Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival
Joe Simpson
62,315
2,763
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Mario Vargas Llosa
22,064
2,788
The Time of the Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
25,982
1,910
Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time
Mark Adams
20,164
1,172
Conversation in the Cathedral
Mario Vargas Llosa
10,654
1,341
These are pretty solid numbers, after a few countries which scored less well.
Slightly controversially, perhaps, I’m allowing the top spot to Bel Canto. Even though it is not explicitly set in Peru, everyone agrees that it’s based on the 1996-97 hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Lima, so I think it qualifies. I was a bit surprised to find that the book in second spot, The Celestine Prophecy, is also set in Peru – I don’t feel the slightest inclination to read it – but apparently that’s the case. The others are much less surprising, with the recently departed Mario Vargas Llosa filling a lot of the spots as you go down the table.
I disqualified the following:
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder – only two of its five parts is set in Peru
The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in the Dominican Republic
The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in various countries
Inés of My Soul, by Isabel Allende – only one part set in Peru
The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in Brazil
People seem to have a tendency to slap the ‘Peru’ tag onto books by Mario Vargas Llosa, whether or not his country is represented in the actual content.
In the brief downtime between announcing the Hugo final ballot, and getting voting under way (which will be Real Soon Now), I reflected that the two disqualifications and two withdrawals from the ballot this year seemed rather low by recent standards. So I looked into the records, and found indeed that of the seven years that I have been involved with running the Hugos, only one had fewer such cases – two were disqualified, and one declined, in 2021, otherwise a really crazy year for Worldcon.
(For these purposes I’m counting a disqualification as any exclusion of an otherwise valid nominee by the administrators under their interpretation of the rules. This includes the various permutations under the Best Dramatic Presentation categories, and also the bad decisions made and published by the Chengdu Worldcon team in 2023.)
The proliferation of withdrawals and disqualifications is a recent phenomenon. I have access to the nomination statistics for 1980 and 1996, and for every year since 1998. From 1998 to 2002, and again in 2007, there were no disqualifications or withdrawals from the Hugo ballot at all, and in the four intervening years there was only one each time. (Ted Chiang, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman declined fiction nominations in 2003, 2005 and 2006, and there was a disqualification in the Best Semiprozine category in 2004.)
One potential finalist was disqualified in 2008, and two potential finalists declined nomination in 2009, 2010 and 2011; and since then there have been at least three withdrawals and/or disqualifications each year. The high water mark was, infamously, 2023, where (according to the official statistics) twelve potential finalists were disqualified and another three declined nomination, though evidence suggests that votes for many more Chinese nominees were removed from the system at an earlier stage, effectively disqualifying over twenty of them without making it public.
The second highest total for withdrawals and disqualifications was the previous year, 2022, when I was Deputy Administrator. We disqualified seven potential finalists that year, four of them in the Best Editor, Long From category (where another potential finalist withdrew); a unique issue at that time was the blockage to global supply chains caused by the pandemic, as a result of which a lot of 2021 publication schedules slipped, though in my view it also shows the difficulties of voter awareness of the editing process.
The only other ballots that saw as many as seven disqualifications were the 1939 and 1941 Retro Hugos. 1939 (awarded in 2014) saw a lot of eligibility confusion, and in 1941 (awarded in 2016) three of the disqualified potential finalists had had sufficient support to qualify in both Dramatic Presentation categories, and of course they could only be on the ballot in one, and therefore were disqualified from the other.
Among the Hugos, the Best Dramatic Presentation categories have generally had the most disqualifications, largely thanks to the rule (or custom) preventing entire TV series and individual episodes of that series appearing on the same ballot. Thirteen BDP Short Form and five BDP Long Form nominees have been disqualified by administrators in the years that those categories have existed, though in many of these cases at least part of the material disqualified in one category appeared on the ballot in another.
The other category with a lot of disqualifications is the Astounding Award, previously the Campbell Award, where there have been seven disqualifications over the years where I have data (including one each in 1980 and in 1996). Sometimes voters (and indeed writers themselves) are uncertain as to when a writer’s career actually started.
The only disqualification for Best Fan Writer on record was the incomprehensible decision to exclude Paul Weimer in 2023; it’s rather difficult to see how anyone who has published anything fannish in the year of eligibility could be ruled out in that category. Apart from Retro Hugos, nobody has ever been disqualified in Best Fanzine or Best Novella, at least in the years for which I have data; nor for the Lodestar, which is also a recent innovation and whose criteria again are broad. Best Game or Interactive Work is the only category where there has not yet been either a withdrawal or a disqualification, but since it has only been going for two years, there is plenty of time…
The largest number of voluntary withdrawals of finalists who would otherwise have qualified numerically is six, in 2016. There were five withdrawals in 2015 and also last year, 2024. As noted above, the last year in which there were no withdrawals from the regular Hugos was 2013.
Seven finalists for the Best Novel and the Best Editor, Long Form categories have withdrawn from the ballot. Pro Artists have declined nomination five times, and Fan Writers and authors of both Novellas and Novelettes four times each, in the years where I have full data.
We have yet to see a voluntary withdrawal in the Best Graphic Story or Comic, BDP Short Form, Game / Interactive Work, and Editor Short Form Hugo categories, or for the Astounding Award or its predecessor, as far as I know. The first and so far only withdrawal from the Lodestar was this year, the first and only withdrawal from Best Related Work that I know of was last year, and the the first only withdrawal from BDP Long was in 2023.
There are two very striking shifts in the numbers. Up to 2011, there were an average of 0.375 disqualifications each year. Since 2012, counting the regular Hugos only, there has been an average of 4.00 disqualifications each year. It’s an abrupt change.
The shift in the number of withdrawals is a little later. Up to 2014, the average was 0.73 per year. Since 2015, the average number of withdrawals from that year’s Hugos is 3.4.
The five rounds of Retro Hugos run between 2014 and 2020 saw no withdrawals at all, hardly surprising in that few of the nominees were in a position to accept or decline nomination, but there were an average of 4.4 disqualifications each year.
(Not that it is a significant difference, but the average number of withdrawals in 2017, 2019-22 and 2024-25, the years where I was personally involved with administering the nominations, is lower – 2.43 rather than 3.4 – and so is the average number of disqualifications – 3.57 rather than 4.00 – but I think this simply shows that the two big years for withdrawals were just before my time, and also I fortunately was not involved with the massive number of disqualifications in 2023.)
I think we are seeing a couple of different effects here over time. Taking withdrawals first: this had never been a huge factor in the Hugos until the Puppy years, when (as noted earlier) a record number of potential finalists declined nomination in both 2015 and 2016. Perhaps one of the lasting effects has been that nominees now feel more comfortable about saying no in general. Also, the aftermath of Chengdu drove the number of withdrawals up again – two of the five in 2024 were directly related to the previous year’s events.
(Kathryn Duval has pointed out to me in conversation that it’s also possible that Hugo administrators in the olden days did not need to be as diligent in chasing nominees for consent as we have been since she and I first administered the awards in 2017. That perhaps is another effect of the traumas of 2015/2016.)
The massive increase in disqualifications since roughly 2012 has several causes. The biggest chunk of disqualifications has been in the Best Dramatic Presentation categories, starting from the year that the entire first series of Game of Thrones was on the ballot, and usually because of a conflict of nominations between the two categories; I have written before about this. And I noted earlier that the special circumstances of the pandemic hit Best Editor, Long Form in 2022.
The constitutional criteria, which are complex in some cases, must also be a factor. The Astounding/Campbell rules are somewhat arcane. The rules in the Artist categories are frankly obsolete. And have you ever had to explain the concept of a Semiprozine? (In Korean?) It all causes a lot of head-scratching for us administrators – it’s not surprising or blameworthy that voters can get it wrong. And the more categories that are added, the greater the opportunity for everyone to make mistakes.
But the other big change, one that almost exactly matches the explosion in the number of disqualifications, is the impressive and welcome surge in the number of voters. I don’t think it is as widely appreciated as it should be that the numbers participating in Hugo voting shifted abruptly upwards in 2009-2011, and now show no sign of declining to their previous level. Before 2009 there had only once been more than 1500 votes on the final ballot, and never been more than 800 voters at the nominations phase. Since 2011, only one year (2023 / Chengdu) has seen less than 1800 final ballot votes (peaking at 5950 in 2015, the first Puppy year), and the lowest number of nomination votes cast was 1249 in 2021 (peaking at 4032 in 2016, the second Puppy year).
NB that this graph includes the published number of nomination and final ballot votes for Chengdu in 2023, which cannot be considered reliable, and the final ballot votes for Glasgow 2024 after 377 fraudulent ballots were disqualified. Blank columns are where I don’t have the data.
Probably the biggest single factor here is the Hugo Voter Packet, which gives hundreds of dollars / pounds / euros worth of books to voters who buy a WSFS membership. It started in 2009 and was really integrated into Worldcon marketing from 2011, almost exactly matching the expansion in participation.
But I think that there was also an effort – perhaps it is too much to call it a campaign – by many people, perhaps in reaction to the 2007 ballot which included only one work of fiction by a woman, to broaden the appeal of the Hugos and make them more diverse. This is a Good Thing. The Puppy argument that the Hugos were locked in a vicious circle of declining participation and political correctness was precisely backwards: by the early 2010s, Hugo participation was rising, not falling, and this was adding some very welcome and needed diversity to the ecosystem.
The effect has been to bring in a cohort of voters who are less invested in some of the older (indeed, oldest) categories, as fan culture itself is de-emphasising the traditional channels. Twenty years ago, in 2005, 546 nominating votes were cast in the Hugos, and a nominee needed 20 votes to get onto the Best Professional Artist ballot, 36 for Best Semiprozine, 24 for Best Fanzine, 30 for Best Fan Writer and 26 for Best Fan Artist. This year there were 1338 nominating votes, almost 2.5 times more than in 2005, but the effective thresholds to qualify for those five categories are the same or lower: 14 for Best Professional Artist, 38 for Best Semiprozine, 25 for Best Fanzine, 27 for Best Fan Writer and 16 for Best Fan Artist. (Though of course there are now six finalists per category rather than five.)
Analyzing the historical levels of participation in each category in depth is for another blogpost (and maybe someone else will do it before I do, which is fine by me). But I think it’s clear that in a number of categories, the Hugo electorate of today is broadly less invested than the Hugo electorate of twenty years ago, and it is therefore more likely that well-known but unwilling or ineligible nominees will be chosen.
As an administrator, I always feel a bit sad and uncomfortable when removing any nominee from the ballot. Most people’s votes are cast in good faith, and they should in general be respected. At the same time, the nominees themselves have the absolute right to choose whether or not to participate in the Hugos; and the rules are there for many reasons (mostly good reasons) and need to be implemented to maintain the integrity of the process. So when it has to be done, it has to be done.
No internal divisions, so this is the third paragraph.
She meant that people who live in space live differently than people who live on planets. I’m not talking about the micro-gravity and the sense of confinement and the recycling of air and water and protein, the exercise regimen, and all the implants and augments, like bone-sintering and radiation-nanos and white-blood infusions, and all the other stuff that dirtsiders think about. That’s just mechanics. You live with it.
Entertaining short story about teenage Starling who lives with her grandparents on a space station in the asteroid belt. They are vulnerable to capitalism, betrayal and death, and Starling’s Ganny does her best to outwit them. Very cheerful in the end. You may or may not be able to get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, also by David Gerrold.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Apple Tree”):
It was a fine clear morning in early spring, and he was shaving by the open window. As he leant out to sniff the air, the lather on his face, the razor in his hand, his eye fell upon the apple tree. It was a trick of light, perhaps, something to do with the sun coming up over the woods, that happened to catch the tree at this particular moment; but the likeness was unmistakable.
Six very spooky stories by the author of Rebecca, the title story being well known as the basis of another Hitchcock film. Apart from “The Birds”, which gave me sleepless nights when I first read it at the age of 12, the other really effective piece is “The Apple Tree”, where a woman gets posthumous revenge for a bad marriage though manipulation of vegetation. But they are all splendidly creepy. Two out of six are definitely not sff, but at least three of the other four are, so I’m booking this as genre rather than non-genre in my tally. You can get it here.
Unfortunately Virago don’t give a credit for the striking cover. (They have published a more recent hardback edition with a different cover, by Neisha Crosland.)
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske.
Current Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell
Last books finished Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky It Came from Outer Space, by Tony Lee et al. The Tusks of Extinction, by Ray Naylor The Hunger and the Dusk vol. 1, by G. Willow Wilson, Chris Wildgoose and Msassyk The Feast Makers, by H.A. Clarke (did not finish) A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke
Next books Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
A short story from the 2020 Hugo packet, about a Syrian scientist trying to enter the USA with his ideas about the empirically demonstrable connection between the soul and the body. Short but clear. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves (virtual and physical) acquired in 2020. Next on that list is Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan.
I flagged this book to myself as the second most popular book published in 1874 on LibraryThing and Goodreads, after Far From the Madding Crowd. It’s a ridiculously long fantasy (750 pages!) about five chaps who, escaping from Richmond in the closing days of the U.S. Civil War, are swept by balloon to a remote Pacific island, where fortunately they find all the animal, vegetable and mineral resources necessary for them to survive and thrive.
Towards the end they encounter a character from a previous Verne novel, and this firmly tips the book into science fiction (it has been teetering on the edge up until then, with a super-intelligent orang-utan). Lots of incident, lots of Great Engineer solutions, lots of unconscious racism (and some totally conscious racism from Caleb Carr in the introduction to my edition). I think if I had not had been reading two other rather long books at the same time, it might have become a bit tedious, but it’s all done at cracking pace.
My edition also features the glorious line-drawing illustrations by Jules-Descartes Ferat, engraved by Charles Barbant, from the original French version.
Homegoing has a commanding lead here, especially on Goodreads, and it’s good to see Ghanaian authors penetrating the two systems.
I disqualified eight books, in some cases because they are mainly about the Ghanaian migrant experience and in others because they are actually about the process of migrating from Ghana. They were Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi; Maame, by Jessica George; Open Water, by Caleb Azumah Nelson; The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński; Pigeon English, by Stephen Kelman; Illegal, by Eoin Colfer; The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, by Arthur Japin; and North to Paradise by Ousman Umar.
Next up: Peru, Saudi Arabia, Madagascar and Côte d’Ivoire.
I can strongly recommend the exhibition of art by Victor Hugo at the Royal Academy in London at the moment. Not much of this was published or exhibited during his lifetime; he clearly felt a compulsion to draw, but much less of a compulsion to show his drawings off to people – with a couple of exceptions, including his homage to John Brown, L’Homme pendu, which I felt was too gruesome to post here.
There are about 70 of Hugo’s drawings in the exhibition, and a lot of information about his life and travels. There are also a few photographs, particularly of Hauteville House, his home on Guernsey for many years. He put a lot of effort into furnishing the house and muttered that he had missed a career as an interior decorator.
Anyway, these were the pieces that particularly jumped out at me. The exhibition is on until 29 June, so you have plenty of time to get to it.
Happy New Year 1856 from Victor Hugo!Furteneck [actually Fürstenberg] castle in Mist, 1840Inkblot retouched with a pen (1850s) – look at the faces he has found in the ink patternsFantasy landscape with a castle on a cliff, 1857Mirror frame with birdsLandscape reflected in waterScary octopus from late novel The Toilers of the SeaFrontispiece for Les MiserablesThe lighthouse at Casquets, GuernseyThe town of Vianden (in Luxembourg) seen through a spider’s web
He lay in hospital for a long spell, painful but self-satisfied. The nature of his injuries was not yet clear to him. Presently he would get all right again. “V.C.,” he whispered. “At twenty. Pretty decent.”
This is the last of the set of novels by H.G. Wells that I bought in 2019 and have been working my way through ever since. I’m glad to say that after a couple of real duds, I have ended on a high note. It’s a very long book, and you know where it is going as soon as you see the title, but I found it very worthwhile and interesting.
Joan and Peter are cousins, and are orphaned quite early in the book and brought up together. Their guardianship passes from a pair of eccentric left-wing aunts (“I suspect them strongly of vegetarianism”), to a monstrous conservative cousin (“In spite of its loyalty, Ulster is damp”), to another cousin, war hero Oswald who has been busy civilising Africa and wants to do the same for England, or at least for the two children who he has ended up with.
Wells’ Big Theme for the book is education, and Oswald’s efforts to secure it for both Peter and Joan (“if women were to be let out of purdah they might as well be let right out”), but if you can ignore the lengthy philosophising about that, and the certainty that the White Man hath his Burden, there’s rather a good human story between Oswald and Peter’s parents at the start, and then between Oswald, Joan and Peter.
The two kids both have plenty of other potential lovers apart from each other, but I am a bit of a romantic at heart and I do like the slow path to the (spoiler) happy ending. Adam Roberts didn’t; he found the pace far too slow. I was reading a couple of other very long books at the time, so it suited me. I will agree with Adam that Wells makes Joan sound unnecessarily childish, even as an adult.
There are some great lines. Here’s one of Joan’s unsuccessful boyfriends:
…when Huntley went on to suggest that the path to freedom lay in the heroic abandonment of the “fetish of chastity,” Joan was sensible of a certain lagging of spirit.
Here are the lefty aunts:
Aunt Phoebe sat near Aunt Phyllis and discoursed on whether she ought to go to prison for the Vote. “I try to assault policemen,” she said. “But they elude me.”
Here’s one of the failed educational theorists who Oswald interviews:
Hinks of Carchester, the distinguished Greek scholar, slipped into his hand at parting a pamphlet asserting that only Greek studies would make a man write English beautifully and precisely. Unhappily for his argument Hinks had written his pamphlet neither beautifully nor precisely.
And here’s just a nice bit of scene-setting:
Slowly, smoothly, unfalteringly, the brush of the twilight had been sweeping its neutral tint across the spectacle, painting out the glittering symbols one by one. A chill from outer space fell down through the thin Russian air, a dark transparent curtain. Oswald shivered in his wadded coat. Abruptly down below, hard by a ghostly white church, one lamp and then another pricked the deepening blue. A little dark tram-car that crept towards them out of the city ways to fetch them back into the city, suddenly became a glow-worm…
As with Mr Polly, there is a crucial plot twist depending on a fake death by drowning.
Also, uniquely in Wells’ work as far as I have read it, there is a significant section set in Ireland. Wells’ characters generally float back and forth on Home Rule (more forth than back); here, Peter and Oswald go on a fact-finding mission to pre-war Dublin and are a bit disappointed with the facts that they find, while the monstrous conservative cousin Lady Charlotte throws her energy into Unionism:
“We’re raising money to get those brave Ulstermen guns. Something has to be done if these Liberals are not to do as they like with us. They and their friends the priests.”
There’s a certain amount of “these tedious people and their comic accents quarreling with each other rather than working for a better world society”, but there’s also some good observation based on personal experience, rather than just reading the newspapers.
This was a positive note to end two of my projects on: working through the H.G. Wells back catalogue, as I mentioned, and also finishing all the unread books that I acquired in 2019. So it’s another to add to this list:
그녀는 아주 젊지 않다. 딱히 미인이라고 부르기도 어렵다. 다만 목선이 고운 편이고 눈매가 서글서글하다. 자연스러워 보이는 옅은 화장을 했으며, 흰 반소매 블라우스는 구김 없이 청결하다. 누구에게든 호감을 줄법한 그 단정한 인상 덕분에, 희미하게 얼굴에 배어 있는 그늘은 그다지눈에 띄지 않는다.
She isn’t really young anymore, and it would be difficult to call her a beauty, exactly. The curve of her neck is quite attractive and the look in her eyes is open and friendly. She wears light, natural-looking makeup, and her white blouse is neat, uncreased. Thanks to that smart impression, which one might reasonably expect to attract curiosity, attention is deflected away from the faint shadows clouding her face.
translated by Deborah Smith
This came top of my survey of books set in South Korea, and contribute to the author winning the Nobel Prize for Literature last year; and it also came strongly recommended by a number of friends in whose judgement I generally have faith. It’s the story of Cheong Yeong-hye, who decides to stop eating meat, to the dismay of her extended family who eventually commit her to a mental hospital. It’s told in three parts, by her husband, her sister’s husband and then her sister, so that we get the events of each part retold and reflected on by the next narrator.
It’s not really about the merits or demerits of meat. It’s much more about shame, choice, illness and desire, and it’s very closely and intensely written. It really does stick in the mind. You can get it here.
Han Yang is the only Nobel Prize winner for Literature who is younger than me (born in 1970). She celebrated her 54th birthday between the announcement last November and receiving the award in December. She was the youngest writer to win it since 1987 when it went to Joseph Brodsky, then 47; Orhan Pamuk was a few months past his 54th birthday when he won in 2006.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer and my top unread book by a woman. Next on those piles respectively are The Birds, by Daphne du Maurier, and The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang.
Current Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold It Came from Outer Space, by Tony Lee et al. Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke
Last books finished Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold How Many Miles to Babylon, by Jennifer Johnston
Next books Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
It has long been traditional to group together certain books in the Bible under the heading ‘wisdom’: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job, and in the Apocrypha, Sirach or the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sira (also known as Ecclesiasticus) and the Wisdom of Solomon.¹ All these books contain many short sayings or aphorisms, summing up the fruits of experience or giving explicit advice on how to behave. Many seem to reflect life in a village or small community, and draw ‘morals’ from activities such as farming:
The field of the poor may yield much food, but it is swept away through injustice. (Proverbs 13:23)
Like vinegar to the teeth, and smoke to the eyes, so are the lazy to their employers. (Proverbs 10:26)
The righteous know the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel. Those who till their land will have plenty of food, but those who follow worthless pursuits have no sense. (Proverbs 12:10-11)
Many of these proverbs are paralleled in other cultures, and could be seen as part of a popular understanding of the world, like our own ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ or ‘Look before you leap’.
¹ Excellent guides to biblical wisdom literature are J.L. Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction(Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, third edition 2010), and Katharine J. Dell, Get wisdom, Get Insight: An Introduction to Israel’s Wisdom Literature (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2000).
A really fascinating, detailed book about the sacred text of Christianity and Judaism, starting at the very beginning with the compilation of the older parts of the Old Testament, and finishing with the most recent translations for today’s audience. Too much information to synthesis crispily, but it puts lots of things together that I had not really thought about, for instance:
There are lots of manuscripts for the New Testament, but the accepted version of the Hebrew Old Testament largely depends on a single eleventh-century manuscript, the Leningrad Codex.
Syriac, the first language into which the New Testament was translated, is the local version of Aramaic used in Edessa (now Şanlıurfa) – I had always been a bit confused about this. Aramaic was certainly Jesus’ native language, but he would have spoken the Galilean dialect.
The story of the woman taken in adultery is a very late addition to the Gospel of John. (Incidentally one of the few gospel passages that mentions writing.)
Leaping forward, translating the Bible can be a crucial step in codifying a language; alongside Luther’s impact on German you could add Jurij Dalmatin’s impact on Slovenian, for instance.
I think even non-Christians will find quite a lot of interesting stuff in this account of one of the world’s most important literary artefacts. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2023 which is not by Ben Aaronovitch. Next in that list is Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi.
Next in the sequence of First Doctor audios, this gives Peter Purves licence to do his famous and excellent William Hartnell impression, along with Maureen O’Brien as Vicki, in a pure historical story which takes place in Florence in 1514. Main characters are Giuliano de’ Medici, ruler of Florence; his brother Pope Leo X; and Niccolo Macchiavelli. There’s also a comic guard and a token Renaissance woman. It’s actually great fun, and my only complaint is that they all pronounce ‘Giuliano’ with a hard ‘g’ – it’s Julie-anno, folks, not Gully-anno. You can get it here.
As I have done for many years, here are the statistics for the finalists for this year’s Hugo Award categories (and the Lodestar Award) where the finalists are on Goodreads and LibraryThing. As I have said before, this shows how well a book has permeated the general market, but that is not the same as appealing to the Hugo electorate.
Best Novel
GR
LT
The Ministry of Time
Kaliane Bradley
124,781
3.60
1,737
3.71
The Tainted Cup
Robert Jackson Bennett
37,491
4.31
916
4.37
A Sorceress Comes to Call
T. Kingfisher
31,087
4.09
903
4.16
Service Model
Adrian Tchaikovsky
10,488
4.04
316
3.87
Someone You Can Build a Nest In
John Wiswell
9,557
3.99
324
3.94
Alien Clay
Adrian Tchaikovsky
8,551
4.03
280
3.88
A clear lead for The Ministry of Time in market penetration, though The Tainted Cup has the most enthusiastic readers.
Best Novella
GR
LT
What Feasts at Night
T. Kingfisher
28,342
3.81
381
3.87
The Butcher of the Forest
Premee Mohamed
5,895
3.89
216
3.77
The Brides of High Hill
Nghi Vo
4,436
4.15
200
4.10
The Tusks of Extinction
Ray Nayler
4,808
3.82
183
3.83
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
Sofia Samatar
1,811
3.83
123
3.76
Navigational Entanglements
Aliette de Bodard
542
3.90
68
3.68
Similarly, a clear lead for What Feasts at Night in market penetration, though The Brides of High Hill has the most enthusiastic readers.
Best Graphic Story or Comic
GR
LT
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2
Emil Ferris
3,126
4.24
245
3.96
The Deep Dark
Molly Knox Ostertag
4,429
4.34
131
4.36
We Called Them Giants
Gillen, Hans & Cowles
1,180
3.58
49
3.46
Monstress, vol. 9: The Possessed
Liu & Takeda
723
4.31
69
3.85
Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way
North & Fenoglio
297
4.59
46
4.42
The Hunger and the Dusk: Vol 1
Wilson & Wildgoose
700
4.17
16
3.90
Much closer between the top two here, while Warp Your Own Way has the best reader ratings of any book in this post.
Lodestar Award for Best YA Book
GR
LT
Heavenly Tyrant
Xiran Jay Zhao
7,402
3.92
430
4.03
So Let Them Burn
Kamilah Cole
6,052
3.84
245
3.94
The Maid and the Crocodile
Jordan Ifueko
2,176
4.40
84
3.93
Sheine Lende
Darcie Little Badger
993
4.26
88
4.38
Moonstorm
Yoon Ha Lee
364
3.52
63
3.50
The Feast Makers
H.A. Clarke
371
4.40
20
4.38
A solid ownership lead for Heavenly Tyrant; The Feast Makers has the fewest readers, but they are enthusiastic!
I usually add Best Related Work here too, but only two of this year’s finalists are logged on GR/LT.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Mozambique.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
A Girl Named Disaster
Nancy Farmer
5,117
1,735
A Time to Die
Wilbur Smith
6,220
807
Sleepwalking Land
Mia Couto
5,775
466
A Treacherous Paradise
Henning Mankell
3,533
562
Chronicler of the Winds
Henning Mankell
2,775
708
Confession of the Lioness
Mia Couto
3,533
266
The Tuner of Silences
Mia Couto
2,615
213
Secrets in the Fire
Henning Mankell
2,060
253
This week’s winner is a Newbery-awarded novel about a girl trying to flee from Mozambique to Zimbabwe; as far as I can tell it takes more than half of the book for her to get across the border, so it qualifies.
I had no idea that Swedish writer Henning Mankell has a close personal link with Mozambique and lived there off and on for many years. I also had not heard of the great Mozambican writer Mia (short for Emilio) Couto, which is definitely my bad.
I disqualified a lot of books which are just generally set in southern Africa, or more specifically in a different country entirely. At the top was Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller, set in Zimbabwe, followed by The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, by Clemantine Wamariya, Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul, Kennedy’s Brain by Henning Mankell again, Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller again and A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn.
As we go down the list, I am increasingly finding that GR and LT users are tagging them into books which have little or nothing to do with the country in question. I may have to adapt my methodology in response.
Next up: Ghana, Peru, Saudi Arabia and Madagascar.
The host was Sir Eliphaz Burrows, the patentee and manufacturer of those Temanite building blocks which have not only revolutionized the construction of army hutments, but put the whole problem of industrial and rural housing upon an altogether new footing; his guests were Mr. William Dad, formerly the maker of the celebrated Dad and Showhite car de luxe, and now one of the chief contractors for aeroplanes in England; and Mr. Joseph Farr, the head of the technical section of Woldingstanton School. Both the former gentlemen were governors of that foundation and now immensely rich, and Sir Eliphaz had once been a pupil of the father of Mr. Huss and had played a large part in the appointment of the latter to Woldingstanton. He was a slender old man, with an avid vulturine head poised on a long red neck, and he had an abundance of parti-coloured hair, red and white, springing from a circle round the crown of his head, from his eyebrows, his face generally, and the backs of his hands. He wore a blue soft shirt with a turn-down collar within a roomy blue serge suit, and that and something about his large loose black tie suggested scholarship and refinement. His manners were elaborately courteous. Mr. Dad was a compacter, keener type, warily alert in his bearing, an industrial fox-terrier from the Midlands, silver-haired and dressed in ordinary morning dress except for a tan vest with a bright brown ribbon border. Mr. Farr was big in a grey flannel Norfolk suit; he had a large, round, white, shiny, clean-shaven face and uneasy hands, and it was apparent that he carried pocket-books and suchlike luggage in his breast pocket.
H.G. Wells attempts to rewrite the Book of Job for a 1919 audience. For the love of God, why???
So, I went to Beijing again at the end of last month, my second time in China after visiting Beijing and Chengdu for Chengdu Worldcon in 2023. I was an invited speaker at the 9th China Science Fiction Convention, itself part of the 2025 ZGC Forum, a joint project of the various layers of government in the Beijing region and the China Association for Science and Technology. It was an industry and politics event, showcasing the various economic successes of investment in science fiction (books, films, games), though there was also a substantial presence from the leading Chinese writers, and plenty of student fan groups had stalls in the exhibition area.
My invitation arose out of a conversation I had had at Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon For Our Futures, with Gong Weimi, Deputy Director of the Beijing Science and Technology Commission, who was exploring paths of creative structured cooperation between Worldcon and the Beijing Zhongguancun Science Fiction Industry Innovation Center, which is (as far as I could tell) a joint project of the Beijing Regional Government and the China Association for Science and Technology. The fact that there is no permanent Worldcon secretariat makes this more difficult for the industry-oriented Chinese establishment.
The meeting with Icy Chen (on my left) and Gong Weimi (on my right) at Glasgow 2024 which kicked it all off.
The outcome of the conversation was invitations to speak at the conference for me (as Hugo administrator last year and this) and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (as Chair of Glasgow 2024). Other foreign guests included Francesco Verso, who has spent years celebrating Chinese SF in Italian and English; Disney storyboarder Grant Dalton Jr; and Vladimir Norov, the former foreign minister of Uzbekistan, subsequently Secretary-General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. We were very well looked after by Icy Xiaohan Chen, who I had met in Glasgow with Mr Gong, and her colleagues Caroline Yueqi Zhang and Lydia Xia Qian. (I am following the convention that if people have Western names, I use Western name-personal name-surname, but if they don’t, I use surname-personal name; the ladies I just mentioned are Chen Xiaohan, Zhang Yueqi and Qian Xia to their friends.)
Me and Esther with Icy Chen, Caroline Zhang showing off one of the fantastic beasts at the Industry Innovation Centre and me with Lydia Qian.
We were given a tour of the ZGC Science Fiction Industry Innovation Centre, where I tried out a VR helmet and found myself in outer space, then on a spaceship, then on the surface of the moon.
A middle aged white man discovers Chinese VR
Proprietary AI morphed my face into Chinese legend:
Back at the conference there were the inevitable dancing robots.
I talked to aspiring writers and student groups, and I may have committed television.
Some impressive cosplay as well.
Esther and Lydia with Three Body Problem crew
We were also hosted for various meals by a number of organisations. The Future Affairs Administration organised a fantastic Sichuan hotpot for us with the Chinese Doctor Who fans led by Yan Ru. Wang Jinkiang and Liu Cixin on behalf of the Beijing Yuanyu Science Fiction and Future Technology Research Institute hosted us for a Mongolian hotpot. And the China Science Fiction Research Centre and the China Research Institute for Science Popualarisation jointly hosted us for a Cantonese spread with Stanley Qiufan Chen. I must say that I came away with a much greater appreciation of the variety of regional cooking within China – on my first two evenings, I had two very different work-related meals both featuring Yunnan cuisine.
Yunnan fish hotpot, with a business contactWith Doctor Who fans, enjoying the Sichuan hotpot hosted by the FAA; saying thank you afterwardsOn the one hand, Lydia and Esther; on the other, writers Wang Jinkang and Francesco Verso; opposite me are Liu Cixin (writer of The Three-Body Problem) with Yan Ru (the Who fan from Wuhan) and Caroline nearest the camera; Mongolian hotpot between us.The Cantonese spread, and the speech in which I quoted Philip K. Dick’s “My God, What if…???”
I gave my own keynote speech to the conference as well of course, citing Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and Lao She.
Games being such a major part of it all, Esther was in her element (and spoke twice to my once):
The conference was held in a former industrial park in Shijingshan District, repurposed to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, so the architecture was a bit unusual.
This modern architecture is overlooked by the Gongbei Pavilion on top of the Shijinshan Mountain, a recent reconstruction on an ancient religious site.
One of the things I particularly came to appreciate is just how huge and varied China is. Beijing is in fact only the third biggest city in China. Shanghai is the second biggest, and Chongqing has the most inhabitants of any city in the world. How many of us could find Chongqing on a map? I met colleagues and fans from all over – from Hainan in the far south to Xinjiang in the northwest, and everywhere in between. Many of them had studied in North America or Europe, and come home to deploy their knowledge profitably. China knows more about us than we know about China.
To address the elephant in the room, I got a sense that for the Beijing folks, the mistakes made by Chengdu Worldcon are an embarrassment and they want to move forward (and incidentally reinforce Beijing’s centrality). I was grimly amused that two people separately recommended R.F. Kuang’s Babel to me; it is very popular in China, and when I replied that it had been banned from the 2023 Hugos, they shook their heads in disbelief.
In discussions with my professional contacts more generally, given that I was the man from Brussels, it will not surprise anyone that the topic of tariffs on electric vehicles came up a lot. I even got to drive one out in E-Town, the BAIC Stelato X9, which is capable of parking itself after you get out.
The Internet of Things is real in China. WeChat / Weixin is the go-to app for everything, and you need to have installed it and Alipay (and linked both to your payment system) before you go. The DeDe car-sharing app is a kind of super Uber – even out at the Great Wall it was possible to get a ride back to Beijing in three minutes. One taxi driver puzzled me as I got in by saying, in firmly interrogatory tones, “wǔ wǔ yāo sì?” I looked blank, so he held up five fingers twice, then one, then four – of course, the last four digits of my phone number, to confirm that I was the right client. (Taxis incidentally are very cheap, but the traffic in Beijing is awful – it took two hours to get from the conference centre on the western side of the city to the Sichuan hotpot on the east.) Shopkeepers and service staff would speak into their translation apps and show the message that they wanted to convey in English. It can be useful to save frequently used phrases as an image.
I did three tourist expeditions. First, the Dongye Temple, a Daoist shrine within walking distance of my employers’ Beijing office, founded in 1319, gutted during the revolutionary period, restored in 2002. The courtyards are full of memorial steles.
The original gateway is now on the other side of the main road.
The joy of the temple is 76 small rooms, of which maybe half a dozen are clearly favoured by regular worshippers. Each small room contains a dozen statues representing a part of the Daoist otherworld, some of them more attractive than others.
Some of the individual statues are quite striking.
It’s a little dilapidated, but clearly still has a faithful following. I noted also a tree with ribbons tied to it, not so different from what you might find in rural Ireland.
The next day, I went to the Tiantan, the Temple of Heaven, one of the landmarks of Beijing. It’s a massive religious complex to the south of the Forbidden City, which I had visited in 2023. This is where the Emperor made the annual sacrifice for the continuing good of the kingdom. This is also where, sickeningly, the Eight-Nation Alliance led by the British and French based their occupying military forces during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, building a railway station on the sacred ground. They didn’t teach you about that in school, did they?
At the sacred stone which is the Heart of Heaven, there was a queue of tourists waiting to stand on it; about half of them prayed when it was their turn, and about half posed for photos.
As with the Forbidden City, many people (almost all young women as far as I could tell) had chosen to dress up in traditional costume and pose for photographs.
Posing is definitely a thing.
And I also went out to the Great Wall, the largest man-made structure in existence. To get the 80 km up to Badaling is only €20 by DeDe, an hour from Shijinshan, and the same back again. Once you get to the base, there is a cable car ride up to the top. (Alternatively, you can hike up or down if you like, but I’m 57.)
It’s crowded, and the path along the top of the wall itself is steep, and there’s no explanation of what’s going on or what happened; but it’s a spectacular structure and a spectacular view. I don’t feel that I need to go back, but I’m very glad that I went.
Anyway, it was a fantastic trip, with good fellowship. Many thanks to Mr Gong and the Beijing Science and Technology Commission, and to my work colleagues, for looking after me for this extraordinary week and a bit. (Arrived 23 March; left, 1 April.)
A Christmas Carol was the first Doctor Who Christmas special produced and written by Steven Moffat and starring Matt Smith. It has Amy and Rory trapped on a doomed spaceship, which for handwavium reasons only the Scrooge-like Kazan Sardick (Michael Gambon) can save. The Doctor goes into Sardick’s past to make him into a nicer person through the love of the beautiful Abigail (Katherine Jenkins). Unfortunately for more handwavium reasons this means that Sardick no longer has the power to save the doomed spaceship, but luckily Abigail’s voice resonates at just the right frequency, so she saves the day (it is implied that she then dies of some fatal but not very debilitating illness). The music is good.
Don’t get me wrong – this was a lovely episode of Doctor Who and just right for Christmas evening. But as a work of SF, I think the other nominees are better.
Rewatching it, I felt the same; it’s a remake of Dickens in Doctor Who terms with light comedic relief from Rory and Amy, the story line is a little too clever and also a little too simple (often the case with Steven Moffat), and it’s perfect fare for a day when you’re not expecting anything too demanding on the brain cells. It did inspire one of the more remarkable cosplays that I saw at Gallifrey One in 2013:
Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry have taken the interesting tack of looking at the TV episode in the context of Charles Dickens, asserting firmly that it “remains the only explicit adaptation of another text in the Doctor Who back catalogue.” I disagree with that – I think that The Androids of Tara is even more closely aligned with The Prisoner of Zenda – but I can see their point.
A short introduction looks at Christmas specials in Davies and Moffat era Doctor Who.
The first chapter, “A Traditional English Christmas With Sharks”, considers the history of Christmas in Britain, the previous adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and its importance in British popular culture.
The second chapter, “A Blot of Mustard, a Crumb of Cheese”, looks at Steven Moffat’s gift for transforming apparently normal situations into fairy tales.
The third chapter, “Time and Relative Child-centrism”, looks at children as focal narrative figures in Moffat’s Doctor Who. Its second paragraph is:
Had it always been thus? Could British audiences expect throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to encounter Dickens (and ACC [A Christmas Carol]) in late December? Certainly, on British television December was seen as a good time to air adaptations of Dickens’ works. On the BBC, adaptations of ACC aired on Christmas Day 1950, Christmas Eve 1977 and a few days before Christmas in 2019. The 1999 TV series of David Copperfield debuted on Christmas Day, and the 1976 episode of A Ghost Story for Christmas was an adaptation of the short story ‘The Signalman’ (1866). The Pickwick Papers (1952), David Copperfield (1974) and Great Expectations (2011) all first aired in December. In 2007, Dickens was central to the battle for the Christmas season ratings, with the BBC broadcasting a five-part adaptation of Oliver Twist in the week leading up to Christmas, and ITV airing a feature-length adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop on Boxing Day (with production design by Michael Pickwoad, of whom more in Chapter 4).
The fourth and longest chapter, “The Pickwoad Papers”, looks in great and pleasing detail at the superb design of the story.
The fifth chapter, “What Right Have You To Be Merry?”, looks at the Doctor’s habit of interference in human timelines.
A brief conclusion, “Everything’s Got To End Some Time”, summarises the above.
I still feel that the actual story is not particularly memorable, but Beckwith and McMurtry gave me some pause for thought about where it came from. You can get their Black Archive here.
I only recently watched The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time, which sticks surprisingly closely to the original text, but as a result of that experience combined with reading the Black Archive monograph, I was inspired to go back and read Dickens once again, probably for the first time since I was a child. The second paragraph of the third ‘Stave’ of the short book is:
Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time of day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
It’s tremendous, even when you know what is going to happen; Dickens sometimes succumbed to mawkish sentimentality, but here he largely keeps himself restrained and lets the story tell itself. I found I had something in my eye as I got to the end, and you will too. God bless Us, Every One!
I am nearing the end of my H.G. Wells marathon and I can see why this book is not very well known. Bealby is a comic lad because he is working class and has ideas above his station, which is as a servant in a posh house. There are shenanigans involving the Lord Chancellor and a holiday caravan which I did not find very funny. At least it is short. Adam Roberts liked it more than I did.
Next up (and penultimate) in my Wells-a-thon: The Undying Fire.
You can read a lot on an 11-hour daytime intercontinental flight (also spent about six hours in slow-moving taxis last Thursday).
Current Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold
Last books finished A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar We Called Them Giants, by Kieron Gillen et al Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, by Jordan S. Carroll A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by John Barton The Vegetarian, by Kang Han Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger The Vetting, by Michael Cassutt The Birds, and other stories, by Daphne du Maurier
Next books Dead Man’s Hand, by Tony Lee et al A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
Man on left: “No thank you Mr Kin. / Who’s the little girl? Your granddaughter?” Man behind desk: “Chiyoko. And no, my wife and I were never blessed with children. / Chiyoko acts as my … marketing consultant on the Goruda project.”
This is a compilation of comic strip stories from Doctor Who Magazine during the Eleventh Doctor era, all by Jonathan Morris; I had not appreciated it at the time, but they actually have a cleverly worked out arc (about, er, the Child of Time) which culminates at the end, shortly after we meet the killer Brontë sisters.
Charlotte: “Doctor, how delightful to finally make your acquaintance!” Emily: “If I may introduce myself – I am Emily, these are my sisters Charlotte and Anne.” Anne: “Together, we are the Brontës!”
Having been working through the IDW Doctor Who comics dating to the same era, it’s interesting to feel a very different dynamic to the DWM strips, which have much shorter episodes and also had to respond to the TV show in real time – there are some very informative endnotes from Morris and the artists about the creative process.
Also I particularly like the story with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
C.S. Lewis: “‘…And that was the very end of the adventure of the bookshop.’ / So, what does everyone think?” J.R.R. Tolkien: “Well, I thought it was a bit juvenile… a jumble of unrelated mythologies… all rather derivative, I’m afraid… / And I wasn’t convinced by the allegorical element at all!”
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 18) A Christmas Carol, by Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, by Jordan S. Carroll A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by John Barton
Non-genre 3 (YTD 13) The Research Magnificent, by H.G. Wells The Friend Zone Experiment, by Zen Cho Bealby, by H.G. Wells
Plays 1 (YTD 1) The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol 3: Radio and Television Plays
Poetry 1 (YTD 1) Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead
SF 8 (YTD 28) Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett The Butcher of the Forest, by Premee Mohamed Heavenly Tyrant, by Xiran Jay Zhao (did not finish) Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens The Undying Fire, by H.G. Wells A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 7) Oh No It Isn’t!, by Paul Cornell
Comics 4 (YTD 8) Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle, Eddie Robson and Andy Kuhn The Child of Time, by Jonathan Morris, Dan McDaid, Mike Collins, Roger Langridge and Rob Davis Star Trek: Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio We Called Them Giants, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowell
6,400 pages (YTD 19,400) 8/22 (YTD 26/76) by non-male writers (McMurtry, Nussbaum, Cho, Mohamed, Zhao, “Kingfisher”, Samatar, Hans) 4/22 (YTD 11/76) by non-white writers (Cho, Mohamed, Zhao, Samatar) 3/22 rereads (Men At Arms, A Christmas Carol, Oh No It Isn’t!) 232 books currently tagged unread, down 1 from last month, down 99 from March 2024.
Reading now
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger
Coming soon (perhaps)
Dead Man’s Hand, by Tony Lee et al Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis, by Kevin Clarke Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith
The Vetting, by Michael Cassutt Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham
The Vegetarian, by Kang Han Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World
Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
36,267
547
The House of Doors
Tan Twan Eng
18,160
539
The Storm We Made
Vanessa Chan
19,635
354
Black Water Sister
Zen Cho
10,481
647
I have not actually been to Malaysia, but it is where my father was born, so I was interested to see where this analysis brought me. In fact there are an unusually high number of Malaysian writers on the list – better yet, three of them are fantasy novels, including this week’s winner, The Night Tiger. And I am very glad to see Zen Cho make an appearance.
I disqualified nine books, all for the usual reason but all in different ways. In some of these cases I guess that GR and LT users are using the tag ‘malaysia’ because of the origin of the author rather than the setting of the book, in others it must simply be geographical confusion. Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan, is mostly set in Singapore. The island in Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, is clearly in what’s now Indonesia (as discussed). Daughter of the Moon Goddess, by Sue Lynn Tan, is set in a fantasy China. A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute, has many memorable sections in Malaysia, but in the end it is about Australia. The Glass Palace, by Amitav Ghosh, is set all over the region. Nothing But Blackened Teeth, by Cassandra Khaw, is set in Japan. Old Filth, by Jane Gardam, is set in England and India more than Malaysia. What My Bones Know, by Stephanie Foo, is set in the USA. And Sorcerer to the Crown, again by Zen Cho, is set in a fantasy UK.
Next up: Mozambique, Ghana, Peru and Saudi Arabia.
Opening of third play (“Great Parliamentarians: Lord Palmerston”):
ANNOUNCER. ‘Great Parliamentarians’. We now present as the next in this series, a radio biography of Lord Palmerston, written and produced by Denis Johnston. (Fade in music) The scene opens in the Balkans where a British resident will tell of a dramatic incident in which he took part. (Peak music and then fade out.) BRIDGEMAN. We called it Wallachia in those days. But now it has some new fangled title and a king of its own no less! (He laughs to himself) One evening – I think it was in 1849 – I was standing outside my warehouse looking across the brown swirling waters of the Danube at a boat crossing over from the further shore. Close by me, my little step-daughter was playing on the rough wooden pier that juts out into the stream and always seemed to me to be on the point of being swept away by the current. (Fade in distant drumming.) BRIDGEMAN. Eliza, come away from there! CHILD (aged about 12). Papa, Hëren sie die Trummele? BRIDGEMAN. Speak English, my child. Do you wish to forget your native tongue? CHILD. I hear drums, Papa. BRIDGEMAN. It is the Turks over the river in Widin.
(Linguistic note: “Hëren sie die Trummele?” is pretty bad German. “Hören Sie die Trommeln?” would be grammatically correct, but a child speaking to her father would be much more likely to say “Hörst du die Trommeln?”)
Denis Johnston (1901-1984) has gone out of fashion now; the only play of his that I have seen on stage was “Strange Occurrence on Ireland’s Eye” in the early 1990s. His daughter Jennifer, who died only last month, had much more staying power with the Zeitgeist.
This book is the third of three volumes of his collected plays, devoted to his work for radio and television. It includes a biographical note and some fascinating essays about the early days of TV drama, when the producer could see only one other camera besides the one that was actively recording (or indeed broadcasting) and the art of cutting between shots was unknown. On a related point, it was not at all obvious that reporters doing outside broadcast should simply hold a microphone and speak into it – much fruitless effort went into managing booms in windy conditions, and in other inhospitable situations.
As well as the essays on TV drama, there are seven radio plays here, five TV plays and two theatre scripts that escaped the previous volumes. I got the book ages ago because my great-grandfather, James Stewart, is credited as one of the bit players in the very first of the radio plays, “Lillibulero”, an account of the siege of Derry in 1688-89, broadcast in 1938. One of the actors brought over from England to narrate the story was 19-year-old Jon Pertwee, his first broadcast job. It’s dramatic stuff; I managed to get hold of a recording and it carries itself well, 87 years on. Unfortunately I am not sure which of the voices is my great-grandfather’s. (Jon Pertwee, even at 19, is unmissable.)
It’s the best of the radio plays. The others are a farce about working in radio drama which I have to hope was funnier on air than it is on the page; a biography of Lord Palmerston which can’t quite decide if it is being funny; a play about the German high command in the first world war which tries to be funny about an awful subject; another funny historical about Lady Blessington where it’s clear that Micheál Mac Liammóir stole the show as her camp lover the Comte d’Orsay; a rather mean-spirited portrait of the novelist Amanda McKittrick Ros, who had only recently died; and a dramatisation of Frank O’Connor’s short story “In The Train” which prompted me to go and re-read the original text, which is better.
The two theatre scripts in an appendix are Blind Man’s Bluff, a comedic adaptation of Die Blinde Gottin (The Blind Goddess) by Ernst Toller, which actually has the same punchline as “Strange Occurrence on Ireland’s Eye”, and a four page skit called Riders to the Sidhe, whose title pretty much says it all.
It’s very much work of its time – even the plays set in the nineteenth century have a slightly tired mid twentieth century feel about them. It’s also pretty long, at 516 pages. But I was glad to work through it. You can get it here.
This was the very last unread book that I had acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells. Next on the Wells list is Bealby.
I slightly regretted my decision to get into the Big Finish First Doctor stories when the last one I tried turned out to be rather a dud. But this is much better, a story of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, Vicki and Jospa landing on a very alien planet with vividly realised aliens, and also the question of just how many people are in the Tardis crew. It’s a concept that was also visited in the Buffy episode Superstarand the Torchwood episode Adam(and the Torchwood novel Border Princes), but I think we have a new twist here – rather than having a strange new character intruding on our heroes’ regular setup, we have both a strange new character and a strange new world, and this being a Big Finish audio which was released more than fifty years after the TV stories with which it is in continuity sequence, we listeners don’t quite know what to make of it at first. On top of that, as I said, the aliens are very alien and well depicted; and it’s William Russell’s second last audio performance, as both Ian and the Doctor, recorded shortly before his 90th birthday. James Joyce (no relation) is suitably suave as the extra companion Jospa, and Kate Byers as the lead alien. You can get it here.
‘We didn’t find a phone,’ I said, although it was true I hadn’t thought of that.
Tremendously executed climax to the arc of stories about occult London police detective Peter Grant, and his adversary the Faceless Man, with loving detail to the history and geography of London and the river spirits who sometimes ally with us mortals. The frustrations of working in the fictional bureaucracy of the magical side of the Met is also well imagined. I wasn’t so wowed by the previous book in the sequence but definitely enjoyed this. Two more to go (at least, two more that I have left over from a previous Hugo packet). You can get it here.
Current The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by John Barton Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher
Last books finished Star Trek: Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North et al The Undying Fire, by H.G. Wells Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead
Next books Dead Man’s Hand, by Tony Lee et al The Vetting, by Michael Cassutt The Vegetarian, by Kang Han
Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield woke up, stretched, and sang a single pure note. The stretch had brought on the singing. It was all because of the look of the day. Sunlight was dappling through leaves above her. Birds were cheeping. The air smelt of a summer morning.
The first of the Bernice Summerfield spinoff novels, adapted to become the first Big Finish audio. Bernice, settling into her new job as a professor of archæology, finds herself sucked into a world where she and her colleagues are transformed into pantomime characters, and facing down the alien Grel. (Facts! Good facts!) It’s actually rather well done – the concept risks being either too twee or too clever for its own good, but Paul Cornell bends the rules of narrative here just enough to get away with it. You can get it here.
The audio adaptation – from 27 years ago, good heavens! – is particularly memorable for Nicholas Courtney’s performance as Wolsey, Bernice’s cat, though everyone is good including Alastair Lock as the Grel. I listened to it just after re-reading the book, so can’t really tell how well it stands on its own. You can still get it here.
On my first encounter with the Grel of the Whoniverse (which was actually in the Sixth Doctor audio The Doomwood Conspiracy), I confusedly assumed that they were the same as the Grell, a D&D creature that I remember from White Dwarf #27 back in 1981 (actually invented by Ian Livingstone in WD #12, two years earlier). But the D&D Grell, with two ‘l’s, are disembodied hovering brains with a beak and barbed tentacles, while the DW Grel, with one ‘l’, are humanoids with squid-like faces. You’re welcome.
He hadn’t come for Alicia’s company, any more than he’d come for the exhibition itself. The name Dior meant as little to him as, he supposed, Shostakovich or Britten would to someone who didn’t care about classical music.
I know Zen of course both as a friend (I believe that we are the only Eastercon Guests of Honour with parents born in Malaysia) and for her intriguing fantasy novels and shorter fiction; I believe that this is her first venture into contemporary romance, a genre which is sometimes taken less seriously than it should be.
Renee Goh gets dumped by her pop star boyfriend on page 6, and bumps unexpectedly into her ex Ket Siong on page 26, and despite Renee’s experimental attempts to keep Ket Siong in the Friend Zone, we basically know where they will have got to by the end on page 341. I really enjoyed the ride; human beings are complex creatures, capable of misunderstanding their own best interests and getting confused about the signals they receive from others, and it’s entertaining (occasionally painful) to read.
As well as being a good empowering love story, with the dynastic intricacies of the Malaysian business community’s presence in London as backdrop, there is a grim subplot involving a massive political corruption scandal and human rights abuse, which peripherally touches both our lovers and also the Bad Boy rival for Renee’s affections. Renee manages to triumph here too, thanks to her ability to think outside the box, though it has an impact on her relations with her own family.
I am interested that the last Asian romance novel I read, Those Pricey Thakur Girls, also had a really grim political subplot underlying the girl-meets-boy main current. I don’t know how common this is for romance novels.
