Yugoslavia’s air defenses were dominated by surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries equipped with thousands of Soviet-made SAMs, including three SA-2 battalions; 16 SA-3 battalions, each with numerous launchers directed by LOW BLOW fire-control radars; and five SA-6 regiments fielding five batteries each, for a total of 25 SA-6 batteries directed by STRAIGHT FLUSH radars. These radar-guided SAMs were supplemented by around 100 vehicle-mounted SA-9 and several SA-13 infrared SAMs, along with a profusion of man-portable infrared SAMs, some 1,850 antiaircraft artillery (AAA) pieces, and numerous stockpiled reserve weapons and buried communications lines. Backing up these defenses, the Yugoslav air force consisted of 238 combat aircraft, including 15 MiG-29 and 64 MiG-21 fighterinterceptors.¹ Although the Yugoslav IADS employed equipment and technologies that dated as far back as the 1960s, albeit presumably with selected upgrades, its operators knew U.S. tactics well and had practiced air defense drills and honed their operational techniques for more than four decades. They also had the benefit of more equipment and better training than did the Bosnian Serbs in 1995. Finally, they enjoyed the advantage of being protected both by mountainous terrain and by the cover of inclement weather when the air war began.
¹ “AWOS [Air War Over Serbia] Fact Sheet,” Hq USAFE/SA, December 17, 1999. See also The Military Balance, 1998/99, London, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998, p. 100.
A RAND study of the Kosova war from the point of view of the air force. Reading the introduction, I rather got the impression that this was a supposedly independent report, funded by the USAF and coincidentally promoting the idea that it would have been so much better to just let the USAF get on with dropping bombs, without any political interference. The background historical analysis chapter was full of flaws as well. When we got onto the weapons porn (“16 SA-3 battalions, each with numerous launchers directed by LOW BLOW fire-control radars; and five SA-6 regiments fielding five batteries each, for a total of 25 SA-6 batteries directed by STRAIGHT FLUSH radars”) I decided I had had enough. You can download it here.
This was my top unread book about Kosova. Next on that pile is Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers.
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 the current boundaries of Austria.
When I did this exercise in 2015, I declared the winner to be Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi. But closer examination reveals that it (just) fails my criteria; the protagonist spends only the first 91 pages of a 187-page book in Vienna. Otherwise it would have been far ahead of the field.
The three sites have again served up three different winners. I had not previously heard of Marlen Haushofer, or her dystopian novel The Wall, in which the protagonist finds herself and her Alpine cabin sealed off from the outside world by an invisible barrier. I see that there was a film in 2012. It is way ahead on StoryGraph, second on Goodreads and not so very far behind on LibraryThing.
Letter from an Unknown Woman is a 68-page novella which wins on Goodreads, is in second place on StoryGraph, but lags on LibraryThing. It is about a years-later tragic resolution of an upstairs-downstairs love affair. For some reason Goodreads logs it under the Turkish translation, Bilinmeyen Bir Kadının Mektubu, which makes me suspect that it is a popular text for students learning German.
Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday, is ahead on LibraryThing but only fourth on Goodreads and further behind on StoryGraph. It is the only one of these that I have read, and I enjoyed it a lot.
Love Virtually, originally Gut Gegen Nordwind, is an email romance story. As far as I can tell, the setting is not specified, but everyone assumes that the protagonists live in Vienna.
I thought long and hard about Zweig’s Beware of Pity, as mentioned last week. The setting is described as “eine kleine Garnison an der ungarischen Grenze”, a garrison on the Hungarian border, on the main train line from Vienna to Budapest and closer to Vienna. Although the protagonist’s love interest is the daughter of the local Hungarian aristocrat, it is clear that everyone is speaking German (he comments on her Hungarian accent). I reckon that this would be one of the towns that was historically in Hungary and then briefly in the Banate of Leitha before being incorporated into today’s Austrian state of Burgenland.
Dream Story and The Piano Teacher are both explicitly set in Vienna, and A Whole Life is set in the Austrian Alps.
Bringing in the StoryGraph numbers again helped the gender balance; we lost The Third Man, by Graham Greene, and The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth and gained The Piano Teacher and A Whole Life. I am not sure if The Radetzky March would have qualified geographically anyway.
I disqualified a number of books which had been tagged “austria” on LibraryThing and Goodreads. I already awarded Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and The Trial to the Czech Republic. Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl is mainly set in German concentration camps, some of which are now in Poland. Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, is set in what is now Slovenia. The Only Woman in the Room, by “Marie Benedict” (Heather Terrell) is about Hedy Lamarr, who was born in Vienna but spent most of her life elsewhere. I already mentioned Persepolis 2. The Hare with the Amber Eyes jumps around too. There were many others.
Next up will be Switzerland; then a jump south to Sierra Leone; then back to Europe, for the last time in a while, for Belarus; then way off east for Laos.
Back in 2019-23, I revisited each of the months that I’ve been bookblogging since November 2003, in anticipation of the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging. I’m going to do the same now for the tweenty-fifth anniversary in November 2028, this time spacing the monthly updates at three or four day intervals. Also since my first go started on Livejournal and moved to WordPress only in March 2022 when I abandoned LJ, it means I can tidy up the internal links and have the definitive versions all in one place.
November 2003 was politically momentous – there were elections in Northern Ireland and Croatia, a major political crisis in Moldova, and an election followed by a revolution in Georgia, all of which affected my work, though we were able to publish a report on Mostar. I also attended a conference in Vienna with my American intern B, who now works in IT in Arizona. He left halfway through the month and was replaced by a Croatian journalist, S, who I last heard of back in Zagreb working as a press officer for an international organisation.
At home, we took the kids to a snoezelruimte, which the older two both enjoyed. (B was six and F was four.)
For me (aged 36) and U (eleven months) it was a bit overwhelming.
The one I wrote least about at the time, but that on reflection I think is definitely the best of them, is The Separation, Christopher Priest’s story of dual identites, overlapping histories and alternate timelines for the second world war. I’ll return to it in due course, as it won both the Clarke and BSFA Awards. You can get it here. (I always felt that American Gods was interesting but flawed; you can get it here.)
The book I would not recommend is Ersatz Nation, a poorly written and jumbled narrative.
I’m still not totally sure about the Best Poem category, but I’m going to kick off my Hugo reviewing for this year by revealing my own votes, as follows.
Mission Control, you told me not to be shocked. I’m just an envoy among these meetings. A pleasure just to be invited and all that. And you told me not to sell myself short, I know I am neither peerless nor no less a peer as the others here, but you don’t get it. I… get emotional. When we gather here, we consensus the stars. We draft the laws that carve diamonds fine, we dictate the portent paths, we school and are thus schooled; in a ten-minute parley between panels we broker treaties that move stories through the digit-lines; in a brief passing twixt moving platforms two colleagues will draft new craft guidances for new worlds; in a barcon brokerage tomorrow night two lords will strike delicate business firm; all weekend we will declare truces— sparing doubt without relying on fear, holding sorrow without swelling to hopelessness, saving our blades for the armies of capital growth and the rattle of the badly impersonating clanker swarms and oh God the fascists why are there still fascists but that’s why we have these meetings in the first place. I would risk a rank or more if I could fellowship here forever. Because are we ever still together if we can’t break bread or ice or our own bad habits of not being personable? Aren’t I allowed to dream of more realms being let into our commonwealth?
A witty depiction of a space explorer visiting a Worldcon.
Bitch got stuff done. Lightning hits a bit different now. Still pounds against the clouds, of course. Still kills when it lands too close. But doesn’t pierce the way it once did, or leave half-orphans in its wake. And those temples. You’ve seen them, right — still gleaming over broken fields. And her hands, a sudden gentle touch, slicing through the sharpest pains.
You can spend your days sitting on the rocks, stirring the tidal pools as though they were cauldrons, causing shipwrecks if you want to, granting wishes, stealing the voices of mermaids and seabirds to make yours especially shrill, screeching like a gull, or sonorous, like buoy bells ringing far from shore. You can gather and store the treasures of the waves—bits of glass worn smooth, coral and pearls, gold vessels from Phoenician ships. How rich you will be! And how deeply you will dream, sea witch— as deeply as the dark hidden depths of the sea.
Way back in 2007, I was just getting into the Big Finish audios, and it did not take long until I reached the 29th of their monthly releases, The Chimes of Midnight, starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and India Fisher as his audio-only companion, Charlotte “Charley” Pollard. I wrote it up as follows:
The Chimes of Midnight is just creepy: the Doctor and Charley trapped in a house where the servants keep on dying horribly – and even more mysteriously coming to life. Clearly some Big Revelation about Charley’s nature is being planned.
With the new novelisation just published, I listened to it again and it deserves its place of one of the consistently top-rated Big Finish audios. The soundscape successfully invokes the cramped servants’ quarters of an Edwardian mansion, with the guest stars utterly convincing in their denial of reality, especially as they start getting bumped off one by one. There is an Irish character, the butler, Shaughnessy, played by Lennox Greaves (who in real life is a Yorkshireman). I ended the story not quite sure what had happened, but certain that I had been entertained.
This story was recorded in January 2001 but released only in February 2002. You can get it here.
It used to be that one could handily check facts about Big Finish audios on Wikipedia, but I was dismayed to discover that Wikipedia has deleted all of its pages covering individual Big Finish plays. I guess that they were judged not to be of general interest in the way that, say, Andorra’s 2007 Eurovision Song Contest entry obviously is. A shame.
Rob Shearman has novelised his two best known Big Finish audios, this and Jubilee, so needless to say I have got hold of them both. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Chimes of Midnight is:
‘And is this exactly the same as your house back home as well?’ asked the Doctor.
This is a very lucid retelling of the story, offering a lot more depth to some of the characters – particularly Charlotte herself, but also Shaughnessy the bultler – and giving a slightly better idea of what the story is actually about. It’s twenty-five years since Shearman first wrote this, and his style has become comfortable and fluid. The house as portrayed on the page is recognisably the same as in the original play.
I think that readers who aren’t already into the Big Finish Eighth Doctor continuity might be sufficiently intrigued by this to try the other plays in the sequence, though they should be warned that this is something of an outlier. However there is plenty to discover about the Eight / Charley relationship.
