It’s only one shop, of course, and the SFF section is not huge, and maybe they had all been bought after the announcement last week. I hope so.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Case of the Missing Will”):
She arrived punctually—a tall, handsome young woman, plainly but neatly dressed, with an assured and business-like manner. Clearly a young woman who meant to get on in the world. I am not a great admirer of the so-called New Woman myself, and, in spite of her good looks, I was not particularly prepossessed in her favour.
The subtitle here is “Twelve Devonshire Mysteries”, but in fact several of them are set in Cornwall rather than Devon – just warning anyone who is expecting Dumnonian exactitude. The stories were originally published between 1923 and 1940 – Agatha Christie’s peak – in a variety of different magazines and collections, and they feature individually Poirot, Miss Marple, Parker Pyne and Tommy and Tuppence, so a decent sampling from across the spectrum of her protagonists. The collection was assembled between hard covers only last year.
One story, “The Hound of Death“, is not about crime at all but a horror story involving a Belgian nun in Cornwall. There is a foreword, extracted from her autobiography, about Agatha Christie’s love of Torquay. Some of the short stories depend on an obvious twist, but the point is more about Christie’s convincing portrayal of the West Country’s landscape and society than the actual plot. Worth it for the Christie fan.
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
