Second paragraph of third story (“Morte de Smudgie”):
When Nell and Tig’s cat Smudgie died, Nell dealt with her disproportionate sense of loss by rewriting Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur,” with Smudgie in the leading role, supported by a full cast of noble cats in medieval robes and chain mail. This was a deeply frivolous thing for her to do, and the results were not felicitous:
A paw, Clothed in white sarmite, mystic, wonderful…
After some thought, I classified this collection of short stories as non-genre rather than sf in my roundup from last month; several of the stories are quite explicitly sf, and a couple more verge on fantasy, but the majority are sent in our world, and seven of the fifteen deal with Nell and her husband Tig, firmly rooted in today’s Canada.
I thought these were all excellent, with particular shout-outs to “The Dead Interview”, in which Atwood imagines herself having a conversation with George Orwell through a medium, “Metempsychosis” in which a snail becomes human, “Death By Clamshell” in which Hypatia of Alexandria tells the story of her own murder, and “A Dusty Lunch” in which Nell finds out about Tig’s father’s war record. But each of them is very much worth reading.
At lunchtime we found a fantastic restaurant. From the outside it looked ordinary, a little run-down even, but once you went through the door you were in another world. There was Duke Ellington playing on the tape deck, and a smell of rich sauces reducing and cognac and cigars. A group of businessmen were sitting having dessert. Their puddings looked like they had been fashioned by Faberge.
Pearson is apparently a well-known UK sports journalist; he wrote this book about exploring Belgium with his girlfriend and their baby daughter in 1997 and 1998 (so the baby must now be almost 30). It’s a slightly frustrating book. There are some memorable turns of phrase and neat anecdotes such as this, from the museum in Tournai:
There was one eye-catching canvas, a massive Victorian oil painting called The Plague of Tournai in 1090 by someone named Galliat. The scene depicted was one of gruesome devastation, with people weeping and wailing and mad dogs tearing at the flesh of unburied bodies. I couldn’t help noticing in the centre of it all that several young women had reacted to the crisis by tearing open their bodices and baring their perfectly formed breasts. At first I thought this was simply gratuitous. Later, though, I wondered if Monsieur Galliat hadn’t based his work on historical records. After all, people did all sorts of weird stuff to prevent the plague – wore masks, burned incense; Arnold of the Abbey of Oudenburg near Bruges even insisted his parishioners drank beer instead of water, and became patron-saint of Belgian brewers as a result – perhaps this was just another of them. I imagined a meeting of Tournai Town Council. ‘What will we do about this dreadful plague?’ the mayor asks. ‘Why don’t we get all the nubile women of the city to expose their bosoms?’ cries a councillor. ‘And will that stop the plague?’ asks the mayor. ‘Who cares!’ replies the councillor.
Alas, this is a little too good to be true. Close inspection of the actual painting reveals only one or two boobs, so it’s not exactly a major theme of the art.
Internally the book is very disorganised, jumping around in space and time somewhat jerkily within chapters. There’s a bit of “aren’t foreigners funny”, but there’s also a fair bit of defensiveness towards Belgium.
Maurice Maeterlinck, for example, is routinely described in English-language surveys of European writers as a ‘Belgian-born French dramatist’, despite the fact that he didn’t actually move to France until he was thirty-six. Nor was it such a surprise to hear the actor Gene Wilder telling Sue Lawley of his love of all things French on Desert Island Discs and then going on to pick a record by Jacques Brel to remind him of Paris.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2021, and the non-fiction book which had lingered longest on my shelves. The next books on those piles respectively are Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, by Rick Edwards, and Mother Ross: An Irish Amazon, by G.R. Lloyd.
Second paragraph of third chapter, with the list that it introduces:
At the end of the meal, the list stood as follows: Living in Kirkcudbright:
Michael Waters – 28 – 5 foot 10 inches – unmarried – living in lodgings with private latch-key – landscape painter – boasts of being able to counterfeit Campbell’s style – quarrelled with Campbell previous night and threatened to break his neck.
Hugh Farren – 35 – 5 foot 9 inches – figure and landscape painter – particularly broad in the shoulder – married – known to be jealous of Campbell – lives alone with a wife who is apparently much attached to him.
Matthew Gowan – 46 – 6 foot 1 inch – figure and landscape painter, also etcher – unmarried – house with servants – wealthy – known to have been publicly insulted by Campbell – refuses to speak to him. Living in Gatehouse-of-Fleet:
Jock Graham – 36 – 5 foot 11 inches – unmarried – staying at Anwoth Hotel – portrait painter – keen fisherman – reckless – known to be carrying on a feud with Campbell and to have ducked him in the Fleet after being assaulted by him.
Henry Strachan – 38 – 6 foot 2 inches – married – one child, one servant – portrait painter and illustrator – secretary of golf-club – known to have quarrelled with Campbell and turned him off the golf-course.
I remember the TV version of this story broadcast in 1975 when I was eight, starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey and scripted by Antony Steven, infamous in Doctor Who lore as the writer of The Twin Dilemma. It was enjoyable but rather above my head, so I got the original novel out of the library soon after, at a point when I was really way too young to understand why Mrs Smith-Lemesurier wanted to be coy about her night-time visitors, and then read it again when I was about thirteen and more into the mystery genre.
So I have a sneaking nostalgic affection for this book. I first read it at about the same time as I first read The Lord of the Rings, and the attractive point that jumped out at me then was the map of Galloway inside the front cover, not so very different from Tolkien’s maps of Middle-Earth. Ever since, Galloway has had slight resonances of JRRT for me. Family holidays did sometimes take us that way driving south to London from Stranraer, but we would tend to zoom quickly through Newton Stewart, Castle Douglas and Dumfries before hitting the M6 at Carlisle, without time to explore excitingly-named places like Kirkcudbright or Gatehouse of Fleet, where much of The Five Red Herrings is set. I don’t think I have been to or through Galloway in the last thirty years.
Incidentally, although Tolkien and Sayers were almost the same age (he was born in 1892, she in 1893) and graduated from Oxford in the same year (1915) there is no evidence that they ever met, though both were very friendly with C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Tolkien hated her Wimsey novels Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon.
The story starts off very promisingly, with some lyrical description:
The artistic centre of Galloway is Kirkcudbright, where the painters form a scattered constellation, whose nucleus is in the High Street, and whose outer stars twinkle in remote hillside cottages, radiating brightness as far as Gatehouse-of-Fleet. There are large and stately studios, panelled and high, in strong stone houses filled with gleaming brass and polished oak. There are workaday studios – summer perching-places rather than settled homes – where a good north light and a litter of brushes and canvas form the whole of the artistic stock-in-trade. There are little homely studios, gay with blue and red and yellow curtains and odd scraps of pottery, tucked away down narrow closes and adorned with gardens, where old-fashioned flowers riot in the rich and friendly soil. There are studios that are simply and solely barns, made beautiful by ample proportions and high-pitched rafters, and habitable by the addition of a tortoise stove and a gas-ring. There are artists who have large families and keep domestics in cap and apron; artists who engage rooms, and are taken care of by landladies; artists who live in couples or alone, with a woman who comes in to clean; artists who live hermit-like and do their own charing. There are painters in oils, painters in water-colours, painters in pastel, etchers and illustrators, workers in metal; artists of every variety, having this one thing in common – that they take their work seriously and have no time for amateurs.
[…]
After a brief delay, bumping over the new-laid granite, he pushed on again, but instead of following the main road, turned off just before he reached the bridge into a third-class road running parallel to the main road through Minnigaff, and following the left bank of the Cree. It ran through a wood, and past the Cruives of Cree, through Longbaes and Borgan, and emerged into the lonely hill-country, swelling with green mound after green mound, round as the hill of the King of Elfland; then a sharp right-turn and he saw his goal before him – the bridge, the rusty iron gate and the steep granite wall that overhung the Minnoch.
At the same time, there is a perhaps unhealthy obsession with railway timetables as part of the solution to the murder:
The Sergeant replied, with a certain grim satisfaction, that the 9.51 only ran on Saturdays and the 9.56 only on Wednesdays, and that, this being a Thursday, they would have to meet him at 8.55 at Ayr.
[…]
He had not gone on to Glasgow by the 1.54, because it was certain that the bicycle could not have been re-labelled before the train left. There remained the 1.56 to Muirkirk, the 2.12 and the 2.23 to Glasgow, the 2.30 to Dalmellington, the 2.35 to Kilmarnock and the 2.45 to Stranraer, besides, of course, the 2.25 itself.
There is free but not frequent use of the n-word, and a really offensively stereotyped Jewish minor character. Some readers complain that the Scottish accents of all the local characters, including most of the police, go too far, but I did not find it distracting myself. And the mystery is fair enough, though I think it’s a bit mean of Sayers to keep the one crucial detail about the murder scene from the reader; I remembered that moment in the TV serial, where it is revealed quite fairly to the audience, and of course it gives necessary context to the vital clue when we get to it on page 173.
I got hold of this after reading Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, because my memory was that The Five Red Herrings is the better book. I still think that it is better, though not by quite as much as I remembered. Sayers does description of countryside and of people much more memorably than Crofts, and she also has visible women characters. Both books depend a bit too much on railway timetables, The Five Red Herrings slightly more so if anything. Amusingly, Sayers references Crofts’ book, which was published a year earlier.
I had a book – a very nice book, all about a murder committed in this part of the country. Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, by one Mr. Crofts. You should read it. The police in that book called in Scotland Yard to solve their problems for them.
The Five Red Herrings is a long way down most Sayers fans’ lists, but I still retain my eight-year-old affection for it. Here’s a lovely piece making the same point by A.J. Hall, aka Susan Hall, aka the late great @legionseagle. And I am pondering reviving my Sayers reading as a mini-project; there’s really quite a lot in this one, even with its drawbacks. You can get The Five Red Herrings here.
(Incidentally, I had always thought that the title was Five Red Herrings, without the definite article. That was certainly the name of the TV adaptation, but the original book is clearly articled.)
(Incidentally again, Lord Peter Wimsey was born in 1890, so would be 40 or 41 in the year that the book is set; Ian Carmichael was 55 in 1975.)
Current Het Zoet Water door de eeuwen heen, by Jean Binon and Paul Coeckelbergh Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire and Christophe Gaultier American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Last books finished Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, by Rick Edwards & Dr Michael Brooks Omega, by Mark Griffiths and John Ridgway Final Cut, by Charles Burns Doctor Who: Lux, by James Goss The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle (did not finish) Behind Frenemy Lines, by Zen Cho Mother Ross: An Irish Amazon, by G.R. Lloyd “Two Hearts”, by Peter S. Beagle
Next books Howul: A Life’s Journey, by David Shannon The Years, by Annie Ernaux The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng
I really love Tula Lotay’s lush drawing style, here illustrating a tale of witchcraft in medieval England, where all the women and almost all the men are youthful and sexy, and occasionally take their clothes off. I think any actual medieval specialist would get a bit annoyed by the depiction of medieval life, but the point here is to have fun and revel in the sensuous story. You can get Somna here.
Second paragraph of third story (“Infinite Tea in the Demara Café”, Ida Keogh):
He had found himself at his usual corner table in the Demara Café, affording him a full view of both the establishment and the street outside where the morning traffic was making haphazard progress towards central London. Or rather, at first glance it looked like his usual table. But it didn’t feel like it. Without thinking, he straightened the cutlery. It felt too light.
A 2020 collection of thirteen stories from NewCon Press, concentrating on London as a setting, which I had bought originally because one of them was on the BSFA shortlist the following year. The list of authors is pretty stellar and the quality of the writing what you would expect. The two stories that particularly jumped out at me were “Fog and Pearls at the King’s Cross Junction”, by Aliya Whiteley, and “Nightingale Floors”, by Dave Hutchinson, the latter possibly in the same continuity as his Europe books. You can get London Centric here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Musings on Mothering, ed. Teika Bellamy.
One of the books from the Clarke submissions pile that I put aside because it clearly wasn’t science fiction but looked like it might be worth reading anyway. A future world where women are likely to be witches, and are kept under strict social control by being compelled to marry; our protagonist’s mother vanished years ago, and the quest to find her, and what happens next, is part of the story. It’s a rather healthy contrast to Fritz Leiber’s awful Conjure Wife, which takes the same premise in a different direction. The concept is not so dissimilar to The Handmaid’s Tale, but I think it is sufficiently different to be interesting, and the society depicted is sufficiently close to our own to be scary. You can get The Women Could Fly here.
This was my top unread books acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne.
We’re back in Europe for the first time since I looked at Ukraine six months ago. When I did this exercise back in 2015, I rather cheekily gave the award to Dracula, by Bram Stoker, but in fact only the opening and closing chapters are set in Transylvania, and most of the book is set in England. At that point, this week’s winner, I Must Betray You, had not yet been published; it has clearly been a big hit on Goodreads, though it is only fifth on LibraryThing. It was published as recently as 2023. It’s a story of being a teenager under Communist-era repression, by a Lithuanian-American author.
The top book on LibraryThing set in Romania, Wildwood Dancing, also features on my 2015 list, as did The Land of Green Plums. I was not completely sure about Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water, but I checked and he crosses the Romanian border from Hungary on page 83 of the 242 pages of the book.
I am not completely sure about Emil Cioran’s philosophical treatise On the Heights of Despair, but I ruled out his similarly philosophical The Trouble With Being Born. The former was written in Bucharest and the latter in Paris.
Books by Romanians who are not Herta Müller do remarkably well on Goodreads and remarkably badly on LibraryThing. There were several others with more than 10,000 raters on GR and less than 200, in some cases less than 100, on LT. The relevant authors are George Călinescu, Liviu Rebreanu, Camil Petrescu, Mihail Sadoveanu, Ioan Slavici, Marin Preda and Mircea Eliade.
I disqualified eight books, including Dracula and The Trouble With Being Born as noted above. Three are set in numerous countries including Romania: Night by Elie Wiesel, The Historian by Elisabeth Kostova and Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan. I thought at first that Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ would easily qualify, but in fact it covers all of Eastern Europe with a particularly strong focus on Russia. Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinocéros is set in Paris. Finally, Bengal Nights by Mircea Eliade is set entirely in India.
Coming next: Guatemala, the Netherlands, Ecuador and Cambodia.
Depuis dix mois, à sa [Juncker’s] demande, je suis le conseiller spécial du président de la Commission pour les questions de défense et de sécurité. Ces sujets m’ont toujours intéressé et j’avais même, en 2002, présidé le groupe de travail de la Convention européenne sur la défense. Ce qui à l’époque avait été proposé par mon groupe pour renforcer la coopération en matière de défense au sein de l’Union européenne se retrouve aujourd’hui dans le traité. Tout y est : le rôle renforcé du haut représentant pour les affaires étrangères et la politique de sécurité, l’Agence européenne de défense, la clause de solidarité et la possibilité pour un groupe de pays de partir en «éclaireurs» au moyen d’une «coopération structurée».
For the past ten months, at the Commission President’s request, I have been his special adviser on defence and security policy. These are issues that have always been of interest to me; indeed, in 2002 I chaired the European Convention’s Working Group on Defence. My group’s suggestions at the time for strengthening defence cooperation within the EU have now been incorporated into the Treaty. It’s all in there: a stronger role for the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, a European Defence Agency, the solidarity clause and the possibility for a group of countries to set out as ‘pathfinders’ by way of ‘structured cooperation’.
I have personally encountered Michel Barnier I think on three occasions. Way back in about 2002, he was one of the speakers at the opening of the Northern Ireland representative office in Brussels, as the then European Commissioner for Regional Policy. He made quite a good speech, but he made it in French, which was increasingly unusual even then. Fast forward to 2018 when Alexander Stubb was running against Manfred Weber to be the EPP’s lead candidate for the European Commission (and lost); I was leafletting incoming delegates at the EPP convention in Helsinki on Stubb’s behalf and happened to encounter Barnier, who muttered (in fluent English) that he would have to maintain his neutrality. And at the end of 2023, I caught him and Stubb chatting (again in English) at a Brussels conference we were all attending. Everyone else was taking pictures of them too, and indeed in the following year, 2024, Stubb was elected President of Finland and Barnier was briefly Prime Minister of France.
I wrote, blogged and tweeted (remember Twitter?) extensively about Brexit before, during and after the period when Barnier was the EU’s chief negotiator with the UK. My perceptions, as a fairly well-informed Brussels bubble-er, are not very different from his. There was never any intention in Brussels or the rest of the EU to sneakily reverse the decision of the UK to leave; there was however a determination that the subsequent relationship would not unduly favour the Brits. The key points that Barnier makes about the dynamics of the negotiations are conclusions that I had already drawn, but it is reassuring to see them supported here.
The most important point is that there had to be full transparency among all stakeholders on the EU side, to make sure that all 27 governments, and the European Parliament, and the European Commission (which was Barnier’s immediate paymaster), had confidence that Barnier was representing their point of view. This approach locked the whole EU into support for Barnier as negotiator, because they believed that he was supporting them. It meant that British efforts to detach EU governments from Barnier were inevitably futile, because they were always going to have more confidence in the guy who they were talking to regularly and who claimed to understand their situations, rather than the shifty Brits, who could not even agree their own line at home.
Indeed, Barnier’s main frustration in the first phase was that Theresa May failed to articulate or decide what the UK actually wanted; a fatal and unforced disadvantage for the British – if you do not know what you want, you are unlikely to get it. In the second phase, under Boris Johnson, David Frost seemed clearly to have instructions to run out the clock and force a last-minute decision which the UK (wrongly) thought would break in their favour. The British perception was that the EU was desperate to avoid a no-deal Brexit, but in fact contingency planning for that on the EU side had started as soon as the referendum results came in, and the Brits (as usual) were way behind the curve.
I was interested in a couple of Barnier’s personal observations, which need to be tempered by the obvious fact that he has massaged his diary notes for publication. Reading between the lines, he clearly regarded David Davis as convivial company, but fundamentally very stupid, which is pretty much how Davis came across at the time and comes across now. There is a ‘lost hero’ narrative believed by some on the Tory right, that Davis was astutely negotiating for British interests until May sneakily entrusted Olly Robbins with doing the deal behind his back. In fact, Davis did nothing but occasionally visit TV studios to muddy the waters.
Second, the one person on his own side who Barnier does regard with suspicion and annoyance is Martin Selmayr, who on a couple of occasions tried to bypass or minimise Barnier’s role, purely for the sake of bureaucratic turf-warring; there was no ideological difference between them. On these occasions, Barnier went straight to Juncker, who corrected the situation quickly. Juncker himself comes across as somewhat disengaged, but engaged enough to be supportive of Barnier’s work.
I was also interested to note that about twenty people who I know personally crop up in the narrative, usually in complimentary terms – including even Diane Dodds of the DUP! Barnier felt that he knew Northern Ireland a bit – as noted above, my own first encounter with him was at a Northern Ireland event – and while I don’t think he knew it quite as intimately as he perhaps believed, he certainly displayed more knowledge and sympathy than anyone in the British Conservative government (I’ll make an honourable exception for the six months of Julian Smith in 2019-20).
There is an argument in some EU and British circles that Barnier created problems by negotiating too successfully and putting the UK in a worse position at the end than it needed to be. I must say I think that the blame for the UK doing badly in the negotiations does not, in my view, rest with the other side. I found this a useful though not a challenging read. You can get My Secret Brexit Diary here.
Climb a little over scrubby branches and broken thorns that catch at the hems of wanderers, and one will reach a promontory that bulges from the land to peek up like a naughty child between fingers of faded leaf and broken stone, commanding a view upon sea and town, the crooked roofs of the palace and curling groves of rough-boughed trees. This is not usually a place disturbed by human voices, being a solitary kind of local fit for a prowling lynx or yellow-beaked hunting bird. Yet now as we draw near, we may hear something truly remarkable for Ithaca – not merely voices, but that most unusual combination of melodies – a man and a woman, speaking together.
So, it’s the climax of the excellent trilogy of novels by Claire North, following Ithaca and House of Odysseus, in which the goddess Athena tells us how Odysseus returns to Penelope and Ithaca, bringing more violence with him; and there is a final reckoning with the suitors and their relatives. The scene where Odysseus wreaks undeserved vengeance on Penelope’s servants is particularly and horribly well done, as is the sequence where Odysseus, Penelope and their supporters are holed up in a stockade, Wild West style, waiting for the bad guys to attack. There are lots of beautifully done small moments too, many of them reflecting on gender and power. This was a great set of books, and they deserve to be better known. You can get The Last Song of Penelope here.
I’m now going to explain why they are all wrong. In so doing, I’ll make some points that I’ll repeat in more detail later in the book. When I do this, I’ll tell you. However, I don’t apologise for this. These are crucial points and bear repeating.
This was given to me by the author, an old friend of mine from Cambridge days who now manages property investment portfolios mainly in the northwest of England. He makes a very strong case that, if you are in a position to invest, investing in property in the UK is a good idea, and also takes the reader through the potential pitfalls that a landlord may encounter. It’s breezily written and will certainly convince those who were thinking of going in that direction anyway. I am not so sure how the economics would work out here in Belgium, where the equivalent of stamp duty is much higher. But I think anyone thinking of taking the plunge would find this helpful (and probably convincing). You can get The Dream House here.
This was the shortest book that I had acquired in 2021 and not yet read. Next on that pile is Wouters Wondere Wereld: beeldende kunst een boodschap laten brengen, by Guy Gilias.
His ID badge gave his name as Stephen Higgins, in black on a pink background, and his department as Magrathea – models, maquettes and concept art. He turned smoothly, shifting his balance and letting his hands fall to his sides in a deceptively relaxed manner. I remembered how fast he’d been back at the London Library and matched his pose.
As with Feet of Clay, I had been wondering if I would continue my project of reading through the Rivers of London books, though I was more inclined to keep going in this case as I have only two more to go after this. And as with Feet of Clay, reading False Value reassured me that I should follow through and finish the series. Here we have Peter Grant, cohabiting with Beverly, a very pregnant river goddess, and going undercover to investigate a software company which appears to be concealing occult secrets from the age of Babbage and Lovelace. I think I like these books more when they take the narrator away from standard Met occult policing into new territory, and this surely did while at the same time remaining firmly rooted in London. The Douglas Adams theme of the software company is excruciatingly awful and also all too believable. All good stuff. You can get False Value here.
Next (and so far, second last) on this list is Amongst Our Weapons.
Current Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, by Rick Edwards & Dr Michael Brooks
Last books finished Musings on Mothering, ed. Teika Bellamy Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer Ghost Devices, by Simon Bucher-Jones ‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Next books Omega, by Mark Griffiths and John Ridgway Mother Ross: An Irish Amazon, by G.R. Lloyd Final Cut, by Charles Burns
Blood ran in a trickle across the pages of a rare volume of religious essays, which had been torn in half.
I was a bit disappointed with the last Pratchett that I reread, Men at Arms, but this turned out to still have the old magic for me. The core of it is a double magical murder and attempted murder mystery, with Vimes resolving what’s fairly obviously a golem going rogue combined with an attempt on the life of Lord Vetinari; certain circles want Nobbs to be put in as a figurehead replacement ruler, though Nobbs himself is notably not keen on the idea. There are a lot of humane reflections on power, freedom and basic decency; and there is the new Watch recruit, Cheery Littlebottom. There are some very good lines which have been collected here. I had been wondering whether to continue with my Pratchett reading project, but now I will. You can get Feet of Clay here.
This was my top unreviewed Discworld book. Next on the pile is Thief of Time.
Usually as soon as the detailed Hugo statistics have been published, I run an analysis looking at the closely results, the lower placings, and the almost-nominated. I have done it again this year – see who won by one vote, who got onto the ballot by one vote, who came sixth despite almost topping the final ballot in their category and who was beaten by No Award – but I also have thoughts about the strengths of the individual categories.
As usual, Best Novel and Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, appear the strongest, with the most nomination votes and the most nominees. The other two categories that look very robust are the two Best Artist categories, which had the lowest number of first preference votes for No Award and both the lowest number and the lowest percentage of No Award votes in the runoff.
But other categories seem a bit more vulnerable. If the old 25% rule had still been in force, two categories would have been No Awarded this year – Best Editor Long Form and Best Fanzine (the latter by a hair’s breadth). Best Editor Long Form also had the lowest number of nominating votes, the lowest number of nominees, the lowest number of final ballot votes and the highest percentage of No Award votes among first preferences. I have long been of the view that it is difficult for Hugo voters to make a fair assessment of the editor’s role in bringing a novel to press.
Best Fanzine has been struggling to attract voters for a while. Fanzines are at the core of the history of science fiction fandom, and it would be a sad day if we had to admit that they are no longer relevant for a critical majority of fans. But sometimes sad days come.
The special Best Poem category performed below my expectations. It had the lowest threshold for getting on the final ballot, and the highest number of No Award first preference votes. I would want to see at least one more trial before I voted to ratify it as a new Hugo category.
More robust than the above, but worth noting that Best Game or Interactive Work had the highest percentage of No Award votes in the runoff.
Second paragraph of third of the sections of “The Dance of the Horned Road”:
Apart from Fairly. Alone, scared.
This won the BSFA Award for Best Novel this year, beating the poem Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead, and the novel Rabbit in the Moon, by Fiona Moore; Adrian Tchaikovsky withdrew Alien Clay from consideration. Apart from Alien Clay, none of them got a lot of Hugo nominations in Best Novel, which is what I was concentrating on at the time (Calypso did make the Hugo ballot for Best Poem, and got my vote), so I was really taken by surprise; I had not heard much buzz about it.
Having bought it and got around to reading it on the 24-hour ferry from Rosslare to Dunkirk, I was really surprised by how inventive a novel it is. In my mind, fairly or unfairly, the BSFA tends to go for safer choices. This is a narrative of blocks of 381 words (I did not count, but I bet there are 381 of them), describing the heroic journey of a young woman called Fairly across a world that is very different from ours (though we’re told it’s 2024). At the same time (so to speak) starting in the year 2314, another young woman, Rowena Savalas, is reading Fairly’s story, “The Dance of the Horned Road” and adding footnotes to it over a period of decades, so that we have not so much a story-in-a-story as a short-story-slightly-outside-a-much-longer-story.
We therefore have an inventive way of exploring two different worlds. Fairly’s quest / odyssey takes her through shattered communities and even into outer space, while steadily being pursued by the Breathing Man and handling the chas, which seem to be intelligent pigs also used as currency. Rowena joins us in observing this from centuries in the future, and explaining the awkward parts of her own world’s approach to history and life.
My one point of dissatisfaction is that the long footnotes are not always rendered correctly on the Kindle reader, which in pop up view will only show the first paragraph of the note without indicating that there is more. I was about half way through before I realised that this was a problem, and had to go back and reread the previous notes. With that in mind, you can get Three Eight One here.
The only remaining novel to have won the Tiptree/Otherwise, BSFA and/or Clarke Awards is Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, this year’s Clarke winner. Once I have read it, I’m going to take up a new project: reading books by all of the Nobel laureates in literature who were not white men.
So Long a Letter is an epistolary novel whose narrator is a recently bereaved widow; it reflects on the situation of women in West African Muslim communities in the wake of colonialism. At 90 pages, it is very short. Like most of the above list, it was first published in French, as Une si longue lettre.
It’s interesting to see the list so dominated by Senegalese writers (with one Barbadian), and also interesting that this week’s winner is so far ahead of the field, with more raters/owners on either system than the next two combined.
The English translation of Pure Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has not yet been published (which perhaps explains its rather low LibraryThing score) but is apparently on the way.
I disqualified a dozen books. Some of these are set in various countries (or mainly in the USA or UK) with Senegal getting a bigger or smaller look-in along the way; this applies to Swing Time, by Zadie Smith; How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith; The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński; The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates; Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuściński again; The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, by Issa Rae; Sahara, by Michael Palin; and China’s Second Continent, by Howard W. French.
Others, however, are very directly addressing the Senegalese emigrant experience, and while I made a judgement that less than 50% in each case is set in Senegal, I may be wrong. Those were At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop; The Most Secret Memory of Men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr; Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane; and The Belly of the Atlantic, by Fatou Diome.
Away from Africa for the next few weeks, with Romania, Guatemala, the Netherlands and Ecuador.
This is a nice idea from Cutaway Comics: what happened in the parallel universe of Inferno? How did Britain get to a state where it was ruled as a military regime by a dictator who looks just like the founder of the BBC’s Visual Effects Department?
This short comic, which I picked up at Gallifrey One earlier this year, has the answers. It’s a somewhat complex plot – Churchill allies with Oswald Mosley, who betrays and assassinates him, and then rules first in alliance with Germany and then against, before being in turn betrayed by the new leader. Meanwhile over in China, a Professor Keller is doing something odd with a mind-bending machine… It’s a well put together romp, though in our timeline Oswald Mosley would have been addressed as “Sir Oswald”, not “Baronet” (obviously a point of divergence there). But a resource-hungry country needs the potential power unleashed by Professor Stalmann…
Good stuff and you can get Inferno here (along with a DVD of extras which I didn’t get at Gallifrey).
I recently enjoyed reading Michel Barnier’s My Secret Brexit Diary, and will review it here soon. The English translation by Robin Mackay is generally very fluent, but there is a bizarre glitch in one anecdote which is worth exploring in detail. (Apologies in advance – I am not immediately translating all of the original French and German texts below, but I am giving the gist, and the official English translation of Barnier’s book is part of the story.)
Barnier quotes the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s supposed account of his first meeting with French leader General Charles de Gaulle (as relayed by a later French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), with de Gaulle thinking that his German was better than it really was:
De Gaulle croyait qu’il parlait allemand. Je ne le connaissais pas, a raconté Adenauer, et la première fois, de Gaulle m’invite à venir le voir à Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. J’étais inquiet de son accueil et de ce premier contact. Une voiture vint me chercher à l’aéroport militaire le plus proche et nous nous rapprochions de Colombey. À un moment, nous avons aperçu une grande silhouette vêtue d’un grand manteau accompagnée d’un militaire. Le chauffeur me prévint que c’était de Gaulle, venant à notre rencontre sur la route. Et mes premiers mots pour le saluer furent en allemand : “ Wie gehen Sie ? ” Interloqué, il me répondit : “ Zu Fuss ! ” Et après cela, nous avons décidé de faire appel à un interprète.
Now, this anecdote is confused in Barnier’s telling, above, because “il” and “je” swap places at the end – for reasons that I will explain, Adenauer would certainly not have said “Wie gehen Sie?” to de Gaulle. If Adenauer is the narrator, the last three sentences should surely have been,
Et ses premiers mots pour me saluer furent en allemand : “ Wie gehen Sie ? ” Interloqué, je lui répondit : “ Zu Fuss ! ” Et après cela, nous avons décidé de faire appel à un interprète.
Als Konrad Adenauer im Jahre 1958 den französischen Ministerpräsidenten Charles de Gaulle in dessen lothringischem Wohnsitz-Dörfchen Colombey-les-deux-Èglises besuchte — es war die erste Begegnung der beiden -, begrüsste ihn der Gastgeber auf deutsch: »Wie gehen Sie?« Adenauer antwortete: »Zu Fuss.«
I will now explain the actual joke. Supposedly, de Gaulle translated the stock French phrase for “How are you?”, “Comment allez-vous?” directly into German, “Wie gehen Sie?” – literally, “How are you going?” – and Adenauer, having got out of his car, replied in puzzlement “On foot!!”
The correct formal German for “How are you” is “Wie geht es Ihnen?” – literally, “How is it going for you?” Given that this is one of the first phrases that a student learns in German, it’s a bit improbable that anyone would make that mistake, and it’s also improbable that Adenauer would have misunderstood de Gaulle’s meaning even if the mistake was made.
In any case, Adenauer spoke French fluently (there is plenty of video evidence of him and de Gaulle nattering away to each other in 1958 and at later meetings) and from the protocol point of view it’s usual for the visitor to be the one who makes the effort to speak in the host’s language, not the other way around.
Having said all that, the English translation of Barnier’s memoir, by Robin Mackay, preserves Barnier’s mistake about who said what, but alters the German part of the exchange to make even less sense:
‘De Gaulle believed that he could speak German’, Adenauer recounted. ‘I didn’t know him, and for our first meeting de Gaulle invited me to come and see him at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. I was worried about this first encounter with him and what kind of welcome I would get. A car came to pick me up at the nearest military airport and soon we were approaching Colombey. At a certain point we saw a tall figure in a big coat accompanied by a soldier. The driver warned me that it was de Gaulle, coming to meet us on the road. And my first words of greeting to him were in German: “Wie geht es Ihnen?” Somewhat flustered, he replied: “Zu Fuss!” After that, we decided to get an interpreter.’
This version has Adenauer greeting de Gaulle, entirely correctly from the linguistic point of view, with “Wie geht es Ihnen?” – literally “How is it going for you?” – changing the German from the original Barnier text (and from the 1989 account in Der Spiegel). De Gaulle allegedly replies to this entirely correctly framed question, incorrectly, with “Zu Fuss!” – “On foot!” Really, this response does not answer the question as reported here, whereas at least in Barnier’s original version it does.
And really really, if de Gaulle had ever studied any German at all, he would have learned the correct reply, “Sehr gut, danke!”, long before he learned “Zu Fuss!”
And really really really, a German leader would not speak in German to greet the head of the French government, in the latter’s French countryside home, the first time they met each other, so soon after a brutal war and occupation by the Nazis. Anyway etiquette would require de Gaulle, as host, to speak first and greet his visitor.
In fact the official video of the 1958 meeting (here at 42s) shows a perfectly comfortable and relaxed exchange, with de Gaulle, aged 67, striding from his front door to greet Adenauer as soon as the latter gets out of his car. I think you can literally see Adenauer, who was 82, making the mental shift to speak French.
Even the details of the story are fictional; de Gaulle was not wearing a big coat and not accompanied by a soldier, and the conversation took place right outside his house, not on the road. The only correct point, judging from the video of the meeting (which in fairness would not have been readily available to Giscard and his audience in 1979), is that de Gaulle was the first to speak – and Barnier’s version gets that wrong too. I think we can be pretty certain that when de Gaulle spoke to Adenauer, he spoke in French.
So my suspicion, for what it is worth, is that Giscard d’Estaing made the story up out of whole cloth, to impress upon his German hosts in 1979 that he could speak to them (and also, understand them) much better than his predecessor; and Barnier unintentionally garbled the anecdote in his book; and Barnier’s English translator, trying to correct Barnier’s German and not spotting Barnier’s real mistake about the order of the speakers, garbled it further.
In mid-November of 1903, notice came from Warden Addison Johnson, of Sing Sing, that I was to report there for a scheduled execution. I informed my wife that I was going, and she raised no objection. She thought, as I did, that my role as Davis’ assistant would be little more than that of an observer.
The autobiography of the state executioner of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Massachusetts, who killed 387 people by judicially mandated electrocution between 1926 and 1939. Before I get into the substance, a bit of local interest: his father, who emigrated to America in 1844, was a devout Methodist from County Cavan, and unsuccessfully encouraged the young Robert to get ordained to the ministry. He died when his son was seven.
Elliott gives details of how he got involved, what the job practically entailed, and public reaction (which he clearly found incomprehensible). The most famous of Elliott’s cases were the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, and Bruno Hauptmann who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh. Elliott makes it pretty clear that he was personally unconvinced by the evidence in those cases, but “I did not permit my views to have any effect on the performance of my duty.” His house was bombed a few months after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, though he is hesitant to draw a straight line between the two events.
Most notoriously, his execution of a woman in 1928 was surreptitiously photographed by a reporter who had smuggled a hidden camera into the front row. Elliot reflects:
The ethics of taking or printing a photograph of this sort is not for me to discuss. However, I am inclined to believe that if more such pictures were published with the permission of the authorities, the homicide rate might decrease. Public opinion might also be aroused to the extent that capital punishment would be abolished. In either event, I think their publication would be fully justified.
Alas, I think what would happen in today’s media and social media climate would be the growth of execution porn, and indeed even in his own time, Elliott mentions the unhealthy interest of a lot of people in watching or being more closely involved in the process, an “orgy of sensationalism”.
The two strongest chapters are first, a listing of a number of cases where Elliott was very much inclined to think that the person he executed was innocent; and second, the last chapter, in which he sets out his own opposition to the death penalty.
There are several reasons why the ancient law of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” should be wiped from the statute books. First, man should not be permitted to destroy the one thing which cannot be restored–life. Furthermore, I believe that capital punishment serves no useful purpose, and is a form of revenge.
A wrong, no matter how serious, is not righted by ending a life. And if, as has happened, the condemned should not be guilty, then the tragedy is complete. These instances, of course, are very rare; but the judgment of juries is not infallible. There is always the possibility that an innocent person will pay the extreme penalty.
That’s certainly my own feeling on the subject too; and I think any of us would have to admit that Elliott, who died very soon after this book was published in 1939, had thought about it a lot more than most people.
Since the bodies had been buried by people in Kibuye after the genocide, the general location of the main grave was known: a large, somewhat sunken area of dirt and grass below the priests’ rooms and on the cusp of the northern slope down to the lake. With Stefan at the controls of the backhoe over the previous day or two, the surface layers had already been lifted away and four of us began working with picks, shovels, and trowels to expose the human remains closest to the top of the grave. Doug was setting up and running the electronic mapping station that would chart the contours of the site and provide a three-dimensional outline of each body and its location in the grave. The production of highly detailed and trial-friendly maps was Melissa’s specialty. Ralph was running between the grave and the analysis areas by the church, photographing both processes.
A couple of rather gruesome books up for review today and tomorrow, I’m afraid. Clea Koff outlines the experiences of a forensic anthropologist in the mid to late 1990s in Rwanda and the Balkans. This was a side of conflict resolution that I never came very close to, though colleagues certainly did. The description of how an international team of variously motivated and variously qualified specialists comes together and works together in different and difficult sets of circumstances is very interesting reading; but the core is in the detail, if you can take it, of how she was able to bring closure (or often, sadly, not) to people whose relatives had disappeared as their countries collapsed.
It’s easy and lazy for conspiracy theorists (and genocide apologists) to claim that Srebrenica, or the Serbian attack on the people of Kosovo, or the Rwandan massacres, were hoaxes made up by the international conspirators of your choice. It’s vital that we do enable international organisations to follow these stories to their natural conclusion, and although Koff doesn’t dwell on the political underpinning for her work, it’s always there. You can get The Bone Woman here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and my top unread non-fiction book. Next on those piles respectively are Silence, by Diarmaid McCulloch, and The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition.
Current Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch Ghost Devices, by Simon Bucher-Jones Musings on Mothering, ed. Teika Bellamy ‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Last books finished Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood Black Mountain and other stories, by Gerry Adams (did not finish) Irish Conflict in Comics, by James Bacon The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson @Wouters Wondere Wereld, by Guy Gilias Thirst, by Amelie Nothomb The School of Death, by Robbie Morrison et al
Next books Omega, by Mark Griffiths and John Ridgway Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, by Rick Edwards Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer
Second paragraph of third essay (on The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint):
It is clear that this volume is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.
A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves
While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long one, sorry):
According to his own account he was not what we call conscious, and yet at the same time the experience was a very positive one with a quality of its own. On one occasion, someone had been talking about “seeing life” in the popular sense of knocking about the world and getting to know people, and B. who was present (and who is an Anthroposophist) said something I can’t quite remember about “seeing life” in a very different sense. I think he was referring to some system of meditation which claimed to make “the form of Life itself” visible to the inner eye. At any rate Ransom let himself in for a long cross-examination by failing to conceal the fact that he attached some very definite idea to this. He even went so far–under extreme pressure–as to say that life appeared to him, in that condition, as a “coloured shape.” Asked “what colour,” he gave a curious look and could only say “what colours! yes, what colours!” But then he spoiled it all by adding, “of course it wasn’t colour at all really. I mean, not what we’d call colour,” and shutting up completely for the rest of the evening. Another hint came out when a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment and he was pressing on me in his Scots way with such questions as “So you think you’re going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there’ll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye’ll have a grand time of it!” when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, “Oh, don’t you see, you ass, that there’s a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?” That, of course, directed McPhee’s fire to him. What emerged was that in Ransom’s opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were, as he said “engulfed.” He used the word “trans-sexual” I remember and began to hunt about for some similar words to apply to eating (after rejecting “trans-gastronomic”), and since he was not the only philologist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels. But I am pretty sure he was thinking of something he had experienced on his voyage to Venus. But perhaps the most mysterious thing he ever said about it was this. I was questioning him on the subject–which he doesn’t often allow–and had incautiously said, “Of course I realise it’s all rather too vague for you to put into words,” when he took me up rather sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, “On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language.” And that is about all I can tell you of his journey. One thing is certain, that he came back from Venus even more changed than he had come back from Mars. But of course that may have been because of what happened to him after his landing.
This is the second of C.S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, after Out of the Silent Planet which is set on Mars, and before the eminently skippable That Hideous Strength, set on Earth. It is a re-telling of the Garden of Eden myth, with Weston, the villain of the previous book, turning up as the corrupting Satan for the Venusian Adam and Eve (particularly the latter) and Ransom (the hero) doing his best do counter Weston by means of argument and eventually brute force. It’s a story of not always totally exciting philosophical discussions against a fantastic and well-described landscape, with a sense of the mythic importance of the struggle between Good and Evil. Lewis says in a note at the start that “All the human characters in this book are purely fictitious and none of them is allegorical.” I am not sure that I agree!
The whole thing is told in a framing narrative by Lewis as himself, including this reflection on just how evil Professor Weston is:
He was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of “scientifiction,” in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite–the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species–a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary. In Professor Weston the power had at last met the dream.
Obviously a direct attack on science fiction, science fiction fandom, and interplanetary colonisation, an early shot in the dialogue that he later had with Arthur C. Clarke. Given that this was published in 1943, one can forgive a certain scepticism about the unbridled benefits of technology. However, C.S. Lewis was not about to challenge Hugh Carswell for the title of first Belfast science fiction fan.
This was my top book in my LibraryThing catalogue which I had not already written up. That pile has now been somewhat up-ended by receiving two dozen books from my father’s library, so the next will be East of Eden by John Steinbeck.
I rankedThe Devil’s Chord fifth out of the eight stories from last year’s Doctor Who series, writing about it:
The Devil’s Chord has a really sinister plot, with music being removed from the world; Big Finish has sometimes dared to play with the soundscape of the fictional universe, but this is the first time that the TV show has really gone there. This time it was the execution that was a bit silly, with Jinkx Monsoon really chewing the scenery as the Maestro.
The returning figure from the show’s history that really took me by (pleasant) surprise was June Hudson, in her first appearance on screen at the age of ninety-something; she did all the costume design for late 1970s and early 1980s Who, and also for Blake’s 7. She is the only character actually killed in the 1963 part of the episode.
In his typically readable and enjoyable new Black Archive, out this month, Dale Smith goes behind the spectacle which was my abiding impression of the episode and looks at its commentary on pop culture, especially on the Beatles – indeed, the book is almost as much about the Beatles as about Doctor Who, not that this is a bad thing necessarily.
The first chapter, “The Beatles and the 60s”, looks at the social and political context of post-war change, and in particular how this produced the Beatles, James Bond and Doctor Who. He looks at the extent to which different eras of Who lean towards the Beatles or Bond.
The second chapter, “‘You Can’t Use a Single Note'”, looks in detail at the surprisingly interesting question of when and how the music of the real Beatles has been and can be used in Doctor Who, both in broadcast of new stories and in the re-issuing of old ones.
The third chapter, “The Day the Music Died”, starts by examining the extent to which the episode belongs to the character of Maestro, and then takes a deep dive into music as a cultural phenomenon and the ethical questions of creativity. Its second paragraph is:
Whilst we’ve seen that pop music was a part of Doctor Who almost from the very start, it was predominantly used as diegetic background music. That began to change in the dying days of 20th-century Doctor Who, with Delta and the Bannermen (1987) bolstering its 1950s credentials by including ‘live’ cover versions of a number of period hits, rerecorded by Keff McCulloch, his wife, her sister and a number of other singers put together just for this occasion, or Silver Nemesis (1988) featuring a ‘live’ performance from the actual Courtney Pine². But it was Davies who introduced the modern TV trope of large sections of silent action played to loud, emotive non-diegetic music to Doctor Who, perhaps most notably with the Master unleashing the Toclafane to the sounds of ‘Voodoo Child’ (2005) by Rogue Traders³. But still he held back from sending the TARDIS into one of the few genres it has never visited: the full-blown musical. Rumours abounded that The Devil’s Chord would be Doctor Who’s version of the musical episode, something which had become a staple of genre TV since Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) gave us Once More with Feeling (2001). ² Cooray Smith, James, ‘Delta and the Bannerman’. ³ Donnelly, KJ, ‘Tracking British Television: Pop Music as Stock Soundtrack to the Small Screen’, Popular Music vol 21 no 3, Music and Television, October 2002, pp 331-43.
The fourth chapter, “‘I Thought That Was Non-Diegetic'”, looks briefly at the circumstances of the episode’s production, and then at the breaking of the fourth wall in Doctor Who and elsewhere as an element of postmodernism.
The fifth chapter, “Beatles vs Stones”, looks at Russell T. Davies’ intentions for his second go at running the show: change, to adapt to the demands of today’s audience, while also appreciating its ‘cultural heft’. He posts out that while you can have an argument about whether the Beatles or The Rolling Stones were the better band, there is no argument about which was more culturally important. He mounts a strong defense of Davies’ approach to New Who, even in the current uncertainty about the way forward. In a sense, this is the Black Archive we need to read in the current time of confusion.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Somalia (including Somaliland).
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
Mark Bowden
68,067
4,798
A House in the Sky
Amanda Lindhout
70,898
1,187
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
Warsan Shire
21,170
513
In the Company of Heroes: The Personal Story Behind Black Hawk Down
Michael J. Durant
5,877
533
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Warsan Shire
9,123
239
Desert Dawn
Waris Dirie
4,340
468
Call Me American: A Memoir
Abdi Nor Iftin
4,561
233
The Orchard of Lost Souls
Nadifa Mohamed
1,822
216
I’m going to start providing summaries of the winning books (should probably have done that much sooner). Black Hawk Down, published in 1999, is about the unsuccessful 1993 US military raid in Mogadishu to try and capture a local warlord. It was later adapted into a film directed by Ridley Scott.
It’s a bit unfortunate that three of the top four books, including the top two, are about violent foreign experiences of Somalia rather than giving voice to the people themselves, and I also freely admit that I’ve stretched a point with Warsan Shire’s two poetry collections – on a quick scan, they did seem to be well grounded in Somalia as a location, but I did not go through and tally pages. The Orchard of Lost Souls represents Somaliland here; hopefully some day we’ll be able to tally it separately.
I disqualified ten books. Ayaan Hirsi Ali leaves Somalia early in her autobiography, Infidel, and does not return; the second volume of her autobiography, Nomad has her travelling further afield. Desert Flower, Waris Dine’s better known book, is mostly set in the UK. When Stars Are Scattered, by Victoria Jamieson, and City of Thorns, by Ben Rawlence, are mostly in Kenya. Don’t Tell Me You’re Afraid, by Giuseppe Catozzella, is about the refugee experience en route to Europe. Djibouti, by Elmore Leonard, is mostly set in, er, Djibouti. Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men is mainly set in the UK, and her Black Mamba Boy is mostly in Yemen. Ilhan Omar’s This Is What America Looks Like is more about her life in the USA than her life before.
Next up: Senegal, Romania, Guatemala and the Netherlands.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 53) The Devil’s Chord, by Dale Smith The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by Clea Koff Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction, by Paul Kincaid Agent of Death: Memoirs of an Executioner, by Robert Greene Elliott The Dream House, by Lee Berridge My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion, by Michel Barnier A Tall Man In A Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson Irish Conflict in Comics, by James Bacon @Wouters Wondere Wereld, by Guy Gilias
Non-genre 3 (YTD 25) The Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy L. Sayers Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood Black Mountain and other stories, by Gerry Adams (did not finish)
(Counting Old Babes in the Wood as non-genre, though there are several stories that are clearly sf.)
8,600 pages (YTD 55,400) 15/32 (YTD 92/219) by non-male writers (Koff, Sayers, Atwood, Williams, Gilbert, Tesh, Lucas, Whiteley, North, Giddings, Jikiemi-Pearson, Nothomb, McCormack, Smith, Cloonan/Lotay) 2/32 (YTD 27/219) by non-white writers (Koff, Jikiemi-Pearson) 4/32 reread (The Five Red Herrings, Voyage to Venus, Feet of Clay, Deadfall) 209 books currently tagged unread, up 2 from last month thanks to summer acquisitions, down 91 from August 2024.
Reading now Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
Coming soon (perhaps) The School of Death, by Robbie Morrison et al Ghost Devices, by Simon Bucher-Jones Omega, by Mark Griffiths and John Ridgway Doctor Who: Lux, by James Goss Musings on Mothering, ed. by Teika Bellamy Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, by Rick Edwards Mother Ross: An Irish Amazon, by G.R. Lloyd Het Zoet Water door de eeuwen heen, by Jean Binon ‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer Final Cut, by Charles Burns “Two Hearts”, by Peter S. Beagle Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire The Years, by Annie Ernaux The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng Silence: A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition East of Eden, by John Steinbeck Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle
I’m browsing Then, Rob Hansen’s comprehensive analysis of the early history of UK science fiction, and came across the interesting fact that in 1935, one Hugh C. Carswell was appointed as Director of the Belfast chapter of the Science Fiction League, created by Hugo Gernsback for readers of his magazine Wonder Stories. Hansen then reports that this chapter ‘collapsed’ in around May 1937, when Hugh Carswell joined the RAF. Quite possibly there were no other actual members. In any case, Hugh Carswell is the first identifiable participant in science fiction fandom from Northern Ireland (I originally thought he might be the first from the whole of Ireland, but Fitz-Gerald P. Grattan (1913-1993) was writing to Astounding in 1931) and in the UK, the Belfast chapter of the SFL was preceded only by Leeds.
I wondered what else might be traceable about Carswell. From the genealogy sites, it was fairly straightforward to find his vital statistics: Hugh Crawford Carswell, born in Belfast in 1919, died in Waterford in 1985, married to Alice Kervick of Waterford (1916-1990) in Weston-super-Mare in 1946. His address in Belfast was 6 Selina Street, one of the tangle of streets at the bottom of the Grosvenor Road which was demolished to build the Westlink. His appointment as Director of the Belfast chapter of the SFL would have been shortly before his 16th birthday, and his gafiation around the time of his 18th.
Selina Street marked in red, between Elizabeth Street and Dickson Street.The same area on a modern map. Selina Street is mostly under the Westlink, just north of the Grosvenor Road exit.
Hugh’s father John Carswell (1890-1944) was born in 12 North Queen Place, another vanished street which was just around the corner from Selina Street. (It seems to have been between Stanley Street and Willow Street.) The family are recorded as Church of Ireland in the 1900 census. John’s father, Hugh’s grandfather, Henry Carswell (1858-1906) was born in England; his profession is given as “labourer” in the census. John’s mother, Hugh’s grandmother Sarah nee Veighey (1857-1945) was born in Co Armagh.
Hugh’s mother Elizabeth / Lizzy nee Crawford (1891-1967) was born in Hutchinson Street, between Selina Street and North Queen Place. The family are recorded as Presbyterians. Her father Thomas Crawford (1864-1931) was born in County Down; his profession is given as “brass fitter”. Lizzy’s mother, Hugh’s grandmother Jane nee Moore (1866-1917) was born in County Antrim, which could mean Lisburn or Ballycastle or anywhere in between.
John and Lizzy married at St John’s Church (Church of Ireland) on the Malone Road in Belfast on 5 September 1911; he was 21 and she was 20. It’s an interesting choice of venue; St John’s is a good hour’s walk from central Belfast, and even in these benighted days I count a dozen Church of Ireland churches closer to their birth places than St John’s. His profession is given as Lance Corporal in the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles, based in Dover, so he had a nice shiny uniform. They seem to have had six sons between 1912 and 1924, Hugh being the third, and then a daughter in 1927.
John Carswell is recorded as living in Selina Street in the various online street directories for 1924, where he is described as a labourer, and for 1932, 1939 and 1943, where he is described as a grocer. After his death, Mrs E. Carswell (ie Lizzie) is also described as a grocer in 1951 and 1960. Initially they lived at 8 Selina Street, but later acquired number 6 as well; my guess would be that number 8 was the grocery shop and number 6 the residence.
Hugh made the newspapers in January 1936 when he passed the examination for Aircraft Apprentice with the RAF, though it looks like this didn’t impede his fannish activity for another year. A Facebook comment by Des Carswell, one of his five sons, says, “He was later transferred to South Africa where he trained as a pilot with the RAF and was responsible for flight testing of aircraft that his Squadron assembled in South Africa for operation duties in that theatre.”
He goes on, “Hugh returned to the U.K. in 1946 initially stationed at St. Eval before be transferred to 202 Squadron in Aldergrove outside Belfast where he undertook flying duties carrying out weather flight testing in Handley Page Halifax aircraft as a Sargent Pilot. On retirement from the RAF Hugh continued to work with the services until his retirement in 1979.”
There’s a bit more to say about the end of the story, but I’ll get to that later. Worth noting here that the new tech Air Force is exactly the branch of the services that you might expect a teenage science fiction reader to be drawn to in the 1930s.
(One minor discrepant detail: Hugh’s grandson says that he was based in north Africa, not South Africa, during the war, and indeed northern Africa seems more likely, given that the RAF was very active in that campaign and that South Africa had its own air force. He may of course have done both.)
I had had better luck at a distance of two seas and ninety years than James White, who in 1952 found Hugh Carswell’s own copy of Wonder Stories in a Belfast bookshop, and, as recounted by Walt Willis, decided to track him down at his Selina Street address. (See Fantastic Worlds v.1 no. 1, 1952, reprinted in The Willis Papers (1959) pages 8-10).
The address was one of a long row of identical houses in a working-class street. The door was opened by a middle-aged woman with a truculent expression. “Mr. Carswell?” asked James, politely. She gave him a suspicious look and would probably have slammed the door in his face if it hadn’t been for the fact that James is roughly a mile high and wears heavy round glasses which make him look like an electronic brain in its walking-out clothes. She contented herself with gradually reducing the width of the aperture until she was in danger of cutting her head off. “Which Mr. Carswell?” she asked warily. “Hugh,” said James. She reddened, insulted. “What do you mean, me?” she enquired angrily. She was hurt. ”Not you,” said James hastily. He gave her an aspirate to remove the pain. “Hhhhugh. Hugh Carswell.” Malevolently she seized her opportunity for further obstruction. “Which Hugh Carswell?” Now, I have the type of mind that mentally falls off every bridge before I come to it. If I had been going to make this call of James’s, I would have cased the joint first. I would have looked up the house in the street directory to make sure the Carswells were still there after 17 years. Then I would have looked up the Register of Electors to see the names of all the people in the house who were of voting age. Finally I would have walked past the house a few times and then had a pint in the nearest pub and seen what dirt I could dig up. Such intelligent preparation and brilliant detective work wouldn’t have made the slightest difference, of course, but it would have been fun. “Er…..the one who’s interested in science fiction,”, said James at last. The woman looked at him blankly. It seemed to come naturally to her. Obviously, she was waiting for him to say something intelligible. She didn’t seem to think there was much hope. “Signs fixin’?” she asked. “What signs?”
Hoffman’s cartoon of James White in Selina Street.
I don’t find any other Hughs in the immediate Carswell family, so either the lady was being even more annoying to James White than he realised, or he was making that detail up for entertainment. Personally I suspect the latter. I can also believe that as a relatively recent widow, she could get snappish when a stranger asked where Mr Carswell was. At least, I assume that White met Lizzie, who would have been 63 in 1952; Hugh’s sister Pauline does not appear to have ever married, so was probably still living with her widowed mother, but she was only 24 in 1952, which doesn’t really fit White’s description.
By his own account, White then became alarmed by the presence of sinister men who appeared to be monitoring his presence, so he left the scene rapidly, having first established that all of Hugh’s old magazines had been thrown away the previous summer by his mother.
One night in September 1973, a loyalist gunman fired six shots through the front window of the home of my grandparents – my Waterford Catholic grandmother Alice Carswell (nee Kervick) and my Protestant-born Catholic convert grandfather Hugh Carswell, better known as Paddy.
Their Catholic house on the predominantly Protestant Cregagh estate had been attacked several times before because of the family’s religion, but the gun attack was the final straw. Nobody was hurt, but the message was clear: it was time to get out.
My uncle Hilary remembers seeing the flashes of the gunshots from an upstairs bedroom and pulling his brother Dick to the ground. The family has photographs of the bullet-holes, including one snap of my cousin Jaimie, then a toddler, with his finger in one of the holes.
The day after the attack, the Irish News newspaper carried a brief, two-paragraph article about the shooting at the bottom of its front page. Within weeks, the Carswells had packed up and relocated to Catholic west Belfast.
“At that stage, there were 12 Catholic families living in the Cregagh estate. That was all that was left. And then there were 11,” says Hilary Carswell.
The fact that Hugh had converted to Catholicism is a new and interesting detail. The Catholic Church, especially in Ireland, perhaps even more so in Northern Ireland, was very demanding of couples in mixed marriages in those days. As it happens, both of my own grandmothers, brought up as Protestants, converted to Catholicism to marry my grandfathers.
By 1973, Selina Street, North Queen Place and Hutchinson Street had all disappeared under the developers’ bulldozers, but Hugh still took his family back to West Belfast when crisis struck, before heading permanently to the Republic where he and Alice lived out their days. His RAF service record, which had not helped him in Cregagh, won’t have helped much in West Belfast either.
I checked in with Simon Carswell, who was only vaguely aware of his grandfather’s interest in science fiction. He wrote to me:
I remember him as a really clever and fascinating man. He repaired and flew Hurricane fighter planes for the RAF in north Africa during the Second World War and I recall him being interested in technology and innovation, and taking an interest in US television programmes about the future so this fits with his interest as a boy in science fiction.
He was a brilliant Grandad who took a great interest in his grandchildren. He died far too young at the age of 65. He had been in poor health from malaria that he contracted in north Africa, which was not helped by a hardened smoking habit. He was much loved and is much missed by his family, even 40 years after his death. Our memories of Grandad remain as vivid today. I hope he is up there reading science fiction novels, comics and books, and pondering what the future might bring to us down here.
Coming full circle, I am tremendously grateful to Hugh’s son Paul Carswell for sharing this photograph of Hugh with his mother Lizzie and their dogs, one of whom was named Rex, at the door of their Selina Street house. From Hugh’s apparent age, it was taken just a couple of years before he became Northern Ireland’s first known science fiction fan.
Wilson As on the peaks of some high mountaintop the south wind, Notus, pours a fog so thick that nobody can see beyond a stone’s throw- unwelcome to the shepherds, but for thieves better than night—so rose the cloud of dust beneath their feet-they hurtled at such speed across the plain.
Chapman And as, upon a hill’s steep tops, the south wind pours a cloud, To shepherds thankless, but by thieves that love the night, allow’d, A darkness letting down, that blinds a stone’s cast off men’s eyes; Such darkness from the Greeks’ swift feet (made all of dust) did rise.
Graves Sheep-stealers love the cloud That hangs on every hill Better than night’s black shroud; They can do what they will: For they go wandering free (Long may the south wind last!) Where shepherds cannot see Beyond a short stone-cast. Much the same obscurity resulted from great clouds of dust which rose as the Trojan [sic] forces advanced at a double across the plain.
I preferred The Iliad somehow to The Odyssey. There is a wider range of characters, a broader range of settings, a continuing tension between the battlefields of Troy and the realm of the gods. Indeed, I found the continuing interference by rival divine authorities in human affairs strongly reminiscent of the Balkan / Levantine instinct for explaining contemporary human politics by conspiracy theory, resorting to unseen, unaccountable forces to explain what is going on. […]
Non-robot women get rather a raw deal in the Iliad. The quarrel between Achilles and the rest of the Greeks starts with a dispute over who gets to keep the captive women Briseis and Chryseis. In the funeral games for Patroclus, Ajax and Odysseus wrestle for a prize of a woman who is not named but is skilled in all domestic matters (Edited to add: she is worth four large oxen). Actually she is the consolation prize for the loser: the winner gets a nice big cauldron. (I am not making this up.) The match is declared a draw and Ajax and Odysseus are told by Achilles to split the prizes, but we are not told how they manage this (and perhaps we are better off not knowing).
Having said which, the goddesses Thetis, Athena, Hera and indeed the Trojan women, Hecuba and Andromache (and to an extent Helen) are all interesting characters in their own rights; as are most of the men, several of whom (this is hardly a spoiler) get horribly killed off during the conflict.
I was fascinated by the continuous tension between praise and horror of combat. It’s clear to me that Homer’s articulation of the warrior’s code of honour lies rhetorically behind an awful lot of subsequent eras’ jingoism and exhortation of young men to die stupidly. The battle scenes are pretty gory and get a bit repetitive, but there are moments of real power. Yet at the same time he is clear about the other side: moves towards peace-making are clearly a Good Thing, though torpedoed by human incompetence and divine malice; the last chapter has grieving Priam confronting Achilles over the body of his son Hector.
On this reading, I found The Iliad less attractive than The Odyssey. The sheer grind of ongoing combat is far too familiar from the daily news, and although the gore is sometimes cartoonishly described, it’s difficult to take light-heartedly, along with the casual treatment of women as property – poor Briseis in particular! I also noted that a lot of the warriors are described as sons out of wedlock, which makes me wonder about the obligations of paternity and marriage at the time. And it’s very long, and even then doesn’t actually reach the conclusion which we all know is coming. But Wilson’s translation is fluid without being florid, and very comprehensible.
In my previous review I commented on the golden fembots in Book 18. I am very happy with Wilson’s translation here:
Slaves hurried to assist their lord. They were made all of gold, but looked like living women. They had a consciousness inside their hearts, and strength and voices. They had learned their skills from deathless gods.
As I said before, these surely must be the earliest robots in literature?
Anyway, it took me a month to read, a Book at a time, and I think I would recommend it despite my reservations. You can get The Iliad here.
Once upon a time a long way from Croydon, a child was born, the fifty-fifth child to be born that year in the North Zone in BC-ville. The Nativity Robots decanted her from the amniotic chambers and, with huge smiles upon their chests, duly proclaimed her Sasha 55.
When I watched the TV episode earlier this year, I wrote:
Something didn’t quite gel for me with the first episode, The Robot Revolution. Partly that the plotline wasn’t all that original, but somehow it felt like actors on a set in a way that even early 60s Who didn’t. I was watching it on a cramped screen in a B&B with ants in the floorcracks, so it may not have been the best circumstances, but it really felt like spectacle was being prioritised, and it was one of the weirder introductions for a new companion even by New Who standards.
I am glad to report that I liked Una McCormack’s novelization much more than the TV story; we get a lot more of Belinda’s background and a lot more of poor Sasha 55, and a very good sense of the world of Missbelindachandra as a more-or-less functioning society. It really rounds off the corners of what felt like a slightly hasty TV production. Well worth adding to the shelves. You can get Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution here.
