Today, Bersun was plainly dressed. An iron band for a crown, stamped with an ∞ – sacred symbol of the Eternal Path. His black tunic was slashed with five scarlet claw marks, a reversal of his bodyguards’ uniform. He wore chain mail beneath his tunic, and a longsword at his belt. Orrun was at peace, the rebellion a long-faded scar. But Bersun was a warrior to the bone. Even now, after more than two decades on the throne, he looked more natural dressed as one.
First of the Hugo Best Novel finalists that I acquired and read after the ballot was announced and before the Packet was made available. (These posts are a couple of weeks behind my actual reading at the moment.) Hodgson is apparently already well known as a writer of eighteenth-century crime novels; this is her first fantasy, set in a world (or at least a country) where eight totemic elemental animals (including the titular Raven) dominate human culture, and the new king is determined in a series of Hunger Games-style trials. It’s an intricate and well constructed plot, as leading characters turn out to be completely different to who we thought they were, and indeed the game plan of the bad guys turns out to be completely different to what it looked like. I found the brutal violence a bit ick though. You can get The Raven Scholar here.
That was the way of our relationship. The way of the vast majority of brotherly and sisterly relationships that crossed sunrise and sunset in the Kingdom of Reikova. We had some power to make our night- or day-brothers aware of something specific; a power often exercised through saying a thing repeatedly, perhaps with the aid of a mirror, or the written word – as I had chosen that day. But total certainty was impossible. An obstinate day-brother could do their utmost to ignore the night before, or see a note and choose not to read it. In that sense there was some degree of control – or the illusion of control – in what we remembered of each other. It was possible, for instance, to be the prying sort. I might know much of what my day-brother did with his sunlit hours. Instead, I had long ago decided his doings were tedious at best, distasteful at worst. I preferred to ignore them as best I could. I imagined he felt the same way of my nightly endeavours. But as with all Reikovan citizens who made something of their lives, who avoided the clutches of St Leonars prison and the like, we lived in a peaceful enough accord with each other. An accord that, on occasion, relied on wilful ignorance.
One of the Clarke submissions that I put aside at the time as clearly fantasy and therefore ineligible, but worth coming back to. The setting is a world (or at least a country) where everyone transforms into a different person at sunrise and sunset, meaning a whole different set of relationships, economic activities, habits etc. The protagonist and his shadow become involved in an occult murder mystery up-country (a frequently used trope, where the author explores their secondary world through the medium of a crime narrative). Quite nicely done, with very good plot pacing as we discover more about the world. Though I did find myself wondering about the personal inconveniences of the setup – the author touches on the intricacies of childbirth, but there’s a lot more to intimate personal interaction than that. You can get Equinox here.
This was the sff book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker, but that will have to wait until I have finished my non-fiction acquisitions of 2022.
I had not yet seen the Old Man. He had been out when I arrived, and after a bath, a shave and a change I had gone out to meet Sophia. When I returned to the house, however, Glover told me that he was in his study.
Since I am trawling through the less popular Agatha Christies at present, I am at the point where most of them are not up to her usual standards (the last one I wrote up here was described by the author herself as “rotten”. But sometimes you get a gem that has escaped the acclaim given to her best known work, and Crooked House is one of those. No Poirot, no Marple; the narrator is a junior diplomat whose father is a senior police detective, and whose girlfriend’s grandfather has just been gruesomely murdered. The entire family (apart from the lovely girlfriend) are a horror show of emotional abuse, all of whom had means and motive, and working out which of them did it takes up a very entertaining 200+ pages.
I had read it years back, but could only remember who was responsible for the second murder attempt, so it was good and fresh for me. There is the usual cop-out of not facing human justice at the end, which perhaps requires a bit more ethical examination than Christie usually gives, but otherwise I felt this was a story where Christie plays the game fairly, and the clues are there if you look past the narrator’s biases. You can get Crooked House here.
Four more of the BBC Twelfth Doctor audios, released in 2017. To be honest they are not especially memorable. The four stories feature the Doctor and New Yorker brother-and-sister companions Alex and Brandon Yow investigating Weeping Angels. The first, The Lost Angel, read by Kerry Shale, is set in contemporary New York; the second, The Lost Planet, read very well by Nicola Bryant (who oddly does not get cover billing), has alien plants infesting the TARDIS; the third, The Lost Magic, read exceptionally well by Dan Starkey, has the team visiting the Spanish Main and John Dee (probably the best of the four); and the final story, The Lost Flame, read by Claire Higgins, takes us back to Karn. Completists will probably enjoy these but I can’t really make a stronger recommendation. You can get them here, here, here and here.
‘Miss Brackley,’ he said, ‘I am told that it is a kindly concern of yours to see that Felicia is sustained during her nocturnal activities. If it really is necessary – which I doubt, since she doesn’t seem to have touched your gift, but if it is – would you mind placing your saucer in a less traffic-prone situation in future. This is the third time I have almost fallen over my own feet in avoiding it.’
A really fascinating (and short!) book by Wyndham, published in 1960; a drug to slow the aging process is developed separately by two English scientists, one of whom uses it only for himself and his immediate family, while the other makes it the core of her beauty business, building up a sympathetic constituency of rich women to support her when the shit hits the fan, as it duly does.
Wyndham is being frankly feminist here, imagining a drastic change in society engineered by a woman for the benefit of women, and brutally portraying the forces of the patriarchy who come out against it. He also finds time for satirical swipes against the media (which one feels are founded in personal experience) and the beauty industry (where perhaps he is less sure-footed).
It’s a novel of ideas rather than action, which ends perhaps a bit abruptly, but that’s because it has worked through its central idea as far as can usefully done in the context of England in 1960. It also perhaps reflects the anxieties of that time, with the Swinging Sixties tangibly around the corner.
The Irish government is brought into the story at one remove, as various English people discover to their astonishment that it is an independent country – there is a rumour that the longevity drug originates from a particular type of Galway seaweed.
‘I mean, it would have been nice to hang on a while, and see whether one couldn’t do something about acquiring seaweed rights in Galway Bay. But, obviously it couldn’t wait for that, so I wired a friend in Dublin to get a head start by making inquiries about legal rights over seaweed, in Irish law.’
The editor shook his head.
‘You’d probably have to petition the Pope, or something,’ he said. ‘It’s likely to be a pretty serious matter with the Irish. They eat the stuff.’
‘They what?’
‘Eat it. They call it dulse.’
Gerald shook his head in his turn, though whether in doubt, or out of sympathy for the Irish, was not clear.
I was also interested in the references to China – the troublesome lichen come from Hokiang, now known as Hejiang, the easternmost part of China which is part of the historic region of Manchuria; it is exported through Dairen, now Dalian, previously Port Arthur. It’s actually a very good call to place a mysterious Chinese agricultural product there. I don’t find any record that Wyndham knew much about China, other than the brief references in this book; maybe he asked a friend.
Next in the series by Weber and Deville about Kathleen, a young Belgian woman coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Here she is recruited by the organisers of the famous Brussels Expo of 1958, with the Atomium in pride of place, and rapidly becomes entangled in a Cold War plot – not that dissimilar to Jonathan Coe’s Expo 58, which makes one feel that there must have been a lot of it going on. Lots of attention to historical detail (including the sexism directed at Kathleen), and successfully conveying the sense that this was an event which Belgium hoped would boost the entire country’s confidence after the war years, seen from the perspective of someone who was there. I’m enjoying this run. You can get Sourire 58 here.
This was my top unread comic in a language other than English. Next on that pile is Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps, by Mansoureh Kamari.
One of this year’s Hugo finalists for Best Graphic Story, a straightforward short book, perhaps for younger readers, about coming to terms with grief through celebrating the day of the Dead with otherworldly entities. You can get The Invisible Parade here.
“Who briefed you?” My own voice sounds distant as a stranger’s.
My first Hugo book since the 2026 ballot was announced, this is one of the finalists in the Lodestar category, and turns out to be the third in a fantasy trilogy. I enjoyed it for the frenemy relationship between the two central characters and the convoluted magical fantasy plot; I felt I did not lose out too much by having missed the first two books. The breathless first-person present-tense narration annoyed me, as did the many mistakes in German in what is explicitly a Bavarian-based world; and I wondered how it comes about that teenagers get given senior law enforcement responsibilities in this particular society. So I suspect it won’t get my top vote in the category, but it was a good start. You can get Holy Terrors here.
Meanwhile, advancing internal decay, as well as external pressure, had severely weakened the Porte. Capitalising on this weakness, the Serbian and Montenegrin principalities took advantage of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-8 to invade Kosovo, thus bringing the Serbs and Montenegrins into their first serious conflict with Albanians. Thousands of Kosovo Serbs crossed over into Serbian territory to enlist in the Serbian army; those Serbs and Montenegrins who remained in Kosovo largely managed to avoid conscription into the Ottoman army by bribing military officials. Facing little opposition, the Serbian army advanced steadily, occupying the towns of Nis, Lescovac, Vranje and Prokuplje, before entering Kosovo. During this period thousands of Albanians were forcibly expelled from the region of Toplice in the Sandjak of Nis, and many of the region’s mosques were destroyed, while as many Serbs fled southern Kosovo ahead of unleashed bashibazouks, who began to take vengeance upon the remaining Serbian inhabitants. The operations of the Serbian army in Kosovo provoked a wave of refugees in the opposite direction as an estimated 30,000 Albanians deserted those parts of the region which the Serbian army occupied. Alongside the retreating Ottoman troops were thousands of displaced Albanians who arrived in Kosovo as refugees. Unaware that Russia and the Porte had agreed to a truce, the voluntary Serb regiment of Major Radomir Putnik took Gnjilane, while the advance guard of the Serbian army reached the Gracanica monastery near Pristina towards the end of January 1878. There a solemn liturgy was performed to honour the victory of the Serbian army and Prince Milan, and a commemoration was held for the heroes of 1389. However, the concluded truce was inclusive of the Serbian army whose units were thus compelled to withdraw from Kosovo.² ² Batakovic, The Kosovo Chronicles, p. 108.
I had read this ages ago, soon after it came out in 1998, and like any book about Kosova published before 1999 (well, 2008), it misses the climax of the story through no fault of the author’s. It’s also somewhat in the shadow of Noel Malcolm’s better known Kosovo: A Short History. But it complements Malcolm in concentrating on the twentieth century and the internal dynamics of Kosova’s emerging autonomy and confidence within pre-1988 Yugoslavia, followed by the collapse of communications between the majority population and the structures of the state.
It’s actually rather difficult to see what other paths were possible from the main actors at the end of this period, given the personalities and starting points; Milošević’s destruction of the Yugoslav state was rooted in his destruction of Kosova’s autonomy, while on the other hand Kosovar militants were not in a position to resort to military pressure earlier than they actually did, never mind the fact that the Americans had told them not to.
I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that the political violence spilled from Kosova as far as Brussels. Vickers recounts that in 1981, a Yugoslav diplomat was killed and another injured in a shooting near the Bourse, in what was then the White Horse pub and is now a hotel / shisha bar called La Pièce. The gunman himself was found shot dead in 2004 in the Loi underground car park, quite close to my office. There were other Brussels incidents too, but those were the most notable. (And of course there were plenty of incidents in other parts of Western Europe.)
This was my top unread book about Kosova. Next on that pile is British Generals in Blair’s Wars, edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron, and Hew Strachan (where I suspect the Kosova content may not be huge).
Next in my sequence of educating myself about the work of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Gabriela Mistral (real name Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, 1889-1957) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945, the first Latin American writer to get the award. Originally trained as a teacher, she had become famous as a writer with her second volume of poetry, Desolación, published in 1922, and had also pursued an international career in education which transitions to being a full-time diplomat from 1932 onwards.
Her Nobel speech is short and modest, and the presentation speech from the Swedish Academy is also short but makes interesting parallels with the career of Selma Lagerlöf, also a schoolteacher who hit the big time with her writing.
It’s actually quite difficult to get hold of Mistral’s writing in English, and I had to be satisfied with a 2002 collection of prose and prose-poems edited and translated by Stephen Tapscott. The second paragraph of the third piece, “The Golden Pheasant”, is:
Gracias al blanco y al negro no hace arder el arrayán sobre el que se coloca.
Thanks to the white part and the dark part, it doesn’t scorch the myrtle tree where it perches.
I found the pieces in general lyrical, but also sad; a lot of them are religious, rooted in the Catholic tradition which looked eternal in the early twentieth century but is now crumbling away; the emotional energy is rich and intense. None of the passages particularly jumped out at me, but I could see that the whole is at least as great as the sum of tis parts. The observations at the end about writing and politics are also interesting, as she tried to carry the perspectives of Chile to the rest of the world and vice versa. You can get it here. I wish I had been able to find a translation of Desolación though, or of Ursula Le Guin’s tranlation of some of her poems.
The circumstances of [David] Hunter Blair’s conversion were spectacular. During the winter term of 1875 he obtained leave to study music in Leipzig and from Leipzig proceeded to Rome in time to attend the ceremony at which [Henry] Manning was created a cardinal, on 15 March 1875. Manning was a special hero because of his stern espousal of the doctrine of papal infallibility, which he had recently defended against Gladstone’s charge that it ‘equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history’. Swept away by enthusiasm, Hunter Blair, ten days after the Manning ceremony, was himself received into the Church. He was a notable convert: Archbishop (later Cardinal) [Edward] Howard confirmed him, Pius IX himself blessed him and conferred on him the honorary post of papal chamberlain.
When I was nine years old, the final edition of Burke’s genealogies of noted Irish families was published. The Whytes qualified for entry not for being famous, as we weren’t (apart from one or two notable ancestors in the 16th and 17th centuries) but because we happen to have a genealogy that goes back to the twelfth century, though I suspect that the earliest parts are fake. I noted with very slight interest that the family listed immediately after us in Burke’s had changed their name at some point, and vaguely wondered why. Eventually I found out.
(And, good heavens, they published people’s private addresses back in those days! Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s only grandchild, is still alive aged 80, but has lived in France for many years now.)
Richard Ellmann’s Pulitzer-winning biography of Wilde is pretty comprehensive. It starts with his parents, noted surgeon Sir William Wilde and the revolutionary poet and writer born Jane Elgee but known as Speranza. (Oscar was born at 1 Merrion Square.) 550 heavily footnoted pages take us through the 46 years of Oscar’s life, though it’s clear that there is a lot more to say about him (and some of it has been said).
It’s a story that combines many elements. While still a student at Oxford, Wilde rapidly became famous for being famous, to the point that D’Oyly Carte sent him on a (very enjoyable) lecture tour of America before launching their opera about him, Patience. But he was a genuinely good writer as well; Ellmann goes into some of his work, but I think more could also be said about the extent to which it echoed his life.
Wilde was a posh boy who made a career out of being a posh boy, but intellectually he was genuinely a supporter of socialism, Irish nationalism and revolution. This is what gives the drawing-room comedies their vicious edge; he is echoing back to his English hosts what he actually heard them saying behind the polite niceties.
He very courageously chose martyrdom because of his sexuality. He could have escaped to France, Italy and/or the USA and avoided prosecution. But he chose to stay and face his fate in the courts, though he knew it would probably kill him.
Nancy Mitford (born four years after he died) has a telling observation on his legacy in The Pursuit of Love, in an exchange that would have fitted well into one of Wilde’s own plays:
Linda and I were very much preoccupied with sin, and our great hero was Oscar Wilde.
‘But what did he do?’
‘I asked Fa once and he roared at me – goodness, it was terrifying. He said: “If you mention that sewer’s name again in this house I’ll thrash you, do you hear, damn you?” So I asked Sadie and she looked awfully vague and said: “Oh, duck, I never really quite knew, but whatever it was was worse than murder, fearfully bad. And, darling, don’t talk about him at meals, will you?”’
‘We must find out.’
‘Bob says he will, when he goes to Eton.’
Wilde was witty but not wise; he spent his way through both money and relationships extravagantly. Even the grand love affair with Bosie Douglas, which brought him down, seems to have brought him as much pain as pleasure. He genuinely loved Constance and his sons, but accepted that the consequences of his own choices had parted him from them.
It’s a really interesting book and I recommend it, though I know that scholarship in the last four decades may have advanced our knowledge of Wilde a bit further. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald.
We watched the National Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon, a few weeks back. I didn’t feel that the stage production transferred to the screen all that well – obviously in live theatre, a lot of the experience is bound up in the audience dynamic with the actors. But Ncuti Gatwa is, as ever, completely magnetic, and Sharon Clarke (who was Grace O’Brien, Graham’s wife / Ryan’s grandmother, in Doctor Who) steals the scene as a very West Indian Lady Bracknell.
Note also Richard Cant, Brian Cant’s son, as Canon Chasuble. The staging more than hints at intense relations between Algernon/Jack on the one hand and Gwendolen/Cecily on the other, and livens it up with music long postdating the original 1895 production. I think the only production of the play that I had seen before was a 1988 BBC version with Joan Plowright and Paul McGann. (But can that be right? I feel it was a bit earlier.)
Anyway, the play itself is very entertaining if just a bit implausible, and although the good lines are front-loaded in the first half, the whole thing is fun.
Apologies for length, but this is an important monograph about an important Doctor Who story.
I first watched the original version of The Daleks back in 2007, from the DVD set of the first three Who stories. I wrote then:
Great fun. I had of course read David Whitaker’s novelisation, roughtly 25 years ago. A few things that sprang to mind:
1) the settings were very convincing – the Dalek city (OK, we know with the eye of hindsight that it was a model shot), the sense that this was a big landscape with forest, swamp and caves.
2) Barbara’s romance with Ganatus – there is surely some fanfic dealing with that somewhere?
3) The devious Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS deliberately to get a chance to explore the city.
4) The time travellers, despite Barbara’s relations with Ganatus, are all set to just bugger off and leave the Thals to their doom at the end of episode 4.
5) The end of episode 6 is indeed a literal cliff-hanger – with a brutal resolution
6) Terry Nation’s attack on pacifism. A lot more ideological than I remembered from the book.
7) The Daleks at the end talking about the total extermination of the Thals practically raise their plungers in Nazi salutes – sounds silly when I describe it but actually very effective.
8) the one bit that really didn’t work – the fight at the end; the time-travellers and Thals win too easily.
Anyhow, well worth it. I watched with the closed caption commentary, which to be honest was more annoying than helpful on the whole. Though it was interesting that the very day of the filming of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks was 22 November 1963, the day before the first Doctor Who (recorded over a month before) was to be broadcast, and also the day of John F Kennedy’s assassination. (And of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley; but who remembers that?)
When I came back to it in 2009 early in my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
The Daleks really is where Doctor Who gets going. There is a case to be made that the pepperpots never get so interesting again. Certainly they are incomprehensible, blankly hostile, psychopathically destructive, and strangely watchable. The conversion of the Thals from pacifists to fighters has some moral ambiguity – the Tardis crew are motivated by their own need to get away, and there is a certain air of tragedy even in the final victory. (Shame that the actual final fight scene is a bit crap.) And Barbara gets the first Who romance with Ganatus (comprehensively rewritten to Barbara/Ian by David Whitaker for the book).
Coming back to it again, I felt that it holds up really well, especially if you are sensitive to the cramped sets and other constraints of the production. The four main cast are very good, clearly getting into their stride. And I should have previously mentioned the superb incidental music of Tristram Cary. You can get it in this box set.
The colorised and abbreviated version of the story released a few years back (you can get it here) foolishly dumps Cary’s music, misses some of the plot and loses out a bit on pacing, but ends with this lovely montage of the rest of the Hartnell era.
I know the novelisation well, and re-read it for this post. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I ran towards the sound, the branches of trees cracking and powdering in clouds around me as I forced my way through. I found Barbara with her back pressed up against a tree, the knuckles of one hand pushed hard against her teeth. She was staring away from me into some bushes. I caught the glint of the eyes of some animal or other and stopped dead still.
There was a time when this was literally the only Doctor Who book in existence (under its excellent original 1964 title of Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks); indeed it was the only commercially available representation of any Doctor Who story, in those days long before video-recorders (let alone DVDs). So we have Whitaker taking much greater liberty with Terry Nation’s TV script than almost any other novelisation (John Lucarotti’s treatment of The Massacre differs even more from the story as broadcast, but he was reverting back to his own original script).
And the result is quite possibly the best of the novelisations, judged as a novel. The opening of the story is comprehensively rewritten, Ian being an unemployed research scientist who accidentally encounters Barbara, who has been tutoring the mysterious Susan, and gets involved with the Doctor and his Tardis. So much time is invested – wisely – in setting the scene that we are a third of the way through the book before we reach the equivalent point to the end of the TV story’s first episode (out of seven).
The biggest novelty, for those of us who have read almost any of the subsequent hundreds of Who books, is that the whole story is told in the first person, from Ian’s point of view. (It’s not unknown in later Who literature, but it is very unusual.) This does require a certain amount of narrative juggling, but Whitaker gets away with it better than I remembered from when I first read this, three decades ago.
Today’s generation of fans will squee at the pronounced sexual tension in the Ian/Barbara relationship here – the TV story has Barbara close to flirting with Ganatus, one of the Thals, but he barely gets to look at her on the printed page. Poor Susan rather fades into the background as well after she has done her mercy run to the forest. The characterisation of the Doctor is much more harsh and edgy than Hartnell’s depiction; since Whitaker was the story editor, perhaps this was what he had originally in mind? (A possibility supported by the surviving first cut of the first ever episode.)
And the Daleks themselves are pretty memorable here, though Whitaker seems a bit confused about their size – three feet high at one point, four foot six at another, though the illustrations are of our “normal” sized pepperpots. However, this confusion is compensated for by the glorious description of the mutants within the metal casings, and their glass-enclosed leader. The TV show has never managed such memorable presentations of the creatures inside, though it has occasionally tried. (The versions encountered by the Ninth Doctor come closest.)
Anyway, this is an excellent read, well worth hunting down.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, so I went and also rewatched the Peter Cushing film Dr Who and the Daleks. Last time I saw it, in 2010, I wrote:
As a Doctor Who fan, it is impossible not to judge this film in comparison with the original seven-part Dalek story, so I won’t really try. The positives: it is in colour, which is a huge difference. It looks better (except, oddly enough, the interior of Dr. Who’s Tardis, which just looks like a film set with some machines dotted around it). The plot is tighter – it’s difficult (with one exception, which I’ll get to) to remember what has been cut from the original story to produce a film half its length, and some of the best bits are still there. The music is decent – not as unearthly as in the TV version, but not offensive either.
The huge difference, however, is in the performances and portrayals. Peter Cushing plays elderly slightly comical scientist Dr. Who, who keeps a time machine called ‘Tardis’ in his back garden, shaped like a police box for some reason. He doesn’t have the grumpy gravitas of William Hartnell, but I detect some homage to his portrayal in the approach taken by Sylvester McCoy. Roberta Tovey as his nine-year-old granddaughter Susie is actually rather good, and recasts Carole Anne Ford with perhaps a bit more grit.
When I first saw this on a Saturday morning repeat aged about 11, the surprise was that Ian is played by Roy Castle, who of course I knew as the presenter of the BBC children’s programme Record Breakers. This was actually his second film role – he had also appeared with Peter Cushing in another Max Subotsky film with a doctor in the title (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) earlier in 1965. Castle’s Ian starts as a clown but more or less settles into the heroic sidekick to Cushing’s Who by the end, probably the closest of the four main characters to the TV version (though William Russell’s Ian is much brainier).
The most serious cut in the film as compared to the TV original is Barbara, Dr. Who’s other grand-daughter, played by Jennie Linden. She gets almost nothing to do, except that her over-vigorous embrace of Ian sets Tardis going in the first place. (And even that is portrayed as Ian’s clumsiness.) She is practically background scenery, especially when compared to Jacqueline Hill’s history teacher.
Rewatching it in close proximity to the original TV story brought home to me how much better the latter is. Just compare the almost wordless acting of Hartnell and Russell here:
versus Cushing, Castle and Tovey playing the same scene for weak laughs here:
Obverse Books have published a novelisation of the film, ostensibly by “Alan Smithee” but I believe actually by Iain McLaughlin. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Ian considered himself to be fit and healthy. He had been drilled into good shape during his National Service and he was still active now, playing football twice a week and turning out for the local cricket side during the summer. He also went dancing – hopefully from now on with Barbara – every weekend, but even he was feeling the effects of the journey. He was out of breath and perspiring heavily. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his muscles ached.
It made me realise that the visual comedy of the film is one of its key elements, very difficult to transfer to the printed page! Anyway, you can get it here.
So, on to the latest of the Black Archives, Oliver Wake’s monograph on The Daleks, concentrating on the original TV series but also referring to the Whitaker novelisation and the Cushing film, and to later Dalek and Terry Nation stories. There is a real break of format with previous Black Archives, with no less than eighteen short chapters each addressing a different aspect of the story, and building the overall case (which is surely unassailable anyway) that The Daleks can be seen as the crucial founding text of the show as a whole. A short introduction explains the book’s agenda:
I aim, firstly, to explore the influences and inspirations Nation called upon in devising the story; secondly, to analyse the story’s mixed authorship and the ways in which varied contributors gave it meaning; and thirdly, to examine The Daleks’ world-building as a piece of televisual fantasy fiction.
The first chapter, “Commissioning The Daleks”, recapitulates what we know about how the story came into being – it was written very quickly, which meant that it was ready for production when an early gap needed to be filled.
The second chapter, “The Bomb”, looks at how the story portrays radiation sickness and the neutron bomb.
The third chapter, “A Climate of Fear”, looks at other portrayals of the aftermath of nuclear war in fiction up to the mid-1960s. Its second paragraph is:
Stories of nuclear weapons had been science fiction and consequently were hidden away in niche publications. After the Second World War they began to emerge into the mainstream, in Britain at least; in the more conservative USA they tended to remain hived off in the sci-fi niche¹. Every conceivable scenario of nuclear devastation was played out in literature, much of it ill-informed and scientifically illiterate. ¹ Brians, Paul, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, unpaginated online edition, Chapter 1.
The fourth chapter, “The Survivors”, queries the extent to which the story is meant to show the future of Planet Earth humanity.
The fifth chapter, “The Dead Planet”, looks at the Petrified Jungle and also in some detail at the Magnadon (the dead metallic lizard).
The sixth chapter, “Alien Sound”, looks at the brilliant soundscape of the story created by Tristram Cary’s music and Brian Hodgson’s effects. As I noted earlier, this is one point where the Cushing film is seriously deficient.
The seventh chapter, “The Time Machine”, looks at the influence of Wells’ novel and George Pal’s film adaptation on The Daleks.
The eighth chapter, “The Mutants”, looks at what we are told about both Thals and Daleks as mutations, and points out the inconsistencies. (I must say I prefer this approach to desperately trying to retcon everything.)
The ninth chapter, “The Aryan Thals”, points out the problematic of the perfect Thal race being tall and blond, leaning again on The Time Machine.
The tenth chapter, “Pacifism, the Thals and Terry Nation”, goes into Nation’s well-documented political views, which he expressed as pacifist and sometimes socialist. (So Gareth Roberts is completely wrong on this, not surprisingly.) Ian’s argument with the Thals is Nation’s argument with himself.
The eleventh chapter, “Gender and Authority”, looks at the story’s problematic treatment of gender roles among the Thals and the character of Dyoni, and queries how both Thal and Dalek societies are actually governed.
The twelfth chapter, “Martians and Ants”, looks at the influence of The War of the Worlds (both the Wells novel and the 1953 film) and the early John Wyndham story “Wanderers of Time” on The Daleks.
The thirteenth chapter, “The Power (and Irradiation) of the Daleks”, looks at the Daleks’ dependence on static electricity, their life support systems, and their vulnerability to radiation, and then asks, what do they eat?
The fourteenth chapter, “Outer Space Robot People”, makes some interesting points about who the Daleks are shown to be, as opposed to later portrayals.
In their first appearance, the Daleks are scared isolationists. They are survivalists trapped in their fallout shelter, unable to go outside but possessive of the world beyond their city. This jealousy manifests as paranoia and xenophobia when the Doctor’s party and then the Thals come calling.
The sixteenth chapter, “The Direction of the Daleks”, calls attention to the work of Christopher Barry and Richard Martin in bringing the story (and the Daleks) alive.
The seventeenth chapter, “Extermination, Then?” looks at how the Daleks’ catchphrase slipped subtly into the script.
The eighteenth chapter, “Dal to Lek”, looks at the sources for the name Dalek. These include Wyndham’s “Wanderers of Time” and Nation’s general fondness for cycling through similar names. Wake considers and discounts the relevance of the fact that “dalek”/“daleko” means “far away” in the languages once known collectively as Serbo-Croat.
If I may divert for a moment, I am not quite so sure. My relationship with Balkan nationalisms is ambivalent, but there is a haunting Serbian First World War song, “Tamo daleko”, about the exiled remnants of the Serbian army sheltering on Corfu. (As a Serbian military friend once said to me, it’s not so much like Dire Straits’ “So Far Away From Me”, which would be a literal translation of the title, as “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, only less jolly.) I do not know if Nation was ever exposed to, say, a Serbian restaurant playing live or recorded folk music, or some other aspect of Serbian culture, but I can imagine him hearing this song somewhere, somehow, and “daleko” sticking in his subconscious memory. It is the heavily emphasised second word of each of the first three verses; even if you don’t speak any Serbian, it is difficult to miss.
A brief conclusion pulls all this together and looks at questions of authorship.
An even briefer note looks at one of the story’s many variant titles, “Beyond the Sun”, and how this might have come to be.
I was a bit worried at first that I wasn’t going to like this Black Archive; Wake’s style starts out a little jerky. But he settles down fairly quickly and delivers a must-read analysis of one of the most important Doctor Who stories. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Case of the Discontented Soldier”):
The major took a deep breath and abruptly plunged through the swing door leading to the outer office. A plain young woman looked up from her typewriter and glanced at him inquiringly.
A dozen Agatha Christie stories featuring London – though the main settings of individual stories can wander far beyond the suburbs and into the Home Counties. Includes some of her crazy wannabe political thriller work, notably “The Kidnapped Prime Minster”, and some particularly contrived romances, such as “The Case of the Discontented Soldier” and “The Listerdale Mystery”. But there’s some good classic mystery stuff here too, notably “Witness for the Prosecution”, and “The Case of the Caretaker”. Thanks to whoever at HerperCollins had the idea of finding and assembling all of these. You can get Capital Christie here.
In the previous two chapters, we have examined the culprits co-responsible for the strange death of what we used to call the liberal international order.² We have analysed the resentments, aspirations and chicanery of both the Central European populists and Vladimir Putin. But they plainly did not act alone. Indeed, no Poirot-style sleuthing is required to discover that the current President of the United States has been their willing accomplice.³ His motives for turning his back on America’s allies, disavowing multilateral treaties, and trying to wreck the international institutions created by the US after the Second World War are a matter of controversy. But whatever his motives, he has been an eminent confederate in the gang-slaying of the ‘liberal hegemony’ that characterized international politics for three decades after 1989. ² Graham Allison, “The Myth of the Liberal Order, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2018) ³ David Leonhardt, “Trump Tries to Destroy the West”, The New York Times (Io June 2018); Robert Kagan, “Trump Marks the End of America as World’s “Indispensable Nation”, Financial Times (19 November 2016).
I am conscious that my last couple of books reviews here have been less than positive, so I’m very glad to turn that around and give a glowing recommendation to this short explanation of how western liberal democracy got into its current mess. There are three chapters, one on Viktor Orbán and the other Eastern European populists, one on Vladimir Putin and Russia, and one on Donald Trump, with an afterword on China.
The key argument is that “the future was better yesterday”; western liberals failed to grasp the nature of the task of building and preserving democracy and decent societies in the former Socialist world, and indeed at home in the USA, and that populist politicians, by operating smartly within and outside the new rules, were able to capture the imagination of their own publics and gain and consolidate power. Even now that Orbán and PiS are out, and Trump appears to be struggling, the arguments remain valid.
Indeed, I am sure that the authors would agree that the missing part of the book in retrospect is Western Europe, where we actually have a populist (though relatively well behaved) government in Italy, Nigel Farage seems very likely to win the next British election, the Rassemblement National is not quite as close but close enough to worry about in France, and the AfD is on the rise in Germany.
Their conclusion is that in the end, populism does not present long term stable solutions in the way that liberal democracy does; but that liberals remained complacent for too long, and did not pay attention to the internal threats to the democratic system. They speculate – hope, perhaps – that the rise of China, a a more durable alternative system but one which is not very interested in exporting its societal model, may prove a stimulus to liberals to become more creative.
Nine years on, a lot of this remains just as valid, with the second Trump term proving worse than the first. We have a long way to go.
This bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously- the top unread book acquired in 2022, the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and the shortest book acquired in 2022 on the unread shelf. Next on the first two of those piles is The Damnable Question, by George Dangerfield; next on the third is Kosovo: The Path To Contested Statehood in the Balkans, by James Ker-Lindsay.
Yugoslavia’s air defenses were dominated by surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries equipped with thousands of Soviet-made SAMs, including three SA-2 battalions; 16 SA-3 battalions, each with numerous launchers directed by LOW BLOW fire-control radars; and five SA-6 regiments fielding five batteries each, for a total of 25 SA-6 batteries directed by STRAIGHT FLUSH radars. These radar-guided SAMs were supplemented by around 100 vehicle-mounted SA-9 and several SA-13 infrared SAMs, along with a profusion of man-portable infrared SAMs, some 1,850 antiaircraft artillery (AAA) pieces, and numerous stockpiled reserve weapons and buried communications lines. Backing up these defenses, the Yugoslav air force consisted of 238 combat aircraft, including 15 MiG-29 and 64 MiG-21 fighterinterceptors.¹ Although the Yugoslav IADS employed equipment and technologies that dated as far back as the 1960s, albeit presumably with selected upgrades, its operators knew U.S. tactics well and had practiced air defense drills and honed their operational techniques for more than four decades. They also had the benefit of more equipment and better training than did the Bosnian Serbs in 1995. Finally, they enjoyed the advantage of being protected both by mountainous terrain and by the cover of inclement weather when the air war began.
¹ “AWOS [Air War Over Serbia] Fact Sheet,” Hq USAFE/SA, December 17, 1999. See also The Military Balance, 1998/99, London, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998, p. 100.
A RAND study of the Kosova war from the point of view of the air force. Reading the introduction, I rather got the impression that this was a supposedly independent report, funded by the USAF and coincidentally promoting the idea that it would have been so much better to just let the USAF get on with dropping bombs, without any political interference. The background historical analysis chapter was full of flaws as well. When we got onto the weapons porn (“16 SA-3 battalions, each with numerous launchers directed by LOW BLOW fire-control radars; and five SA-6 regiments fielding five batteries each, for a total of 25 SA-6 batteries directed by STRAIGHT FLUSH radars”) I decided I had had enough. You can download it here.
This was my top unread book about Kosova. Next on that pile is Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers.
Way back in 2007, I was just getting into the Big Finish audios, and it did not take long until I reached the 29th of their monthly releases, The Chimes of Midnight, starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and India Fisher as his audio-only companion, Charlotte “Charley” Pollard. I wrote it up as follows:
The Chimes of Midnight is just creepy: the Doctor and Charley trapped in a house where the servants keep on dying horribly – and even more mysteriously coming to life. Clearly some Big Revelation about Charley’s nature is being planned.
With the new novelisation just published, I listened to it again and it deserves its place of one of the consistently top-rated Big Finish audios. The soundscape successfully invokes the cramped servants’ quarters of an Edwardian mansion, with the guest stars utterly convincing in their denial of reality, especially as they start getting bumped off one by one. There is an Irish character, the butler, Shaughnessy, played by Lennox Greaves (who in real life is a Yorkshireman). I ended the story not quite sure what had happened, but certain that I had been entertained.
This story was recorded in January 2001 but released only in February 2002. You can get it here.
It used to be that one could handily check facts about Big Finish audios on Wikipedia, but I was dismayed to discover that Wikipedia has deleted all of its pages covering individual Big Finish plays. I guess that they were judged not to be of general interest in the way that, say, Andorra’s 2007 Eurovision Song Contest entry obviously is. A shame.
Rob Shearman has novelised his two best known Big Finish audios, this and Jubilee, so needless to say I have got hold of them both. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Chimes of Midnight is:
‘And is this exactly the same as your house back home as well?’ asked the Doctor.
This is a very lucid retelling of the story, offering a lot more depth to some of the characters – particularly Charlotte herself, but also Shaughnessy the bultler – and giving a slightly better idea of what the story is actually about. It’s twenty-five years since Shearman first wrote this, and his style has become comfortable and fluid. The house as portrayed on the page is recognisably the same as in the original play.
I think that readers who aren’t already into the Big Finish Eighth Doctor continuity might be sufficiently intrigued by this to try the other plays in the sequence, though they should be warned that this is something of an outlier. However there is plenty to discover about the Eight / Charley relationship.
Currently reading Equinox, by David Towsey The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton
Finished in the last week The Lost Angel, by George Mann and Cavan Scott Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral The Lost Magic, by Cavan Scott Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers The Lost Planet, by George Mann Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen The Invisible Parade, by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio Sourire 58, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville The Lost Flame, by George Mann and Cavan Scott Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham
April 2026 books
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 28) Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, eds Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment, by Benjamin S. Lambeth (did not finish) The Light That Failed: A Reckoning, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes The Daleks, by Oliver Wake Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers
Non-genre 4 (YTD 17) The Big Four, by Agatha Christie The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, by Zen Cho Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim Capital Christie, by Agatha Christie
SF 4 (YTD 29) Among Others, by Jo Walton Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall (did not finish) Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham
Doctor Who 12 (YTD 32) The Gods of Winter, by James Goss Timeless, by Steve Cole The House of Winter, by George Mann The Chimes of Midnight, by Robert Shearman The Sins of Winter, by James Goss Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker Dr Who and the Daleks, by “Alan Smithee” The Memory of Winter, by George Mann The Lost Angel, by George Mann and Cavan Scott The Lost Magic, by Cavan Scott The Lost Planet, by George Mann The Lost Flame, by George Mann and Cavan Scott
Comics 3 (YTD 9) The Lost Dimension, Book One, by Nick Abadzis, George Mann, Cavan Scott et multi alii The Invisible Parade, by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio Sourire 58, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville
~6,900 pages (YTD 27,300), counting each of the audiobooks as 100. 12/32 (YTD 46/118) by non-male writers (Mantel, Mistral, Vickers, Christie x 2, Cho, von Arnim, Walton, Hall, Owen, Stott/Melo et al, Bardugo) 2/32 (YTD 10/118) by writers of colour (Cho, Picacio) 5/32 reread (The Big Four, Among Others, Trouble with Lichen, Timeless, Doctor Who and the Daleks) 198 books currently tagged unread, up 4 from last month (Eastercon), down 53 from April 2025.
Coming soon (perhaps)
The Lost Dimension Vol. 2, by Cavan Scott et al Sometime Never…, by Justin Richards Jubilee, by Robert Shearman Time’s Mosaic 9 – Eccleston, Torchwood and Quatermass, by Finn Clark
The Damnable Question, by George Dangerfield Kosovo: the Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans, by James Ker-Lindsay British Generals in Blair’s Wars, by Jonathan Bailey
Slow Horses, by Mick Herron The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald O the Chimneys, by Nelly Sachs Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps, by Mansoureh Kamari The Best of All Possible Worlds, by Karen Lord Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Green Twining, by Andrew Cheffings
Second paragraph of third essay (“First War of the Global Era: Kosovo and U.S. Grand Strategy” by James Kurth)
As we will see, all of these claims about the Kosovo War are true, but they are also incomplete. They could therefore be misleading both about the causes of the war and about its implications for future conflicts. To understand these causes and consequences, we will need to examine the war in the context of the grand, or national, strategy of the United States. For the Kosovo War was, inter alia, an outgrowth of a new grand strategy that the United States has developed in the aftermath of the Cold War. Among the Kosovo War’s distinctions, it was the first American war of the global era.
A collection of essays about the Kosova war, published in January 2002. Most of the essays are critical of the way in which the war was conducted from a military doctrine or strategic thinking viewpoint. Most of them also try to look ahead to see what the implications are for future conflicts where the USA may not need to have a strong ground component, though very few of the observations turn out to have been helpful to understand the Afghanistan war, started just before the book was published, or the Iraq war, which started just after.
Less surprisingly perhaps, none of them foresaw a future where the USA first threatened annexation to its allies and then attacked Iran and lost. One feels for analysts trying to make sense of the world we are in and then discovering that the future has arrived and it’s not as expected. But none of these essays made me feel that the US policy community had any much better idea of what is going on in the world than the rest of us. In particular, none of the writers has much knowledge of Kosova itself, which is what I am most interested in.
You can get War over Kosovo here. This was the shortest book acquired in 2022 which was still on my unread shelf. Next on that pile is The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.
Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins had not thought of references, and they had not dreamed a rent could be so high. In their minds had floated sums like three guineas a week; or less, seeing that the place was small and old.
I’m of the age where I saw and really enjoyed the 1991 film Enchanted April, based on this book and starring inter alia Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence, Michael Kitchen and Jim Broadbent, and when I spotted the novel second hand a few months back I snapped it up. As I had hoped, it’s a warm story about four women who come together on holiday in Italy in 1922, and gradually become friends with each other, with the two who are married also rekindling their relationships with their husbands. It’s not super radical, more a comedy of manners, but I found it very entertaining, mainly for the emotional disentanglements but also for the lyrical descriptions of Italy. You can get The Enchanted April here.
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next up there is H Is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald.
‘Are you all right?’ Anji felt sick to her stomach. ‘Guy, are you all right?’
Another in the series of Eighth Doctor novels which I read in 2015 and failed to write up at the time. This brings a loose end to the incomprehensible multiple timelines arc that began with Time Zero, and writes Anji, one of my favourite book-only companions, out of the TARDIS, replacing her with the rather two-dimensional Trix. There’s more complex overlapping timeline stuff, and some very un-Doctorly incidents of Eight gratuitously hurting the bad guys. This came out in 2003 a month before BBC Wales announced the coming of New Who, and really shows the dead end into which Who books were being written at the time. (The Big Finish audios and comics were more lively.) Still, you can get Timeless here (at a price).
I was however interested that one of the more significant guest characters is named Guy Adams, also the name of a writer of Who books who started getting published a few years later. Coincidence?
It was a beautiful autumn day–the city glowed in the sunlight and the skies were that truly cloudless blue you never see back home. Sunshine is so precious here, though England is sunnier than I thought it would be, having been told so often about its greyness. I think it is because the greyness is so depressing that it makes the sunshine all the more spectacular.
A nice wee novella from Zen Cho, originally published way back in 2012 and being re-released this summer (I got an ARC from the author). It’s about a young Malaysian Chinese writer who moves to London in 1920 and has an affair with a chap who sounds very like H.G. Wells (indeed it starts with her critically reviewing one of his books, just like Rebecca West did to HGW). But she really has feelings for her Tamil editor; and pretty soon an extra complication looms… Told in diary form by the self-possessed and funny heroine, and well recommended. You can get The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo here, starting in July.
(Note: I will not generally review ARCs, please don’t send them to me if you don’t know me.)
Second paragraph of third essay (on John Osborne’s memoirs):
A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ferociously sulky, rancorous book, remarkable for its account of a lower-middle-class childhood on the fringes of London, and for its vengeful portrait of a mother who had ‘eyes that missed nothing and understood nothing.
This is a collection of twenty essays by Hilary Mantel from the London Review of Books, published between 1988 and 2019, including her piece comparing the popular cult of the bodies of Anne Boleyn and Kate Middleton which got a lot of coverage at the time.
These are all witty and mostly humane, with my favourites being the pieces that concentrate on her areas of historical expertise, the Tudors and the French Revolution. I thought her pieces on some of the minor Tudor figures, Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon and Margaret Pole, were particularly strong.
There are also a couple of reflections on more contemporary culture, including the famous “Royal Bodies” essay, but also a grim reflection on the death of James Bulger and a piece about Madonna which says pretty much what you’d expect.
I confess that I had not realised that Mantel wrote much apart from the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, but her messages to the LRB editor reproduced here are full of references to other novels and books that she was writing, including her French Revolution novel A Place of Greater Safety. I’ll start looking our for them.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles are Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall, and The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.
“Mon ami,” he said, “if you wish you may wait in to put salt on the little bird’s tail, but for me I do not waste my time so.”
Well. I thought this was rubbish when I read it at thirteen, and I still think it’s rubbish now that I am almost 59. Poirot and Hastings become involved in an effort to uncover the “Big Four”, who are secretly running the world, or trying to take it over, or something. They include a stereotypical Chinese oligarch, a stereotypical American squillionaire, a French scientist who is in no way at all based on Marie Curie, and the mysterious fourth man, who is English and a master of disguise. We also have Hercule Poirot’s twin brother Achille, though (SPOILER for a book published 99 years ago) he turns out to be one of Poirot’s disguises.
Apparently this is a fix-up of a dozen individually published stories, and it shows; very episodic, with a corresponding lack of internal continuity. Every adventure sees the Big Four’s implausibly convoluted plans confronting Poirot’s even more implausibly convoluted plans. There is a comedic has-been actress who gets bumped off mercilessly. There is a grand explosion in Switzerland at the end. The basic concept is the same as The Secret Adversary from five years earlier, but not executed as well. Agatha Christie herself called this a “rotten book” and it is difficult to disagree with her. However, you can get The Big Four here.
However bothersome Nanny’s antics were, they were easy to rationalise. Explaining why a blue box had suddenly appeared from the ether was beyond his patience.
Bali Rai is new to the Whoniverse, but an established YA writer from Leicester. This book is one of a sequence bringing the Doctor into classic children’s novels and seeing what heppens, in this case the Eleventh Doctor and Clara dropping into the world of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, where they are joined by River Song and the Paternoster Gang. There’s some admirable unpacking of the slave economy behind the Caribbean trade of the eighteenth century, and we get Jim gender-flipped to Janey, and escaped slaves setting up a free community on the island, but the story is a bit lacking in actual plot (and poor Clara is sidelined for much of it). The Paternoster Gang get some good lines though. You can get Rebellion on Treasure Island here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is The Order of the New Moon Reflected in Water, by Zen Cho.
Second paragraph of third chapter (though I did not get that far):
The following section considers several explanations forwarded to explain the shift from pursing narrow national interests in foreign policy to focusing on human rights questions in areas where Western states have little economic or geo-strategic interest. It suggests that while international changes have provided the opportunity to present foreign policy in ethical terms, the main dynamic behind ethical foreign policy lies in the domestic sphere and the search for new forms of political legitimacy. Subsequent sections develop this analysis, considering the low costs involved in ethical foreign policy and the selective nature of its application, further suggesting that the lack of clear policy aims in human rights promotion reflects a desire to use foreign policy for domestic purposes rather than any concern with human rights issues per se.
I reviewed one of Chandler’s earlier books for a defunct website back in 1999, and also wrote up an essay collection that he edited more recently, so I knew in advance that I was unlikely to agree with this book (I have the second edition from 2005). He makes the argument that the human rights justification for international interventions is fundamentally wrong-headed, but I would reflect that criticism back at the writer.
I’m not even sure that it’s correct to say that the Afghanistan war (his main reference point other than Kosovo) was framed to the Western public as a human rights-driven intervention. My memory is that the core argument was about security and removing a government that was supporting Al-Qaeda. Twenty years on, especially after the last few weeks, it’s very difficult anyway to make the case that there is a dominant human-rights culture in international military interventions, so one feels that Chandler was attacking a straw man at a particular moment in history when it maybe looked more substantial than it has turned out to be. But it also seems to me that it is a Bad Thing if the concept of intervention to protect human rights has disintegrated.
I was also startled to read a series of statements about the 1999 Kosova conflict on pages 15-16 which are simply objectively wrong. Cherry-picking is a tactic that we are all sometimes tempted to use, but at least make sure that you are picking real cherries rather than fictional ones. I’m not going to waste time here by dissecting statements in a twenty-year-old book that nobody who reads this is going to go and read, but really, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
This was my top unread book about Kosova of the bundle that I acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is NATO’s Air War for Kosovo, by Benjamin S. Lambeth.
Three works won both Nebula and Hugo Awards for fiction published in 2011 and awarded in 2012, the second most recent year when this has happened, and 27 years after the most recent previous instance. Personally I think that of the “triplet years”, this is the strongest, well ahead of 1979/80 which is its nearest rival. I know that others will disagree with me; judge for yourself:
Taking the 2011/12 group in increasing order of length:
Second paragraph of third section of “The Paper Menagerie”, by Ken Liu (depending exactly how you count the sections):
Sometimes, the animals got into trouble. Once, the water buffalo jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted to wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but the capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up into his legs. The saucesoftened legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed onto the table. I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp. Mom eventually wrapped his legs in saran wrap so that he could wallow to his heart’s content (just not in soy sauce)
Like the Resnick [“The Homecoming”], this is a tale of familial drama, with a marginal (but significant) sfnal element; the narrator explains how he allowed himself to become estranged from his Chinese mother, who had the magical gift of making origami creatures come alive. I thought this was more honest and much less cloying than the Resnick story, daring to actually be sad. The metaphor is fairly heavy (and we never find out the names of the Chinese girls who translate the mother’s words to him and to his father at crucial moments), but it’s very beautifully written and captures the marginalised schoolboy very memorably.
I still liked it very much on re-reading. The narrator’s estrangement from his mother is cultural as well as emotional, and the magical paper animals are a well executed metaphor.
You can find PDF copies of “The Paper Menagerie” in various places around the internets. If you want a hard copy, it is (not surprisingly) included in Ken Liu’s collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, which you can get here.
It won the Hugo pretty convincingly, though had been only in second place at the nominations stage.
Two other short stories were on both ballots, “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”, by E. Lily Yu (who won what was then the Campbell Award), and “Movement”, by Nancy Fulda, which was my personal favourite.
Second paragraph of third section of The Man Who Bridged the Mist, by Kij Johnson:
The clock in the room in which he slept didn’t work, so one day he used his penknife to take it apart. He arranged the wheels and cogs and springs in neat rows on the quilt in his room, by type and then by size; by materials; by weight; by shape. He liked holding the tiny pieces, thinking of how they might have been formed and how they worked together. The patterns they made were interesting but he knew the best pattern would be the working one, when they were all put back into their right places and the clock performed its task again. He had to think that the clock would be happier that way, too.
I thought this was a brilliant story of a world not quite our own, with a hero-engineer dealing with the challenges of a river of deadly mist and of facing up to his own emotional needs – an odd but effective mixture of immersive fantasy and basic technology. Excellent stuff, which I really hope wins the award.
Again, I still like this story. Re-reading it, I was interested that the world where the story is set is equivalent to early modern in technology, but has much better gender equality; the emotional core of the story is the bridge-builder’s love affair with one of the river sailors who will be put out of business by the bridge. You can get The Man Who Bridged the Mist as a standalone volume here.
It won the Hugo narrowly enough as these things go, having been second-placed on the nominations ballot.
Unusually there were four other novellas on both the Hugo and Nebula ballots: “The Ice Owl”, by Carolyn Ives Gilman; “Kiss Me Twice”, by Mary Robinette Kowal; “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, by Ken Liu; and Silently and Very Fast, by Catherynne M. Valente.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Among Others, by Jo Walton:
I managed to say thank you as well as goodbye. The aunts each kissed me on the cheek.
I must admit that at various points in this novel I wondered how Jo Walton had got inside my head. Her narrator is a teenager in 1979-80, growing up reading Vonnegut, Zelazny, Heinlein and all the classics of science fiction, coping with the usual pains of growing up. Of course, Mor has a few extra problems that I didn’t have: no real friends at school, a move to a different country (Shropshire is very different from South Wales), dealing with a new family, and coping with the physical and emotional scars of the car accident which killed her sister and was conjured by her sorcerous mother. Rather like Buffy, Mor finds the terrors of adolescence taking supernatural and physical form; there’s also an interesting dialogue about England and Wales going on in the background (mostly). I was completely captivated by it; I am a couple of years younger than the heroine and her creator, but basically we are the same generation and Among Others hit me squarely in the memories. (I do wonder if it will appeal as much to those who are much older or much younger.)
I finished reading this at Eastercon (that’s how far my bookblogging is lagging my actual reading) and loved it still. My previous summary missed two important points. First, in Among Others, fairies are real and among the problems that Mor is navigating her way through. Second, one of the joyful aspects of the book is Mor’s encounter with sf fandom, through a group in the local library, at a much younger age than I really started to engage – although I was active in CUSFS and Jómsborg as a student, I have only been regularly attending conventions since 2002, when I was in my mid-thirties. I wish that I had started sooner. You can get Among Others here.
It won the Hugo pretty convincingly, and topped the nominations poll as well.
Embassytown, by China Mieville, was also on both ballots.
In the novelette category, the Hugo went to “Six Months, Three Days”, by Charlie Jane Anders, and the Nebula to “What We Found”, by Geoff Ryman. Each was also on the other ballot. Also on both ballots were “Fields of Gold”, by Rachel Swirsky, and “Ray of Light”, by Brad R. Torgersen, which I personally thought was terrible but was runner-up for the Hugo.
The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form and the Ray Bradbury both went to The Doctor’s Wife, arguably making this year a quadruplet rather than a triplet. Captain America: The First Avenger, Hugo and Source Code were all on both ballots.
Next in this sequence: the winner of Hugo, Nebula and lots of other prizes in 2014, Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie.
This case is illustrative of the conditions in Kosovo during the late Ottoman period, when religious divisions were still more important than ethnic ones. Religion was the dominant marker of identity, in this case dividing Albanians into Muslims and Christians, or into those conservative circles who were determined to defend Muslim hegemony against those who were or intended to become Catholics. Yet this case also marks the beginning of a new period of Ottoman reforms, which led to attempts by the Roman Catholic church, notably the Franciscan order, to gain back some of the souls which had been lost to Islam during the long period of Ottoman rule. The development of the Marian devotion in Letnica, as well as the policy of conferring the sacrament on non-Catholics, were the main devices used to accomplish this, i.e. to re-Catholicize part of the population in the Karadag mountains. The concept of crypto-Christianity was instrumental in church policy. Instead of taking crypto-Catholicism simply for granted, I would like to suggest that initially (i.e. in the first decades of the nineteenth century) it was primarily a church category which did not correspond with the ‘lived realities’ of those who received this label.¹ It was designed to redefine the identity of people who had a vague or ambivalent sense of religious belonging, and to explicate and justify a church policy of Catholic recovery and expansion into Ottoman territory. Through the workings of the devotional and missionary regime in the parish of Letnica, however, the category became increasingly real for those involved. ¹ I do not dispute that at an earlier stage, at the time when Albanian Catholics were converting to Islam (during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), crypto-Catholicism was a ‘lived reality’ indeed. There is ample documentary evidence for that (see for instance Malcolm 1998: 173-175). I want to question, however, the common assumption that there was a clear continuity of crypto-Catholicism up to the nineteenth century. I believe that the awareness of belonging to two different and radically opposed religious traditions was gradually lost among ordinary converts (after two or three generations).
Published in 1999, before the dynamics around Kosova changed completely, this is a study of several interesting cases of religious and ethnic identity in the region, making the case that both are much more fluid than you might think from public discourse. I’m always on for some good anthropological field work, and this is good anthropological field work.
In fact for anyone who knows the region, Duijzings’ core theme is not new. Back in 2024, I was talking with two fairly well-known political figures from Serbia and North Macedonia, and we discovered that each of them had a parent who had been expelled from the same part of northern Greece in the 1940s, and also had cousins who had remained and are now ‘Greek’. Identity is what you make it.
Duijzings approaches the topic with empathy and care, and brings to life the cases he looks at. These are:
Christian shrines which are also the subject of Muslim pilgrimages and other religious practices
The ‘crypto-Catholics’ of the Albanian lands
Dervishes and Bektashi, and their clashes with the state-sanctions Muslim authorities
The Egyptian minority in Kosova and Albania
He then looks at the structure and impact of two nationalist cultural projects, contrasting the unsuccessful attempt by Naim Frashëri to promote Bektashism as a core part of Albanian identity with the successful use of Serbian epic poetry, notably “The Battle of Kosovo”, to do the same for Orthodox Christianity and Serbian nationalism.
Another in the series of BBC original audiobooks, this has the original TARDIS crew arriving on a space liner in what we are told are the early days of interstellar space flight, and at the same time there is also an alien presence and an ancient mystery, treacherous crew members and terrified passengers. It’s reminiscent of Terror of the Vervoids, but done much better (and I am one of those who actually rate Terror of the Vervoids higher than the consensus). Paul Hayes is a radio producer who write two non-fiction books about Doctor Who for the 60th anniversary in 2023; this seems to be his first fiction for the Whoniverse, but I think he has an assured touch. You can get Star Flight here.
In most places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot like walking through a forest, and very likely this is exactly what you are doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution.
Published in 2020, and reflecting on decades of climate negotiations (Figueres was one of the key people behind the 2015 Paris Agreement), this is a surprisingly upbeat book, very clear about the scale of the climate crisis and the devastating consequences for humanity if we don’t get a grip on it, but also clear that there are things that can be done at national, local and individual levels which will all make a difference. Not preachy, very digestible. You can get The Future We Choose here.
I wonder how the authors would assess the situation six years on. The book came out just before the pandemic, which of course showed us that massive disruptions to our economic well-being are entirely possible, and natural disasters linked to climate change have been stacking up. The USA has largely turned its back on the fight against climate change. But at the same time, China, Europe and the growing economies of the middle income countries are pushing ahead with a shift to renewable energy and more sustainable economic practices. So I think stubborn optimism is still appropriate.
This was both the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2022, and the shortest unread book acquired that year. Next on those piles respectively are Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel, and Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings.
