Author Archives: fromtheheartofeurope

The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al

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Second frame of third part:

Next in the sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics, this keeps Alice, the Doctor’s librarian companion from the previous two sequences, and introduces the mysterious Sapling, a young sapient tree which is at the centre of a mystery that needs to be solved. Some very good story concepts, the first half involving a weirdly stereotypically British planet and a Silent that even other Silents cannot see, and the second half involving one of Alice’s neighbours who has unaccountably become multiply duplicated. A good start. You can get it here.

The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Maggie Aderin-Pocock

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

It’s the classic Monty Python question; I mean what has it done for us? We all have a vague notion that it gives us the tides, but how else can a ball of rock in space help us here on Earth?

The astronomer Maggie Aderin-Pocock has been one of the presenters of the BBC astronomy TV programme The Sky at Night for ten years, following in the footsteps of Patrick Moore. I’m afraid it’s generally on too late for me to watch, but I read this book with much interest, having read Patrick Moore’s classic Guide to the Moon forty years ago.

Moving with the times, it’s a very approachable combination of autobiography, science and culture, with the second quarter of the book looking at the history of lunar observation and at literature inspired by the moon. There’s not much about the Apollo landings – you can find plenty of information about them elsewhere – but there’s a lot about the research findings of what is on and inside the Moon.

But the guts of the book are to explore the effect that the moon has on us – both culturally and scientifically. Aderin-Pocock’s approach is that curiosity about the moon is a gateway drug that may lead readers into more research on science. It’s tightly and breezily written, and recommended. You can get it here.

2024 Hugos in a bit more detail

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Headlines:

3813 final ballots were received (3808 electronic, 5 paper). As we announced on 23 July 2024, we had to disqualify 377 of these which were not cast by natural persons. We did count the remaining 3436, which is the third highest final ballot vote ever.

1720 nominating ballots were received (1715 electronic, 5 paper), the eighth highest nominations vote ever.

The winner of Best Semiprozine was decided by a margin of 6 votes, and the winners of Best Professional Artis and Best Fancast by margins of 7. These were the closest results among winners.

At lower placings, there were ties for 3rd place in the Astounding Award, and for 5th place in the Best Graphic Story or Comic category, and 4th place in the Best Graphic Story or Comic category was decided by a margin of one vote.

The most decisive contest was for Best Game or Interactive Experience, where the winner got 42.7% of the first preferences and won on the fourth count, with three other finalists still in the race.

In five categories, the finalist with the second highest number of first preferences won after transfers. In two categories, the finalist with the third highest number of first preferences won after transfers.

In ten out of twenty categories, the winner had also topped the poll at nominations stage. In four categories, the winner placed second at the nominations stage; in three the winner had placed third at nominations, in two the winner was fourth and in one case the winner was the second last to qualify.

The last place on the ballot in the following categories was decided by a single vote: Best Related Work, Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, Best Fanzine, Best Fan Artist.

The last place on the ballot in the following categories was decided by a margin of two votes: Best Short Story, Best Professional Artist, Best Semiprozine.

Full details linked from here.

In detail:

Best Novel

  1. Some Desperate Glory by 71 votes ahead of Translation State.
  2. Translation State ahead of The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
  3. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi ahead of Witch King
  4. Witch King ahead of The Saint of Bright Doors
  5. The Saint of Bright Doors ahead of Starter Villain
  6. Starter Villain by John Scalzi (Tor, Tor UK)

Some Desperate Glory also topped nominations by EPH points, though in fact Translation State had the most votes. Martha Wells declined for System Collapse, and its replacement Cosmo Wings was not eligible. The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz missed the ballot by only 3 votes.

This category had the most nominating votes, and the joint fewest first preference votes for No Award on the final ballot.

Best Novella

  1. Thornhedge by 112 votes ahead of Seeds of Mercury
  2. Mammoths at the Gates by 3 votes ahead of Seeds of Mercury
  3. Seeds of Mercury by 12 votes ahead of The Mimicking of Known Successes
  4. The Mimicking of Known Successes ahead of Rose/House
  5. Rose/House ahead of Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet
  6. Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet

Seeds of Mercury had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

The Mimicking of Known Successes was narrowly ahead of Thornhedge for nomination votes. Untethered Sky, by Fonda Lee, missed the ballot by twelve votes.

This category had the most final ballot votes, and the joint fewest first preference votes for No Award on the final ballot.

Best Novelette

  1. The Year Without Sunshine by 312 votes ahead of Ivy, Angelica, Bay
  2. One Man’s Treasure by 2 votes ahead of Ivy, Angelica, Bay
  3. Ivy, Angelica, Bay ahead of On the Fox Roads
  4. On the Fox Roads by Nghi Vo way ahead of the other two
  5. I AM AI by Ai Jiang ahead of Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition
  6. Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition

The Far North was way ahead on nominations, but the author, Hai Ja, declined. The Year Without Sunshine was way ahead of the rest. Science Facts, by Sarah Pinsker, needed 8 more votes, or in excess of 4.00 more points, to get on the ballot.

Best Short Story

  1. Better Living Through Algorithms won on the fifth count, with How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub and The Mausoleum’s Children still in the race
  2. How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub ahead of The Mausoleum’s Children
  3. The Mausoleum’s Children ahead of The Sound of Children Screaming
  4. The Sound of Children Screaming ahead of Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times
  5. Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times ahead of Answerless Journey
  6. Answerless Journey

Answerless Journey, which came sixth on the final ballot, topped the nominations ballot. The winner, Better Living Through Algorithms, came third. Day Ten Thousand, by Isabel J. Kim, needed 2 more votes to get on the ballot.

This category had the most nominees; the lowest percentage of nominating votes for the top qualifying finalist; the joint fewest first preference votes for No Award on the final ballot; and the lowest percentage for No Award in the runoff.

Best Series

  1. Imperial Radch by 516 votes ahead of October Daye
  2. The Final Architecture ahead of October Daye
  3. The Laundry Files ahead of October Daye
  4. October Daye ahead of The Universe of Xuya
  5. The Universe of Xuya ahead of The Last Binding
  6. The Last Binding

Imperial Radch topped nominations as well, just ahead of The Universe of Xuya. The Craft Sequence, by Max Gladstone, needed 18 more votes to get on the ballot.

Best Graphic Story or Comic

  1. Saga, Vol. 11, by 88 votes ahead of The Three Body Problem
  2. Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons ahead of The Three Body Problem
  3. Bea Wolf ahead of The Three Body Problem
  4. The Three Body Problem by 1 vote ahead of Shubeik Lubeik
  5. tie between Shubeik Lubeik and The Witches of World War II

The Three Body Problem had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

The Three Body Problem was way in front at the nomination stage, with Saga, Vol. 11 second on EPH points but only fourth in actual votes. Why Don’t You Love Me?, by Paul B. Rainey, needed 9 more votes to get on the ballot.

This category saw the winner with the fewest first preference votes.

Best Related Work

  1. A City on Mars by 39 votes ahead of The Culture: The Drawings
  2. The Culture: The Drawings ahead of A Traveller in Time
  3. A Traveller in Time ahead of Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History v2-3
  4. All These Worlds ahead of the rest
  5. Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, vols 2 and 3 ahead of Discover X
  6. Discover X

Discover X was far ahead at nominations, with the most votes in any category, and rather unusually got fewer votes in the final ballot. A City on Mars was fifth on nominations, after Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood withdrew. Making It So, by Patrick Stewart, needed 1 more vote to get on the ballot.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

  1. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves by 49 votes ahead of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  2. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ahead of Barbie
  3. Barbie ahead of Nimona
  4. Nimona ahead of Poor Things
  5. Poor Things ahead of The Wandering Earth II
  6. The Wandering Earth II

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was also well in the lead at nominations stage. Godzilla Minus One needed 1 more vote to qualify for the ballot.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

  1. The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time” by 18 votes ahead of Those Old Scientists
  2. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Those Old Scientists”, ahead of Glorious Purpose
  3. Loki: “Glorious Purpose”, ahead of Subspace Rhapsody
  4. Doctor Who: “The Giggle”, ahead of Subspace Rhapsody
  5. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Subspace Rhapsody”, ahead of Wild Blue Yonder
  6. Doctor Who: “Wild Blue Yonder”

Long, Long Time was also far ahead at nominations. Doctor Who: “The Church on Ruby Road” needed 8.8 more points to get on the ballot.

Best Game or Interactive Work

  1. Baldur’s Gate 3, far ahead of the field
  2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom ahead of Chants of Sennaar
  3. Chants of Sennaar ahead of DREDGE
  4. DREDGE ahead of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
  5. Alan Wake 2 ahead of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
  6. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Baldur’s Gate 3 was also far ahead of the field at nominations stage. Stray Gods needed 6 more bullet votes to qualify for the ballot. No Award got the highest number of first preference in this category.

Best Editor Short Form

  1. Neil Clarke by 100 votes ahead of Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas
  2. Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas ahead of Jonathan Strahan 
  3. Jonathan Strahan ahead of Yang Feng
  4. Scott H. Andrews by 9 votes ahead of Yang Feng
  5. Yang Feng ahead of Liu Weijia
  6. Liu Weijia

Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

Yang Feng was way ahead in nominations, and Liu Weijia well ahead of the rest. Nisi Shawl needed 8 more votes worth 3.34 points to get on the ballot.

This was the category in which No Award got the fewest votes in the runoff.

Best Editor Long Form

  1. Ruoxi Chen by 38 votes ahead of Lee Harris
  2. Lee Harris ahead of Yao Haijun
  3. Lindsey Hall ahead of Yao Haijun
  4. Yao Haijun ahead of Kelly Lonesome
  5. Kelly Lonesome by 14 votes ahead of David Thomas Moore
  6. David Thomas Moore

Lee Harris topped nominations, with Ruoxi Chen second. Natasha Bardon declined nomination. Gillian Redfearn needed 5 more votes worth 2.86 points to get on the ballot.

This was the category where No Award got its highest vote share in the runoff.

Best Professional Artist

  1. Rovina Cai by 7 votes ahead of Alyssa Winans
  2. Alyssa Winans ahead of Micaela Alcaino
  3. Galen Dara by 3 votes ahead of Micaela Alcaino
  4. Micaela Alcaino ahead of Dan Dos Santos
  5. Tristan Elwell by 7 votes ahead of Dan Dos Santos
  6. Dan Dos Santos

Alyssa Winans had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

Alyssa Winans was far ahead on nominations here, with Rovina Cai third in votes and fourth in EPH points. Feifei Ruan needed 2 more votes worth 1.08 points to get on the ballot.

Best Semiprozine

  1. Strange Horizons by 6 votes ahead of Uncanny Magazine, the closest result of the night.
  2. Uncanny Magazine ahead of FIYAH Literary Magazine
  3. FIYAH Literary Magazine ahead of Escape Pod
  4. Escape Pod ahead of the field
  5. khōréō ahead of GigaNotoSaurus
  6. GigaNotoSaurus

Uncanny Magazine had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

Strange Horizons was far ahead at nominations. Interzone needed 2 more votes to qualify for the ballot.

Best Fanzine

  1. Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together by 17 votes ahead of Journey Planet
  2. Black Nerd Problems ahead of Journey Planet
  3. Journey Planet ahead of Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog
  4. Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog ahead of Idea
  5. Idea by 8 votes ahead of The Full Lid
  6. The Full Lid

Black Nerd Problems had the most first preferences here, and Journey Planet the second most, with Nerds of a Feather coming from third place to win.

Nerds of a Feather had the most votes at nominations stage, but Journey Planet had the most EPH points. Zero Gravity News needed 0.5 more points to get on the ballot.

This was the category whose winner had the fewest first preference votes.

Best Fancast

  1. Octothorpe by 7 votes ahead of Worldbuilding for Masochists
  2. Worldbuilding for Masochists by 6 votes ahead of The Coode Street Podcast
  3. The Coode Street Podcast ahead of Publishing Rodeo
  4. Hugos There by 18 votes ahead of Publishing Rodeo
  5. Publishing Rodeo ahead of Science Fiction Fans Buma
  6. Science Fiction Fans Buma

Discover X and Diu Diu Sci Fi Radio both got far more nominating votes than anyone else, but both are professional productions so were not eligible. Octothorpe got far more than any of the rest. Hugo, Girl! needed 8.33 more points to get on the ballot.

This was the category with fewest nominees, and the category where fewest final ballot votes were cast.

Best Fan Writer

  1. Paul Weimer by 114 votes ahead of Jason Sanford
  2. Jason Sanford ahead of Bitter Karella
  3. Bitter Karella ahead of Alasdair Stuart
  4. Alasdair Stuart ahead of James Davis Nicoll
  5. James Davis Nicoll ahead of Örjan Westin
  6. Örjan Westin

Paul Weimer was far ahead at nominations. Camestros Felapton withdrew. Alex Brown needed 3 more votes worth 1.75 points to qualify for the ballot.

This was the category where No Award had its best percentage share of first preference votes.

Best Fan Artist

  1. Laya Rose by 57 votes ahead of Sara Felix
  2. Iain J. Clark ahead of Sara Felix
  3. Sara Felix ahead of Dante Luiz
  4. Dante Luiz ahead of the rest
  5. Alison Scott ahead of España Sheriff
  6. España Sheriff

Iain J. Clarke and Sara Felix led nominations, with Laya Rose third on EPH points and fourth on votes. Yuumei needed 0.8 more points to qualify for the ballot.

This was the category with the fewest nominating votes, and therefore also the category where the top nominee got fewest votes.

Lodestar Award for Best YA Book

  1. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by 42 votes ahead of Liberty’s Daughter
  2. Liberty’s Daughter ahead of The Sinister Booksellers of Bath
  3. The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by 11 votes ahead of Abeni’s Song
  4. Unraveller by 3 votes ahead of Abeni’s Song
  5. Abeni’s Song ahead of Promises Stronger than Darkness
  6. Promises Stronger than Darkness

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath and Promises Stronger than Darkness led nominations. Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle, needed 10 more votes worth 6.05 points to qualify for the ballot.

Astounding Award for Best New Writer (sponsored by Dell Magazines)

  1. Xiran Jay Zhao by 159 votes ahead of Moniquill Blackgoose
  2. Moniquill Blackgoose ahead of Ai Jiang
  3. tie between Sunyi Dean and Ai Jiang
  5. Hannah Kaner ahead of Em X. Liu
  6. Em X. Liu

It was very close at the top here in nominations, with Sunyi Dean getting the most votes, just ahead of Moniquill Blackgoose and Ai Jiang, who were just ahead of Xiran Jay Zhao. On EPH points, Blackgoose was top, Jiang second and Dean third, with Zhao fourth again. Bethany Jacobs needed in excess of 3.33 more EPH points, or 12 more votes, to qualify for the ballot.

This was the category where No Award got most votes in the runoff.

And now for next year…

The best known books set in each country: Iran

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I’m posting this on Saturday this week because my Hugos post will go up tomorrow (though not until after the official announcements). See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in Iran.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (vol 1 of 2)Marjane Satrapi212,2888,651
Reading Lolita in TehranAzar Nafisi 135,27613,103
The Complete PersepolisMarjane Satrapi186,2466,989
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (vol 2 of 2)Marjane Satrapi75,9914,214
Ruba’iyatOmar Khayyám21,6725,246
Not Without My DaughterBetty Mahmoody35,4191,827
EmbroideriesMarjane Satrapi28,1131,960
Persepolis, Volume 1 (of the original four)Marjane Satrapi90,763554

Well, I’ve had cases where a single author dominates literary perception of a country, but this is the first time that I’ve had four slightly different versions of the same work in the top eight. And I must say I agree; Persepolis is an outstanding artistic achievement, and probably the first half of it is the crown. Also it’s nice that seven out of eight of these books are by actual Iranians.

I disqualified House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, because it is set in the USA. But I let Persepolis 2 through because just under half of the book (the original part 3) is set in Austria and just over half (the original part 4) back in Iran.

I also allowed the Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam as being mainly set in Iran. Omar Khayyam may not have written all of the poems that are now attributed to him, but he was a very real Persian statesman, scientist and writer, and there are plenty of Iranian cultural references in the poems, which are told from a first-person perspective.

So we end up with five graphic novels (OK, two graphic novels, one of them in four different versions), two first-person factual accounts and one work of poetry. Not bad.

Next up: Türkiye.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea

L’Affaire Tournesol / The Calculus Affair, by Hergé

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Second frame of third page:

Tintin: We’re home again, and none too soon, either!
Captain Haddock: The telephone, Nestor.
(translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner)

This is one of the great Tintin albums: a simple story in which our hero and Captain Haddock go to the rescue of their friend Professor Calculus (Tournesol in the original French) who has been kidnapped by the agents of an Eastern European dictatorship. There’s lots of exciting action through the streets of Geneva and the Swiss and Balkan countrysides, with a climax in the opera house with the great Bianca Castafiore; there’s also comic relief in the form of Thompson and Thomson, the professor’s complete deafness, and the insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg (Séraphin Lampion in French) who invites himself to become Captain Haddock’s friend and house guest while he is away.

Most of the art is close up framing of our heroes, but Hergé throws in a couple of big picture panels. Here is a crown of rubberneckers gathering outside Marlinspike, to Captain Haddock’s annoyance.

Hergé has actually put himself in there at the bottom right, as the man in the crowd with a drawing pad drawing the crowd. He didn’t do that very often.

It was great fun to revisit this, and you can get it here in English and here in French.

This was my top unread comic in a language other than English. Next up is the first volume of Bellatrix, Leo’s latest series.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith (and Stephen Wyatt)

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I caught the last episode of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on first broadcast in 1988; when I watched the whole story for the first time in 2008, the last story of Old Who that I watched first time round, I wrote:

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is not a bad end to the season (and indeed to my watching all of Old Who). It looks generally good, and performances are all pretty convincing. I did once again find myself wondering about the means and motivation of the villains, in this case the Gods of Ragnarok; and I was left a bit confused by how the Psychic Circus fitted into the planetary society (and also a bit confused by the ending). But it was all fairly watchable. Now I can go back and do it all again.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:

And finally for this run, once again I enjoyed The Greatest Show In The Galaxy more than I was expecting to. The storyline is awfully simple – the Psychic Circus as a deathtrap set by ancient powerful beings, the Doctor and Ace trying to escape from it and destroy it – and there is therefore an awful lot of circular plotting before the dénouement, but somehow the extra bits tacked on to the plot all add to it. A particular cheer for T.P. McKenna’s fraudulent Captain Cook as a parody of the show’s central character, and the earnest fan played by Adrian Mole Gian Sammarco who finds that the object of his fascination is a fatal obsession; but Jessica Martin and Chris Drury are excellent too, and the whole thing just looks so much better than we were getting two years ago (or even one year ago). Let’s hope they can keep up the standards for a few more years.

What struck me this time round was how symbolic it all is. The story seems somehow not very concerned with creating a convincing secondary world, but instead with managing the characters in a particular plot and emotional space. And yet it gets away with it.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Stephen Wyatt’s novelisation of his own script is:

‘There’s something not quite right about all this,’ the Doctor mused.

When I read it in 2008, I wrote:

Wyatt’s book is not really an improvement on the TV original. Shorn of (for once) decent production values and the compelling performances of the actors, the holes in the plot and clunky scene-setting are more apparent, and Wyatt, having written a TV script, is reduced to reporting what we saw on screen without being able to add much to it. Fails the Bechdel test – each female character is rigidly paired off with a male, and on the rare occasions that they converse it is always about one of the men (usually the Doctor).

Nothing to add too that, sixteen years later. You can get it here.

Dale Smith wrote the punchy Black Archive on The Talons of Weng Chiang which I reviewed a few months ago; he has also written a Tenth Doctor novel that I liked and a Seventh Doctor novel that I didn’t. Here he has done what some of the best Black Archives have done, by taking a story that I had not really thought about very much and making me think about it a lot more, the thoughts going in some unexpected directions. He has also blogged about the process of writing it.

The opening chapter, “What Did You Say Your Name Was?” looks at the over production situation on Doctor who at the time the story was made and draws many parallels about what we see on screen and what was happening behind the cameras.

The second chapter, “Tears of a Clown”, looks at clowns in general and why Ace is right to be scared of them.

The third chapter, “Let There Be Rock”, looks at quarries, and then slides into an argument that the comics artist Alan Moore is a formative and pervasive influence on Andrew Cartmel’s era of Doctor Who. Its second chapter is:

This view of quarries is certainly reflected in Cartmel’s era on the show: outside of season 24 – where one story featured three separate quarries but Cartmel had limited ability to course-correct – only three stories featured quarries, and only two used them as alien planets3. Of those two stories – The Greatest Show and Survival – both used Warmwell Quarry in Dorset. Part of this was the simple reason that only these two stories featured any significant time spent on alien worlds, as Cartmel’s realisation that the BBC could do period drama very well led him to move the show to more Earthly settings. But that shift didn’t result in Doctor Who becoming completely studio-based: the production team settled into alternating between studio-based and location-based stories for the rest of their run, with The Greatest Show being intended to be studio-based until circumstances forced a rethink.

3 Doctor Who Locations Guide, ‘Season Twenty-Four’, ‘Season Twenty-Five’, ‘Season Twenty-Six’. The third was Battlefield (1989), which used the Castle Cement Quarry in Kettleton for pyrotechnics work when Ancelyn crashes into a hill on arrival, presumably on the grounds that quarries are less concerned about things blowing up than Rutland Water.

The fourth chapter, “Fingerprints of the Gods”, looks at the role of magic in Doctor Who, particularly in the Cartmel era.

The fifth chapter, “Forward”, is sheer but entertaining self-indulgence on Smith’s part; it takes the history of Doctor Who, the history of hip-hop, and finds parallels between them despite the rather imperfect rapping delivered by Ross Ricco as the Ringmaster. It is unusual subject matter for a book on Doctor Who, but Smith succeeds in making the case.

A Black Archive that I like more than the story it is about. You can get it here.

Incidentally the Seventh Doctor is the first Doctor to have more than half his stories and episodes covered by Black Archives. (Apart from the special cases of the Eighth Doctor and the Shalka!Doctor.)

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)

Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

That’s not a word I often hear.

This won the Tiptree Award (now the Otherwise Award) in 2018. It’s a short book about a post-apocalypse future England, in a world where most human men have died of a gender-specific virus and the survivors live in secret reservations, while women get on with running civilisation. Our protagonist is a teenager who has no idea that men are still around; she meets a teenage boy who has fled his reservation, and finds out more about her society than she expected to. I see a lot of very unenthusiastic reviews of this book online, but I rather liked it; I think I can see what the author was trying to do. You can get it here.

The Tiptree Award shortlist included a short story, five novels and one duology. The only one I have read is An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen.

The BSFA Award that year was won by The Rift, by Nina Allan; the Clarke Award was won by Dreams Before the Start of Time, by Anne Charnock, which was also on the BSFA ballot. (I wrote both up here.) The Hugo and Nebula both went to The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin.

The following year the Tiptree Award (as it still was) went to a short story, “They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete, so that will be next in this sequence.

Tuesday reading

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Current
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
Why Politicians Lie About Trade, by Dmitry Grozoubinski
Doctor Who: Kerblam!, by Pete McTighe
Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait

Last books finished
Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson
The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Maggie Aderin-Pocock
The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al
Companion Piece, by Ali Smith
Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna
Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks
Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman (did not finish)

Next books
Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson
Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato

Since I am spending most of the next week at Worldcon, I doubt that next Tuesday’s list will be as long!

“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick; “The Martian Child”, by David Gerrold

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These two stories both won the Hugo and the Nebula in their respective categories in 1996 for work published in 1994. They are very different works, one trying to put a new gloss on an old theme and the other barely sfnal.

The second paragraph of the third section of “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” is:

But the more he concentrated on those memories, the more vague and imprecise they became, and he knew they must have occurred a very long time ago. Sometimes he tried to remember the name of his tribe, but it was lost in the mists of time, as were the names of his parents and siblings.

This is an old-fashioned tale about the decline of humanity, as detected by alien anthropologists investigating a depopulated Earth; the narrator is able to sense the story of the owner of an artefact through its aura (or whatever). It turns out that the humans are not so extinct after all. Seven short stories add up to a grim big picture. I found it a somewhat moralising tale, with an original concept reaching a rather obvious conclusion. The best of the internal stories is the middle one, about a safari in the year 2103, which is also the only one explicitly about white folks from outside swooping in to look at Africa; better when you write what you know. People loved this at the time, but I feel it slightly muffs the landing, though not as badly as Resnick’s later humorous squibs.

“Forgiveness Day”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, was also on both Hugo and Nebula ballots for Best Novella.

Cover by George Barr for the 1994 chapbook

The second paragraph of the third section of “The Martian Child” is:

I was in Arizona, at a party at Jeff Duntemann’s sprawling house. Jeff is a two-time Hugo nominee who gave up science fiction to write books about computer programming. Apparently, it was far more profitable than science fiction; now he was publishing his own magazine, PC-Techniques. I write a regular column for the magazine, an off-the-wall mix of code and mutated zen. It was the standing joke that my contribution to the magazine was the “Martian perspective.”

This on the other hand is a story I love, even though it may not even be sfnal depending on how you read it. The author, who is not named but clearly shares many characteristics with David Gerrold, adopts a boy who has certain behavioural quirks, one of which is that he believes that he is a Martian and may have a limited ability to grant wishes. Any of us who have experienced or closely observed parenthood will sympathise with the experience of having a tiny and new personality developing right in front of you. Any child that you raise includes bits of you, but also has characteristics that seem to come from somewhere else entirely. From Mars? Why not?

Cover from Gerrold’s website, no artist given.

I was fortunate to meet with David Gerrold at SMOFCon in Santa Rosa, California, in December 2018, and we discussed this story among other topics. Here we are at the Charles M. Schulz Museum. I admit that I was a little starstruck.

“The Singular Habits of Wasps”, by Geoffrey A. Landis. and “The Matter of Seggri”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, were also on both Best Novelette ballots.

That year the Hugo for Best Novel went to Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold, and the Nebula to Moving Mars, by Greg Gear; the Hugo for Best Short Story went to “None So Blind”, by Joe Haldeman, and the Nebula to “A Defense of the Social Contracts”, by Martha Soukup.

This marks the start of a rather odd period when there was very little crossover between the Hugos and Nebulas. Normally there are a couple of joint winners every year, but between 1995 and 2001 there was only one, Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman, which will be the next in this series.

Meanwhile my own copy of both stories is in the Nebula Awards 30 anthology, which you can get here.

Caged, by Una McCormack

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

She’d been trekking for days across the grassy plains that lay beyond the valley and the river and the settlements, but at last the ground was beginning to climb. She was sure she would find answers here.

A rather lovely Fifteenth Doctor novel, with two different sets of cute aliens in potential conflict with each other, and the Doctor and Ruby sorting out the conflict. You won’t get the same level of characterisation here as in Ruby Red, but it’s a good sfnal concept, executed in a very Whovian way. You can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Vietnam

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See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the Vietnam.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
The Things They CarriedTim O’Brien319,91114,549
On Earth We’re Briefly GorgeousOcean Vuong316,9003,996
The Quiet AmericanGraham Greene64,4998,127
The LoverMarguerite Duras58,9995,234
MatterhornKarl Marlantes44,3432,823
We Were Soldiers Once… and YoungHarold G. Moore31,3052,550
DispatchesMichael Herr20,1663,242
The Best We Could DoThi Bui36,5111,231

I excluded the following because less than half of the book (as far as I can tell) is set in Vietnam: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving; The Women, by Kristin Hannah; The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen; Inside Out & Back Again, by Thanhhà Lại; and In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O’Brien.

That still leaves a better list than I had expected. I feared that it would be dominated by American experiences of the war, and indeed four of the top eight books are in that category. But two of them are actually about the West’s encounter with Vietnam before the war with the USA (and it’s interesting to see Graham Greene make my list for the second week running).

I’m not 100% confident that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous passes my 50% test, but The Best We Could Do certainly does, and it’s also the first graphic novel to feature here.

However, the US perspective remains dominant, even if not quite as dominant as I had feared, and the top book for Vietnam is Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried – not the first short story collection to feature in these posts, but the first to win.

Next up: Iran.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea

Antiquities of Luxembourg: necropolis, dolmen, menhir, rock art and qanat

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As my regular reader knows, I have done a few road trips over the last few years to visit all the surviving menhirs of Belgium. (I grew up calling them “standing stones”, which is the usual UK / Ireland terminology, but local practice is to use the French term “menhir” which originates from the Breton for “long stone”, though apparently in modern Breton the completely different word “peulvan” is used.)

I’ve exhausted Belgian resources in this regard – the excellent Megalithic Portal lists several that I have not visited, but expresses serious doubt about whether any of them are real megaliths. But there is still plenty to look at in the neighbourhood. I had been tipped off by Herman Clerinx’s Roman book to the joys of Luxembourg, and a bit of research indicated that there was enough there to tick many of my antiquarian boxes.

So on Tuesday, the hottest day of the year so far, I set off down south for a long afternoon.

Diekirch: the necropolis and the museum

My first stop was the northern Luxembourgish town of Diekirch. It has a local beer, an obsession with donkeys, a museum of military history, a museum of historic motor vehicles, and a museum of the history of brewing. But I was not there for any of those. In the 1960s, excavations under the Church of St Lawrence revealed that it had been built on top of a Gallo-Roman necropolis, an indoor cemetery; and a block away a nearly intact large Roman mosaic was found in 1950.

The necropolis, with one of the deceased residents
The mosaic

The church is free, but to access the necropolis and mosaic you have to pay a very modest entrance fee to the Diekirch History Museum, which I warmly recommend. The museum is very accessible and friendly. Unfortunately all the displays are in German; there are leaflets available in other languages but they really don’t cover much of the content.

Deiwelselter

On a rock outcrop overlooking the town of Diekirch is the site of what used to be a megalithic dolmen, the Devil’s Altar or Deiwelselter in Luxembourgish. From the number of stones, it must have been about half the size of the big Wéris dolmens, far bigger than the Irish ones that I grew up with. Unfortunately, in 1892 the city fathers of Diekirch decided to rearrange the stones into a large arch shape, completely destroying the existing structure. God save us from the arrogance of the nineteenth-century antiquarian.

It’s quite a hike to get to as well. I am afraid that I ignored the ‘No Entry’ sign at the bottom of the lane, and parked at the edge of a field. Today’s city fathers of Diekirch could profitably think about improving access.

Beisenerbierg

The only genuine menhir surviving in the whole Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is near the town of Mersch. It was buried until 1978 and then erected on its present location, 30 metres from where it was found. It’s unusual among menhirs in that it’s on top of a hill – usually they are on the flank of a slope. Some commentators claim to see an anthropomorphic shaping of its profile; I am not convinced myself, but see what you think.

Of the four monuments I tracked down in the field, this was by far the easiest to find – you park in a layby by a 17th century chapel, and then the path from the chapel is pretty obvious. (And it’s interesting that although the stone itself was buried for centuries, Christianity built a shrine nearby.)

Häerdcheslee / La Roche des Payens

I have never seen anything quite like this before.

Here are two figures carved into a sandstone boulder on a hillside. In the rock above them is a rectangular pit (which I am not athletic enough to access). Are they gods? A funeral memorial? Who knows? Nearby rock show signs of stone-age grooves, but the Häerdcheslee figures are dated firmly to the first century AD (…ish).

In his novel L’homme qui rit, Victor Hugo makes a passing reference to:

…la clairière dite la Mauvaise Femme, près Diekirch, où il y a deux bas-reliefs énigmatiques représentant une femme qui a une tête et un homme qui n’en a pas……the clearing called “The Wicked Woman” near Diekirch, where there are two mysterious sculpted figures representing a woman with a head and a man without one…

It’s not all that close to Diekirch, and I think I’d say the headless figure is more likely to be female, but he’s clearly talking about the same place.

It’s not well signposted at all, but as long as you have the coordinates you will find it.

Raschpëtzer Qanat

The Raschpëtzer Qanat is a 600 metre long tunnel, built around 130 AD, which brought water from a spring on one side of the Petschend hill to a large Roman villa in the Alzette valley on the other side. It is an extraordinary feat of engineering. At least eighteen shafts were dug from the hillside down to the channel below. The mysterious pits on the hill were known about for centuries, but the water channel was only rediscovered in 1986.

One of them has been lit so that you can see all the way down to the water flowing at the bottom.

My cousin J lives in Luxembourg, close to the Qanat, and joined me for the trip. “I’ve lived in this country for ten years, we are less than ten minutes’ drive away, and I’d never been here before!”

There is a visitors’ gallery to the tunnels which is supposedly open only on Sunday afternoons; but we were lucky and found it open on a Tuesday.

From the top of the hill there is a lovely view of the towns of Heisdorf and Steinsel.

This is impressive engineering, and the best example of this sort of water management system north of the Alps, but in fact the emperor Claudius (remember him?) had set up a similar and much bigger structure to drain the waters of Lake Fucino in Italy about 80 years earlier (including what was the longest tunnel in the world, until 1871), and it is on record that this was repaired at almost exactly the same time that the Raschpëtzer Qanat was built, so the technology was available within the Roman Empire.

The Raschpëtzer Qanat is not very well signposted (a familiar refrain) from the car park, but if you use online resources you can find your way fairly quickly. A fellow rambler told us that there used to be more and better signs, so perhaps by the time you get there the situation will have improved again. And on such a warm day it was nice to spend so much time in the woods with their natural air conditioning.

Food and language

Always worth noting where I ate – you may want to follow suit. In Diekirch I had lunch at Niklos Eck, an unpretentious Luxembourgish eatery at 3 rue Nicolas Wathelet – actually on the square around the corner from St Laurence’s Church and the museum. The lentil and sausage salad was yummy and kept me going all afternoon. It doesn’t have a website, you’ll just have to show up and hope for the best.

For dinner, J. took me to Um Eck in Hostert, which apparently has upgraded significantly in the most recent period and did a rather good seafood platter – the calamari were a bit chewy but that’s tricky to get right for the first customers of the evening, and the rest was very yummy.

Everyone speaks French and German in Luxembourg, and most people speak English; and if your German is good enough you can catch most of what is written or spoken in Luxembourgish as well. It’s one of those situations where making all the languages official and legal has taken the sting out of the cultural issue.

So, I don’t think I need to go back to Luxembourg for the sake of the antiquities, but I am glad I went. (And it’s always nice to spend time with J.)

Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective, eds. Lawrence Leduc, Richard G. Niemi, Pippa Norris

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Second paragraph of third chapter (“Party Systems and Structures of Competition”, by Peter Mair):

The most conventional and frequently adopted criterion for classifying party systems is also the most simple: the number of parties in competition. Moreover, the conventional distinction involved here has also proved appealingly straightforward: that between a two-party system, on the one hand, and a multiparty (i.e., more than two) system, on the other (see Duverger 1954). Nor was this just a casual categorization; on the contrary, it was believed to tap into a more fundamental distinction between more or less stable and consensual democracies, which were those normally associated with the two-party type, as opposed to more or less unstable and conflictual democracies, which were those associated with the multiparty type. Thus, two-party systems, which were typically characteristic of the United Kingdom and the United States and invariably involved single-party government, were assumed to enhance accountability, alternation in government, and moderate, center-seeking competition. Multiparty systems, on the other hand, which usually required coalition administrations and were typically characteristic of countries such as France or Italy, prevented voters from gaining a direct voice in the formation of governments, did not necessarily facilitate alternation in government, and sometimes favored extremist, ideological confrontations between narrowly based political parties. And although this simple association of party system types and political stability and efficacy was later challenged by research into the experiences of some of the smaller European democracies, which boasted both a multiplicity of parties and a strong commitment to consensual government (e.g., Daalder 1983) and thus led some early observers to attempt to elaborate a distinction between “working” multiparty systems (e.g., the Netherlands or Sweden) and “nonworking” or “immobilist” multiparty systems (e.g., Italy), the core categorization of two-party versus multiparty has nevertheless continued to command a great deal of support within the literature on comparative politics.2
2 See, for example, Almond, Powell, and Mundt (1993, 117-20), where this traditional distinction is recast as one of “majoritarian” versus multiparty systems; see also the influential study by Lijphart (1984) where one of the key distinctions between majoritarian and consensus democracies is defined as that between a two-party system and a multiparty system.

This was another of the books that I got at the end of 2016, lost and then found again, to prepare a talk that I gave in Belfast that December. It was published in 1996, but it seems a bit dated even for 28 years ago; most of Eastern Europe was already two cycles into the new democratic system by then, and more could have been made of the test bed for democracy. In addition, there’s almost nothing about the actual subject of my talk, which was electoral boundaries. Still, I only paid £3.88 for it, so I can’t really complain.

What it does have is quite a wide range of essays picking out different aspects of the democratic process – not just the legal framework of the vote and the political party system, but also the roles of what we would now call civil society, opinion polls, media, the economy, and the impact of leadership, recruitment of candidates, and campaigning – the chapter on actual campaigning by David Farrell is probably the best in the book.

A useful snapshot of where research stood in the mid-1990s, but with massive gaps even then in the Global South. I hope that there is a more up to date volume out there. Meantime, you can get it here.

Version 1.0.0

The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney

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My usual system of quoting the second paragraph of the third section is always challenged by theatre scripts, and in this case there are no sections to the play at all, though there is a point where an optional interval is indicated. So I’ll just quote the most famous lines.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

These lines come at the conclusion of a grim story: the young Neoptolemus is sent by Odysseus to retrieve the bow of Philoctetes, who has been abandoned by the Greeks on the island of Lemnos. Philoctetes’ bow shoots invincible arrows, and the Greeks know that they cannot conquer Troy without it. But the only way to get it from Philoctetes is for Neoptolemus to pretend that he too has fallen out with the Greeks. Eventually a divine intervention helps to resolve the plot into a more cheerful place than seemed likely for most of the duration. (This is not a spoiler; the chorus tells us that it’s going to happen in the first speech of the play.)

It’s often difficult to appreciate a play from the script (well, difficult for me at least), but I really enjoyed this, in particular Heaney’s use of Ulster turns of phrase to give a clear voice to the characters. It’s a psychological story which can be told with minimal scenery. I’d certainly pay to see it.

You can get it here.

The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Paulius has draped a robe over Kenna’s shoulders as he leads Kenna across the orchard, headed for a small frosted-glass door set into a polished aluminum wall. Kenna clutches at the white linen lapels, reveling in the feeling of clean cloth; he’s worn his filthy Inevitable Robe for so long he can no longer distinguish between the stained cloth and his squalid skin.

I used to occasionally dip into Ferrett Steinmetz’s livejournal back in the day – I remember a particularly vivid account he wrote about of having sex during a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. This was one of the books in the 2020 Hugo packet which I have only just now got around to. It is a space opera with a somewhat wacky setting. It didn’t really grab me and I gave up after a hundred pages. But you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Desdemona and the Deep, by C.S.E. Cooney.

July 2024 Books

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Non-fiction 5 (YTD 41)
The Combined 2001 Election, by NISRA
Frontiers of the Roman Empire: The Lower German Limes, by David J. Breeze, Sonja Jill, Erik P. Graafstal, Willem J.H. Willems and Steve Bödecker
Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece to Life, by Jonathan Bardon
Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective, eds. Lawrence Leduc, Richard G. Niemi, Pippa Norris
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith

Poetry 2 (YTD 3)
How to be Invisible: Lyrics, by Kate Bush
The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney

SF 7 (YTD 54)
Godkiller, by Hannah Kaner
Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse (did not finish)
The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean
“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick
The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz (did not finish)
“The Martian Child”, by David Gerrold
Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 20)
The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis
The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford
Caged, by Una McCormack
Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Stephen Wyatt

Comics 2 (YTD 20)
The Malignant Truth, by Si Spurrier et al
L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé

3,700 pages (YTD 38,100) 
8/20 (YTD 71/157) by non-male writers (Jill, Norris, Bush, Kaner, Roanhorse, Dean, Bergin)
2/20 (YTD 23/157) by a non-white writer (Roanhorse, Dean)
4/20 rereads (“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, “The Martian Child”, Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, L’Affaire Tournesol)
299 books currently tagged unread, down 8 from last month, down 61 from July 2023.

Reading now
Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna
Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Coming soon (perhaps)
The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al
Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who: Kerblam!, by Pete McTighe
Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson
The Edge of Destruction, by Simon Guerrier
Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman
Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait
Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis
Comparing Electoral Systems, by David M. Farrell
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato
The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless
The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells
Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo
Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Desdemona and the Deep, by C. S. E. Cooney
“They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete
The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch
South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton
Monica, by Daniel Clowes
Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman
Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

The Emperor Claudius and the eclipse on his 54th birthday

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Thursday this week marks the 2033rd birthday of the Roman Emperor Claudius, who reigned from AD 41 to AD 54. (The calculation is a bit unfamiliar – there is no Year 0; he was born in 10 BC, so his ninth birthday was in 1 BC, his tenth birthday in AD 1, and his 2033rd birthday is 2023 years after his tenth birthday.)

My good friend Professor G has serious doubts that Claudius was actually born on 1 August, 10 BC, but she also makes a good argument as to why he would have wanted to celebrate his birthday on that day. Anyway once he had become Emperor, six months before his 50th birthday, it was too late to change the official narrative.

The historian Cassius Dio records that in the run-up to Claudius’ 54th birthday on 1 August 45 AD, he took the following preventative action:

Since there was to be an eclipse of the sun on his birthday, he feared that there might be some disturbance in consequence, inasmuch as some other portents had already occurred; he therefore issued a proclamation in which he stated not only the fact that there was to be an eclipse, and when, and for how long, but also the reasons for which this was bound to happen.

So, it’s fascinating that a) Claudius thought his birthday was a big deal for his loyal subjects (he may or may not have been correct), and that b) he was completely certain that there would be a solar eclipse on his birthday. The stakes were pretty high – if he had issued a proclamation about an eclipse that didn’t happen, he would have looked really stupid.

What’s really interesting is that Cassius Dio then gives the reason for a solar eclipse, saying that he is quoting Claudius’ decree:

These reasons I will now give. The moon, which revolves in its orbit below the sun (or so it is believed), either directly below it or perhaps with Mercury and Venus intervening, has a longitudinal motion, just as the sun has, and a vertical motion, as the other perhaps likewise has, but it has also a latitudinal motion such as the sun never shows under any conditions.

”Longitudinal motion” means the progress of the Sun and Moon around the ecliptic as their daily and monthly regular apparent movements. “Vertical motion” means varying distance from the earth, and it’s interesting that it’s taken for granted that the Moon’s distance varies but Claudius/Cassius Dio is not as sure about the Sun. And “latitudinal motion” means the Moon’s divergence from the ecliptic due to the inclination of its orbit; since the ecliptic is by definition the Sun’s path, the Sun doesn’t do this.

When, therefore, the moon gets in a direct line with the sun over our heads and passes under its blazing orb, it obscures the rays from that body that extend toward the earth. To some of the earth’s inhabitants this obscuration lasts for a longer and to others for a shorter time, whereas to still others it does not occur for even the briefest moment. For since the sun always has a light of its own. it is never deprived of it; and consequently to all those between whom and the sun the moon does not pass, so as to throw a shadow over it, it always appears entire. This, then, is what happens to the sun, and it was made public by Claudius at that time.

It’s not a bad summary of the mechanisms, and I am inclined to think that Cassius Dio is directly quoting from the imperial proclamation. Claudius, who was a polymath, was au fait with astronomy. Cassius Dio then goes on to explain lunar eclipses, and I find his vocabulary just a bit different, as if he was writing it himself rather than quoting a century-old document. It too is not a bad summary.

But now that I have once touched upon this subject, it may not be out of place to give the explanation of a lunar eclipse also. Whenever, then, the moon is directly opposite the sun (for it is eclipsed only at full moon, just as the sun is eclipsed at the time of new moon) and runs into the cone-shaped shadow of the earth, a thing that happens whenever it passes through the mean point in its latitudinal motion, it is then deprived of the son’s light and appears by itself just as it really is. Such is the explanation of these phenomena.

We tend to forget that the ancient Romans and Greeks had a very good understanding of the movements of the Sun and Moon relative to the earth, but is is well expressed here. and of course people had been predicting eclipses for thousands of years at this stage.

Solar eclipses are more difficult to calculate than lunar eclipses. They do repeat fairly reliably after 18 years, 10 or 11 days (depending on how many leap years are involved) and 7 hours. From a fixed point on the Earth’s surface, such as, for instance, Rome, this means that if you hang around long enough after one eclipse, you’ll see another 54 years and 32 or 33 days later (again depending on the number of leap years in the interim).

As it happens, just a month before Claudius was born, on 30 June, 10 BC, there was a solar eclipse which was nearly total from Rome and most of Europe. If he ever looked up the details of past eclipses (and I’m sure he did) and knew about the 54 years and 32-33 days cycle (and again, I’m sure he did), he’d have been very aware that his 54th birthday was certain to see a repeat eclipse.

Of course, I think it’s also significant that we only know about this from Cassius Dio, who was working from archive documents a century later. My suspicion is that Claudius and Cassius Dio were both much more interested in eclipses than the average inhabitant of the Roman Empire, and that the average provincial governor probably filed Claudius’ proclamation with the latest imperial directive about corn tariffs, so that the mass of the population never heard about it.

But it’s interesting all the same.

Path of the 1 August, AD 45 eclipse from EclipseWise. It is a bit incongruous to see modern (well, pre-2005) political boundaries on the map!
Path of the 28 June, 10 BC eclipse from EclipseWise. (Computers cannot cope with the fact that there is no Year Zero in our calendar, so 10 BC is shown as the year -9.)

Tuesday reading

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Current
Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna
Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Dr.Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Last books finished
Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith
L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé

Next books
The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al
Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Pearlman
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato

The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford

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When The Waters of Mars was first shown, I wrote:

I enjoyed it. I think RTD is rather good at the base-under-siege stories, and Lindsay Duncan, who I don’t think I had seen before, was superb as Adelaide. (Has anyone remarked on the fact that this story was headed by two Scottish actors putting on English accents?)

Many electrons have been distorted in discussion of whether the ending worked in terms of Adelaide, the Doctor, and Time. I was satisfied with Adelaide. She took agency back from the Doctor, even though it meant her own destruction; of course, she did this because she knew what her death would mean, and valued that ahead of her life.

The Doctor has now been without a regular companion since Donna left. (We also have a whole bunch of companionless Tenth Doctor books and audios released this year, for those who are prepared to take their Who outside the TV canon.) Donna told him at their first meeting that he needs someone to tell him when to stop, and that latent part of his character was made manifest in the climax of The Waters of Mars. It’s a dramatic twist to show us a flawed hero – still recognisably the same person, but seen by us (and himself) in a different way.

It topped the nominations for the 2010 Hugo in the BDPSF category by a very wide margin, and went on to win the award though in a tighter vote.

I enjoyed rewatching it as well. There aren’t all that many Doctor Who stories about space exploration, which is odd when you think about it. And I’m not always keen on the stories which show the Doctor as a flawed hero, but sometimes it works better than others, and I think this is one of those times.

Phil Ford has now written a novelisation of his own script – he had previously done the same for one of his Sarah Jane Adventures stories, and I complained then that it was not comfortably done, but I liked his Torchwood stuff (see here and here). That SJA novelisation was seventeen years ago, and he’s clearly got a lot more writing experience under his belt since then. The Waters of Mars is one of the better recent novelisations. The second paragraph of third chapter is:

He said he had been eight years old, and it was a tomato, small but perfectly round and deeply red, that he had plucked from a spindly but leafy tomato plant grown in a pot at the back of his father’s greenhouse. One side of the greenhouse was filled with tall, flourishing plants, their limbs already bowing with the weight of ripening tomatoes. The opposite side was a jungle of cucumber plants, aubergines and potted bushes of red and green chillies.

There’s a lot of juicy extra stuff here that didn’t appear in the TV story, whether because there wasn’t room for it in the original script or whether the author has imagined it more deeply when coming back to the novelisation. The characters on the Mars base are all more fully realised on the page than on the screen, and we get more into the secrets that the astronauts have discovered on planet; while the fundamental plot arc is not reinforced particularly, it isn’t weakened either. So, definitely one to look out for. You can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Democratic Republic of Congo

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See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
The Poisonwood BibleBarbara Kingsolver752,10926,582
Heart of DarknessJoseph Conrad519,31623,867
CongoMichael Crichton172,4488,107
King Leopold’s GhostAdam Hochschild60,8584841
A Bend in the RiverV.S. Naipaul17,8453218
Tintin in the Congo Hergé10,9641333
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken HeartTim Butcher 11,489952
A Burnt-Out CaseGraham Greene5,0491,904

I was surprised by the fact that I had read half of these, though much less surprised that six of the top eight are by white men. Disqualified due to not being sufficiently set in the DR Congo are The Leopard, by Jo Nesbo; The Mission Song, by John le Carré; and The Dream of the Celt, by Mario Vargas Llosa. I was interested that books by two former colleagues, Gerard Prunier and Jason Stearns, were both bubbling under. The top book by an author who is actually from Congo is How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child, by Sandra Uwiringiyimana.

Next up: Vietnam.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea

Pepys Pilgrimage (and a couple of museums, and the Clarke Award)

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I spent the last couple of days in London, mainly with a view to attending the Clarke Award ceremony, but also just to do some tourism in the city. In particular, I wanted to do the self-guided tour of Samuel Pepys’ London, a different way of looking at the city; and this turned out to be a great way to spend the middle of the day on Thursday.

It starts at Samuel Pepys’ birthplace on Salisbury Court, just off Fleet Street – I walked over there after a meeting at Parliament, which took me through the courts area which I don’t think I have previously had reason to explore. Of course, the house where he was born was destroyed in the Great Fire and would not have survived the centuries anyway, but there is a plaque.

It’s very close to the church of St Bride’s, which I had been to once before (I went to see the film Bohemian Rhapsody with the vicar back in 2018). This is where Pepys was baptised, and where his brother was buried; it was also destroyed in the Great Fire and badly damaged in the Blitz, but the German bombing revealed its medieval and Roman foundations which you can see in the crypt.

There are also plenty of memorials to other parishioners apart from Pepys. I found this one particularly moving, because of the eloquence with which it doesn’t say the thing that we all know.

I was intrigued by the use of the word “lobbyist” in this memorial, but in fact is seems to mean that Sir Alfred Robbins was a parliamentary correspondent.

I wandered slowly along the Pepys walking route. I didn’t go into St Paul’s Cathedral, as I had a good look around it in 2014 – but around the corner from St Paul’s, I looked at the mysterious plaque of the Panyer Boy, who frankly looks to me like he is doing a poo on the top of Ludgate Hill, reputedly the highest point in the City.

When ye have sought
the Citty Round
Yet still this is
the highest ground
August the 27
1688

The walk doubles back a bit to Christchurch Greyfriars, which I don’t think I had seen before; badly damaged in the Blitz and not rebuilt, and with a monument to Christ’s Hospital school, where Samuel Pepys helped set up what is now the mathematics department.

There isn’t a particular Pepys connection to the church of St Mary-le-Bow, but the Norman crypt does a really excellent lunch. The Norman arches were an innovation for 11th-century England, and gave their name not only to the church (arch = bow) but also to the Church of England’s judicial arm, the Court of Arches, which still meets there.

It’s a bit of a walk from there to the Monument, which I photographed from both east and west.

The depiction of King Charles II distributing relief to the citizens of London is very silly.

Across the road is a plaque marking the site of the bakery on Pudding Lane where the Fire broke out; though I felt that the Worshipful Company of Bakers could have added some comment like, “Er… sorry!”

Having got there from Westminster on foot, I must say I had a new appreciation of the extent of the Great Fire which devastated London from more or less the Monument to the Temple, a half hour’s brisk walk (I had taken a lot longer over it). I also have a new appreciation of the extent to which Christopher Wren shaped and continues to shape the urban landscape of London. It’s one thing to know the fact that he built over 50 churches in the City, about half of which are still standing; it’s another to wander around the streets and find that there’s another Wren church around almost every corner.

One that Wren didn’t need to touch was All Hallows by the Tower, known to Pepys as Barking Church, protected during the Fire by Sir William Penn who blew up neighbouring buildings to create a firebreak. This was the tower that Pepys climbed on the fourth day of the Great Fire, 5 September 1666, “and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw”. (Though again, the tower was badly damaged in the Blitz and has been reconstructed.) Incidentally this is where John Quincy Adams married Louisa Johnson 131 years later, in 1797.

All Hallows is at the bottom of Seething Lane where Pepys lived and worked; half way up the street there is a lovely memorial garden to him with a bust by Karin Jonzen, which a kind passer-by captured for me.

And at the top of the lane is St Olave’s church, where he worshipped and was buried. I was utterly delighted that I happened to wander in just as the Belarusian pianist Olga Stezhko was starting a performance of Debussy’s Estampes. Not Pepys’ type of music, and yet I think he would have approved.

On the right hand wall is a memorial to Pepys erected in 1883 by his Victorian fans.

But actually the point where you feel closest to Pepys isn’t either of the memorials to him inside or outside St Olave’s; it’s the monument to his wife Elizabeth. They married two weeks before her fifteenth birthday in 1655; their marriage was not always happy, and he had another long relationship after Elizabeth died, but this is how he wanted their love to be remembered. She died of an unspecified fever in 1669, just after they had returned from a holiday in France, where she had grown up. She leans out of the wall, turning her head to look at the gallery (now demolished) where he continued to worship for another third of a century without her, until he in turn died in 1703.

My attempt to translate the Latin epitaph which Samuel wrote for Elizabeth:

Wife of Samuel Pepys (Secretary of the Royal Fleet)
Educated in France, first in a convent, then in a school
She shone in the virtues of both:
Beautiful, accomplished, multilingual
She bore no children, because she could not be equalled
In the end she said farewell peacefully
(Just after a voyage to lovely places in Europe)
She returned, and now she is discovering a better world.

She died on 10 November
in the 29th year of her age
the 15th year of her marriage
the 1669th year of Our Lord.

She was also appreciated by none other than the Third Doctor.

One other thing struck me about the beginning and end of the journey through Pepys’ life. The church where Pepys was baptised is St Bride’s, named for the semi-mythical Irish Saint Brigid of Kildare, one of the patron saints of Ireland; the church where he is buried is St Olave’s, named for the Norwegian king who helped the Saxon dynasty regain London from the Danes in 1014 and is the patron saint of Norway. These are two cults which originated not in England but in neighbouring countries. London has always been defined by its links with the outside world.

This is quite a long enough entry as it is, but I just want to call out two museums that I went to on Wednesday before the Clarke ceremony. Believe it or not, I had never before been to the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (I went to the Pink Floyd retrospective there in 2017). I had no expectations at all, but was blown away by the two Cast Courts, which assemble replicas of great sculptures.

I was particularly delighted to find a copy of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s funeral monument from Fontevrault – I don’t know if I will ever see the real thing.

The other museum I went to was one flagged up to me by the Discovering Tudor London guide, the Museum of the Order of St John at St John’s Gate in Clerkenwell. This tracks the story of the Knights of Malta in their various guises since the 11th century. The Knights are strong on branding.

I also liked the model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which apparently you can take apart to look inside.

Unfortunately I didn’t get organised to join one of the guided tours of the old priory; but there will be a next time.

How to be Invisible, by Kate Bush

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Second verse of third song (“Love and Anger”) as given here:

Take away the love and the anger,
And a little piece of hope holding us together.
Looking for a moment that’ll never happen,
Living in the gap between past and future.
Take away the stone and the timber,
And a little piece of rope won’t hold it together.

I’m not a super-fan of Kate Bush, but I like her music well enough, and what’s interesting about this collection of her lyrics is that it’s very much curated by her – this is not a chronological order from early to modern, it’s a compilation of all of her songs to date (2018) grouped by theme. I enjoyed revisiting some old favourites, but also realised how little I know Bush’s complete œuvre, and there is clearly some good stuff that I have missed out on so far. There’s also a very nice and helpful foreword from David Mitchell (the novelist not the comedian, from context). You can get it here.

This was both the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2018, and the shortest of the unread books acquired in 2018. Next on those piles respectively are Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis, and Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait.

Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece to Life, by Jonathan Bardon

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Wealth and comfort were assured from the moment Jennens was born in 1700 at Gopsall in Leicestershire. At that stage his father was overseeing the production of over 2,000 tons of cast iron a year. The Darbys of Coalbrookdale had discovered the art of smelting ore with coke, but they kept this knowledge to themselves: until the middle of the eighteenth century charcoal was the only fuel that could then produce metal of a quality acceptable to all other ironmasters. Prodigious quantities of wood for charcoal burning were needed to feed the industry now burgeoning in the English west midlands. For a time timber felled in the broadleaved forests of Ireland, shipped across the Irish Sea, had met the requirements of a great many English smelters. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, these forests were no more – heedless exploitation had left Ireland, apart from Iceland, the most treeless country in Europe. Jennens’s father, also called Charles, had been assiduously buying up suitably wooded land still remaining in England and Wales to ensure a steady supply for his business: when he died in 1747, his son inherited 736 acres at Gopsall and no fewer than 33 other properties in 6 different counties.1
1 McCracken, 1971, pp29 and 83-84; Smith, 2012, p.3

Jonathan Bardon (who died of COVID in 2020) was one of the great Irish historians, and this was his last monograph, published in 2015. It is a lovely micro-study of the before, during and after of the evening of 13 April 1742, when Handel’s Messiah was first performed in Dublin at the long-vanished music hall on Fishamble Street

He carefully unpicks the cultural background to the performance, with Dublin, feeling that it was not punching its cultural weight as a city, eager to find openings where it could score over London. He also looks at the stories of the other people involved with the show – librettist Charles Jennens (who submitted it to Handel unsolicited); leading soprano Susannah Cibber, sister of Thomas “Rule Britannia” Arne; and Jonathan Swift, whose grumpy authority over the choristers of St Patrick’s Cathedral almost derailed the entire performance at the last minute.

And he goes into the subsequent history of Messiah, which was actually rather slow to catch on in the English-speaking world. Interestingly it was the Methodists who first picked up on it, and then it became a staple for large-scale musical spectacle starting with a performance in Westminster Abbey in 1784 to commemorate the centenary of Handel’s birth. (He was actually born in 1685, but never mind.)

So, it’s a nice study of a particular cultural event which will tell people who know about Irish history some interesting things about music, and will tell people who know about music history some interesting things about Ireland. Recommended. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next is Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman.

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The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

She had been bored with her cabin on the Newton, which was cramped and utilitarian. She had moved to the ship’s small common lounge until she had become bored with that. Finally she had taken to pacing the ship’s main corridors with a scowl disfiguring her fine features, until it seemed she reached a state of total dissatisfaction with every deckplate and bulkhead door.

Working through my backlog of unblogged Doctor Who novels brings me to this story of the Fifth Doctor, Peri and Kamelion, and a quest narrative with a host of competing quirky teams and a prize at the end that turns out to be more symbolic than valuable. I’ll be honest, I didn’t care for it much; the plot has been done better elsewhere in both Who novels and other media (The Ghost Monument comes to mind), and there were some very annoying typos – “Van Gough” was the one that grated most. The only one of Bulis’ Doctor Who books that I really liked was The Eye of the Giant. But you can get The Ultimate Treasure here.

Next in this sequence: Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks.

Tuesday reading

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Current
Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin

Last books finished
The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford
The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz (did not finish)
The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney
Caged, by Una McCormack
Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective, eds. Lawrence Leduc, Richard G. Niemi, Pippa Norris
Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Stephen Wyatt
“The Martian Child”, by David Gerrold

Next books
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith
Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna
L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé

2024 will now only be the *third* most elderly U.S. presidential election ever

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This is an update of my post from March.

In 2016, the combined ages of the two front-runners in the American presidential election, at 139, was the highest ever – Donald Trump turned 70 a few months before the election, and Hillary Clinton a few months after. That was ten years more than the previous record, Reagan (73) and Mondale (56) in 1984 (total 129). In 2020, the combined ages of the two candidates was 151 – the election was a few months after Donald Trump’s 74th birthday, and very soon before Joe Biden’s 78th.

Kamala Harris has now replaced Joe Biden on the Democrats’ ticket for this year’s election. She turns sixty a few days before the election; Donald Trump turned 78 last month. Their combined total age on election day will be 138, higher than any previous election apart from the last two, and only a notch behind the then record-setting 2016.

Only twice before 2016 had both main candidates been over 60 – the obscure elections of 1848, when Zachary Taylor (63) beat Lewis Cass (64), and 1828 when Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams (both 61). Only three times prior to 2016 had even one candidate been over 70 – in 1984, 1996 and 2008 (all Republicans).

In the list below, I’ve put the 18 elections since 1952 (starting with 1956) in red; the 16 elections before 1852 (ending with 1848) in blue; and the 26 elections from 1852 to 1952 inclusive in green. This year sees the 60th of the quadrennial elections, so I have grouped them in tens.

It’s clear that the middle period saw younger candidates, with those 26 elections supplying 22 of the bottom half of the table, and 4 of the top half – in fact, none of the middle 26 are in the top 30% of the table, and the high-water mark is the comparatively youthful matchup between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden in 1876. Of the seven elections where the top candidates’ combined ages totalled less than a century, the most recent was in 1960 and the second most recent in 1908.

The earlier period was also elderly, with only two elections (one of which was not really competitive) of the first 16 in the lower half. And all six elections since 2000, and all but two of the twelve elections starting with 1980 (in darker red), including 2024, are in the oldest third of the table.

2020 Biden (77) + Trump (74) = 151
2016 Trump (70) + HR Clinton (69) = 139
2024 Trump (78) + Harris (60) = 138
1984 Reagan (73) + Mondale (56) = 129
1848 Taylor (63) + Cass (64) = 127
1980 Reagan (69) + Carter (56) = 125
1840 WH Harrison (67) + Van Buren (57) = 124
1996 WJ Clinton (50) + Dole (73) = 123
1956 Eisenhower (66) + Stevenson (56) = 122
1828 Jackson (61) + JQ Adams (61) = 122

1800 Jefferson (57) + J Adams (65) = 122
1832 Jackson (65) + Clay (55) =120
2008 Obama (47) + McCain (72) = 119
1988 GHW Bush (64) + Dukakis (55) = 119
1816 Monroe (58) + King (61) = 119
1808 Madison (57) + Pinckney (62) = 119
1804 Jefferson (61) + Pinckney (58) = 119
2004 GW Bush (58) + Kerry (60) = 118
1792 Washington (60) + J Adams (57) = 117 – more of an acclamation than an election
2012 Obama (51) + Romney (65) = 116

1876 Hayes (54) + Tilden (62) = 116
1844 Polk (49) + Clay (67) = 116
1836 Van Buren (53) + WH Harrison (63) = 116
1976 Carter (52) + Ford (63) = 115
1820 Monroe (62) + JQ Adams (53) = 115 – more of an acclamation than an election
1992 WJ Clinton (46) + GHW Bush (68) = 114
1952 Eisenhower (62) + Stevenson (52) = 114
1892 Cleveland (55) + B Harrison (59) = 114
1824 JQ Adams (57) + Jackson (57) = 114
1796 J Adams (61) + Jefferson (53) = 114

1916 Wilson (59) + Hughes (54) = 113
1852 Pierce (47) + Scott (66) = 113
1968 Nixon (55) + Humphrey (57) = 112
1964 Johnson (56) + Goldwater (55) = 111
1872 Grant (50) + Greeley (61) = 111
1948 Truman (64) + Dewey (46) = 110
1972 Nixon (59) + McGovern (50) = 109
1912 Wilson (55) + T Roosevelt (54) = 109
1856 Buchanan (65) + Frémont (43) = 109
1788 Washington (56) + J Adams (53) = 109 – more of an acclamation than an election

1932 FD Roosevelt (50) + Hoover (58) = 108
1928 Hoover (54) + Smith (54) = 108
2000 GW Bush (54) + Gore (52) = 106
1940 FD Roosevelt (58) + Wilkie (48) = 106
1888 B Harrison (55) + Cleveland (51) = 106
1920 Harding (55) + Cox (50) = 105
1884 Cleveland (47) + Blaine (58) = 105
1944 FD Roosevelt (62) + Dewey (42) = 104
1880 Garfield (48) + Hancock (56) = 104
1868 Grant (46) + Seymour (58) = 104

1812 Madison (61) + DW Clinton (43) = 104
1936 FD Roosevelt (54) + Landon (49) = 103
1924 Coolidge (52) + Davis (51) = 103
1908 Taft (51) + Bryan (48) = 99
1904 T Roosevelt (46) + Parker (52) = 98
1900 McKinley (57) + Bryan (40) = 97
1864 Lincoln (55) + McClellan (37) = 92
1860 Lincoln (51) + Breckinridge (39) = 90
1960 Kennedy (42) + Nixon (47) = 89
1896 McKinley (53) + Bryan (36) = 89

Note on methodology: I’ve taken candidates’ ages in whole calendar years on election day. (Which for Warren Harding was his 55th birthday, for all the good it did him.) In 1800 I count Adams (65) not Burr (44) as runner-up since that’s who voters thought they were choosing between in November. For 1872 I’ve counted Greeley (61) as losing candidate even though he died shortly after the election. I have not counted third or lower placed candidates at all (thus excluding incumbent President Taft in 1912, when he was 55, a year older than Theodore Roosevelt and ten months younger than Woodrow Wilson).

Incidentally the older candidate has won 34 times, and the younger 25 times. But those 34 include three elections which were really acclamations (1788, 1792 and 1820) so the fact that the Adamses were younger than Washington or Monroe doesn’t really matter (indeed, there are good grounds for excluding those elections from my list entirely). The most recent period shows a shift of fortune toward (relative) youth; of the 18 most recent elections, the younger candidate has won nine and the older also nine; the younger candidate has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections (but lost twice in the electoral college).

The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Some humans had sexual fantasies in their nightly visions, or nightmares about going to job interviews naked. Her dream was neither, though it had elements of both.

Hugo voting has closed now, and anyway this wasn’t directly a finalist though it was in the Voter Pack as supporting material for the author’s presence on the Astounding Award ballot. I hugely enjoyed it – a story of a vampiric race in today’s Britain, who survive by eating books and brains, and where one plucky young woman plans to overturn the whole order of her repressive society and get to grips with the outside world. Tremendous internal politics and imagination. Great stuff. You can get it here.

Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Someone lifted Serapio’s head, and liquid touched his lips.

In personal news, I am taking six weeks off work, starting today, a kind of mini-sabbatical (I’ve been at my current job for almost exactly ten years) and one of my resolutions is to spend less effort on books that don’t manage to grab me in the first 100 pages or so. This is one of those books, sadly; a perfectly decent fantasy novel, middle book of a trilogy, world based on pre-1492 Americas, but the setting and characters just didn’t quite engage me enough to keep reading. One of the books that I had put aside from last year’s Clarke submissions list because it clearly wasn’t science fiction but also clearly wasn’t bad. But it just wasn’t for me. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo.

The best known books set in each country: Egypt

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See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in Egypt.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
Death on the NileAgatha Christie265,6929,033
Cleopatra: A LifeStacy Schiff 118,0054,427
Crocodile on the Sandbank Elizabeth Peters74,9544,623
Mummies in the MorningMary Pope Osborne23,3499,152
River GodWilbur Smith41,1533,208
NefertitiMichelle Moran 39,3231,882
The Curse of the PharaohsElizabeth Peters24,5422,753
Palace WalkNaguib Mahfouz20,2662,822

Egypt has obviously been a source of fascination to Western writers for centuries, though not always in a good way. Death on the Nile is entirely set in Egypt, but not a single Egyptian character is actually named. Elizabeth Peters has done well out of our collective obsession with the country. At least an actual Egyptian writer makes the top eight, with Palace Walk, by Nobel laureate Mahfouz.

Disqualified because less than half of the book is set in Egypt: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (which I hated); The Red Pyramid and The Throne of Fire, by Rick Riordan; The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty (which I loved); and The Egypt Game, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder.

Next up: the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea

Getting down to business at the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting

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The agenda for this year’s WSFS Business Meeting, to take place next month at Worldcon in Glasgow, has been published. It is probably the longest on record. It has been an immense amount of work for the dedicated Business Meeting team to pull together, especially considering the problems that a couple of proposed resolutions raised with regards to local law.

Often I publish my own commentary on the entire order of business once it is available. I may yet do so this year, but here are my preliminary thoughts. I should emphasise that I’m not really involved with the organisation and administration of the Business Meeting, despite my other roles, apart from lubricating its links with other parts of the convention; inside the room, I am just one more voter.

If I am in the room, I will probably vote against even starting to discuss any new business which is not directly related to sorting out the deficiencies in the system made apparent in Chengdu. I say this with some regret. There are a couple of things that I would have liked to propose myself in a quieter year: changing the ridiculous Mark Protection Committee election system, for instance. Or sorting out the Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist categories, which has long been a bugbear of mine. But this year needs to be a reckoning for what went wrong and for the damage done to the Hugos and to the community.

To be really specific about a couple of things: there are two separate proposals regarding the Retro Hugos, one to abolish them entirely, one shifting them to a ten-yearly timetable. I don’t especially like the Retro Hugos myself, and will advise against and vote against running them in any Worldcon that I may be involved with in future. But whatever else may have been problematic with Chengdu, the Retro Hugos were not part of the problem, and this debate should be deferred to a less busy and fraught year.

The same goes for the proposal to institute a popular vote of WSFS members on constitutional amendments. Again, the cumbersome mode of WSFS constitutional amendment is a problem for WSFS and Worldcons, but was not part of what went wrong at Chengdu, so it can wait. My preferred option would be to kick the ‘popular ratification’ question to a specific subcommittee tasked with putting together a proposal for next year’s Business Meeting in Seattle. I’d be happy to serve on such a subcommittee.

There is a more specific reason to defer discussion of this idea, which is that we at Glasgow 2024 are actually trying it out this year, as a consultative process, in the couple of weeks between the close of Hugo voting (today) and the opening of the convention. Our experiment and the currently proposed amendment differ from each other on a number of points (notably, the time frame of the ballot, but there are other issues too). I am sure that there will be important learnings from this year’s experiment, and I am equally sure that we will not have time to write them up in detail in time for this year’s Business Meeting to consider; and hashing out the details should be bumped to a committee.

I don’t think that every single one of the Chengdu-related resolutions and constitutional amendments is good or needed. (One that I feel is not needed, for instance – the creation of yet more standing committees to oversee the software and the administration.) But I do think that they need to be the focus of the Business Meeting this year. The one that I feel most strongly about is the Standing Orders change proposed by Jesi Lipp, to repeal Rule 7.9 which prohibits virtual participation in the Business Meeting. Rule 7.9 was sneaked through last year in my absence on the first day of the Chengdu Business Meeting, and my attempt to reverse it on the following day failed by 6 votes to 4. (I regret losing my temper during that debate.) The Business Meeting needs to move with the times and open up to all of our membership.

Finally on a totally different point – obviously as well as cleaning up after Chengdu, the Business Meeting still also needs to look at eligibility extensions for films that were not widely distributed in 2023, and in general I am inclined to generosity in these cases; but I don’t think this generosity applies to either The Boy and the Heron or Godzilla Minus One, both of which had theatrical releases in the USA in early December 2023 and should therefore have had a fair chance at the nominations stage. I will vote against eligibility extensions for them, if I am in the room.