The best known books set in each country: Liberia

Posted on 6 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Liberia is on the west coast of Africa. Its neighbors are Sierra Leone to the northwest, Guinea-Conakry to the north and Côte d’Ivoire to the east, with the ocen to the south and west. Its history is rather unusual: it was set up as a kind of reverse colony for freed slaves from the United States, and has been functionally independent since 1847, recognized by the USA and other countries since 1862. Indigenous Liberians got a raw deal from this settlement, and the elected government was overthrown in a coup in 1980. Two civil wars followed, from 1989 to 1997 and from 1999 to 2003. The 2005 elections brought Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first woman president, to power for the first of two six-year terms. She was succeeded in the 2017 election by well-known football player George Weah, who then lost his bid for re-election in 2023 by a margin of less than 1.3% to Joseph Boakai, who had been Sirleaf’s vice-president.

Liberia remains a country with a low Human Development Index, though still ahead of its neighbors Guinea and Sierra Leone. The main industry is subsistence agriculture. Its major exports are gold, iron ore, cacao and rubber, and it also has the second biggest maritime registry in the world after Panama. The lingua franca is English, and the overwhelming religious tradition is Protestant. The largest indigenous ethnic group are the Kpelle, but they are only 20% of the population.

Liberia has not touched my own life and career much. When I was a PhD student in Belfast, the head of the social anthropology department was Elizabeth Tonkin, who was an expert on Liberian society and culture. Later on I worked alongside the late great Stephen Ellis, whose view on Liberia were controversial but heartfelt. I did have the opportunity to ask both about Liberia, and listened in awestruck silence to what they told me. I also encountered Ellen Johnson Sirleaf at a couple of International Crisis Group board meetings just before she was elected president, but was too overawed to talk to her.

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 Liberia.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
She Would Be King	Wayétu Moore	7,495	644	2,826
The House at Sugar Beach	Helene Cooper	8,118	814	617
Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War	Leymah Gbowee	4,361	312	629
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir	Wayétu Moore	3,175	229	846
The Darling	Russell Banks	2,656	861	203
Allah Is Not Obliged	Ahmadou Kourouma	2,576	449	340
Journey Without Maps	Graham Greene	1,889	837	135
This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President	Ellen Johnson Sirleaf	1,997	293	163

The top writer this week is a Liberian woman, Wayétu Moore, whose novel She Would Be King is a magical realist tale set early in Liberia’s history. Her The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is an autobiography, and I think the majority of it is set in Liberia before her family fled the civil wars.

The House at Sugar Beach is also an autobiography, about how Helene Cooper’s family was disrupted by the 1980 coup. She is now the Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times. This was the winner this week on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, but Wayétu Moore seems to have scored big time with StoryGraph users.

Mighty be Our Powers is the story of how Leymah Gbowee built a women’s peace movement to end the civil war, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for it alongside Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

The Darling is about an American woman who gets sucked into Liberian politics in the 1970s and 1980s.

Allah Is Not Obliged is about a Guinean boy who is recruited as a child soldier in the Liberian civil war.

Journey Without Maps tells the story of Graham Greene’s walk across Liberia in 1936 with his cousin (who wrote her own book about it).

This Child Will Be Great is another autobiography, this time by the president herself.

Including the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight, though it did rocket She Would Be King to the top of the list.

I had no tough disqualification decisions this week. I hesitated a bit about both The Dragons, the Giant, the Women and Allah Is Not Obliged, but in the end I think more than half of both is set in the country.

Very few of the books on my shelves have much to say about Liberia. I think there is half a chapter in Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures), by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlethwait, and Andrew Thomson.

Next up are the Central African Republic and Palestine, followed by Oman and Norway.

Set in 2027 #2: Star Cops: TV series, books and Big Finish audio

Posted on 5 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Working slowly through the rather small canon of sf stories and shows set in 2027, I reach the 1987 BBC TV series Star Cops. I have absolutely no memory of watching this show, which went out during the July and August summer holidays at 8.30 pm on a weekday, between my first and second years at university. As far as I remember I spent the summer in Ireland, but there was and is perfectly good BBC reception there.

It’s set among police officers in earth orbit and on the moon, in an era where getting into space seems little more difficult than catching a bus. Indeed, one of the problems of the first few episodes is that the space interiors don’t look all that different from an office environment on Earth, so you’re not quite clear what is happening where.

The 2027 of Star Cops is not very different from the 1987 of when the show was originally made. There seem to be more women in professional leadership positions. The central character, Nathan Spring, has an AI called ‘Box’ which speaks with his voice and is capable of carrying out fairly complex data searches, but nobody else has anything like that. The Soviet Union still exists. “International” generally means from the white, English-speaking world. And as noted above, spaceflight is casually easy.

The show clearly had difficulty finding its feet. The two worst episodes are the first two, written by series creator Chris Boucher and directed by Christopher Baker. Baker had had a long career, though he did very little after Star Cops, and doesn’t seem to have done much science fiction previously. The five episodes (of nine) that he directed are noticeably lacking in energy compared to the other four. (We’ll get onto those in a moment.)

Chris Boucher, who wrote three classic Doctor Who stories and was script editor for Blake’s Seven, should have been able to deliver quality writing, and somehow didn’t here, for a show that was his own baby. Insider accounts tell of the friction between him and producer Evgeny Gridneff. For whatever reason, the first two episodes look flat and have confusing plots, and that was probably enough to kill the prospect of the show continuing.

And that’s a bit of a shame, because although Baker directed five episodes rather unexcitingly, the other four are rather good, and they are all directed by none other than Graeme Harper, who is also the only person to have directed both Old Who and New Who, including one of the stories generally rated as the best of all Old Who, The Caves of Androzani. The screen becomes much more edgy and the show more watchable with him in charge.

In addition, though Chris Boucher wrote the first four episodes and the last, he brought in two other writers for the rest. One episode was written by Philip Martin, who also wrote two Sixth Doctor stories; the other three are by John Collee, then a medical doctor at the start of his writing career, but who hit the big time in the Noughties with his scripts for Happy Feet and Master and Commander. Collee’s scripts are head and shoulders above the other six.

The sixth episode, In Cold Blood, has Graeme Harper directing John Collee’s script, and I think it is the one I would show to someone who was wondering if Star Cops was for them, as a fair representation of its merits and its flaws. As of this writing, you can watch all nine episodes on Archive.org.

Other points that must be made: the scripts are pretty racist and sexist, even by the lower standards of 1987, and the theme tune is just dire.

To go through the episodes one by one:

Episode One: An Instinct for Murder (script Chris Boucher, director Christopher Baker, first shown 6 July 1987): introduces the main cast, Nathan Spring (David Calder) who gets made the head of Star Cops during the story, David Theroux (Erick Ray Evans), an African-American star cop, Pal Kenzy (Linda Newton), an Australian star cop, and Lee Jones (Gennie Nevinson), Spring’s girlfriend. The plot involves a drowning on Earth and spacesuit sabotage in orbit, and the denouement is frankly confusing, though it turns out the Russians are not to blame after all.

Episode Two: Conversations with the Dead (script Chris Boucher, director Christopher Baker, first shown 13 July 1987): Spring’s girlfriend Lee is gratuitously fridged at the start, and the Earth cop put in charge of the investigation , the rather old-fashioned Colin Devis (Trevor Cooper), is incomprehensibly hired by Spring to join the Star Cops at the end of the episode. Meanwhile there is a parallel plot with a space freighter which has gone off course and where almost everything dramatic happens off screen.

Episode Three: Intelligent Listening for Beginners (script Chris Boucher, director Christopher Baker, first shown 20 July 1987): Spring fires Kenzy and another cop for blatant corruption; meanwhile a terrorist group called the Black Hand Gang (Chicago rather than Serbian) is attacking critical infrastructure with ransomware (quite an advanced topic) led by a tremendously creepy hacker played by David John Pope (the Kandyman in Doctor Who). Kenzy thwarts the hijacking of a space shuttle and is rehired basking in glory, the blatant evidence of corruption swept aside (this seemed very improbable to me).

Episode Four: Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits (script by Chris Boucher, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 27 July 1987): the Moonbase has a new commander, Alexander Krivenko (Jonathan Adams, also Dr Scott in the Rocky Horror Picture Show). Spring wants to extend his jurisdiction to the American Ronald Reagan space station (Reagan was still president when this was made), where also a scientist has mysteriously vanished without any trace that he was ever there. The American commander (played by Daniel Benzali) is egregiously sexist, but the denouement is the first impressive episode ending of the series, thanks presumably to Graeme Harper.

Episode Five: This Case to be Opened in a Million Years (script by Philip Martin, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 3 August 1987, for some reason much later than the other episodes): Spring goes on holiday to Italy and leaves Theroux to deal with a nuclear waste rocket crashing into the moonrise. While he is away he gets framed for drug trafficking. Some great shots which look like Rome (and may even have been filmed there).

Episode Six: In Warm Blood (script by John Collee, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 10 August 1987): Introduces a new Japanese star cop, Anna Shoun (Sayo Inaba), a Japanese doctor who is recruited from a pharma company that is up to no good. Sadly she rarely rises above stereotype (not the actor’s fault). Very tightly done plot exploring why a renowned scientist was moved to suicide, and incidentally what killed the crew of the Pluto 5 spaceship?

Episode Seven: A Double Life (script by John Collee, directed by Christopher Baker, first shown 17 August 1987): Brilliant concept involving the secret clone of a famous pianist, hiding out on the moon and threatening the embryos of a rich young widow (played by Nitza Saul, who was the Israeli agent in Kessler).

Episode Eight: Other People’s Secrets (script by John Collee, directed by Christopher Baker, first shown 24 August 1987): German official Ernest Wolffhart (played by Geoffrey “Catweazle” Bayldon) comes to check the moonbase safety, and Devis’ psychiatrist ex-wife comes to make a mental health assessment of the crew. Played slightly for laughs but at this point I was relaxing into it.

Episode Nine: Little Green Men and Other Martians (script by Chris Boucher, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 31 August 1987): Massive media interest is generated by rumors of a Martian artefact, particularly from an American reporter played by Lachele Carl (who went on to be an American newscaster in New Who). Potential shock ending as it looks like one of the main characters has been killed off at the end – or have they?

So, basically I don’t think that Star Cops has the necessary coherence of vision or the resources (or the catchy theme tune) to become a success. It’s clearly still got its fans out there, and I can talk about it now from a position of knowledge.

Chris Boucher wrote two books based on his five episodes. The first, An Instinct for Murder, is a massive expansion of the first TV episode to over 60,000 words, and explains what is going on a lot better than he was able to on screen. It feels like a lot of good writing ideas simply got crowded out by the time limits. The key plot line is still not much good, but it is better supported by the narrative. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

Nathan glanced out through the booth’s perspex dome towards the distant reservoir. He told himself that tollbooths were more secure, but the truth was that the new generation mobilinks made him uncomfortable, and he avoided carrying one. There were times, though, when his aversion to being constantly available for the ‘unbreakably close person-to-person contact’ promised by the manufacturers was definitely inconvenient. He said, “We had a meeting.”

The second book, Little Green Men and other stories, adapts the other four Boucher scripts for the page. A notable difference is that rather than Jonathan Adams’ Russian Moonbase commander, Boucher has a Chinese boss, Jiang Li Ho, and Japanese Anna Shoun is replaced by an Irish star cop, who is not treated any differently because of her nationality. The second paragraph of the third chapter (“Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits”) is:

Marty still looked unconvinced and unenthusiastic. His round, pale face remained irritatingly expressionless. “I think she was lucky they didn’t deport her,” he said. “I would have done.”

Again, this is a sweatier, sexier reimagining of the TV show, written years later and giving a sense of what Boucher maybe wishes the original had been.

Both books were originally published by the one and only Judith Proctor in fanzine format. Now you can get them here in a single volume, Star Cops.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, and I got hold of the first Big Finish box set of plays based on Star Cops, a sequence titled Mother Earth. The promotional video doesn’t say much about the plot but does have a far better theme tune than the TV show did:

Now, as they say, we are cooking on gas. The script editor for the series is Andrew Smith, who is best known in Doctor Who fandom for having written a TV story when he was only 19, but the important point about his career for present purposes is that he grew up to become a senior police officer working on anti-terrorism, which is actually the perfect background to be show-runner for a series about futuristic law enforcement.

There are four stories, the first by Smith, the others by Ian Potter, Christopher Hatherall and Guy Adams (Potter and Adams are well-established Who writers), all about an anti-space-travel activist group causing mayhem and destruction to the Moonbase and other space infrastructure. The third episode, set in Paris but not really sounding much like it, is perhaps the weakest, but they are all good.

Of the original main cast, David Calder and Trevor Cooper reprise Nathan Spring and Colin Devis; Linda Newton appears again as Pal Kenzy only later in the sequence as they had not tracked her down quickly enough in Australia, and Erick Ray Evans sadly died in 1999 so is no longer available to do David Theroux. To them we add two new star cops, played by Philip Olivier (the Sixth Doctor audio companion Hex) and Rakhee Thakrar (who was the English teacher, Emily Sands, in Sex Education), and a Moonbase commander played by Nimmy March (who I think was new to me).

I think that you could enjoy this a lot even if you had no knowledge of the 1987 TV series, and you can get it here. When I do my write-up of SF set in 2027, of course, only the original TV series (and novels) will count, as I keep a twenty-year threshold.

April 2007 books

Posted on 5 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

This month I went to the Political Studies Association conference in Bath to do a panel debate on Europe, and travelled back to London talking to the journalist Tim Sebastian, which was fun.

In family news, my brother and his wife welcomed their new daughter. Also I turned 40, but I don’t seem to have done much in the way of celebration; B’s behaviour at home was getting very difficult, and we just didn’t have the energy.

I wrote about Dodo Chaplet as well.

I read 21 books in April 2007.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 24)
In Search of the Dark Ages, by Michael Wood
Field of Bones: An Irish Division in Gallipoli, by Philip Orr
After Dinner Speaking, by Fawcett Boom
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
800 Years of Women’s Letters, edited by Olga Kenyon (did not finish)

Non-genre 2 (YTD 8)
The Way By Swann’s, by Marcel Proust
The Search For Roots: a personal anthology, compiled by Primo Levi

sf 9 (YTD 26)
The Book of Imaginary Beings, compiled by Jorge Luis Borges
Temeraire, by Naomi Novik
Glasshouse, by Charles Stross
Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
Blindsight, by Peter Watts
Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn
Narn i Chîn Húrin: the Tale of the Children of Húrin, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Blindness, by José Saramago
The Way to Babylon, by Paul Kearney

Comics 3 (YTD 9)
The Last Temptation, by Neil Gaiman
Alias vol. 1, by Brian Michael Bendis
Alias vol 2: Come Home, by Brian Michael Bendis

Doctor Who 2 (YTD 13)
Made of Steel, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, by Terrance Dicks

5,900 pages (YTD 24,700)
2/21 by women (YTD 19/80)
none by PoC (YTD 2/80)

Best of the month: Tolkien’s Children of Húrin, which you can get here, and Saramago’s Blindness, which you can get here. Worst by far: Fawcett Boom’s pointless guide to After Dinner Speaking, which you can get here.

The Invasion, by Stephen Hatcher (and Ian Marter, and Derrick Sherwin)

Posted on 4 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first started watching The Invasion in 2006, I wrote of the animations:

Episode 1 is one of those for which the original video footage has been lost, and only the soundtrack survives. The DVD, however, includes an animation of the style used by the BBC for the Scream of the Shalka and Shada for it, and while it is not a patch on watching real actors deliver their lines, it is much more satisfactory than either soundtrack alone, or the animations generated by fans, or following along the BBC photonovels while trying to listen to the words. Well done to the animators.

Watching the whole thing, I wrote:

The Invasion, from later in that season, leading up to The War Games, is quite a different matter. I’ve commented already on the brilliant idea of using animations for the two episodes (of the right in total) which are missing. I can bear to listen to an entire series in audio, but to mix audio and video is a different matter. I’ve tried the fan “reconstructions”, but don’t find them satisfactory; likewise watching the BBC photonovel combined with listening to the audio. But this format works, although of course once you get back to the live action episodes you realise what you are missing.

Kevin Stoney, as Tobias Vaughn, is a fantastic villain, and every scene with him is great to watch. He is a totally convincing invulnerable sinister scientist oligarch conspiring with the enemies of mankind, and yet achieves a certain measure of redemption at the end. He was, of course, also great as the super-villain Mavic Chen in The Dalek Master Plan, though Chen is quite a different character. (And he popped up in I CLAVDIVS as Tiberius’ court astrologer, Thrasyllus – who is indeed a historical character.) The story is really about Vaughn’s journey as much as about anything else.

Poor Jamie doesn’t get to do a lot, apart from canoeing and climbing up the liftshaft, but the other main characters are all great – Troughton as ever brilliant, but also Wendy Padbury as Zoe sparking a very very watchable rapport with Sally Faulkner’s Isobel Watkins – and incidentally saving the day and blowing up the Cybermen’s fleet with her Mental Powers of Calculation. And of course this is the first UNIT story, with the return of Lethbridge-Stewart (now a Brigadier) and the first appearance of Benton. Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier in particular gets some really good material to work with, a far cry from the cartoonish character of the Pertwee years. Again, the DVD reveals just how much fun the cast were having, especially thanks to the hospitality provided by the Guinness brewery where a lot of the action scenes were filmed.

Some reviewers have expressed bitter disappointment with the Cybermen, either that they don’t have enough screen time, or that they don’t look good, or (inconsistently) both. I don’t completely share those feelings. The Cybermen aren’t seen until the end of episode 4, but that’s really because we have not been told who is behind the invasion of the story’s title. It is a bit unfortunate that much of the action of blowing up spaceships, etc, happens off screen – but of course mediated through that new-fangled radar stuff. I also have the controversial view that the Cybermen redesign is better than the original version – I think supporting evidence is that the new version has survived through to this year.

The only other thing that really annoyed me was the cheery music accompanying the arrival of the soldiers for the final battle (apparently real soldiers from the real army). But the rest of the music is very good, and the whole thing is a jolly good package.

For my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:

The Cybermen are back (though not reallly for long) in The Invasion, and so are the villain and one of the heroes from The Daleks’ Master Plan, Kevin Stoney appearing as the rich mad industrialist Tobias Vaughn, and Nicholas Courtney making a return as Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, now promoted to Brigadier. (The first surviving shot of the latter is of his backside as he emerges from a piece of equipment).

Given how little we actually see of the Cybermen here, it feels more like The Avengers, with the Brigadier trying to stop Vaughn’s plan, though eventually relying on Zoe to destroy the approaching fleet (seen only on radar) and on the Doctor to talk Vaughn into renouncing his allies. Taking a longer view, it’s the most New Who-ish story so far, with an alien threat to contemporary Earth (which never happened in the Hartnell era, and only three times out of 21 Troughton stories, though it was a staple storyline of both the Pertwee years and of RTD) combined with recurring characters and family dynamics among the Doctor’s allies.

It’s a very slashtastic story as well, with the strongly sapphic dynamic between Zoe and Isobel Watkins matched by the Doctor and Jamie playing around in canals and tunnels (the Brigadier being the gooseberry) and even the weird powerplay between Vaughn and his increasingly panicky security man, Packer. The music is also particularly good, with the notable exception of the jaunty military theme which destroys the tension of crucial scenes in the last couple of episodes.

Rewatching it now, a couple of points occurred to me. The eight episodes are distinctly padded (as with the ten episodes of The War Games) by our regular cast running into trouble, getting captured, escaping and then running back into trouble again. But on the flip side, there is a lot of characterization – Robert Sidaway’s Captain Jimmy Turner is an alternative love interest for Isobel (Zoe looks distinctly put out, but which of them is she jealous of?) and the relationship between Vaughn and his sidekick Packer, played by Peter Halliday, is interesting too. But the fact that all the crucial action happens off screen in the final episode is a real letdown.

The novelization is one of those done by Ian Marter, who also played one of Tom Baker’s companions, Harry Sullivan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

‘I thought we were going in there to find the lassies’, he complained.

I wrote a big piece on Marter’s Who writing for Strange Horizons in 2007, and said of this one:

Somehow Marter managed to find his creative spark for his last three novelizations, which are all cracking good reads. The Invasion, also from the 1968-69 season, also featured Jamie and Zoe, and concerned Cybermen invading a near-contemporary London; it also brought back the character of Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart as the Brigadier in charge of UNIT. This was an eight-part story when first broadcast, cut down for Marter’s 1985 novel to 160 pages, so a rather extreme compression. But somehow, Marter makes it work as he failed to with his previous Second Doctor stories; he had better material to start with, true, but the plot is somewhat easier to follow in his novel than in Derrick Sherwin and Kit Pedler’s original script. The villainous Tobias Vaughn, briliantly brought to life by Kevin Stoney on screen, is actually better in some ways here, with several hints that he has already become more—or perhaps less—than completely human, and his change of heart at the end of the story, when he turns on his Cyberman former allies, more consistently portrayed as a fanatic changing targets rather than as the human being brought to his senses whom we saw on television. At the same time, no written description can possibly convey Stoney’s sinister drawl, now available to all on a recently released DVD. There is also, unusually, an injection rather than a subtraction of humour by Marter, with a running joke about the awful tea in UNIT headquarters.

Rereading it, I am struck by the efficiency of Marter’s story telling – the eight episodes get 21 pages, then 25, 20, 19, 22, and the last three 17 pages each. Though perhaps this also illustrates that once he had cut out all the padding, there was a fairly lean story left to tell. You can get the novelization here.

Stephen Hatcher’s Black Archive on the story is a solid look at how The Invasion fitted and fits into the history of Doctor Who and pop culture of the day. The first chapter, “The Doctor, the Brigadier and the Swinging Sixties” makes the point that at the time it was written, the decision to exile the Doctor to Earth in Season Seven had been made, but Troughton and Hines had not yet decided to leave, so the story was potentially setting up a Two/Jamie plus UNIT plus Isabel Watkins dynamic for the next set of stories. That didn’t all come off, obviously, but it’s an unusual Who story in that it was written looking ahead to the future of the show; most of them aren’t.

The second chapter, “England Swings Like a Pendulum Do”, looks briefly at the previous Who stories set in the present day, whenever that happened to be, and then at the role of transistor radios and photographers, both crucial story elements of The Invasion, in making the Sixties swing.

The third chapter, “Doctor Who and the Playboys, Spies and Private Eyes”, looks at the crossover between TV spy shows and Doctor Who, notably The Avengers‘ episode “The Cybernauts” which shares significant plot elements with The Invasion. Also Robert Vaughn, lead actor in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., shares a surname with the villainous Tobias. Its second paragraph is:

The 60s was a period when the Cold War between the USA with its allies in NATO² and the Soviet Union and its fellow members of the Warsaw Pact was at its height. This prolonged period of antagonism between the nuclear-armed superpowers lasted from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although for most of that period, hostilities were confined to ‘proxy wars’ like the Korean War (1950-53) and the war in Vietnam (1954-75), the Cold War was prone to heating up, in response to events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and Soviet actions in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979). Throughout the Cold War, the intelligence services of both sides are known to have been very active in keeping their respective governments aware of what the other side were up to. In Britain in particular, the revelation of the activities of the ‘Cambridge Spies’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – between 1951 and 1963, and the escape from Wormwood Scrubs of the double agent George Blake in 1966, heightened interest in espionage. And, in the same way that popular literature and cinema did before both the First and Second World Wars, film and TV responded to a time of international tension with an upsurge in spy fiction.
² North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

The fourth chapter, “Doctor Who and the Invaders from Space”, looks at the influence of Quatermass, the character of the Brigadier, and the odd resonance of the long-forgotten TV show Counterstrike.

The fifth chapter, “Doctor Who and the Captains of Industry”, looks briefly at boardroom dramas such as The Troubleshooters and The Power Game, and their real life counterparts.

The sixth chapter, “Doctor Who and the squaddies”, looks at the impact of National Service on Britain and in particular on director Douglas Camfield. This is perhaps the moment to acknowledge that Gareth Roberts was correct a few weeks ago to assert that Camfield was pretty right-wing, though the other members of the cast and crew say that he never let it affect his work.

The seventh chapter, “Absence of the Cybermen”, points out that although the Cybermen are only in the second half of the story, it nonetheless had a big impact on subsequent Cyberman stories.

A conclusion asserts briefly that

The Invasion is the Doctor Who story that brings together so much of what was good about 1960s film and television drama, and in doing so it may be the story from that era that is able to speak the most to twenty-first century audiences.

I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I will say that Hatcher has given me new appreciation for a story that I already liked anyway. You can get his Black Archive here.

I’ll also observe that this volume lifts the Second Doctor a little from his under-representation in the Black Archives. This is the first Black Archive about a Second Doctor story since 2019; it is the 84th in the series and The Underwater Menace was the 40th. 19.0% of his stories and 19.3% of his episodes have been covered in the series so far; this is the lowest of any of the first eight Doctors, and taking all Doctors into account, it’s more stories proportionally than the Tenth Doctor’s 13.5% and more episodes than the Ninth Doctor’s 15.4%, but less than anyone else except the special cases of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors. (If you’re interested, apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors, the Seventh Doctor is way in the lead.) I am not blaming anyone for this; I was looking forward to last year’s planned volume on The Enemy of the World, but it never appeared.

Doctor	Stories	BA’ed	%age	Episodes	BA’ed	%age
Eighth	2	2	100.0%	2	2	100.0%
Shalka	1	1	100.0%	1	1	100.0%
Seventh	12	8	66.7%	42	30	71.4%
Sixth	11	4	36.4%	31	14	45.2%
Fourth	41	13	31.7%	172	54	31.4%
Thirteenth	24	6	25.0%	26	12	46.2%
First	29	10	34.5%	134	48	35.8%
Third	24	6	25.0%	103	33	32.0%
Fifth	21	6	28.6%	68	20	29.4%
Twelfth	35	8	22.9%	36	10	27.8%
Eleventh	39	8	20.5%	39	10	25.6%
Ninth	10	2	20.0%	13	2	15.4%
Second	21	4	19.0%	119	23	19.3%
Tenth	36	5	13.9%	39	8	20.5%
Fifteenth	16	1	6.3%	18	1	5.6%
Fourteenth	3	0	0.0%	3	0	0.0%

As soon as someone does one of the Fourteenth Doctor episodes, he’ll zoom to halfway up the table.

Five shakes of the Dragon’s Tail ☋

Posted on 4 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Links about China and EU-China relations that caught my eye this week

1) A useful roundup from POLITICO on the big EU-China issue: the trade imbalance (I don’t know about you, but it comes up in every China-related meeting that I have):

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-wants-to-convince-china-to-curb-exports-to-the-bloc/

2) An intriguing report from Reuters suggesting that some in China have got the hint, and that electric vehicle makers are being urged not to race to the bottom on price:

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-issues-overseas-compliance-rules-automakers-warns-against-disruptive-2026-09-01/

3) On a different note, the FT reminds us that the best robots – including Chinese ones – are the ones that don’t look too much like humans:

https://www.ft.com/content/2bb2b670-999d-499c-ad56-47702b3830b1

4) Fan culture meets Chinese history through the shitong nü. Fangirls offer ibuprofen at the tomb of Cao Cao, for his headaches. It’s a bit late – he died in 280 AD!

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1018940

5) A fragment of Roman silk found on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert in 1914 shows just how ancient the trading and cultural links between China and Europe are, as my old friend Peter Stewart explains.

https://silkroadsarchaeoheritage.org/articles/10.5334/srah.29

Thursday reading

Posted on 3 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
The Owned Continent, by Dave Keating
Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset
Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative Prime Minister?, by Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton

Last books finished
The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth
Upon a White Horse, by Peter Ross
Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr
Gods and Monsters: Sutekh & Omega: Eltralla, by Ian Winterton, Mark Griffiths et al

Next books
Fear Itself, by Nick Wallace
Silent Earth, by Dave Goulson
Léopoldville 60, by Baudouin Deville

Tuki: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith

Posted on 3 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third chapter:

I hugely enjoyed Jeff Smith’s Bone when it first came out, but am sorry to say that I was less impressed with this. It’s the first volume of two about Tuki, an ancient human hunter on the African plains, who is seeking a mythic herd of buffalo and accompanied by three children and by assorted hominids of other species. There is a lot of magic, which makes this a palaeohuman fantasy in a way. I felt that it lacked the humanity and humor that made Bone such a great work, and didn’t really get what the story was supposed to be about. Other people liked it more. You can get Tuki: Fight for Fire here.

This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen, by Kate Evans.

Making Peace in Northern Ireland, by Charles B. Strozier

Posted on 2 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (about Ian Paisley):

At the same time, Paisley was aggressive, mean, a bully, and gratuitously insulting. He made up mocking names for his opponents, like Donald Trump much later. For example, in one of the early issues of the organs of the DUP, the Protestant Telegraph, April 21, 1972, Paisley went on about “Hill-Billy” Whitelaw (for Viscount William Whitelaw, the first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland after Direct Rule was imposed in 1972), and “Liar Lynch” (for Jack Lynch, the Taoiseach of Ireland).⁴ He “generated fear” in everyone around him, as Eamon Mallie and David McKittrick put it in their BBC TV series on the Troubles.⁵ The journalist Eamonn Holmes has said recently that, “I defy anyone to say that lan Paisley in his prime was not scary.” ⁶
⁴ The Protestant Telegraph, April 21, 1972. DS.
⁵ Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick, Endgame in Ireland (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001), 275ff.
⁶ Eamonn Holmes, “Clinton’s Men Tried to Arrest Me Under the Christmas Lights,” Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, eds., Reporting the Troubles: Journalists Tell Their Stories of the Northern Ireland Conflict (Newtownards, Northern Ireland: 2018), 158.

This is a sympathetic book by an outsider. Stormier is both a retired professor of history and a qualified psychoanalyst, and his previous books include two studies of Abraham Lincoln, two books on Christian fundamentalism, and an analysis of the psychological reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Here he gives us a historical account, with nuances rooted in psychology, of the personalities behind the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the process that led to it.

My own first thought on reading the book is that asking why the Good Friday Agreement talks succeeded is a very good question. Many, perhaps most, negotiations around deep-rooted conflicts fail. Look at Cyprus; look at the Israel/Palestine situation; look indeed at the current dynamic between the USA and Iran (I am writing this in mid-August but I think it will be the same when this appears in early September). Even South Africa, held up so often as a paragon of how to do it, had a collapse of the process in mid-1992 with awful violence resulting.

There were several junctures where the Northern Ireland process could have gone in a different and less successful direction, and it’s worth remembering that the timescale was quite short – it was only a decade since the Anglo-Irish Agreement, only twenty-five years since Sunningdale; these were closer to 1998 than 1998 is to us now.

Crozier’s main source for his book is John Alderdice, who was the leader of the cross-community Alliance Party from 1987 to 1998. Crozier interviewed Alderdice expensively and has also had a very good browse through his records. I myself worked very closely with Alderdice from 1993 to 1996, and we have stayed in touch since I left Northern Ireland in early 1997, so even where he is not explicitly quoted I recognized some of his thoughts and analysis coming through.

This is not a bad thing at all – if you have one excellent source to hand, you may as well use it, provided (as in this case) that it is tempered with other sources, in particular the first-hand published accounts of a number of the leading players, notably George Mitchell, and key biographical notes, notably Dean Godson’s on David Trimble (in which I believe I get a credit myself). There is still the occasional slip, and I think the book would have benefited from a final read-through by someone familiar enough with Northern Ireland to catch the occasional point of detail that has gone astray (eg Dolours Price becomes “Jean Dolours”).

The book starts with a 50-page profile of John Alderdice including an introduction to the Northern Ireland situation for beginners. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, who became a psychiatrist, married to a pathologist, but also committed to politics. I had not realized that his family and the Paisleys were near neighbors when he grew up in Ballymena, though there is a big generational difference between them (Ian Paisley was 19 years older).

We then get twenty-page pen portraits of the other leading political figures: Paisley, Adams, Hume and Trimble. Paisley’s participation in the Good Friday Agreement itself was marginal, but it cannot be denied that he is the most dominant Unionist figure, possibly the most dominant figure of any variety, during the Troubles and that Northern Ireland’s troubled psyche ran in tracks that he laid down. There is no mystery about Paisley. Adams is more enigmatic.

After a note about the role of women in the peace process, Crozier then looks at the sequence on the American side that brought Washington into the room, and at the confluence of events in 1994-1995 that led to the ceasefires. This was the period when I myself was most closely involved, and there are a couple of incidents where, while I wasn’t in the room where it happened, I heard about it shortly afterwards from one or more of the protagonists.

I sat on the back benches for the first six months of the 1996-98 talks chaired by George Mitchell. It was a morale-sapping experience, though I did have one good moment when John Alderdice presented a paper on decommissioning of arms that Stephen Farry and I had written, and received compliments from several of the other talks participants. (I think we later published it, but cannot remember where).

My most vivid memory is Jeffrey Donaldson vigorously defending the rights of Orangemen to march through Drumcree – this was 1996, the year that the march was first blocked and then forced through by the police). Nobody enjoyed that phase of the talks, with the DUP and Robert McCartney inside and Sinn Fein outside. McCartney in particular was a complete waste of space, droning on about the purity of his cause so monotonously that even his supposed DUP allies looked bored to death. I left in December, never to return.

However, the point made by Crozier (and not only by him) is that the psychological effect of having party leaders sitting and listening quietly (if not necessarily respectfully) to each other meant that everyone’s point of view received exposure, and it also established the place of action as that depressing room in Castle Buildings (where the ground floor was labelled ‘3’, and the talks took place two stories up on floor 5; we never discovered what lay beneath, but it was rumoured to be the government’s nuclear bunker). That in itself reinforced the credibility of the process, and made Paisley and McCartney look irrelevant once they left.

Post-1998 developments are handled rather quickly in Crozier’s book, which is a shame – the dynamics of the St Andrew’s Agreement of 2007 which brought the DUP into government directly with Sinn Féin, Ian Paisley sharing the top spot with Martin McGuinness, are an important part of the later story.

By then, John Alderdice had moved on to other roles (though he retained an important post as a monitor of paramilitary activity including decommissioning, the subject that Stephen and I had written for him about ten years before); and because Crozier’s main source is off the scene he doesn’t go much beyond the headlines. But this is a book about the Good Friday Agreement, not about Northern Ireland in the last forty years, so I accept it for what it is.

I think even people with little knowledge of Northern Ireland would find this interesting and enlightening, subject to the above caveats. You can get Making Peace in Northern Ireland here.

Where did my votes go?

Posted on 2 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

I was thrilled when I belatedly discovered that I had made the long list of nominees for Best Fan Writer in this year’s Hugos. In most recent years I have been ineligible because I was involved with administering the awards. This year, thirteen of you cared enough about my meanderings here and elsewhere to put me on your ballot. I am very grateful. Next year I will even vote for myself!

From the published numbers I can work out a fair bit about my votes. First of all, the total number of points in the system drops by five after I am eliminated, so that means that five of the thirteen votes were for me and no other surviving nominees at that stage. Thank you again!

The other eight votes added up to a total of 2.95 EPH points, and were distributed from me as follows:

0.8 to Örjan Westin
0.72 to James Davis Nicoll
0.5 to Roseanne Pendlebury
0.38 to Cora Buhlert
0.25 to Paul Weimer
0.16 to Jake Casella Brookins
0.08 to Brandon O’Brien
0.05 to Adam Whitehead

That adds to 2.94 rather than 2.95, because of rounding.

We know that those eight votes were worth 0.5, 0.33, 0.25 or 0.2 points each when they sat with me. There is only one combination of eight votes of those values that is worth 2.95 points:

3 votes worth 0.5 each
3 votes worth 0.33 each
1 vote worth 0.25
1 vote worth 0.2

A little bit of squinting and the following becomes clear:

Three votes were for me and one each of Örjan Westin, James David Nicoll and Roseanna Pendlebury. When I was eliminated they gained 0.5 of a point from those votes.

Two votes were shared by me and Cora Buhlert, and one or other of Örjan Westin, James Davis Nicoll, Paul Weimer and Jake Casella Brookins. Another vote was shared by me and the other two of those four. When I was eliminated, Cora gained 0.33 of a point and the other four 0.17 each.

One vote was shared between me, Örjan Westin, Paul Weimer and Brandon O’Brien. When I was eliminated they each gained 0.08 points from that vote.

One vote was shared between me, Örjan Westin, James Davis Nicoll, Cora Buhlert and Adam Whitehead. When I was eliminated they each gained 0.05 points from that vote.

The raw numbers of votes that I shared with other surviving finalists are as follows:

5 – nobody
4 – Örjan Westin
3 – James Davis Nicoll and Cora Buhlert
2 – Paul Weimer
1 – Roseanna Pendlebury, Jake Casella Brookins, Brandon O’Brien and Adam Whitehead

(Strictly, the votes are calculated by multiplying everything by 60, so as not to lose the fractions. The decimal conversion is what is reported, but it is not the actual calculation.)

If I’d had twice as many votes, I’d have been a finalist! (If.)

March 2007 books

Posted on 2 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Northern Ireland Assembly had an election in March 2007, the last one for which I did not do TV commentary, though I went over a few days later in the wake of P-Con and delivered a lecture about voting.

Apart from that, I had a day-trip to the Hague, and a longer trip to Vienna and Prishtina, all for work.

And I hired my first intern in the new job. J was an intelligent young woman who had tried various career options which didn’t work out, and was prepared to give working in international politics a fling. I’m glad to say that she caught the bug and is now a British diplomat. It also turned out that her elder brother was friends with their neighbour Rebecca Nation, the daughter of Terry Nation who wrote a lovely book for her, and J had played with real Daleks as a child. (For certain values of “real”.) I met Rebecca and Joel Nation earlier this year, and they were amused by the connection.

I read 14 books that month.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 19)
Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, by Carne Ross
Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower, by John Brady Kiesling
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro

SF 4 (YTD 17)
Glorifying Terrorism, ed. Farah Mendlesohn
Master of Earth and Water, by Diana L. Paxson and Adrienne Martine-Barnes
Living Next Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson
Spin Control, by Chris Moriarty

Comics 1 (YTD 6)
Blankets, by Craig Thompson

Doctor Who 6 (YTD 11)
Doctor Who – The Massacre, by John Lucarotti
Doctor Who – The Ark, by Paul Erickson
Doctor Who – The Celestial Toymaker, by Gerry Davis and Alison Bingeman
Doctor Who – The Gunfighters, by Donald Cotton
Doctor Who – The Savages, by Ian Stuart Black
Doctor Who – The War Machines, by Ian Stuart Black

4,000 pages (YTD 18,400)
5/14 by women (YTD 17/59)
None by PoC (YTD 2/59)

The two best of these were the excellent graphic novel Blankets, which you can get here, and Shapiro’s look at Shakespeare in 1599, which you can get here. I do not particularly recommend the novelisation of problematic Doctor Who story The Celestial Toymaker, but you can get it here anyway (at a price).

Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on 1 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When the officer handed me my astrolabe, I resisted the urge to snatch it back. He was an old Khoush man, so old that he was privileged to wear the blackest turban and face veil. His shaky hands were so gnarled and arthritic that he nearly dropped my astrolabe. He was bent like a dying palm tree and when he’d said, “You have never traveled; I must do a full scan. Remain where you are,” his voice was drier than the red desert outside my city. But he read my astrolabe as fast as my father, which both impressed and scared me. He’d coaxed it open by whispering a few choice equations and his suddenly steady hands worked the dials as if they were his own.

I first read Binti on a transatlantic flight while reading up on Hugo-eligible short fiction for 2016. I wasn’t hugely impressed and have never really understood the general enthusiasm for it. When it made the shortlist for the BSFA Award, I wrote:

Some people have been raving about this, but I don’t really see why. The plot (plucky kid survives alien attack, makes peace between aliens and humans) is hardly original, and the fact that the protagonist’s tribal adornments uniquely give her protection against the aliens is pretty cliched. Yes, well written; yes, interesting characters; no, not a masterpiece.

By the time Hugo voting came around, it has already won the Nebula, and I wrote:

I expect that this will win, and indeed it has already won the Nebula. As I said when I read it for the BSFA vote, the plot (plucky kid survives alien attack, makes peace between aliens and humans) is hardly original, and the fact that the protagonist’s tribal adornments uniquely give her protection against the aliens is pretty cliched. But obviously it appealed to a lot of readers.

I re-read it again for this post, and did not like it any better. I would add that the writing style of the first few chapters is rather clunky, and the protagonist forgives the aliens rather rapidly for massacring most of her friends. None of the ideas are original or especially well executed. Obviously a critical mass disagrees with me, but there you go.

When the Hugo results came out, Binti had been only second at the nominations stage, but won a convincing victory on the final ballot.

I see that both Witches of Lychford and “The New Mother” were on the long list; I liked both much more. Emily Tesh keeps telling us to go back and read “Sorcerer of the Wildeeps”, and maybe I will.

You can get the complete Binti trilogy here.

Next in my sequence of joint Hugo and Nebula winners are the two from my own first year as Hugo administrator, “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar and Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Monthly Archives: September 2026

The best known books set in each country: Liberia

Set in 2027 #2: Star Cops: TV series, books and Big Finish audio

April 2007 books

The Invasion, by Stephen Hatcher (and Ian Marter, and Derrick Sherwin)

Five shakes of the Dragon’s Tail ☋

Links about China and EU-China relations that caught my eye this week

Thursday reading

Tuki: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith

Making Peace in Northern Ireland, by Charles B. Strozier

Where did my votes go?

March 2007 books

Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor