The best known books set in each country: Niger

Posted on 8 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Niger.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Shadow Speaker	Nnedi Okorafor	2,696	448
In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger	Paul Stoller	278	76
Don’t Spill the Milk!	Stephen Davies	226	54
Harmattan	Gavin Weston	242	26
Nomads of Niger	Carol Beckwith and Marion van Offelen	31	83

This was a very difficult tabulation. There are a lot of books about West Africa, or just Africa in general. There’s a certain amount of confusion between Niger and Nigeria. There are books about travelling to Timbuktu (which is in Mali), or the Songhay Empire (which was also mainly in Mali), or following Mungo Park (who did the whole river Niger). I excluded 28 books before I got to the fifth one actually set in Niger, and for once I’m not going to list them all; some of them have very spurious Nigerien connections indeed.

The winner – for the second time, see also Sudan – is Nnedi Okorafor, who very clearly sets Shadow Speaker in a future Niger.

The top book set in Niger by a Nigerien author that I was able to identify is Sarraounia : Le drame de la reine magicienne, by Abdoulaye Mamani.

Incidentally, Niger has the second lowest median age of any country in the world, ahead of only the Central African Republic.

Next up: Australia, North Korea, Syria and indeed Mali.

The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane

Posted on 7 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Let us set the stage with a brief exploration of perhaps the most famous example of the intersection of honour imperatives and high politics in sixteenth-century Ireland: the fizzled duel of 1571 between James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald and Sir John Perrot. Fitzmaurice was the instigator and initial leader of the so-called Desmond Rebellions that raged in Munster in the 1570s and early 1580s; Perrot was the aging English knight and ex-soldier sent by the Crown to suppress them. Fitzmaurice proposed to settle matters through personal combat, a proposal to which Perrot gladly agreed, even allowing Fitzmaurice to set the conditions of combat. They arranged to meet outside of Killmallock to fight with the sword and target while clad in ‘Irish tresses’. But if Fitzmaurice’s challenge represents the high point of the politics of honour in Anglo-Irish affairs, his failure to show on the day suggests its rapid demise. He justified his absence by saying that were he to kill Perrot, the Queen would simply send a new president to crush him.¹ Whether this was sincere or not, it certainly showed a concern for the limits of honour politics: how could Fitzmaurice be sure that the Queen would abide by the extra-legal agreement made between himself and Perrot, two gentleman commanders? Following a period of self-exile on the continent, the would-be-duellist returned to Munster and with the aid of a small papal force attempted to raise a holy war against the forces of the Crown – marking the first time that a mature ideology of faith and fatherland appeared on the Anglo-Irish landscape, an ideology that would dominate that relationship, arguably, into the present.² In his abandonment of honour principles for the stronger stuff of faith and fatherland as a basis of resistance, Fitzmaurice may not have shown himself the bravest of rebels, but he certainly demonstrated political vision.
¹ For an extended discussion of the honour principles at stake, see Palmer, ‘The insolent liberty’.
² Anthony McCormack’s analysis of the Earls of Desmond’s intrigues with Francis I of France and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, however, demonstrate the longer lineage of ‘faith and fatherland’ ideology in Ireland and in Anglo-Irish relations. Nevertheless, Fitzmaurice’s landing in Munster accompanied by papal troops and carrying a banner bearing the cross marks the first appearance of this ideological position in the field. See McCormack, Earldom of Desmond, p. 68.

I met Brendan Kane back in 2009 when I attended a conference that he organised about Tudor Ireland in Connecticut; it’s still a topic I hope to write about at some future stage, and this book helped to remind me why. It’s a treatment of the concept of honour and how it affected relations between and withing Ireland and England in the century between the start of the process of declaring Henry VIII King of Ireland, and the outbreak of the Confederate Wars (with subsequent spillover into Scotland and England).

I’m instinctively (and anthropologically) attracted to historical explanations that rely on more than economic self-interest, and the concept of honour turns out to be rather a good lens for examining the history of conflict and co-operation between the various strands of Irish and their English overlords. The analysis of Irish language literature is beyond my competence to assess, but I’m glad it’s there. I found the chapters on the Nine Years’ War and on the mutual difficulties of Wentworth/Strafford and his Irish counterpart forty years later particularly interesting.

I was also completely unaware of the liminal figure of Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clanricarde (1572-1635), who was also created Earl of St Albans and married Frances, the daughter of Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (her first husband, the 2nd Earl of Essex, having come to a sticky end). One of their children married the very Irish Earl of Ormonde, and the other the very English Earl of Winchester. If I count correctly, his younger brother Ulick was my 7x great-grandfather. He was able to move between the two kingdoms and maintain his own set of identities at a troubled time, and I’d like to dig a bit more into his history.

Anyway, a good detailed book on a slightly obscure topic. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. On a related note, the next on that pile is Ireland in the Renaissance, c.1540-1660, eds. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton.

Four modest amendments to the WSFS Constitution

Posted on 7 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I always approach amendments to the WSFS Constitution with some trepidation. The Business Meeting does not always make things better, and it is not always sensitive to the lived experience of Hugo Administrators or con-running volunteers. But Tammy Coxen and I, as Hugo Administrators for 2017, 2019, 2020, 2024, 2025 (for a time) and 2026, hope to make things easier for our successors by clarifying the rules and bringing them fully into line with current practice, as proposed below. All new business is somewhat burdensome on the Business Meeting agenda, not to mention on the poor volunteers running it, but hopefully these four items should be uncontroversial and can be dealt with speedily.

Continue reading →

Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher

Posted on 6 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“The Little Book of Fate”):

When he could get a word in, the Doctor thanked him and set off.

I wrote up the Black Archive on Warriors’ Gate two years ago, including the expanded and revised audio version of Stephen Gallagher’s novelisation which was released in 2019. A few months after my 2023 write-up, the BBC released a print version of the new audiobook, plus two more short stories by Stephen Gallagher set in the same continuity.

As I said before, the revised novelisation gives us a lot more background and characterisation of the slavers and the Tharils than did either the TV series or the 1982 text, and mixes up the plot quite substantially. Gallagher is probably the best known mainstream sf writer to have worked on 1980’s Doctor Who, and he clearly loves the story and can now shape it the way he wants.

The first of the two extra stories is quite a long one, “The Kairos Ring”, featuring Romana and the Tharils and aliens infesting an American Civil War battle. It was also originally released as an audiobook, as the first in a series of five of which the other four were all by Paul Magrs. I had not come across these before, and must look our for them.

The other new story is “The Little Book of Fate”, basically a vignette bringing the Eighth Doctor back into this particular continuity, but nicely done.

Sometimes the BBC tries to make money off us fans by putting old wine in new bottles, but this is very refreshing. You can get it here.

WSFS Consultative votes – one more point

Posted on 6 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

One thing that I should have mentioned in my post from yesterday – an important element of the WSFS consultative votes both last year and this year was that statements were published both for and against the proposed changes, written by people who already had skin in the game – the proposers and people who had spoken or written against each proposal.

I feel that this is a very important element of any future membership vote, and if that does become part of the process, something would need to be built into the rules about it. I wrote yesterday’s post before I had listened to Octothorpe’s discussion of the issue (starting at 40 mins in), and I was interested that one of the Octothorpe editors admits to having their opinion swayed by one of the published statements.

Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe

Posted on 5 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third section:

She didn’t lead with that. First there was some obfuscation.

Story set in a world like today’s America except that there are talking animals. A dog detective teams up with a crow to Solve Crime. Nice idea, though maybe more could have been done with it. You can get it here.

This was both the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2020 (as part of Ellen Datlow’s submission to the Hugo Packet) and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on both of those piles is Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix.

The 2025 WSFS Consultative Votes

Posted on 5 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

So, the numbers are out from this year’s WSFS Consultative Votes. 343 Seattle Worldcon members voted in total.

In the vote to amend the constitution so as to eliminate the Retro Hugo Awards:

Yes: 164
No: 167
Total: 331

In the vote to amend the Hugo Award categories for Best Fan and Professional Artist:

Yes: 124
No: 160
Total: 284

This is less than the 1260 who participated last year, but still two or three times more participants than the peak attendance at the average Business Meeting session.

It’s not surprising that the participation was a bit lower this time. Most WSFS Constitutional amendments are not in themselves interesting and are in themselves technical. Films attract more Hugo voters than the art categories or the Retro Hugos, so turnout was inevitably higher for a proposal on the former than for proposals on the latter. These votes are consultative and were always intended as such.

Also, this year’s timing was experimental. Last year we held the vote for ten days immediately before the convention, the point at which interest in WSFS is perhaps most intense. Turnout was gratifyingly high. But we were aware that some proponents of the consultative vote favour a longer, earlier voting period. So we tried that this year, and got a lower turnout. I’m no longer on the team that made the vote happen, but I consider it to have been a successful effort, with lessons learned.

I doubt that I will be personally involved in future exercises, but my advice to organisers would be to go for a 10-day voting period, rather than a whole month, and link it to one of the Business Meeting sessions, probably the first, having the vote conclude a few days before so that the results can be announced there. I would also be very wary of making the constitutional specifications around the timing too rigid.

I think also that a different Worldcon could devote a few more resources to publicising the vote. I counted all of one social media post about it from Seattle, on the day it closed. (I did a post of my own the previous day, as did David Levine.) It was also the last of several items in a newsletter to all members on 23 May, where it was not mentioned in the opening paragraph. I feel that more publicity would have made a difference. I am sadly familiar with some of the reasons why it didn’t happen that way this time.

It comes down to this though. Is it more legitimate for important decisions to be made by the couple of dozen people for whom it is convenient to meet in a room at a given time? Or by several hundred people in an online up or down vote? I am impressed by those who are very confident that they already know the answer. In my view, it’s still a work in progress.

Also: one more point.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 4 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone
Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith
Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton

Last books finished
The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins
Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix
Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson (did not finish)
Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

Next books
Fear Death by Water, by Emily Cook
The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo

Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly

Posted on 4 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

They stood in the courtyard of a family compound in the out-skirts of Dadang. A fat bottle palm squatted by a well, casting cross-hatched shade. Colorful tunics and shawls hung to dry on lines strung between semi separate houses. Aristide wondered who they belonged to. Surely no one lived here. Still, the illusion was admirable. And focusing on the tradecraft kept him from thinking about what he was about to do.

Third in a series (The Amberlough Dossier) of which I had not read the other two. I read the first hundred pages but couldn’t get into it on its own. Not anyone’s fault. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020, in the Hugo Voter Packet as part of Diana Pho’s generous submission. Next on that pile is A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock, from the same folder.

Hugo Short Stories 2025

Posted on 3 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

6) “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine. Second paragraph of third section:

Okay okay okay, let me explain.

I just didn’t get this. I liked all the others.

5) “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim. Second paragraph(s) of third section:

You have a game with pictures, trying to spot
the differences, your eyes darting back and
forth between them. It is harder with text.
Don’t focus on individual words in each line,
but look at the space between them. Know
what both sides say. Hold it all in your head.
Perhaps don’t even quite focus your vision.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

I did understand this, but found it quite difficult to follow.

4) “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones. Second (and final) paragraph of third section:

The last injection severs their voluntary motor pathways so nothing moves but their eyes. Before the final step, the prisoners feel young again, for a moment.

A very short, vicious, vivid portrayal of a prison planet.

3) “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo. Second paragraph of third section:

“It was better before they put in the big road. The old road ran right by us, and we’d get people all the time. Now it’s just folks who already know we’re here. Or ones that get unlucky. It’s catch as catch can these days, I guess.”

Short story of a family quest and revenge.

2) “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim. Third paragraph (no internal sections):

So they (the first “they”) killed the kid again. They stormed the hole and broke the kid out and slit the kid’s throat on public television (as all television in Omelas was publicly funded), and they said, “Look at what sort of shit your beautiful city is built on!” and the kid bled out and it was extremely graphic to the point of being censored in later broadcasts. And one of the tracks of the free public transit system twisted loose, and a bunch of commuters were killed in a freak accident, and the stock market started shuddering downward, and a house collapsed on the south side of Omelas.

Update of the classic Ursula Le Guin story for today, including communications technology and general societal decay.

1) “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal. Second paragraph of third section:

Margery resettled the bag on her shoulder and the hammering of her heart got louder and harder against the walls of her ribs. Off to the side of the path, something gleamed in the sunlight. Too much sunlight, as if trees were missing.

Fairy tale involving giant homicidal snails. What’s not to love?

Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Beatriz Blum

Posted on 2 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Straightening her eyeglasses, taking in the overall effect, she sighed.

I got this because I had been in contact with the author for a peculiar reason. Back in 2020, when The Canterville Ghost won the 1945 Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, we had the usual difficulties in tracking down the heirs of the creators to send them the trophy. Eventually I found out that the writer of the script, Edwin Harvey Blum, had a living daughter, and duly got in touch with her and sent her the rocket. (In retrospect, we should have also considered the heirs of director Jules Dassin as potential recipients. I think we did contact MGM, and they were not interested.)

I also discovered that Deborah Blum had written this book, and given my vague general interest in anthropology, I bought it; but it then lingered on my unread shelf for five years, to the point that it was the non-fiction book that had been there longest. (Next on that pile is The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane.)

Anyway, I finally got to it. It’s a reconstruction of the love life of Margaret Mead, between her young marriage to schooldays crush Luther Cressman, her affairs with Andre Sapir and Ruth Benedict, and her meeting with eventual second husband Reo Fortune, basically the first third of her life (she lived from 1901 to 1978).

Other people’s sex lives are always interesting, of course, but I felt this missed several beats. Blum has chosen to write a novelistic reconstruction of conversations and other events, rather than a historical treatment of the surviving correspondence (of which apparently there is a heck of a lot), and I always wonder how much has been made up in cases like this. (See also Persia.)

More importantly, the most interesting thing about Margaret Mead is not who she did or didn’t sleep with in her early twenties, but her contribution to anthropology, and this is only briefly covered in the book, which ends with her return from Samoa in 1926 and lightly skips over her subsequent work and fame. It would be nice to be able to draw a line connecting her emotional and intellectual progress, but that isn’t really attempted here and may not in the end be possible.

Not Blum’s fault at all, but I’d also like to read more some time about Alfred Cort Haddon, one of the founders of anthropology, who popped up in my PhD research thirty years ago as a zoology professor at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, before he became famous as Haddon the Head-Hunter. He crossed paths with Margaret Mead a couple of times, but was forty-five years older and lived on a different continent, so it is entirely fair that Blum does not write much about him here.

Mead’s feminism is particularly interesting (and insufficiently explored in this book). I would like to know how many young women in early 1920s America, marrying at 21, refused to change their names to their husband’s. It would certainly never have occurred to my grandmother, born two years before Margaret Mead in the same city (Philadelphia). Edited to add: I was completely unfair to my grandmother here. She did tell my grandfather before they married that she would not change her name; he said that would be fine; and then she changed her mind.

I got a much better sense of Mead’s personal mission from her first husband’s moving tribute to her.

All social science, but especially anthropology, owes Margaret Mead a tremendous debt. At twenty-three years of age she did what no woman in anthropology had done. She went on a poverty-level fellowship compared to the generous stipends now given. She violated the canons of the Establishment by writing a report that was interesting, readable, and relevant to the lives of people in our society. She popularized anthropology. The departments in which some of her critics, both friendly and hostile, now teach owe their existence to Margaret’s popularization of the subject matter. If what she wrote in Coming of Age in Samoa tended to produce an outburst of demand for greater sexual freedom among our young people, it did that because it was a lance puncturing the old pustule of hypocrisy. She became a celebrity, and having been made that by the media she cleverly turned it to her own use to support her programs.

Over a half-century ago, this twenty-three-year-old girl who had never before been out of the country, went to an isolated island under financial conditions a contemporary graduate student would probably reject as demeaning, and there made her first field study. She had the firm conviction that she could establish and hold her place in the profession with men. Her record proves she was right and in the doing she became a pioneer in the women’s movement. We all are indebted to her in some degree. Colleagues as scholars will correct her errors, the perspective of time will establish her scientific work, and we, her professional associates, will gain stature both personally and professionally, if we rightly honor the remarkable young girl and the woman Margaret became.

Anyway, you can get Coming of Age here.

The best known books set in each country: Venezuela

Posted on 1 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Venezuela.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Dragons in the Waters	Madeleine L’Engle	4,810	1,393
Green Mansions	William Henry Hudson	3,251	1,811
Doña Bárbara	Rómulo Gallegos	5,804	517
It Would Be Night in Caracas	Karina Sainz Borgo	7,368	241
The Sun and the Void	Gabriela Romero Lacruz	3,699	408
In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon	Redmond O’Hanlon	1,558	638
Ya̦nomamö: The Fierce People	Napoleon A. Chagnon	1,327	705
The Caiman	Maria Eugenia Manrique	2,393	120

This table sees one of the biggest variations between LibraryThing and Goodreads that I have yet seen. The top-ranked book on LibraryThing is fifth on Goodreads; the top-ranked book on Goodreads is seventh on LibraryThing; the winner on aggregate is second on one system and third on the other. Even bigger divergences would have appeared if I had gone further down the table.

And of all my childhood favourites, I did not expect to see Madeleine L’Engle, of A Wrinkle in Time fame, winning this week’s prize. But indeed, Dragons in the Waters is about a kid going to Venezuela to take over his inheritance, both natural and supernatural.

Venezuelan writers pick up half of the spots this week. Surprisingly, only It Would Be Night in Caracas is directly about the current political situation.

Of the others, The Sun and the Void is set in a fantasy country that as far as I can tell the author wants us to read as Venezuela. The Ya̦nomamö live in both Venezuela and Brazil, but Venezuela has adopted Chagnon’s book, so I’m happy to go along with that.

I disqualified seven books. A Long Petal of the Sea, by Isabel Allende, is mainly set in Spain and Chile, and only in Venezuela at the end. The General in His Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is about the end of the life of Simon Bolivar, in what is now Colombia. Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano, is about the entire continent. Bruchko, by Bruce Olson, unpleasantly straddles the border with Colombia but seems to be more on the other side. When Time Stopped, by Ariana Neumann, is about a Venezuelan discovering her family’s experiences during the Holocaust. Bolívar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana, covers Simon Bolivar’s life and career all over the region. And Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln, by Margarita Engle, sounds very sweet but is set mainly in the USA.

Coming next: Niger, Australia, North Korea and Syria.

Winning at webDiplomacy

Posted on 1 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I’ve spent some time recently revisiting a teenage enthusiasm for the game of Diplomacy, in which (ideally) seven players with differently matched forces try to dominate the map of Europe circa the start of the twentieth century. The webDiplomacy site allows you to test your mettle not only against human players, but also against AIs. This can go quite fast, at a move every minute or so.

I am horrified and fascinated that the AIs continually defeat me, a mere human player. The couple of times I’ve tried “Gunboat Diplomacy” (where there is also no communication) with real humans, I found the going much easier, as opponents with brains made out of meat are more likely to make mistakes. Out of a couple of dozen battles with AIs, I have won only two; one where as Turkey I managed to break out of my corner before the rest of the countries had properly got started (which I think is the least difficult way to win against the software), and another as Italy where I combined good luck with a couple of good tactical shouts and a coherent overall strategy.

Continue reading →

Doctor Who, Series 2 / 15 / 41

Posted on 31 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Well.

THIS POST HAS SPOILERS FOR TONIGHT’S EPISODE OF DOCTOR WHO

Continue reading →

May 2025 books

Posted on 31 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Non-fiction 9 (YTD 31)
Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint
Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith
Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum
Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay
The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans
Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins
Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson (did not finish)

Non-genre 2 (YTD 19)
thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold
The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West

SF 13 (YTD 57)
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly (did not finish)
These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe
On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner (did not finish)
Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 13)
Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones
Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher
Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead

Comics 4 (YTD 16)
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris
The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al

7,200 pages (YTD 35,300)
13/31 (YTD 52/138) by non-male writers (van der Lint, Blum, Ypi, West, Bradley, Cole, Donnelly, Jacobs x2, Kaner, Engle, Huang, Ferris)
3/31 (YTD 21/138) by non-white writers (Bradley, Cole, Huang)
2/31 rereads (Beyond the Sun, Doctor Who: Logopolis)

231 books currently tagged unread, down 20 from last month, down 78 from May 2024.

Reading now
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

Coming soon (perhaps)
Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone
Fear Death by Water, by Emily Cook
Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton

Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton
The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw
The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore

The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna
Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al
The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright
The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Final Cut, by Charles Burns
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson

Hugo Best Novelette

Posted on 30 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I felt that two of these were less good than the other four, but otherwise I found it difficult to rank them. However, you gotta start somewhere.

(Titles link to original publications where available.)

6) “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha. Second paragraph of third section:

We sat on a bench and watched the East River behind the slow-moving bodies on the walkway. I tried to show her the dead book, and she thumbed the margins before giving up when it wouldn’t brighten. It was clear she had no interest in the thing.

Books and technology and perceptions and truth. Didn’t quite have the emotional punch that I wanted.

5) “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed. Second paragraph of third section:

There was plenty of night left; she knew she too could go back to bed. Instead, she wrapped up in her biggest cloak and stomped outside to empty her mailbox. It was almost—almost funny the way it kept coming, like a magic cauldron in a fairytale following a poorly worded command to make porridge, swamping the town. Finally she hauled the bag back inside and spread it out in front of the fire. Outside, the storm grumbled, receded, returned, filled the entire cottage inside the cave with the echoing sound of rain.

Quite short; wizard and her apprentice awkwardly build a relationship and fight evil.

4) “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. Second paragraph of third section:

Antonis could not believe it. In fact, he had probably stopped listening to her rant right about when his werewolf neighbor had sent him a new wallpaper pattern. A thank you gift for watering the roses outside the werewolf’s castle. Antonis said that he’d prefer to be paid in teeth, the currency of TinyCastle™, but as he had explained to Nefeli, you have to roll with the game, that’s half the fun.

Splendidly creepy story of the protagonist (and eventually others) becoming gradually cut off from the rest of humanity, in parallel timetracks, with good sense of place.

3) “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie. (Title story of a collection which you can get here.) Second paragraph of third section:

“A dangerous time,” whispered one mother to the next. “Especially
for the old.” And the whisper scurried through the village.
And close behind it, a day or so later, another whisper, that Darter
Spine’s molt was not going well, and that many had over the years
wondered about Darter Spine’s soul, soul mark or no soul mark.
That elder had always been peculiar, so the mothers and mothers’
mothers had said. “What if ?” the mothers whispered. A good person,
who made beautiful gardens and was kind to all in the village,
but peculiar. “What if ? What if Darter Spine’s soul has died. What
if this elder dies and a soul does not emerge? This elder will be lost!”

This was the first of the novelettes that I read, and I was sure I was going to vote for it, so am slightly surprised to find myself putting it only third. Very well drawn story of a rather merciless alien society, whose first contact with humans brings change, but perhaps not enough.

2) “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker. Second paragraph of third section:

“Hot stuff!” Her truck drifted in my car’s direction as she eyeballed it, then overcorrected. “No wonder you had trouble.”

Tremendous tale which starts off looking like it’s just a matter of a dysfunctional relationship between two sisters finding some common landing point after decades of estrangement, and then turns into something completely different. Loses a quarter of a point for last four paras, which are an unnecessary epilogue.

1) “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer. Second paragraph of third section:

I looked at the lease again and noticed something else: it was the simplest lease I’d signed since that sublet agreement in college that we’d made because everyone’s parents said we needed to “get things in writing.” Leases are usually full of rules and caveats—how to give notice at the end of term, how much you’ll owe if you damage something, whether you’re allowed to have a pet. This lease just said it ran from September through June, how much we were paying per month, and that we’d be paying utilities. The lead-based paint disclosure and the move-in checklist were paperclipped to the back.

Tremendous story of selkies, feminism, toxic relationships and the academic research treadmill. Charming and righteously enraging, with strong sense of the Massachusetts coast. Gets my vote.

Beyond The Sun, by Matthew Jones

Posted on 29 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I ran a finger down the side of his face and he shuddered and wrinkled his nose as if trying to discourage an insect. And then he turned on to his back and began to snore loudly.

When I first read this in 2009, I wrote:

I only realised after reading this that I had already heard the excellent audio adaptation which includes Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills. The original book is very good too, and I think would be reasonably penetrable for someone who hadn’t previously followed the Bernice Summerfield stories. Nicely observed emotional politics between and among Benny and her students, and the various aliens with whom Benny’s ex gets them involved. To a certain extent I felt it was the story that Colony In Space should have been. A good one (only the second Benny novel I have read, the first being the equally enjoyable Walking to Babylon).

I reread it in 2015, but in the midst of Clarke and other obligations didn’t write it up that time. My original plan was only to revisit the Bernice Summerfield novels that I have never written up at all, but then I thought, I actually enjoyed this and I wonder if a return visit will work? And it did; as well as the nicely judged emotional and physical perils of Benny and her students, there’s a particularly wacky alien reproduction process which often results in hot-looking humanoids, and a deceptive Ancient Weapon. One of the good ones. You can (probably) get it here.

I had written of the audio in 2007:

Beyond the Sun is another archaeological dig-goes-wrong story but introduces the character of Jason, Benny’s ex-husband, and lots of emotional angst as well as the actual plot. I was completely absorbed in it, and yet failed to spot the voices of Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills until I read the sleeve notes afterwards.

I spotted Anneke Wills this time, but failed to spot Sophie Aldred, who is actually a very versatile actor. But the star is Lisa Bowerman, really getting into her stride here as Bernice, with sarcasm and emotion, helping us through what’s actually a rather convoluted plot. The only one of the first season audios not adapted by Jac Rayner but by Matt Jones, the original author. You can get it here.

Hugo Best Related Work 2025

Posted on 28 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

6) The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion, by Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford

What? I hear you exclaim. Given my own record on speaking out against the abuses of the Hugo process carried out by the organisers of Chengdu Worldcon, how can I possibly be ranking the Barkley and Sandford Report, which blew the bloody doors off the whole affair in February 2024, last on my Hugo ballot this year?

There are several reasons, which I will go into at greater length in due course. Most important, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures. But also, this Report misses a couple of vitally important issues revealed in its own detail and compensates with rhetoric. So I’m not voting for it, but it may well win the award anyway.

5) The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel, by Jenny Nicholson.

This is a four hour long video report on a bad investment decision by Disney, to create a Star Wars hotel in Walt Disney World in Florida. It looks nice, but I honestly think that the story is not worth four hours of vidding, let alone watching.

4) r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge

I think it’s brilliant that Reddit users got together to challenge each other to read more broadly, and the enthusiasm for this project is great. I just prefer my Best Related Works to be written commentary.

3) Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics, by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones

Now this is more like it, cold hard numbers demonstrating why the published statistics from the 2023 Hugos simply cannot be trusted. I was relieved but not surprised to see that the statistics from the years that I myself was involved generally do pass the mathematical smell test. Lots of beautiful numerical details here, which I’ve been chewing on occasionally ever since it was published.

As noted above, though, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures, so it’s not in my top two in this category.

2) Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll

Second paragraph of third chapter (actually Chapter 2, “Whitey on the Moon”, counting the introduction as the first chapter):

[Richard B.] Spencer expounded upon this idea at length in an early podcast that explicated Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) with alt-right essayist Roman Bernard. Interstellar caused a big stir among alt-right intellectuals because it expressed the widespread reactionary sentiment that the United States had undergone a serious social and technological decline. The country’s malaise, they suggested, could only be reversed by intrepid white explorers taking up where the Apollo missions left off. In the film, the United States has shifted all resources away from technological innovation and into food production after an environmental catastrophe reduces the planet to a dustbowl. Even as the government denies the possibility of spaceflight—they claim the moon landing was an expensive hoax—a secret NASA program strives to save humanity by sending settlers to colonize another planet.

A short, fascinating analysis of the extent to which the alt-right has drawn inspiration from science fiction, often from authors and works who would have been horrified that they were being used for these purposes. Alas, a very timely book given what has been happening in the USA of late. You can get it here.

1) Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum.

As its title suggests, 2312 is a novel driven less by story or characters, and more by the desire to capture a certain (fictional, futuristic) moment of human history. Robinson accomplishes this by trotting out all the best-known (and often-derided) tools of science-fictional worldbuilding, but also by referencing much of the work that has come before him. So 2312 often seems as much a commentary on visions of the future as one of its own.

Tremendous assembly of a body of work by the excellent Abigail Nussbaum, whose thoughtful dissection of form and substance is always a delight, and she is usually right about the books as well (ie often agrees with me). Gets my vote with enthusiasm. You can get it here.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 28 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans

Last books finished
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner (did not finish)
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West
Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi

Next books
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo

City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on 27 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Langrice had shrugged. “Magister.” Speaking Pel easily because running the Anchorage meant you needed to be good with languages. “No Ilmari will work for me. It’s bad luck. Only the desperate will even come buy a drink from me. Or those who need to leave Ilmar the least convenient way.” She’d shaken her head ruefully, as though she’d give up the Anchorage and its trade in a moment if only there was someone else. “They won’t even take my money from my hands. I have to send my staff to market, or else pay some middleman. So why, exactly, would I not work with you Palleseen?”

Won the BSFA Award for Best Novel two years ago, against The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift and The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard, both of which we shortlisted for the Clarke Award that year, and Stars and Bones by Gareth L. Powell and The This by Adam Roberts, which we didn’t. City of Last Chances was also submitted for the Clarke, but is pretty clearly fantasy rather than sf, so I put it on one side for later. (To remind you: we gave the Clarke to Venomous Lumpsucker, the Nebula went to Babel and the Hugo, officially at least, to Nettle & Bone.)

I don’t think I voted in this category, and if I had a vote now I’d vote for The Coral Bones and The Red Scholar’s Wake ahead of City of Last Chances, but this is nonetheless a very good book, set in a fantasy city which has recently been occupied by invaders, where the various ancient civic institutions, including the magical ones, continue to function despite the change of rules, and further potential social ferment is brewing. There is a particularly effective twist in the middle, and a slightly discarded deity who attaches himself to one of the main protagonists. It is, er, a bit long at 496 pages. You can get it here.

I’ve run out of Tiptree and Clarke winners to read, so there are only two left in this sequence which I started with Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop back in 2012; a twelve and a half year reading project comes to an end. I think I’ll replace it with a project of reading a book by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who was not a white man; there are 29 of them by my count. It’s good to have a target.

Lodestar Award 2025

Posted on 26 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Moonstorm, by Yoon Ha Lee. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Most of her classmates zeroed their rifles only when Instructor Kim reminded them. Hwa Young took the training more seriously because of her ambitions. The rest of them could coast on their family connections. She didn’t have that option.

Withdrawn by the author after it became known that this year’s Worldcon had been using ChatGPT to vet programme participants, a revelation that had certain other consequences too. It’s a shame because I rather enjoyed it, a narrative of a young soldier with decidedly mixed loyalties in an interplanetary conflict. You can get it here.

5) The Feast Makers by H.A. Clarke. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dead ahead the Delacroix House exploded upwards and outwards in intricate gingerbread frills. Old snow clung to it, and icicles long as my femurs. Colored lights bled through the windows. Irises clawed through grey slush on the lawn below. It was ostensibly closed for business today, but the look of it said otherwise—people teemed on the long porch in long fur coats and cowboy boots, smoking and bickering and embracing one another. It felt like a music festival or an artist’s funeral. Even from this distance I could hear acrid laughter, drunken singing, weeping, and blunt edged threats. Jing pulled into the lot, cut the music, and eased into one of the last available spots in a sea of variously glossy dark or rust-fucked cars.

A sequel to a book I have not read, and I could not understand what was going on. You can get it here.

4) Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When I land, the impact shatters me to pieces. I am a wreckage of garbled limbs and protruding bones. My heart and lungs struggle behind fractured, exposed ribs.

I am one of the three people in fandom for whom this series hasn’t really gelled, which is a shame as the author comes across as a committed and engaging personality both online and in person. You can get it here.

3) So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dinner had been served. Usually, her parents would wait for the whole family to be home before even setting the table, but not when she was here. When Aveline Renard Castell, the gods-blessed ruler of San Irie, arrived in Deadegg to visit the Vincent family, they brought out the good plates and their best manners. Which was annoying, because she was, well, the absolute worst.

Story of magically gifted teenage girl military leaders, which interestingly is a sequel to an unpublished adventure but works regardless. Lots of high politics and dragons. You can get it here.

2) Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Then, one chilly winter morning, Grandpa Louis wasn’t present anymore.

Prequel to the author’s Elatsoe, which most people loved, but I had reservations. Sheine Lende however is a different matter, nicely and tenderly done story of a girl and a ghost dog, and the forces of evil (both human and supernatural) in 1970s America. You can get it here.

1) The Maid and the Crocodile, by Jordan Ifueko. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Cold leeched from their windowless plaster walls, even in the blazing Oluwan heat. On each front door hung a single adornment: the head of a crocodile, glossily preserved in resin.

Set in the same world as Raybearer, but I felt that the world-building kinks that bothered me about the previous book had been ironed out here; a great tale of gods and (human) monsters, bad parenting and disability, and political liberation – a story for our times, perhaps. You can get it here.

This collage of covers was constructed by hand using PowerPoint and Paint, without use of AI.

The best known books set in each country: Nepal

Posted on 25 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Nepal.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster	Jon Krakauer	543,638	14,827
The Snow Leopard	Peter Matthiessen	19,544	2,844
Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal	Conor Grennan	23,134	1,102
The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest	Anatoli Boukreev	17,718	1,189
Breathless	Amy McCulloch	25,286	563
Annapurna, First Conquest of an 8000-Meter Peak: (26,493 Feet)	Maurice Herzog	10,203	1,078
Touching My Father’s Soul: A Sherpa’s Journey to the Top of Everest	Jamling Tenzing Norgay	2,703	372
Annapurna: A Woman’s Place	Arlene Blum	2,941	256

Into Thin Air is the most popular book on either LT or GR on any of these individual national lists since Night by Elie Wiesel, thirteen countries ago.

Only two of these eight books are fiction. I have not been tracking systematically, but that seems low.

Despite that fact that it has a population of over 30 million, there is only one activity in Nepal that is of interest to most writers. Three of these eight books are about Everest (including the only one by an actual Nepalese writer), two about Annapurna, and one (Breathless) about a fictional mountain peak.

I wasn’t completely sure about We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, which begins in Tibet and ends in Canada, but as far as I can tell the sections about being a Tibetan refugee in Nepal amount to more than half of the book. (Just to make it crystal clear: Tibet is an “Autonomous Region” of the People’s Republic of China, but Nepal is an independent state.)

I excluded nine books for being insufficiently Nepalese in setting, and in most cases they are very firmly set elsewhere, but close enough for readers to get confused. The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, is mostly set in India. So is Sold, by Patricia McCormick. The protagonist of Peak, by Roland Smith, climbs Everest from the Tibetan side. Tintin in Tibet, by Hergé, speaks for itself. Himalaya, by Michael Palin, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, by John Wood, and Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, by Pico Iyer, all cover numerous countries including Nepal. Colin Thubron starts in Nepal but leaves just before the half-way point of To a Mountain in Tibet.

Coming next: Venezuela, Niger, Australia and North Korea.

The WSFS Consultative Votes: the Retro Hugos and the Artist categories

Posted on 24 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Now that I’m no longer involved with the WSFS process this year, I can tell you what I think about the two consultative votes that are running on proposed changes to the WSFS Constitution. The votes are open to all WSFS members of this year’s Worldcon, and run until today week, 31 May. We ran the equivalent exercise much later in the summer last year, so in part this is an experiment to see how big a difference the timing could make.

The votes themselves are purely consultative, of course; the Business Meeting alone has the power to decide the fate of the proposals. The point of the exercise is to see how a consultative vote actually works before anyone starts hardwiring it into the Constitution.

Last year’s Business Meeting passed a total of nine constitutional amendments which must now be ratified by this year’s to take effect. Some of these are minor and/or technical. The two that were felt to be most interesting for the public were the proposed abolition of the Retro Hugos, and language to tighten up the definitions of the Professional Artist and Fan Artist categories. I do have views on all the others, and will come back to them in due course.

I do not love the Retro Hugos. I wrote in Uncanny Magazine earlier this year:

I used to really like this idea [the Retro Hugos], but I went off it after running the Retro Hugos in 2019 and 2020 when it became clear that winners and finalists did not really reflect the spirit of Worldcon as it has become, that voters were voting on the future reputations of the nominees rather than their work in the year in question, that the heirs of the winners were difficult to track down to send the awards to, and that participation was declining.

I don’t strongly feel that it’s of vital importance to ban future Worldcons from running them, but since my opinion is being solicited, I will vote to abolish them.

The other proposal causes me more reflection, not least because I have been calling for these two categories to be reformed for years, and I think that some of the current proposed wording is actually mine, emerging from the Hugo Awards Study Committee in 2022.

I have come to realise that I mistakenly accepted the logic proposed by some of the louder voices on the Hugo Awards Study Committee that we should define all genre-related activity as either Fan or Pro, and then define the awards accordingly. In fact Pro Art and Fan Art have been historically very different things, and what we should be talking about is how to change the definitions of both to reflect how the production and consumption of art has changed over the years.

The definition now proposed makes the mistake of concentrating purely on the economics of the transaction – if the art is paid for, it would be considered professional art; if not, it would be considered fan art. It’s my mistake and I have to admit it. It’s the wrong line. The Hugo for Best Professional Artist recognises, and should recognise, art created as part of the professional enterprise of science fiction and fantasy, and the Hugo for Best Fan Artist recognises, and should recognise, art that is created as fannish activity.

The current definitions are much closer to the spirit of the awards and to the expectations of voters than are the proposed new definitions. They do need to be updated to include the new means of publication of Professional and Fan Art, but the fact is that a lot of Fan Art is paid for, and the point about Professional Art isn’t that it’s paid for but that it’s created in relation to the wider industry.

So I don’t think the current proposal is the right answer, and I’m voting against it.

More on the other proposals at a later date.

The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James

Posted on 23 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third story (Convention Special):

I had planned to read the Eleventh Doctor album Dead Man’s Hand next in my sequence of DW comics, but discovered that as such, it was not in fact in the Humble Bundle that I purchased some years back. However three compilations of compilations were, and the third includes the stories Sky Jacks!, which I read last month, Dead Man’s Hand, two shorts for the 50th anniversary, and also Paul Cornell’s lovely The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who.

Dead Man’s Hand, which is the one I was looking for, is a rather fun Wild West story where the Doctor and Clara team up with Calamity Jane and the visiting Oscar Wilde to fight off alien invaders, with due attention to setting and character. Great fun.

Convention Special is a rather cliched story of aliens invading San Diego Comic Con; it has been done before.

Birthday Boy has a flimsy plot excuse for the Doctor to encounter many of his past companions. Unfortunately they are not drawn very well, which weakens the impact.

But it’s worth it for the three longer pieces. You can get it here.

Hugo Graphic Story or Comic 2025

Posted on 22 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Very clear winner for me.

6) Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed

Second frame of Chapter 51 (the third in this compilation):

I’ve totally lost track of what’s going on with the plot of this series.

You can get it here.

5) My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2

Second frame of what looks like it might be the third section:

Superlative graphic novel, but I am not at all convinced that it is sff.

You can get it here.

4) We Called Them Giants

Only frame of third page:

And then I woke up and found everyone really had [left me].
HELLO?!

Mysterious dark story of the disappearance of most of humanity, and the giants that come instead.

You can get it here.

3) The Hunger and the Dusk: Vol. 1

Second frame of third part:

The poets say, “Call them not dead who lay down their lives for their people.”

Orcs and humans have made peace; but something worse is coming.

You can get it here.

2) The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag

Not sure if there are sections, but this is the second frame of the third page.

Lovely LGBTQ+ coming-of-age story, with a monster in the basement.

You can get it here.

1) Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way

Second frame of third page:

LIGHTS ARE NOW OFF
Mariner: Spock Clock, cancel all alarms for the day.
Clock: Acknowledged. Sleep long and prosper, Lieutenant Junior Grade Mariner.

Just a total joy. Beautifully consistent with the TV series, yet warping the format of a choose-your-own-adventure story to challenge the reader.

You can get it here.

thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold

Posted on 21 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

light squeals in red and white flashes

Intense story of a gay man who serves in Vietnam and becomes a biker. Graphic and lyrical language; mercifully short. Not really sure what more to say. You can get it here.

I thought that this was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves, but it turns out to be non-genre. Next on the unread SF pile is Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 21 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner

Last books finished
These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe
On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher
Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead
The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček
Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay
The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane

Next books
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

The Peladon audio plays

Posted on 20 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

For reasons that I may or may not divulge, I have been listening to the Big Finish plays set on the planet Peladon. There are six of these: The Bride of Peladon, a main sequence Fifth Doctor story from 2008; The Prisoner of Peladon, a 2009 Companion Chronicles story starring David Troughton as King Peladon again; and a four-story box-set from 2022, set at different points in Peladon’s history and with a largely different cast for each play.

The first of these is more than two hours long, and all the rest are over an hour, for a total listening time of the guts of nine hours. I found them very rewarding, especially (shout-out in advance) The Death of Peladon by Mark Wright, the third of the four-fold sequence. Robert Valentine, as script editor for the 2022 stories, drew up a timeline for Peladon’s history, so you can experience the stories in historical order if you like (though I’m writing them up here in release order):

Valentine explained on Twitter/X that the events of the Gary Russell novel Legacy got eaten in the Time War, so the audio sequence should not be understood to be in the same continuity as the book.

In 2009, I wrote:

I loved The Bride of Peladon: OK, a substantial amount of it is a retread of The Curse of Peladon, but that is probably my favourite Third Doctor story so it’s not a bad start; and then we have the Osirans as in Pyramids of Mars, as well as Ice Warriors, Alpha Centauri, Aggedor, Arcturans and all. Erimem’s departure is as you would expect (though we have some good misdirection) and Peri promises that she will not leave the Doctor to marry an alien king. I laughed so loud at that line that passers-by were very startled. But you also have Phyllida Law as the royal grandmother, and Jenny Agutter as the baddie, and it’s generally excellent.

Sixteen years later, I agree with myself. It’s a tremendous ensemble piece, one of my favourite Big Finishes. I should have said that Caroline Morris as Erimem, the Egyptian princess who is a companion for the Fifth Doctor in a dozen Big Finish plays, and Nicola Bryant as Peri, both put in great performances and have very sparkly chemistry in their last appearance together. It’s a bit odd that the dodgy McGuffin can tell who has royal descent by sniffing their blood though. You can get it here.

Also in 2009, I wrote:

The Prisoner of Peladon, by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, is the latest in the Big Finish series of Companion Chronicles, although this time the story is told by a non-companion who appeared in only one story in 1972, King Peladon of the eponymous planet (played by David Troughton, son of Patrick, who has also of course appeared in other Who stories both Old and New and recently took on the cloak and dead bird of the Black Guardian for Big Finish). Troughton is, as ever, great, and Nicholas Briggs is, as ever, good as the monsters (Ice Warriors this time, of course). The concept is very interesting – Peladon has taken in large numbers of Ice Warrior refugees after an internal conflict, with the result that Ice Warrior politics spills catastrophically over to the host planet; the Third Doctor arrives to sort things out, of course, but – and this is the bit I really liked – the King gets a brilliant rant about how badly Three behaves to people, to which the Doctor has no answer. Scott and Wright would not have got away with it if Pertwee was still alive, but it gladdened my heart. (This was directed by Nicola Bryant who herself visited Peladon as Peri in a Fifth Doctor audio last year.)

I should make it clear that this was a format of Big Finish plays where there were only two actors, Troughton (jr) and Briggs with Troughton doing the narration and most of the voices. Listening to it again, I stand by all of the above, and it is really remarkable how prescient the refugees plotline turned out to be – this was in 2009 when the flows from Iraq and Afghanistan had slowed to a trickle, the Syria war had not yet begun, and the wave of economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa was also yet to become a thing. You can get it here.

The four-volume box set from 2022 features Jane Goddard as Alpha Centauri in three of the four episodes, but different rulers of Peladon in each. (And unseen growling Aggedors throughout.) This brief promotional video name-checks the other big stars, but also showcases Howard Carter’s tremendous moody interpretation of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” (aka “Klokkleda, Partha Mennin Klatch”) which is a unifying theme tune for all four plays.

The first of the four stories is The Ordeal of Peladon, by Jonathan Barnes and series script editor Robert Valentine. This brings back David Troughton as King Peladon in old age, dealing with a wandering prophet and a cosmic inspection by the Federation. The plot takes us on a journey across Peladon for the first time – up to now we have only seen the citadel itself and the Ice Warrior refugee camps – and gives a strong sense of a world with gross inequality and structural stress, setting the scene for the next three plays. Both the prophet and his acolyte are played by Black actors (Ashley Zhangazha and Moyo Akandé), which of course has further resonances. There is a well-judged cameo from Qnivq Graanag nf gur Sbhegrragu Qbpgbe at the end.

The Poison of Peladon, by the normally reliable Lizzie Hopley, was probably the one of the four that worked least well for me. River Song is posing as a high priestess at the court of Queen Thalira (played here by Deborah Findley); Ribble the Arcturan (Justin Salinger) is posing as a friend but actually fomenting revolution; Chancellor Gobran (Aaron Neil) is spreading literal poison; there is a villainous Earth priest played by Ariyon Bakare (recently the evil Barber in The Story and the Engine). A lot of moving plot parts that didn’t gel as much as I’d have liked. (Also, for me there is only one Ribble.)

On the other hand, the Death of Peladon by Mark Wright is a taut and well-structured political drama, with an all-female guest cast. A hundred years on from The Poison of Peladon and fifty years on from The Bride of Peladon, Queen Minaris (Sara Powell) and her disaffected daughter Isabelda (Remmie Milner) face both a dissatisfied population led by insurgent Helais (Liz White) and environmental disaster from the (now exhausted) trisilicate mines. The Sixth Doctor and Mel tumble into this but it’s mainly up to the Pels to sort themselves out.

Finally, The Truth of Peladon is more or less a two-hander between Paul McGann and Meera Syal, the latter playing expert seamstress Arla Decanto, who the Doctor persuades to become a rebel by showing her the dark side of Peladon’s society, rather like the Three Ghosts and Scrooge. Jason Watkins gets a look in as evil Chancellor Barok, and Nicholas Briggs turns up again too. Syal is always great, but I did not quite understand why the Royal Seamstress in particular needed to have her eyes opened.

I thought this was a very decent box set. As I said, the third episode was exceptional, and even the second is far from dreadful. You can get it here.

Hugo Novels 2025

Posted on 19 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Now that I am just another punter, I can reveal my votes in this (and other) categories. I found this a much easier ranking than in some years.

6) Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Some past interaction had resulted in the inspector’s cheek and the side of his neck being torn open, revealing plastic bones and the ducts of his hydraulics. For a moment Charles’ proprietary centers prompted him to deny access to Master on the basis that the inspector was improperly dressed, and to ask him to return when his face had been repaired. Police authority overrode him, though. Now that the inspector had arrived, Charles could not impede the investigation. Which was only fair, given that he was the murderer.

I’m sorry, I just don’t like the travails of anthropomorphic robots and their makers as a storyline, and that’s what this book is about. Shortlisted for the Clarke Award. Locus Top Ten (SF).

You can get it here.

I like all the rest though.

5) Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘What did I do?’ I demand, and by the second time it’s more pleading and begging. There aren’t many good reasons to be hauled off to see the big man. And I can’t see why they’d need to make an example of someone right now, given all the varied examples that our delivery method provided us with, but that’s the only thing I can think of. They’re going to dangle me from the scaffolding just to make sure everyone else is sufficiently educated as to the way things are run around here. A final irony, the career academic ending his life as a lesson.

Well imagined, plot-twisty take on exploration of an alien planet, where the scientists themselves are under the control of a brutal autocratic regime and the planet’s environment is horrifyingly hostile. Shortlisted for the BSFA Award but withdrawn. Locus Top Ten (SF).

You can get it here.

4) Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. Second paragraph of third chapter:

And they never once thanked her for it.

Fantasy novel told from the point of view of the anthropophagous monster, which falls in love with a human girl whose family are horrendously abusive. Lots here about disability. Shortlisted for the Nebula Award. Locus Top Ten (First Novel).

You can get it here.

3) A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:

At first her sleep-fogged brain thought that it might have been a sound. Had there been rain? Had she woken because the drumming on the roof had stopped? No, there wasn’t any rain last night, was there? It was clear as a bell and chilly from it.

Another fantasy story with a protagonist whose best friend betrays her early in the book and whose abusive mother has evil plans which need to be thwarted. Shortlisted for the Nebula Award. Locus Top Ten (Fantasy).

You can get it here.

2) The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. Second paragraph of third chapter:

This meant the Empire always had better soldiers than most other fighting forces, certainly. But the beating heart of the Empire were the Sublimes: the cerebrally suffused and augmented set who planned, managed, and coordinated everything the many Iyalets of the Empire did.

Murder investigation in a richly imagined fantasy empire which is beset by adversaries without and within. Locus Top Ten (Fantasy).

You can get it here.

1) The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Second paragraph of first part of third chapter:

Debility, Stanley had said. Well, they all knew what that meant. Scurvy. Men ruptured by melancholy, bleeding from their hairlines. Teeth loose in the head as a blown rose’s petals. Weeping for home— more so than usual. Aching at the joints. The smell of an orange, it’s said, could drive a debilitated man to derangement. The word “Mother” is like a lance to the ribs. Old wounds reopen.

The narrator is assigned to help a member of the Franklin expedition, rescued from 1847, integrate into contemporary British society (where the government has secretly discovered limited time travel). But the project turns out to be much more than she could have anticipated, in several ways. Ticked a lot of my boxes and gets my vote. Shortlisted for the Clarke Award. Locus Top Ten (First Novel).

You can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Cameroon

Posted on 18 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Cameroon.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
How Beautiful We Were	Imbolo Mbue	18,281	726
The Informationist	Taylor Stevens	11,303	950
A Zoo in My Luggage	Gerald Durrell	5,281	959
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut	Nigel Barley	3,375	623
The Bafut Beagles	Gerald Durrell	2,022	709
Les impatientes	Djaïli Amadou Amal	8,714	105
Houseboy	Ferdinand Oyono	2,295	372
The Overloaded Ark	Gerald Durrell	1,418	472

This was one of the easiest runs I have had for a while. Gerald Durrell does well, and I remember reading those books when I was 13 and loving them; and I also remember really enjoying The Innocent Anthropologist when I was a bit older. But I’m glad that the top spot goes to a Cameroonian woman writer, and I’m interested that a novel by another Cameroonian woman writer, that hasn’t even been translated into English, also makes the top eight. I must add also that The Informationist sounds like great fun.

I’m used to a certain fluctuation between the popularity of books on both systems, but the relative LibraryThing invisibility of Les impatientes by Djaïli Amadou Amal is remarkable. It’s the third most widely owned of these books on Goodreads, and not even in the top fifteen on LT.

I disqualified two books, neither of which was a difficult decision. Behold the Dreamers, also by Imbolo Mbue, is about Cameroonian immigrants in New York, and seems to be set entirely in the USA. The Marco Effect, by Jussi Adler-Olsen, is a Danish crime novel with a subplot set in Cameroon, but it’s much less than half of the book as far as I can tell.

Other countries where I only disqualified two books: China, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa.
Countries where I only disqualified one book: India, the USA, Nigeria, Russia, Iran, the UK, Spain, Iraq.
Countries where I have not disqualified any books: Japan, Egypt, DRC, Vietnam, Colombia.

Coming next: Nepal, Venezuela, Niger and then Australia.

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