Here is half of the Hugo ballot for Best Graphic Story or Comic, in my order of preference.
The Space Cat, by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford
First page of third chapter (slightly varying from my usual practice):
This is hilarious and fun – writer Nnedi Okorafor and her daughter have a cat which secretly flies into space on secret missions at night, as well as getting up to the usual cat tricks. There are some glorious moments of observation. It’s not getting my top vote in this category (that’s yet to come) but it will get a decent preference from me. You can get The Space Cat here.
Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Last Amazon, by Kelly Thompson et al
Second frame of Part 3:
I’m not especially well versed in the Wonder Woman universe, but it turns out not to matter, because this has a divergent timeline from the usual Wonder Woman narrative, and takes up the question of what it would be like if Wonder Woman was raised in the Underworld rather than by the Amazons. I enjoyed it without being very invested in it. You can get Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Last Amazon here.
The Power Fantasy, Vol 1: The Superpowers, by Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard et al
No one else seemed to notice it. No one mentioned it, at any rate. He supposed they wouldn’t dare. And he didn’t like to ask. It would be absurd to draw deliberate attention to such a weakness in his own body. But sometimes he looked at it in the mirror and he’d prod at it with his finger and it felt spongy and weird, and if he clenched his teeth hard he could even make it throb.
This is another novelisation of a classic Big Finish audio by its author. Jubilee dates from 2003, starring Colin Baker as the Doctor, the late Maggie Stables as companion Evelyn Smythe, and husband and wife team Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres as the dictator of England and his wife. I’ve written the original audio up twice here, once in 2007:
Jubilee was of course the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek. I was surprised, though, by how different it was. There are similarities – the first confrontation between Doctor and imprisoned Dalek, the relationship between Dalek and companion (done more convincingly on TV), the Dalek’s quest for orders (done more convincingly here); but there is a huge difference in setting, the audio play taking place in an alternate 2003 where the world is ruled from London by the villainous Mr and Mrs Martin Jarvis, thanks to the Doctor’s intervention a hundred years earlier. And yet this doesn’t fall into the category of Doctor-returns-to-the-scene-of-a-previous-adventure stories, because the earlier Sixth Doctor is still there. It’s a good one, but the TV version is I think better (not always the case; see Spare Parts).
I confess that on this listening I didn’t feel that it worked as well. The two core moments – when first the Doctor and then his companion meet the imprisoned Dalek – are both very good and ended up much less changed for the TV story. The first half is fine, as we get dug into the horror of an parallel timeline where the UK’s dictatorship maintains its position by whipping up fear of the Daleks; but I felt it lost the run of itself at the end, with too many cases of characters revealing that their real motivations are completely different to what we had been told; and I did not feel that all the plot strings were tied up. There is some great humour – especially the opening sequence which parodies the whole concept of Doctor Who – but some dark shifts of tone which seemed to me dissonant rather than masterful. It’s probably fair to say that fannish expectations were different back in 2003, when it looked like the Wilderness Years would last for ever.
I didn’t listen to it again before reading the new novelisation, as it was still pretty fresh in my mind from last time round. And I should say perhaps that although the story is the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek, it is a very different thing, with just a couple of key scenes in common – though even then, the beats of Baker / Stables are very different from Eccleston / Piper.
Jubilee is a good Doctor Who book, firmly recasting the story into novel form rather than just being an adaptation of the script. A lot of the rough edges are smoothed off here, and in particular I felt that the unfolding of narrative revelations was more under control than the original script had been; but also the feeling of the fascist, hi-tech but nostalgic British regime came across even more viscerally on the page. Shearman has always been clear that the story was written in reaction to the rise of the hard right, and unfortunately the last two decades have given him plenty more material to draw from.
Perhaps more so than The Chimes of Midnight, it might be a handy gateway book for Who fans who aren’t yet sure about Big Finish – this is a good book based on one of the best of the plays.
Novels had ruined me by the age of sixteen, when Maman invited me into her salon and told me in a hushed and solemn manner, as if she were imparting to me my catechism, that she was arranging for me a mariage de raison with a wealthy sugar merchant from Tours. Instead of thanking her and being blushingly excited, as was proper, I merely said that I was honored by her consideration, but I would wait. I was waiting for true love, you see, for my novels had told me that it existed, somewhere. They had also given me a suspicion that maman’s arrangement had more to do with money and position and less to do with love—in fact, she hadn’t even used that word when she outlined for me my future happiness. My novels had also told me that true love rarely had an auspicious ending, but that seemed of little importance to me at the time.
For some reason, my post about William Wordsworth, Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline is one of the most popular of this entire blog, regularly picking up more hits than anything of my more recent entries. I assume that it has hit some popular special interest resource and spiralled from there.
The facts about Annette Vallon’s life after she bore Wordsworth’s daughter are patchy, and leave a lot of room for imagination. Tipton has put together an exciting tale where she not only helps her Royalist family escape murderous revolutionaries, but she becomes a chouanne, one of the guerillas waging armed resistance against the Republic in the northwest of France, and has many exciting adventure and narrow escapes.
I am sure that this is wishful thinking. I also suspect that when Wordsworth finally met up with her and their daughter Caroline in 1802, Annette already knew that Wordsworth was planning to marry Mary Hutchinson a few weeks later, but Tipton has used story-teller’s privilege to make it as dramatic as necessary for the narrative he wants to tell.
This was my top book acquired in 2023 and the non-genre novel that had lingered longest on my unread selves. Next in those sequences are Last Exit, by Max Gladstone, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe. The latter will have to wait until I have completed my 2023 pile (and I have not yet finished 2022).
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
November 2004 was grimly dominated by the re-election of President Bush, which I honestly had not seen coming. It was an important lesson to me to avoid wishful thinking in my elections analysis in the future.
The newly re-elected Bush administration immediately recognised what is now North Macedonia under the name of Macedonia, which probably played an important role in the failure of the following week’s referendum which would have reversed some elements of the post-conflict local government reform if it had passed.
My one work trip was to Geneva, where I rather bravely drove there and back; I remember a long and valuable walking conversation with Pat Cox beside the lake, where he gave me some invaluable career advice (“get up early, and read the paperwork before the meeting”), and also giving Hattie Babbitt a lift to Geneva Airport as I departed. We actually managed two family trips, one ot the Ardennes with the kids, and one with just the two of us to the Hague for a dance performance connected with the royal wedding earlier in the year.
2,800 pages (YTD 46,000) 3/10 by women (YTD 34/140) None by PoC (YTD 2/140)
The best of these is Tove Jansson’s quiet novel, The Summer Book; you can get it here. The Hartwell/Cramer collection is particularly good this year. You can get it here. On the other hand, I could not see the point of Magnus Mills’ The Scheme for Full Employment. If you want to try it anyway, you can get it here.
Turkmenistan is one of the five Central Asian former Soviet states, sometimes collectively referred to as “the ‘Stans”, though strictly that would cover Afghanistan and Pakistan as well (of course, some would argue that Afghanistan is better understood in the context of Central Asia anyway). It is immediately east of the Caspian Sea, and is best known as a source of fossil fuels and horses. Like most of the other Central Asian states, its language is closely related to Turkish.
After the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Turkmenistan was ruled by Saparmurat Niyazov, known as Türkmenbaşy, who established an unusual personality cult, After his death his close ally Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow ruled until 2022, when he partially handed over to his son Serdar Berdimuhamedow. It is described as one of the least democratic regimes in the world.
Turkmenistan’s biggest tourist attraction used to be a 60 metre wide natural crater near Darvaza filled with burning natural gas, known as the Door to Hell. However the government has taken action to put the flames out, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for the entrance to hell, and go to Turkmenistan for the horses. (Or the fossil fuels.)
See here for the methodology of these posts, 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 Turkmenistan.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
The Tale of Aypi
Ak Welsapar
224
35
95
Joe and Azat
Jesse Lonergan
88
24
18
Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
Adrienne Lynn Edgar
64
36
8
Daily Life in Turkmenbashy’s Golden Age: A Methodologically Unsound Study of Interactions Between the Tribal Peoples of America and Turkmenistan
Sam Tranum
91
12
8
Death of the Snake Catcher: Short Stories
Ak Welsapar
32
11
17
Sacred Horses: Memoirs of a Turkmen Cowboy
Jonathan Evan Maslow
40
16
6
Ruhnama: The Book of the Soul
Saparmurat Niyazov
68
6
5
Unknown Sands: Journeys Around the World’s Most Isolated Country
John W. Kropf
46
26
1
I commented a few months back that Tajikistan seemed to be the least well known of the Central Asian states; well, I was wrong. Turkmenistan is the most literarily obscure country I have covered so far, comfortably outdoing Togo, the previous record holder, in terms of how little known the top book is on the three online systems. Perhaps the oppressive political context dampens creativity from locals and visitors alike.
This week’s winner, The Tale of Aypi, is a short magical realist story about a fisherman and a vengeful ghost on the shores of the Caspian Sea. The author was expelled from Turkmenistan in 1993 and has lived in Sweden since 1994. He also has a short story collection, Death of the Snake Catcher, on the list.
The other Turkmen writer on the list is Türkmenbaşy himself, Saparmurat Niyazov, whose philosophical text Ruhnama was part of his personality cult and was routinely inflicted on foreigners showing even a hint of polite interest in the country.
Tribal Nation, the winner on LibraryThing, is a historical account of how Turkmenistan was formed under the Soviet Union. Adrienne Lynn Edgar is the only woman on this week’s list.
The other four are foreigner-goes-to-funny-country books, though it’s worth noting that Joe and Azat is a graphic novel by the author of Drome, and Sacred Horses concentrates on the horses.
Integrating the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight, or the winner, which was far ahead on both StoryGraph and Goodreads.
There are many many books covering Turkmenistan as part of a wider look at Central Asia or indeed the former Soviet Union, and I disqualified them all. The only other one that I scratched my head over was Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship, by Ken Silverstein, but on closer examination it appears to be mainly set in the lobbying world of Washington DC.
Wikipedia tells me that the best known woman writer from Turkmenistan is Towshan (or Toushan, or Tovshan) Esenova (1915-1988), but none of her work appears to have been translated into English, and anyway she mainly wrote poetry and plays, which tend to do less well in my system (another methodological flaw, I admit).
I don’t normally count travel books here, but I just want to note that the Bradt Guide to Turkmenistan is by the former British ambassador Paul Brummell, who as an undergraduate founded the Cambridge University Diplomacy Society (dedicated to the boardgame, not the profession). I succeeded him in 1987 as its second president. He is currently the British ambassador to Latvia.
Some geographical diversity coming up: Libya next, then rounding off Central Asia with Kyrgyzstan, then Hong Kong (counted separately from China because I’m using Worldometer numbers), then Nicaragua.
I had a very new experience yesterday: I officiated at a wedding, for the first time in my life.
A, who was a very close work colleague until he got another job last year, got engaged to his girlfriend L at the end of last year, and to my delight approached me about conducting the ceremony. This was for the big family and friends party – the legal bit had happened at Ixelles town hall the previous day. (And they are having a religious ceremony in Romania, A’s home country, in a couple of weeks.)
I loved the idea, and agreed immediately. I always enjoy seeing people making the formal step into commitment for the rest of their lives. At my time of life the number of weddings I attend has decreased – I did not go to any last year, but attended three in 2024. Oddly enough the most recent of these also involved a former work colleague, and also involved a bride who grew up in Hong Kong as L did.
Very luckily, a friend from my grammar school days in Belfast is now a professional celebrant, operating in Northern Ireland (where she is legally empowered to marry people) and Spain (where she has more of the role that I did yesterday). I fixed up a call with her to download as much advice as possible. She said several things that stuck with me:
Less than 15 minutes is too short. More than 45 minutes is too long.
At the start, welcome the children in the audience and compliment them on their good behaviour. (Not actually needed yesterday as the children present were too small to understand this, but noted as good psychology.)
If the couple are writing their own vows, make sure that you as the celebrant see them in advance to make sure that they are similar in length and compatible in spirit, and that they actually promise to do something.
She also sent me a very helpful list of readings and a detailed questionnaire to send to the couple about their relationship and their shared understanding of marriage. I didn’t use all of their answers but raided it quite substantially for my script.
I agreed the basic framework with A and L early in the process – crucially, that we were aiming for 30 minutes or a bit less – and refined the outline a month ago as follows (ignoring some of my celebrant friend’s advice):
Processional
Nicholas: meaning of marriage
First reading
Nicholas: what your friends say about you
Second reading
Vows
Third reading
Exchange of rings
Conclusion
The couple themselves chose the readings. There was some background strumming from the musicians but no full song or hymn. I think the riskiest decision here was to split the exchange of rings from the vows by putting the third reading between them. But it worked, because the vows were quite long – about 500 words each – and also quite emotional, and it was good to have a pause to catch breath.
I did most of the actual writing last weekend, having been given a deadline by the event organiser (who would of course have been perfectly happy with a page which said “we will talk for 27 minutes” and was otherwise blank, but it’s helpful to have a deadline to focus the mind). My inspirational music for writing was the Irish jig, “Haste to the Wedding”, which I knew as part of the theme tune to The Irish R.M. back in the day, but there are several YouTube videos of the Corrs playing it.
It took me until early Sunday afternoon before I was happy enough to share it. The total length of the script is only 4,200 words, but it’s quite intense stuff and requires full and deep concentration to write. The couple were still writing their vows, and I gave them my feedback in the middle of the week.
I was still refining my own words early yesterday morning. My last substantial addition was stolen from our old family friend John Bossy, whose classic Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 describes medieval weddings in Christian Europe as taking place not inside the church but just outside, at the church door. The weather yesterday was rather changeable and I thought this demonstrated a interesting medieval attitude to risk-taking.
But before that we had the civil ceremony in Ixelles, overseen by Gautier Calomne, the premier échevin, in the lovely Pavilion Malibran where unfortunately the fantastic sunlight flooded the room and made photography a bit challenging. (But the échevin‘s hair is fantastic.)
There was a nice chat afterwards, which was also my moment to identify the key people – the readers, a Romanian friend of A’s, a British friend of L’s, and L’s mother – and also A’s sister who was the ring-bearer. There would be no bridal party as such; L had decided firmly that she wanted to walk down the aisle independently, on her own.
And then yesterday came the big moment. A and L had chosen an unusual venue, the Asiat Park in Vilvoorde, formerly the Belgian military centre for technical and telecommunications services, now owned by the town of Vilvoorde and transformed into a community centre and event venue. During the 1930s, it was the place where Italian inventor Giulio Ulivi worked on his plans to develop a death ray for the Belgian military. He died in 1948 and his blueprints were never found. I wondered if we might happen to come across them during the wedding reception, but the place was of course thoroughly cleared out by the Vilvoorde authorities when they acquired it.
Anne and I got to the venue good and early, for sound checks and to agree cues with the musicians, and when the main party of guests arrived (by coach from Brussels) I checked in again with the readers and took them though the readings. L’s mother was particularly relaxed and confident. “You’ve done a lot of public speaking, I think,” I said to her. She regarded me. “I used to be a university lecturer.” Ah.
Our timetable had us settling people from 5pm, giving a five-minute warning at a quarter past and then launching into the ceremony at 5.20, but in fact everyone was ready by five past five and we just went for it.
The very last thing that I added to the script was a declaration that they were married. I had hesitated about this. I don’t have legal authority to certify a marriage. But I went back to my notes from my celebrant friend and realised that it was one of the points she had stipulated right at the beginning; and on reflection I felt that I would have the authority to bear witness to the wishes of the gathering as a whole, and that it was important to close with a definite statement of what we were all there for. So that was scribbled onto my script just before the ceremony began.
And then my bit was over, and we were onto cocktails and dinner, and dancing (the Romanians came out in force for Dragostea din tei), and people generally being very complimentary about the service. I said, very sincerely, that it was a pleasure working with such a lovely, happy couple and a lot of the best bits had come from them. I joked with the younger unmarried guests that my rates are reasonable. But it was just a lovely thing.
A former colleague told me it was the best thing he had ever seen me do. I can live with that judgement. And I wish A and L all the best for their future together.
I thought the top two of these were very good, the next two OK, and while I have my own reasons for not rating the bottom two, I am sure that they will have a wider appeal to voters.
You will be asking why she would have gone to the expense and effort of arranging this event. (What I think: She wanted to be known on her own merits, and she wanted to be respected, to demonstrate once and for all that her act was her own. She wanted her name, her chosen name, to be associated with her skill and ingenuity; I still can’t understand why or how she walked away.)
Story of stage magic and girl power. I had been planning to mark it down as not being sfnal enough until I got to the end. Beautifully evocative.
I remember being alone here, having no one but the guards to talk to. Mira shouldn’t have to live like that. Most of the guards are nice and you can learn a lot from them, but some of what you learn’s depressing. Usually borrowing money to take an enhanced body was the only way they could find work. Then most of every payday goes toward servicing the debt.
Dynastic dysphoria in a dystopia, and love that transgresses cruelly set boundaries.
She walked like a man. I do remember that. Not like she was making a big point about it either. It wasn’t a showy thing. She just walked across my property like it could be hers any old time. Without apologizing to the space she moved through. Without curling her shoulders in out of sheer embarrassment that she’d gone out and bothered the air. Frankly, it made me uncomfortable. My head wanted to tell my heart it was tied up in fits because that woman walked along like yet another thing that belonged to me had always been hers. But my heart wouldn’t have it. My heart knew it was mad as marbles because I could’ve been walking through the world just like that this whole time, only I never thought to.
Narrator’s husband has been seduced by the neighbourhood vampire, who drops by for a muddy-the-air chat. I found it a bit too close to horror for my taste.
Tarik got the hatch open and Iris flashed her light over the dark space inside. It was just a corridor, dark metal walls scratched with graffiti, mostly symbols she didn’t recognize. Ladsen and Sunara, both suddenly all business, stepped immediately toward the walls, taking out their recording interfaces. “Is it Pre-CR?” Matteo asked.
A Murderbot story which I bounced off as usual (it will probably win). I thought the plot only went half way.
The seed-planters designed its consciousness to grow slowly, adjusting gently to each new unfolding of comprehension. Two hundred thousand local years would be a long time for any living thing to cling to an undersea ledge, let alone something with the power to wreak planetary havoc. Psychological stability must be assured in a monstrous visitation from the stars.
Godzilla as an Awful Warning planted by well-meaning alien overseers. My suspension of disbelief was knocked by too many anachornisms and inaccuracies.
If this was the case, then Mr. Redmond was in for a difficult time of it: for the Church was in no mood to smile upon a Catholic leader who put his national above his sectarian interests and who —with Home Rule as his great objective — was obliged to maintain a liaison with the Liberal Party. The Church had a tendency to construe the word “Liberal” in European terms — as implying all sorts of disagreeable qualities such as anticlerical, freethinking and materialist: and it was inclined to shudder at the sort of Home Rule which might emerge from such an alliance.
Dating from 1976, this was the last book of Anglo-American journalist George Dangerfield, celebrated for his classic The Strange Death of Liberal England, published forty years earlier. I found it thorough and (mostly) fair, and am a bit surprised that it’s not better known. I guess it was overcome by the substantial academic works of the 1980s, by Roy Foster and Joe Lee, and of course Charles Townshend’s more recent work has retrodden exactly the same ground and got a lot more detail out of it. But I guess there were not many warts-and-all summaries of Ireland from 1880 to 1925 available in the mid-70s. I spotted only a few mistakes, and they were trivial (“Eann Comhairle” for “Ceann Comhairle”, that kind of thing).
Dangerfield ends the book with a brief but very provocative counter-historical speculation: what if the Irish side had rejected the Treaty in December 1921? His view is that Lloyd George’s threats of terrible war were a bluff, and he would have resigned, putting the Conservatives in charge, with no choice but to completely own the inevitability of Irish independence (as Bonar Law actually did when he came to power a year later); and that the British government and an Irish movement which was not split by the Treaty would then have been in a position to force the Ulster Unionists into a united Irish Free State.
I’m really not so sure. I think that the coercive capacity of both Dublin and London was pretty weak by the end of 1921. Unionists still had the strength to resist, and Ulster Catholics would have paid the price for that resistance in the first place. I also think that once a negotiation has broken down, one cannot assume that the next set of negotiators will be able to simply pick up the pieces and resume the process to take it to a better place – Cyprus and Palestine are obvious cases in point. The most likely outcome of a failure in December 1921 would have been a messy, semi-frozen conflict, and a lot more civilian deaths, probably including more senior political leaders than were killed in our timeline.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
I started the month in Portugal, and also went to Washington, New York, Utah, Boston, and London. At work, we published a report on Armenia. (Anne and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary, but I was in Portugal on the day itself.) Somewhere in the internets there is video of me giving evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London on 26 October, but you’ll have to settle for the minutes, here and here. Misha Glenny and I emerged from Westminster to see the sad news that John Peel had died. Here I am speaking at Brigham Young University on 13 October. I had more hair then.
6,800 pages (YTD 43,200) 2/21 by women (YTD 31/130) None by PoC (YTD 2/130)
Best book of the month: the Locus Awards anthology pulls together a lot of superlative short stories, some of which I already knew but almost all of which I really liked. You can get it here. Also Making Sense of the Troubles is dated but thorough; you can get it here. However, you can skip Destiny’s Shield, third in an alternative timeline series about Belisarius fighting an alien invasion; the hero never loses a battle or an argument and it gets boring fast. If you want, you can get it here.
Current Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie Lessons From Kosovo: The KFOR Experience, ed. Larry Wentz The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow
Last books finished Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, by Susana M. Morris The Initials in the Heart, by Lawrence Whistler A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel, by Ursula K. Le Guin and Fred Fordham H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald
Next books The Supremacy of the Cybermen, by George Mann, Cavan Scott, Alessandro Vitti et al Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination, ed. Glyn Morgan O the Chimneys, by Nelly Sachs
Thus, if we’re in the middle of the Cold War, and an influential historian publishes a book magnifying old discussions from Max Weber and Sombart arguing that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the rise of banking and the merchant class, triggered by the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, America can grab that book to say: The Renaissance was the birth of capitalism! Clearly the Renaissance’s true successor is modern western capitalist regimes! The fact that it was a golden age proves capitalism will make a golden age as well! And communism is the bad Dark Ages! If, on the other hand, we’re in the nineteenth-century rise-of-nationalism period, and someone argues that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the idea of Italy as a united nation first articulated in the late 1300s, and that the Renaissance golden age ended because Italy was conquered by outside powers, then the Renaissance can be claimed as a predecessor, not only by the Italian unification movement, but by the German unification movement, and any nationalist movement, all claiming a golden Renaissance will come when peoples become nations. Thus, each time someone (usually a historian) proposes a new X-Factor for the Renaissance, it sparks a new wave of opportunities to claim the Renaissance as a source of legitimacy.
I got this because it is on this year’s Hugo ballot for Best Related Work, but to cut to the chase, I’m not voting for it because it is not actually a work that is related to science fiction or fantasy, other than the fact that its writer is well known as a science fiction writer. I have read the author’s spirited defence of its relevance to the genre, and I am not convinced. This is not a book about sf, it is a book that does what it says on the tin and explains about the Renaissance. I will not be giving it a preference on my Hugo ballot.
Not that it’s a bad book – quite the reverse. It’s very readable and breezy, and makes some very good points about how the Renaissance is read, and by whom. There are some great anecdotes and also some quite profound analytical points. We keep coming back to Machiavelli (and to an extent Petrarch) but that’s only reasonable given their later influence. It’s also interesting to have the science of the period situated so firmly in the other cultural endeavours of the day; I have tended to read work that segregated science out, but that of course is utterly anachronistic.
I think it would have been helpful to have a few maps – I am reasonably familiar with its geography, but I can’t always keep in my head the relative locations of Florence, Siena, Pisa and Perugia, let alone remember where the boundaries of the Papal States were. And the internal geography of the major cities, Florence and Rome in particular, becomes important to the narrative.
My only other problem with the book is that it’s really very long, and absorbed a lot of reading time that I’d have preferred to give to Hugo finalists that I am more likely to vote for. But that’s a me problem, not a problem with the book.
All day he stood by the priest while the flames were fed on the altars, in the midst of the respectful army, and Menelaus stood beside him–the two kings without a rival, now that Achilles was gone. At dusk they let the offerings burn down and smoulder, the soldiers kindled supper-fires, and the priest said the omens so far were good.
This was the best-selling book in the USA in 1926, a hundred years ago, so I got hold of it and read it (as previously for the best-selling books of 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1916, 1917, 1921, and 1925). It’s a bit of a gem – almost entirely told in dialogue, with very little description of the scenery, Helen has nonchalantly returned home with Menelaus after the war and is confronted with the emotional resentment of their daughter Hermione, who sees her mother’s scandalous behaviour as the root of all her problems, but incidentally is in love with her cousin Orestes, who starts killing people (notably his mother, Helen’s sister Clytemnestra) in the last part of the book.
Despite the grim storyline, it’s actually rather funny, with Helen bringing 1920s sensibilities to a dark mythic past. It’s anachronistic, but one can totally see her quipping to her relatives and associates over her cigarette-holder. And her message is one of empowerment: she is unashamed of her love affair with Paris; it didn’t work out, so she is back with Menelaus. She is then challenged to apply the same standards to Hermione, and to another young woman in her household who becomes pregnant, but in the end succeeds in doing so, and we cheer for her. Menelaus (and his doorkeeper Eteoneus who provides an alternative old-fashioned viewpoint) are left confused by her confidence. Rather an interesting find.
A 1967 collection of four novelettes by Zelazny, from near the start of his career.
The Furies
Second paragraph of third section:
In his earlier years he had chalked up the most impressive kill-record of any agent ever employed by Interstel Central Intelligence. Forty-eight men and seventeen malicious alien life-forms had the Lynx dispatched during his fifty-year tenure as a field agent. He was one of the three men in the galaxy to have lived through half a century’s employment with ICI. He lived comfortably on his government pension despite three wives and a horde of grandchildren; he was recalled occasionally as a consultant; and he did some part-time missionary work on the side. He believed that all life was one and that all men were brothers, and that love rather than hate or fear should rule the affairs of men. He had even killed with love, he often remarked at Tranquility Session, respecting and revering the person and, the spirit of the man who had been marked for death.
This is the one about three men with unusual superpowers, chasing the villainous Victor Corgo to his death in a space opera universe. I found two things particularly interesting: the first is that Corgo’s motivations are very well explained, to the point that I think we are asking whether his quest for revenge from a grievous wrong really does make him the bad guy, and whether the trio of hunters are any better at all. The second is that in the end he is tracked down due to what we would now call a data hack from his artificial heart, an early case of a breach of electronic privacy of the kind we are now facing daily.
The original title of the story was “Hunt Down the Happy Wallaby“, that being the name of the Corgo’s spaceship. Frederik Pohl rejected this for Galaxy, saying that he found the narrative “multiply confusing”, which I find an extraordinary comment – it’s crystal clear what is happening and why. Apparently Zelazny wrote it “to honor the comic book heroes that he loved”, and one can see that – the characters are pretty much out of that tradition. The superpowered hunters reappear in a different form in Eye of Cat.
The Graveyard Heart
Second paragraph of third section:
He asked himself (from the blister balcony of his suite in the Hundred Towers of the Hilton-Frisco Complex): Is this the girl I want to marry?
This is the one about a near-future group of fabulously rich people who spend most of their time in cryogenic sleep, emerging now and then for wild parties. The protagonist is in love with an unattainable girl who fortunately turns out to be attainable. There’s also a matriarch, and the girl gets pregnant by the protagonist. However their love provokes the deadly jealousy of a failed poet who is also part of the ‘Set’. (The poetry is Zelazny’s own unpublished work.)
In all four of these stories, the gender roles are pretty firmly baked in, and I thought this one has aged even less well than the others; females are threats, whether cunning crones or unwitting maidens. There is some social commentary about celebrity culture, and capital punishment, but it feels a bit painted on. Not a story I’d recommend to someone who didn’t already know Zelazny.
The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth
Second paragraph of third section:
I had to shed my jacket as we flashed out over the bay. To our rear, the skyline could have been under water for the way it waved and rippled in the heatfall. A hopper can accommodate four people (five, if you want to bend Regs and underestimate weight), or three passengers with the sort of gear a baitman uses. I was the only fare, though, and the pilot was like his machine. He hummed and made no unnecessary noises. Lifeline turned a somersault and evaporated in the rear mirror at about the same time Tensquare broke the fore-horizon. The pilot stopped humming and shook his head.
This is the one about catching a super-giant fish creature on the seas of Venus (which were rapidly turning out to be completely mythical). Some critics have apparently complained that it is too obviously lifted from Moby-dick, but that’s completely unfair in my view; The Old Man and the Sea is the much more obvious source, and anyway it’s a completely different story. The narrator is the spurned lover of a rich woman who wants to hire him to help her catch the Big Fish, and the fundamental implausibility of the plot is very well covered by the pace and descriptive drama of the writing; it won the first ever Nebula for Best Novelette.
A Rose for Ecclesiastes
Second paragraph of third section:
Ecclesiastes, abandoned and returned to a dozen times, was almost ready to speak in the High Tongue.
This is the one set on old-fashioned Mars, where the newly arrived Earthfolk are delicately engaging with the dying Martian civilisation (where there is another matriarch, and another girl who gets pregnant by the protagonist). The protagonist is a lonely genius (how optimistic to think that a famous poet would ever be chosen for a space mission!) who cheers the Martians up by fertilisation, and by translating the Book of Ecclesiastes into their language and telling them, hey, it could be worse. It’s one of Zelazny’s earliest stories, written several months before his first publication, and retains a raw narrative power, at least for me. Apparently the emotional charge is based on his relationship with the folk singer Hedy West. I don’t know what to read into the fact that it turns out that the narrator’s Martian girlfriend never really liked him that much in the first place, and was only pretending.
All four of these stories show both the good and the bad of Zelazny’s early writing. The descriptions are fantastic and the use of language lyrical, and his protagonists’ motivations are very well conveyed; but he’s not comfortable writing about women, either old or younger, and the plots sometimes don’t really stand up even on their own terms.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
Back at work, I continued lobbying for a Commission cabinet position until it became obvious that this was not my year. (I have not seriously tried again since.) I had another op-ed on Macedonia as the political situation there took another twist. I travelled to Moldova, Belfast and ended the month in Portugal, with a day trip to the Hague. A writer whose books I don’t especially like rather sweetly got in touch and offered to send me some more so that I could make a more informed judgement; I accepted. And we celebrated little U’s christening (sadly since then we have lost both Liz, her godmother, and Guy Van Haver, the parish priest).
My dislike of The Gods Themselves is well recorded; I was also deeply disappointed by Janet Evanovich’s To The Nines– I had enjoyed several earlier books in the series but this one put me off the rest. You can get them here and here.
“That’s your considered scientific opinion, is it Fitz?’ the Doctor asked.
I had actually read this one twice before, in 2008 and again in 2015, but I came back to it again to round off the ongoing multiple-worlds narrative of the Eighth Doctor Adventures that I have been slogging through. In my first attempt, in 2008, I wrote:
Well, if I’m going to read more of the 8th Doctor novels at all, I’m going to have to start doing it in sequential order. Dipping into the series – in this case because I was interested to see a different treatment of the Princes in the Tower than we got in The Kingmaker – tends to confront me with characters (in this case Miranda and Sabbath) who clearly have deep significance for the author and for followers of the series but who are unknown to me. There are some vivid bits of description, and a twist at the end which I would have appreciated more if the whole book had not felt rather like fan-fiction in a canon I don’t know much about.
This time round, I felt that there was a decent bit of closure for the narrative, but in the end I still don’t have a strong sense of who and why Trix and Sabbath are in the series at all, and the twist at the end is a nice touch but doesn’t actually tie in with the rest of the story. But you can get Sometime Never… here.
Next in this sequence: Halflife, by Mark Michalowski.
