I truly do believe no maiden that will live To look upon the brilliance of the sun Ever will be contemplative Like this one.
‘I truly do believe no maiden that will live’ may simply mean: I think no girl will ever be as sophos (clever) as this one.’ However, ‘To look upon the sun’ (a stock epic and tragic phrase meaning simply ‘to live’) raises the register, and the lines may express admiration for a girl who has already come to appreciate all that the sun symbolizes in the preceding poem. The sun here contains, in the abstract, qualities of shiny luxury items – glitter and glamour.
Translated poetry is always a bit problematic; you just can’t get the nuances exactly as intended by the original writer – especially when the original writer wrote in a dead language more than two and a half thousand years ago, and most of her known poetry survives only in fragments. But Poochigan seems to me to have made a good effort here. I’m not familiar enough with other translations to make a firm judgement, but I also appreciate his explanatory notes for each poem.
Most of the fragments are short, and have been preserved because of a single arresting image or turn of phrase. A couple of the longer ones jumped out at me. There’s an intense moment of jealousy (pp 22-23 here) when she sees the girl she likes talking to (?flirting with?) a man, and her heart throbs and her tongue “shatters”. The next poem (pp 24-25) is a break-up story, of the last conversation with your lover when you both realise it is over. The langauge is ancient but the sentiments are eternal.
The (very short) book ends with two poems which were very recently discovered on scraps of papyri, one about Sappho’s brother not yet having returned from a sea voyage, one a brief entreaty to Aphrodite about love. Poochigan does not mention it, because the scandal had not yet broken, but both of these passed through the hands of the notorious Dirk Obbink, so their provenance is very murky indeed; on the other hand, scholars do seem united in believing that these are genuine Sappho texts. It is awful and shameful that Obbink muddied the waters so much, both in this case and in the more notorious cases of the New Testament manuscripts.
Second paragraph of third chapter (director Kevin Davies’ retrospective on the making of 30 Years in the TARDIS):
I had been entranced by Dr. Who and the Daleks since I was very young. I can remember cowering behind my father as a big red Dalek glided through Selfridges when we went to see the movie exhibition in 1965. The opening scene of the documentary shows the young boy looking up at one in awe, just as I did all those years ago. I was a skinny little lad, and as she watched it my mother spotted the reference immediately, assuming that I must have cast Josh Maguire because he looked so much like the younger me. Maybe I did, subconsciously. The whole project had been very dear to my heart right from the start…
I hadn’t been aware of the existence of this annual-sized publication to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Doctor Who (which then came out a bit late). But it’s a nice piece of work, with very short stories featuring all of the first seven Doctors by Mark Gatiss, Justin Richards, Gareth Roberts (yeah, I know, but this was 1994), Daniel Blythe, Steve Lyons, Simon Messingham and Andy Lane, with comic strips by Paul Cornell and Warwick Gray (now Scott Gray), when all of them were at or near the beginning of their Whovian writing careers. There are also personal reflections from Nicholas Courtney, Sophie Aldred and director Kevin Davies. It’s a great little package, and better than some of the more recent annuals. You can get the 1995 Doctor Who Yearbook here.
The Windup Girl won the Nebula for Best Novel in 2010, and was the joint winner of the Hugo for Best Novel along with The City & the City, by China Miéville. It also topped the Hugo nominations ballot.
This is the only tied result for the winner of any category for the regular Hugos since 1993. (In the forty years before that, there were eleven ties, including one for the then Campbell Award; but voter participation was much lower.) We also had a tie for the Retro Hugos in 2020; I remember vividly spotting it as I went through the results while driving through France (I was not at the wheel).
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Windup Girl is:
And then she wonders if she has it backwards, if the part that struggles to maintain her illusions of self-respect is the part intent upon her destruction. If her body, this collection of cells and manipulated DNA—with its own stronger, more practical needs—is actually the survivor: the one with will.
When I first read it, shortly after it won the Nebula, I wrote:
Emiko, the girl of the title, is an artificial human being of a near-future world ravaged by agricultural disaster, created as an escort for a Japanese businessman and abandoned by him in Thailand. She, like all her kind, is easily identifiable by her jerky body movements, and is subject to instant destruction at the whim of the law (not to mention the risks of metabolic overheating). Her personal dilemma, trading her body for self-preservation, intersects with a political and environmental crisis in Thailand, with fairly catastrophic consequences. It is a fast-paced book which beat out Miéville’s The City & The City for the Nebula, and I’ll find it difficult to choose; while Bacigalupi’s vision is less audacious, he carries it off rather more consistently. Some nasty sex and violence so not for all readers.
In the end, my thinking was matured by reading several feminist critiques of The Windup Girl, and I put it third on my ballot, behind both The City & the City and Palimpsest by Cat Valente (so mine was one of the 24 votes that transferred from Valente to Miéville on the third round). I also put it second last on my BSFA ballot the following year.
Rereading it now, I have to be honest, I really didn’t like it. The lushly imagined Thailand is rather Orientalist, and the protagonist is not just a whore with a heart of gold, she’s a robot whore with a heart of gold. (To be crystal clear: my objection is not to sex work, but to clichés.) There is a lot of sexual violence which doesn’t advance the story at all. Maybe it was just my jet lag in California, but I also found the plot difficult to follow. I’m dropping my opinion of it from mediocre to actively bad, as has happened occasionally in this sequence of reading.
Incidentally I have also found that it is the best-known book set in Thailand, as measured by LibraryThing. (The Beach by Alex Garland has a lead on Goodreads.)
That year, the Hugo for Best Novella went to “Palimpsest”, by Charles Stross; for Best Novelette to “The Island”, by Peter Watts; and for Short Story to “Bridesicle”, by Will McIntosh. This was the last time (so far) that the four traditional fiction Hugo categories were all won by white men.
The Nebula for Best Novella went to The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, by Kage Baker; for Best Novelette to “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast”, by Eugie Foster; and for Short Story to “Spar”, by Kij Johnson.
The following year, the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel both went to Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, but I am going to skip it as I wasted far too much time on reading it the first time round. That means that the next post in this sequence will be about Ken Liu’s short story “The Paper Menagerie”, Kij Johnson’s novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, and Jo Walton’s novel Among Others.
It was when he shifted his sight into the Dusklands that it became something else. A dolmen mound. A monumental structure, silvery and solid yet alive… set there by the Ancients, a crossing point between this world and the Underworld.
This is a massive book that kept me going all through my trip to Gallifrey (though in fact I had very little time for reading when on the ground there, it was more for the plane flights). It’s a fantasy of a contemporary England where our protagonists are two generations of two families of Aetherials, who come from the otherworld of Faerie, to which however the path is barred. It’s a bit of an Aga saga, but with magic and demons. I got very drawn into the family dynamics, though I groaned at one (early) revelation in particular. Lots of sex and drama, and agonized psychological traumas manifesting as politics in the human world. I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy it, but I did. You can get Elfland here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (another Eastercon purchase). The next on those piles respectively are The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres, and Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson.
Last week I got sucked into an internet slapfight on the naming of a science fiction award. This was sparked by the news on File 770 that at last weekend’s DeepSouthCon, the Phoenix Award, for the professional (writer, editor or artist) who has done the most for Southern Fandom, and the Rebel Award, for the fan who has done the most for Southern Fandom, were both presented. (Photo from ceremony on Facebook)
The name of the latter award jumped out at me. It’s kind of difficult to see the word ‘Rebel’ being used for a celebration relating to those who live in the former Confederacy, and not draw the obvious conclusion. I therefore asked,
The Rebel Award presumably commemorates the defenders of slavery?
This provoked a defensive and vituperative set of responses, mainly from a former winner of the Rebel Award, which really failed to convince me (and other commenters) that the name of the award was intended to have any other meaning than commemorating the defenders of slavery. (Although the case for changing its name was none the less conceded as having been made.)
During the discussion, my attention was drawn to a flier for DeepSouthCon III, held in the centenary year of 1965, where the Rebel Award was presented for the first time. The flier informs us that:
Any of the Trufen wishing to pay in Confederate money should apply to the Chairman for conversion rates between real money and that of the USA.
Ha ha, very funny.
Here is the membership badge for that DeepSouthCon III in 1965 (which by the way had only 19 attendees, so numbering the badges up to 74 was optimistic):
I think it is fair to say that there is a pictorial element of this badge which weakens the assertion that no reference to the defenders of slavery was intended, and I said so, provoking another vituperative response:
…even as late as the mid-1980s that flag was a key design feature of the paint scheme of the General Lee, the automobile that was an iconic image of the popular CBS prime time television show The Dukes of Hazard. It was after that when the flag became hijacked by racist white supremicists as their totem.
If it was only afterThe Dukes of Hazzard that the flag was hijacked by racist white supremacists, who was using it between 1861-1865? (Actually a question with a slightly more complex answer than might first appear, but not by very much.) And let’s not forget the Dixiecrats who won four states in the 1948 presidential election on an explicitly racist white supremacist platform, under this flag – and held their founding convention in Birmingham, Alabama, just seventeen years before DeepSouthCon III.
And as for The Dukes of Hazzard themselves, hmm, what was the name of that car again? General who? What was he fighting for, and in which army?
You can’t feature the flag of Dixie and not be about the South and race, like it or not, even if only by passively feeding into the argument that the flag is only about family pride, good ol’ boys and good ol’ times.
Anyways, here’s my thoughts on the Rebel award name. I think it is clear that the name is meant to reference Confederate iconography. It’s paired with the Phoenix award, which is another common Confederate symbol. It was adopted during the centenary of the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement when southern states started really leaning into the Lost Cause as a reaction to the gains made by blacks. I cannot claim to know the hearts and minds of the people who made these decisions more than a decade before I was born. But I think it’s unavoidable that this was an influence on their thinking. It may have meant pride in their heritage to them. But Confederate iconography and Lost Cause propaganda is harmful and has always been, even if not everyone realizes that.
I appreciate her honesty about what the name of the award clearly meant and means, and actually I did not expect to see the question extended to the Phoenix Award as well. It’s easy to see how the iconography of the phoenix could tie into the narrative of the Lost Cause, but I found it surprisingly difficult to identify real-world examples of this (internet searches kept bringing me instead to the handful of Confederate monuments near Phoenix, Arizona). However, I’m also certain that the Southern Fandom Confederation has done more research on this question than I have, so I will take their word for it.
I wish the Administrator and her colleagues well in the search for new and more acceptable names for the awards. For the other participants in the debate, perhaps a reminder that “Shut up, you fugghead!” isn’t the clincher argument that some of you seem to think it is. There are actually some interesting things to be said about how the Rebel Award came into existence, but you chose not to make those points, and I’m not going to make them here either.
See here for methodology (though NB I am now also taking Storygraph into account, as well as LibraryThing and goodreads). Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Papua New Guinea.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
This was one of the most fiendishly difficult of these lists to produce, because there are a lot of books set in western half of New Guinea, now part of Indonesia but formerly ruled by the Dutch, and to make matters more complicated the Indonesian part is also known as Papua (the names of the Indonesian provinces are Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua, South Papua, Southwest Papua and West Papua).
Tell me if I have got any wrong, but I have done my best to keep to books which are set in the borders of what is now the state of Papua New Guinea, formerly ruled by Australia, Britain and Germany. This includes the troubled autonomous island of Bougainville, which despite a strong independence movement remains under Papua New Guinean sovereignty. One helpful point that I had not previously realised is that the majority of the WW2 fighting in New Guinea took place in the eastern half, so in general, books about those campaigns qualify by my criteria.
No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison
Behrouz Boochani
9,095
495
1,274
Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas
Christian Kracht
4,412
384
516
Kokoda
Peter FitzSimons
1,922
315
92
A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea
Don Kulick
1,049
132
211
The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea–The Forgotten War of the South Pacific
James Campbell
1,327
290
57
The White Mary
Kira Salak
997
268
79
This week’s winner, Euphoria, is a novel about three anthropologists carrying out research in New Guinea in 1933, very much based on the real life of Margaret Mead. Anthropology pops up a lot in books about both parts of New Guinea.
This week’s LibraryThing winner, Mister Pip, is a novel about a schoolteacher and his class caught up in the conflict in Bougainville. I read it a few years ago and was very moved.
No Friend but the Mountains is an autobiographical account of being imprisoned in an Australian immigration detention camp on Manus Island, one of the off-shore islands of Papua New Guinea.
Imperium is based on the true story of August Engelhardt, who founded a German colony based on the principles of nudity and eating coconuts in the part of New Guinea under German rule at the start of the twentieth century.
Kokoda and The Ghost Mountain Boys are both about the Second World War fighting, the former about the Australians and the latter about the Americans, in both cases trying to secure safe routes across the island.
A Death in the Rainforest is an anthropologist’s account of the disappearance of a language and a culture in Papua New Guinea. The country is estimated to have over 800 languages, 12% of the world’s total, and this diversity is fragile. (This book’s relatively high Storygraph rating bumped another anthropology book, Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums and Penis Gourds, by Tim Flannery, off the list.
The White Mary is about a journalist who goes in search of her missing mentor in the jungle and Learns Things. It starts in America but as far as I can tell, most of it is set in Papua New Guinea.
All of the above are about and by foreigners. Papuan writers are few and far between. The top book I found by a Papua New Guinea-born writer is The Shark Caller by Zillah Bethell, but her family background seems to be British. The top book by a writer who was born and still lives in the country is Maiba, a Papuan Novel, by Russell Soaba. The top writing by Papua New Guinean women (if we don’t count Bethell) is My Walk to Equality: Essays, Stories and Poetry by Papua New Guinean Women, edited by Rashmii Amoah Bell.
The top book that I excluded because it is mainly set in the western half of the island (then Netherlands New Guinea, now Indonesia) is Lost in Shangri-la: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II, by Mitchell Zuckoff. It would have ranked below Imperium but ahead of Kokoda.
We have a run of European countries coming now: Sweden, Czechia, Azerbaijan and Portugal; indeed nine of the next twelve countries are European. I might pause for breath when we get to Switzerland, which is the
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 12) The Ark, by Philip Purser-Hallard Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown, by Rory Carroll Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill The Recollections: Fragments from a Life in Writing, by Christopher Priest Britain’s Other D-Day: The Politics of Decimalisation, by Andy Cook Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore
Non-genre 5 (YTD 11) Cards on the Table, by Agatha Christie Country Christie, by Agatha Christie The Big Wave, by Pearl S. Buck Pavilion of Women, by Pearl S. Buck Appointment With Death, by Agatha Christie
Poetry 1 (YTD 1) Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments, by Sappho, translated and edited by Aaron Poochigan
SF 8 (YTD 15) Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Dead Take the A Train, by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey (did not finish) Elfland, by Freda Warrington The Doors of Midnight, by R.R. Virdi (did not finish) Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett Serbian Folk Tales, ed. Jake Jackson
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 15) The Penumbra Affair, by Paul Magrs (audiobook) Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters Whodle: a Whodunit Adventure Through Time and Space, by Tim Dedopulos, Roland Hall and Dave Knowles (did not finish) Doctor Who: The Ark, by Paul Erickson The Doctor Who Yearbook 1995, eds Gary Russell and Peri Goodbold
~6,900 pages (YTD 16,000) (counting 100 for the audiobook) 10/26 (YTD 23/59) by women (Moore, 3x Christie, 2x Buck, Sappho, Khaw, Warrington, Goodbold) 2/26 (YTD 4/59) by writers of colour (Khaw and Virdi) 5/26 reread (The Big Wave, Red Planet, The Fifth Elephant, Reckless Engineering, Doctor Who: The Ark)
195 books currently tagged unread, up 11 from last month (thanks to Gallifrey One), down 38 from February 2025.
Reading now The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
Coming soon (perhaps) Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al Last Resort, by Paul Leonard The Tribe of Gum, by Anthony Coburn
De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel
A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu Drome, by Jesse Lonergan Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai Enchanted April, by Elizabeth Von Arnim Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral Sourire 58, by Baudouin Deville et al Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton Slow Horses, by Mick Herron Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
The BBC released a series of short audiobooks in 2021-22, each taking a companion or companions from the classic series and imagining what happened after their time with the Doctor ended. The first of these is The Kairos Ring, by Stephen Gallagher, bringing Romana and the Tharils to the American Civil War, and I had read it as part of the expanded Warrior’s Gate novelisation, though you can get it separately here. The next four are a connected set of stories by Paul Magrs, and I listened to them several weeks ago with the intention of writing them up in time for Gallifrey (but did not have time).
We start with Bessie Come Home, narrated by Stephanie Cole as Bessie. She is best known (by me anyway) as co-star with Graham Crowden in the sit-com Waiting for God. (Playing a pensioner, she turned 50 while that series was being made.) It’s a nice idea to give a voice to Bessie, the yellow Edwardian car acquired by the Third Doctor and driven also by the Fourth and Seventh Doctors, and the story is an amusing recapitulation of the adventures that Bessie participated in, a real nostalgia fest. The ending has a twist that I was not really sure about; the majority of reviewers felt that it capped the story nicely, but I found it a bit contrived. (I know, I know, an odd complaint to make of a story about a sentient car…)
I felt the sequence getting a little more into its stride with London, 1965, which tells the story of Ian and Barbara returning to London after two years away. It is read by Jamie Glover, who has been playing Ian Chesterton in recent Big Finish plays (and played William Russell in An Adventure in Space and Time). Rather than floating into a fairytale ending, the two former time travellers find it very difficult to readjust to life in London and become distant from each other; Ian is sucked into writing a science fiction show by the mysterious Mr Harman, while Barbara becomes a subject of the psychic researches of the enigmatic Angela Leaman. There are lots of knowing nods to Who continuity and to Sixties culture. I felt that this was the best of the four, and the story is sufficiently independent that you could enjoy it on its own.
Sleeper Agents takes us to and beyond the other end of the First Doctor’s era, with Ben and Polly returning to London on the day that they left. This time the narrator is Anneke Wills, the only one of the four to have actually been on TV Who, reprising her role as Polly. Again we have Mr Harman and Miss Leaman, and a good role for Polly’s pet cat, and a mysterious Arctic Island; but it’s a bit of a middle story in the arc, with the ending leaving some plot strands to be resolved.
Finally, The Penumbra Affair brings back Susan Jameson as Mrs Wibbsey, the Fourth Doctor’s housekeeper in the Nest Cottage series of BBC audios written a decade earlier by Paul Magrs, featuring Tom Baker before he decided to work with Big Finish. Mrs Wibbsey receives a letter warning that all of the Doctor’s former companions are in danger, and falls into correspondence with Polly Wright, now retired, who ends up on her doorstep for Christmas. The Nest Cottage setting is beautifully realised, and there’s a good twist on exactly how Angela Leamann fits into the story. It wouldn’t make much sense to listeners who are not familiar with both the previous three stories, and the Nest Cottage series, but in that context it works perfectly well. It’s a shame that Susan Jameson has never been in TV Who.
Last books finished Britain’s Other D-Day: The Politics of Decimalisation, by Andy Cook Pavilion of Women, by Pearl S. Buck The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore Serbian Folk Tales, ed. Jake Jackson
Next books Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek (if I can find it) A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske
Tyler Banks was Thorne & Dirk’s head of Client Excisions, meaning he made problems disappear. Cut them entirely out of existence when necessary. However, he didn’t like getting his hands dirty with the seriously dangerous jobs. That’s what Julie was for— but she was the last thing on his mind as he stepped into the room.
Urban fantasy with our magically empowered heroine dealing with demonic intrusions and her own disastrous love life. I did not get very far because the horror scenes were gruesomely anatomical, and there is only so much of that that I can read. You can get The Dead Take the A Train here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2024. Next on that pile is A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske, of which I have higher hopes.
“Who plays bridge?” asked Mr. Shaitana. “Mrs. Lorrimer, I know. And Doctor Roberts. Do you play, Miss Meredith?”
A mid-period Christie, in which the murder is carried out during a bridge game, in the presence of Hercule Poirot and three of Christie’s other regular characters. Since we know none of them can have done it (spoiler: indeed, none of them is the murderer), suspicion turns to the four bridge players, who are characterised in detail to help us pick and choose the potential baddie. The plot is a little improbable, as each of the suspects has their own history of causing death; did they do it again? And solving the mystery involves several more deaths. But it’s classic Christie, and it’s no harm for Poirot to be forced to share the stage with some of her other characters (including Colonel Race, previously seen in The Man in the Brown Suit). You can get Cards on the Table here.
She pointedly ignored the ungracious hail, sitting out in the slanted morning sun with her folding desk, working on her triple-entry accounting. The first entry to calculate, the second to check the calculations and the third, on a separate piece of paper, to include all the errant entries that she wouldn’t be reporting to anyone but still felt the obscure need to keep track of.
This is the second in the Tyrant Philosophers series which started with City of Last Chances. Our protagonist, a survivor from the previous book, is conscripted into a military field hospital where with the help of his personal god, he is able to heal the wounded – provided that they then refrain from violence, a riff also from Forever Peace. There’s a complex cast of characters and a varied political and geographical landscape of war; there’s plenty of plot to keep you interested, but it’s still a very long book! I hugely admire Tchaikovsky’s industry and talent, but I would love it if he could write at shorter length too…
Second clue from third puzzle (“The War Machines”):
Dodo believes that the attack will come at sunset, while Ben thinks it will be six hours later, give or take.
I didn’t finish reading this yet, but I think it will be a nice distraction in idle hours (such as they are): a set of 61 logic puzzles, of the type that I loved when I was eleven or twelve, each based around a classic or modern Doctor Who story. I did the first two and found that they had pleasing subtleties. Here’s the grid from “The War Machines” to give you an idea of what it’s about:
See here for methodology, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Tajikistan.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Neanderthal
John Darnton
3,104
1,141
198
Hurramabad
Andrei Volos
88
39
11
A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East
Richard C. Foltz
39
17
8
The Disobedient Wife
Annika Milisic-Stanley
101
5
10
Huit monologues de femmes [8 монологов женщины] [Eight Women’s Monologues]
Barzou Abdourazzoqov
39
8
12
Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan
Artemy M. Kalinovsky
30
11
6
The City Where Dreams Come True
Gulsifat Shakhidi
42
3
11
The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic
Paul Bergne
30
15
3
Poor Tajikistan! Most of the books that I found with that tag on LT and GR are about Central Asia in general, and Tajikistan is always the last of the five republics that people write about – more difficult to get to, very different language to the other four, devastated in the war of the 1990s which the rest of the world has forgotten.
The top book here (by a long way), Neanderthal by John Darnton, is actually a novel about discovering two lost tribes of Neanderthals in the mountains of Tajikistan. The Neanderthals have psychic powers, and one tribe is peaceful while the other is aggressive. It sounds like rubbish to be honest.
Hurramabad, this week’s runner-up, is about the Russian minority in Tajikistan after independence. Its author, Andrei Volos is an ethnic Russian from Tajikistan. The Disobedient Wife is about an expat western woman in Dushanbe and her maid.
The City Where Dreams Come True is about the civil war of the 1990s and its impact; Gulsifat Shakhidi is the top Tajik woman writer on my list. It made the list thanks to a better Storygraph rating, bumping Uncertain Light by South African writer Marion Molteno off the end.
I put a slight question mark against Huit monologues de femmes [Eight Women’s Monologues], which has not been translated into English (and I also could not find much by searching on its original title, 8 монологов женщины). One summary that I have seen says that it is set on the border with Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. However Barzu Abdurazzoqov is a Tajik writer (mainly for the theatre) so I’m assuming that the monologues are set on the Tajik side of the Uzbek and Afghan borders with his country.
A History of the Tajiks, Laboratory of Social Development and The Birth of Tajikistan are all self-explanatory. (I say that, and then someone will write to me to say that at least one of them is really a great work of post-Soviet magical realism.)
I disqualified, though again with question marks, two books about great Tajik cultural figures, because both seemed to me to be more set in Uzbekistan than Tajikistan. These were the autobiographical The Sands of Oxus, by Sadriddin Ayni, who spent much of his youth in Bokhara, and Возвращение в Панджруд [Return to Panjrud], by Andrei Volos, which is about the poet Rudaki; although his eponymous home, Rudak, is in Tajikistan, his career peaked under the Samanids who were based further west.
This was unusually enlightening and humbling – it turned out that I know much less about Tajikistan than I thought.
Next up is Papua New Guinea; then we’re into a run of European states, with Sweden, Czechia and Azerbaijan.
My regular reader knows that I am fascinated by the seventeenth century stucco artist Jan Christiaan Hansche, a dozen of whose fantastic three-dimensional ceilings survive. I first encountered his work in the summer of 2021, and since then have tracked down almost all of what is left of it. Some of his best sculpture is preserved at Park Abbey near Leuven. This is their own (very short) promotional video.
A major exhibition opened last weekend at the Park Abbey, and of course I went to have a look for myself. There are displays about how he actually built the ceilings, with his apprentices, and talking heads explaining his difficulties with the guilds in Brussels. There are original invoices with his actual ink signature, an interesting contrast with the signature he puts in his ceilings.
“Jan Christiaen Han… / Kalcksnijder”
Here’s my own humble attempt to convey the scale of the refectory, with its magnificent Last Supper.
To my delight, I found out about several Hansche works I had not known about. In the Abbey itself, the vestibule at the end of the museum gallery – a room I have stood in half a dozen or a dozen times before, without noticing the ceiling – has a fine Assumption.
And on display in the cloister is a panel from the demolished Canfyn House in Gent – not one of the five main decorative panels, just an cherub and surrounding imagery, but one I simply had not known about before.
Other displays told me about a couple of other now lost Hansche works. The old St Catherine’s Church in Brussels had Hansche ceilings in the aisle and transepts, demolished in 1893.
The exhibition also notes a lost ceiling in the Hôtel d’Ursel in Brussels, but I guess this may be known from documentary evidence only; the building was remodelled in the mid-18th century and then demolished entirely in 1960 – but I suspect that the Hansche ceiling was lost two hundred years earlier; we have photographic evidence of the ceilings lost in Germany in the twentieth century.
The exhibition also mentions a Hansche ceiling at the Château de Saint-Fontaine in Clavier not far from the impressive stuccos at Modave. This supposedly shows the family tree of Olivier-Renard de Saint-Fontaine, cavalry captain and high bailiff, and his wife. The exhibition implies that this ceiling survives, but the tourist guides to Saint-Fontaine tell me that the whole castle was rebuilt in 1820 after a fire, and again I don’t see any photographs. The castle is in private hands, but maybe I’ll see if I can contact the owners to clarify it.
It’s all very attractively laid out, with a children-friendly approach as well – do your own art, that kind of thing. And it’s open until 31 May. If you are in reach, do go and have a look.
I’m going to make an effort to be more assiduous in tracking my non-book entertainment here. We very much enjoyed two TV series made last year which we watched this year, one SF on Apple TV, one historical on Netflix.
Plur1bus is a tremendously well implemented vision of a future where some alien force has has merged humanity into a single group consciousness, and our protagonist, romantasy novelist Carol (played very effectively by Rhea Seehorn, who I had not seen before) is one of a very small number of people worldwide who are immune.
Carol hates people in general – her lover is killed off in the first episode – and she hates her own writing, describing her new book as “like a bad episode of Star Trek“. But she eventually becomes motivated to try and find a way back for humanity, and by the end of the first series is talking to another of the survivors about how to do that. (Great Guardian interview with Rhea Seehorn.)
What the Plurbs cannot replicate is true rivalry. Its absence no doubt spares their economy from waste, redundancy and foolishness. But it also limits the scope for progress. However much wisdom they collectively possess, the Joined will also need to learn from trial and error. Although they can presumably run polite, collegial experiments to test alternative economic strategies, none of them can pursue a strategy with the kind of blinkered, eccentric conviction that characterises many of capitalism’s most successful entrepreneurs. The economy often makes progress through rare, successful attempts to defy collective wisdom. And to defy collective wisdom, it helps to be immune to it.
Most of it is set in Albuquerque, with excursions elsewhere, and a filming dynamic that totally reinforces Carol’s isolation among the rest of her species. The merged humanity is incapable of cruelty, or of lying, but also incapable of creativity; so the food starts running out (apart from the Soylent Green solution), and Carol’s novels become the only new art produced in the world. (There is a grimly funny moment when Carol asks the collective brain what her spouse really thought of her writing, and gets an honest answer.) Some of the details are better not examined closely, but in general it’s a thought-provoking as well as an entertaining story.
Here’s the trailer.
I expect to see the series as a whole, or perhaps just the first episode, “We is Us”, on the Hugo ballot.
I don’t expect to see Death by Lightning on the Hugo ballot. It is a solid four-part Netflix series about the campaign, presidency and death of James Garfield, who served from March to September 1881; more especially it’s about his assassin, the deranged Charles Guiteau, played by Matthew Macfadyen with effective creepiness and passion combined.
Garfield is played by Michael Shannon, a completely different character from the evil colonel in The Shape of Water (he was also one of the sons in Knives Out). The other notable performances are Bradley Whitford, a welcome return from The West Wing, as James G. Blaine, Garfield’s Secretary of State; Betty Gilpin as Garfield’s wife Lucretia; and Shea Whigham as corrupt New York senator Roscoe Conkling, who enables Garfield’s rise and then wishes he hadn’t.
A special shout for Nick Offerman, in a great performance as Chester Arthur, who starts as Conkling’s sidekick, becomes Vice-President due to Garfield’s political necessity and thanks to Guiteau ends up in the top spot himself. He gets the best character arc of anyone, moving from boozy sub-boss to penitent reformer. In real life, Arthur had never fought an election before 1880, and may have been born in Canada which would have rendered him ineligible if it had ever been confirmed (the original Birther controversy). His father was from Cullybackey in County Antrim.
Macfadyen is mesmerising as Guiteau, but the ensemble is necessary to support the role. The script is terrific, somewhat updated to modern discourse (by which I mean that the characters all say “fuck” a lot) but also with knowing reference to the interaction between popular culture and politics today. Also Hungary puts on a very good act as nineteenth century America
Betsy Gilpin as Lucretia Garfield gets the last word, in a (totally fictional) visit to Guiteau shortly before his execution:
America may mourn him today, but as the years pass by, they’ll forget. And I can feel him waning away even now. In no time, he’ll just be another face on the wall. Lost to history.
But then again… So will you.
Here’s a trailer.
Those were both 2025 productions. In between watching them, we sat down to the 2003 remake of The Lion in Winter, starring Patrick Stewart (aged 63) and Glenn Close (aged 56). Of course, a director should feel full creative power to make the film they want to make, but I was a bit thrown by the change in dynamic compared to the original 1968 version with Peter O’Toole (aged 36) and Katherine Hepburn (aged 61). In 1183, when the story is explicitly set, Henry II was 50 and Eleanor of Aquitaine 59, so Peter O’Toole was 14 years younger and Patrick Stewart 13 years older than their historical counterpart. O’Toole always acted older than he really was (playing the older version of David Tennant in Casanova, he was only 72 but does a good mid-eighties), but Stewart always acts his exact age.
It is also difficult to surpass the supporting cast of the 1968 film, which included Antony Hopkins, in his first major film role, as Richard the Lionheart; Timothy Dalton, in his first ever film role, as Philip of France; and Nigel Terry as future King John. (And Jane Merrow as Alais and John Castle as Geoffrey are good mid-ranking actors too, Castle is particularly good in this.)
Given the relative balance of talent, the 2003 film is dominated by Glenn Close, who has good chemistry with Patrick Stewart but is also magnetic on her own.
Of course he has a knife! I have a knife. We all have knives. It’s 1183 and we’re all barbarians!
Of the others, I felt Rafe Spall played John a bit too much for laughs, and it was difficult to see why either of his parents might want him to inherit. On the other hand, Julia Vysotskaya was a very believable Alais. (Her character is the lover of King Henry, almost thirty years older than her; in real life, she was and is married to the film’s director, Andrei Konchalovsky, who is thirty-six years older than her; perhaps this helped.)
It looks good; the music is good; but it’s not as good as the original. Here are the traiers; judge for yourself.
The temperature was rising and the dawn wind was blowing firmly, but it was still at least thirty below. Strymon canal was a steel-blue, hard sheet of ice and would not melt today in this latitude. Resting on it beside the dock was the mail scooter from Syrtis Minor, its boat body supported by razor-edged runners. The driver was still loading it with cargo dragged from the warehouse on the dock.
Published in 1949, this was a book that I greatly enjoyed as a young reader, one of Heinlein’s successful juvenile series. The protagonist is a lad in the human colony on Mars, attending a military boarding school where he discovers a fiendish plot by the Earth-based rulers to destroy the colonists. Aided by his Martian pet, and by the mysterious giant Martians themselves, he gets home via the canals and other Martian tech, raises the alarm and helps his family and the rest of the colony defeat the evil administrators, who are apparently eaten by the Martians.
It’s a very male book; the protagonist and his buddy, and their fathers and a wise old doctor, carry most of the narrative, with some dialogue from mothers and a bratty sister. It’s a very pro-gun book; the colonists’ equivalent of Second Amendment rights are taken as obvious common sense (and of course crucial in the uprising). The colonists’ mission is explicitly colonial; no questions are asked about the fate of the Martians once humans spread out over the planet.
And yet there’s still a very attractive sensawunda about it, a feeling of estrangement from Earth and awe at the ancient mysteries and dangers of a new world, and arid landscapes not quite like the American West. Some of the magic remains for me, though perhaps not quite enough for me to recommend it to readers of the same age as I was when I first read it. You can get Red Planet here.
This was my top unread sf book (though of course I had read it long ago). Next on that pile is Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham.
Current The Pavilion of Women, by Pearl S. Buck The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore
Last books finished The Doors of Midnight, by R.R. Virdi (did not finish) Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch The Big Wave, by Pearl S. Buck Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill The Recollections: Fragments from a Life in Writing, by Christopher Priest
Next books De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske
Dusk fell when I still had about four miles more to go. needed to borrow some matches so I called in at an antiques shop in Dragonsdale, a giant metropolis of seventeen houses, three shops, two pubs and a twelfth-century church. That’s modern hereabouts. Liz Sandwell was just closing up. She came out to watch me do the twin oil-lamps on the Ruby. Well, you can’t have everything. Liz is basically oil paintings and Georgian incidental household furnishings. She has a lovely set of pole-screens and swing dressing-mirrors.
Having been rereading the Agatha Christie novels, I realised that I still had an unread Lovejoy novel from years ago on my shelves. And actually I realise now that I had read it even more years ago, but it’s short and digestible.
This is the Lovejoy of Gash’s original conception, fanatically obsessed with antiques and fatally attractive to women, who he treats badly. In fact he hits one of his girlfriends on page 2 (though in fairness she hits him first). If you pick this up expecting the gentle humour of Ian Le Frenais’ writing and Ian McShane’s acting, well, you’ll be surprised.
At the same time, I think the writer is fully aware of Lovejoy’s flaws and shows us what a monster he is, through his own lack of self-perception. And the actual plot of the book is a murder mystery, where Lovejoy is motivated by righteous rage when a friend is killed and the police write it off as an accident. I found the actual mystery resolution a bit opaque, but there is a fantastically well written climactic scene in Colchester Castle, where Lovejoy and his charming newly hired apprentice Lydia take on the villain, Lydia making her first of many appearances here.
There’s also a fair bit of lore about the Holy Grail – this book was published in 1979, three years before The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, but after at least two of the three BBC documentaries that it drew on (from 1972, 1974 and 1979). Not to go into details, but it had me checking Wikipedia for the career of Hester Bateman, one woman for whom Lovejoy has the highest respect.
I haul my bag up the hill. I haven’t brought much. All I need are shorts and t-shirts, flip flops, sneakers. Swim shorts. Harper arrives next week. Nat’s coming to the cottage tonight. I wrote to him weeks ago via the Castine post office, the way he told me to, and let him know I was coming. I don’t have his address. When I passed through Castine earlier I found his reply waiting, just as he promised I would, written in careful, childlike cursive: OK. I’ll bring dinner.
I got this as part of Kelly Lonesome’s submission for the 2024 Hugo packet, in the Best Editor Long Form category. I’m not sure if having that category for the Hugos really makes a lot of sense, but I am very appreciative of the reading material that it generates.
At first I wasn’t even sure if this book was sfnal to be appropriate for the Hugo packet. It starts out as an intense account of a teenager’s encounter with a serial killer in a village on the coast of Maine, and then flips a little forward to his retelling the story at university. But as we see layer upon layer of narrative unpeeling, and the true nature of the events becomes clear, I realised that it definitely qualifies as fantasy horror. It’s a complex and overlapping story, but Ward keeps control of it and we always know where we are. An unexpected dark pleasure.
The first of a recent series of six graphic novels by Weber and Deville, set in Belgium in the mid-twentieth century (later years are 1958, 1960, 1961, 1965 and 1968).
The framing narrative has the central character, Kathleen, cleaning up her mother’s house in 1960, and coming across souvenirs of the war years seventeen years earlier – the same distance that separates us from 2009. We are then plunged into an intense narrative of resistance to German occupation, mostly from a schoolgirl’s point of view, with a lot of real life events and people woven into the fiction. The climax is the publication of the “Faux Soir” on 7 November 1943.
Fiction based around historical personalities and events, whether on the screen or on the page, often falls into the trap of doing it by the numbers. I felt that Bruxelles 43 avoided that; we readers of course know that the occupation will not last for much longer, and that Belgium will pick itself up again, but the characters don’t. It’s also very neat that comics themselves as a medium are woven into the story – Hergé is one of the many historical characters to make an appearance, and there’s a sensitive exploration of the role of culture in general in an occupied society.
This is a good start to the series. Next in the sequence is Sourire 58, by the same creative team. You can get Bruxelles 43 here.
And this attitude baffled Poirot. To begin with, his vanity suffered. It was his constant dictum that all the world knew Hercule Poirot. Here was someone who did not. Very good for him, I could not but feel-but not precisely helpful to the object in view!
This is the seventh Poirot novel, written and set in 1932, with Poirot and his friend, Hastings the narrator, becoming entangled with a naïve socialite who lives in a decaying seaside mansion. She appears to be the target of a series of assassination attempts, and after someone else is killed apparently in mistake for her, things get very serious. Lots of good plot here, with some red herrings and some totally fair clues, and Christie turns the tables on the reader very neatly at the end. Not especially memorable perhaps, but classic Christie.
There are a couple of less good bits. A random bloke turns up at the end, starts shooting at people, and is bundled away while Poirot explains that he had nothing to do with the actual plot. There’s casual anti-semitism about another minor character. The ending sees natural justice rather than state justice meted out. But again, this is classic Christie, warts and all.
A brief note about last weekend’s Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles, and some of the other things I did there. I was actually feeling rather under the weather for two days of the three of the convention, so didn’t take my usual cosplay photos, but I also got out and about a bit.
To begin at the beginning: I was a little hesitant to go to the USA at all, under current circumstances. One American friend urged me to simply boycott her country. But going through Dublin Airport is very smooth and straightforward, because you get preclearance for US immigration while still in Ireland. There was no queue at all for border control on the Irish side, and it meant that when we landed in Los Angeles at 6pm, it was straight to the baggage reclaim and shuttle bus, and checked into the hotel by 7pm. The price difference of flying with Aer Lingus is not much, and it is massively helpful to not be standing for hours in an immigration queue when you are already jet lagged and worrying about whether you will be immediately deported, or worse.
Also, Gallifrey One is a very safe space, woke, queer, éclairé, however you want to put it, in Los Angeles which is itself a very anti-MAGA city. Driving from the Getty Villa to the Griffith Observatory takes you through an extraordinary array of cultural diversity. It is places like LA that actually do make America great.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Cuba.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
From now on, I intend to add numbers from Storygraph to the numbers from LibraryThing and Goodreads. It didn’t change the top eight in this case, though it did bump Our Man in Havana to third rather than second.
This week’s winner is an epic but short story about a Cuban fisherman. It’s Hemingway’s second win after, oddly enough, Tanzania; he also had a book on the Italy list and two on the Spain list. Strictly speaking, most of The Old Man and the Sea is set, well, at sea, but it’s clearly meant to be in Cuban territorial waters, so I’m giving it the win. It has the highest rankings on both GR and LT of any book since Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girlback in September.
All of the above are in dialogue with the US-Cuba relationship. I was not entirely sure about the two Chanel Cleeton novels – and I did disqualify a third by her, The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, which is clearly mainly set in the USA. Though born in the USA, Cleeton identifies as Cuban-American. I also wasn’t completely sure about Dreaming in Cuban, but on balance it seems to be mostly set on the island.
I disqualified a lot of other books which are only partially set in Cuba, or not at all. Works by and about Che Guevara figured in the list. I did pagecounts of two more Hemingway books, Islands in the Stream and To Have and Have Not, but concluded that neither qualified.
Next up is Tajikistan; then Papua New Guinea, and after that a run of European countries starting with Sweden and Czechia.
As I’ve said before, I feel that the BSFA long-lists are a bit too long. But I’ve delved into several of the categories and would like to recommend a few of the nominees for the consideration of voters. The second round deadline is closing in – it is at midnight UK time next Thursday night, so you need to get moving (and this is a process where every single vote counts).
Best Art
None of the nominated art is bad, but I loved the audacity of Nick Wells’ tesselated covers for the twelve-book Fractal series of novels by Allen Stroud. It’s a lovely image anyway, but to split it across different books is very bold. Gets my vote, but I will nominate another three as well.
I liked the confidence of Stephen Embleton’s cover for The Nga’phandileh Whisperer, by Eugen Bacon. A lot of the nominated art has memorable human figures, but this one has something special for me.
Another humanoid figure, this time clearly a struggling robot, in Tithi Luadthong’s cover for Cage of Stars, by Frasier Armitage. I liked the use of colour and scale here.
Finally, what appears to be a standalone art piece, The Dust Library by Sylvain Sarrailh. I like the detail of the architecture, and the small human figures in the foreground. It carries also this narrative: “He told me he had all the books in the world. I took him for a strange poet, but I followed him for four days and three nights in the desert, curious to know the outcome of his fable. He hadn’t lied.”
Best Short Non-Fiction
Of the 28 nominees for Best Short Non-Fiction, I was able to read 26. One of the remaining two is a paywalled academic journal article, and the other was a Zoom panel discussion. The others are all available via the BSFA ballot list. A couple of them are only marginally about science fiction – the piece on the Dublin / New York Portal, for instance, tries to argue that it should be considered as an sfnal work, but unfortunately gets tangled up in its own jargon to really understand.
There are seven that I particularly want to draw your attention to, and I know which four are getting my vote. I liked, but will probably not vote for:
When People Giggle at Your Name, Or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident, by Grigory Lukin – as I said at the time, this was a pretty poor show by those responsible for the Hugo ceremony, and this piece illuminates the problem very eloquently, but I don’t generally think that this year’s awards should perpetuate last year’s controversies.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI, by Cory Doctorow – again a great piece of writing which I have recommended to curious policy-makers inside the EU bubble, but I’m not nominating it for the BSFA Award on the technical grounds that it is about technological fact rather than fiction.
Paul March Russell’s review of When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift – Again I think this is a fine piece of writing, and my reason for not voting for it (in this round anyway) is simply that I haven’t yet read the book that is the subject of the review, so I don’t feel that I am yet in a position to make a call about the nominated piece.
I will be voting for two pieces about Tolkien and two others. The two Tolkien pieces are:
“Should Galadriel have taken the Ring?”, by Nick Hubble – a short piece in which the writer points out the roots of Galadriel as Faery Queen, and the disruption that this archetypal figure brings to the Middle Earth legendarium. “I’ve finally concluded that Galadriel actually ‘passes the test’ by not allowing herself to get caught up in the false binary choice between refusing or accepting the ring. She doesn’t have to choose between being the ‘White Lady’ or the ‘Dark Queen’ because she is already both of those and all points between.”
“What Lies and Threats? History and Nationalist Myth-Making in The Lord of the Rings“, by Abby Roberts – looks at the uncomfortable nexus between Tolkien’s national myth-making project and political nationalist extremism. In general Tolkien is not a guilty party, but he does look at myth even within The Lord of the Rings. “Ultimately, in the last two decades of his life, Tolkien became increasingly critical of the mythopoeic elements in his work, which Fimi argues contributed to his failure to complete The Silmarillion. Tolkien’s self-reflection mirrors the general soul-searching that occurred among postwar myth scholars, as they reckoned with their discipline’s role in the Holocaust and World War II.”
The other two pieces that I am voting for are quite different.
“A Path Through the Landscape: My Own Route Through Science Fiction”, by Roseanna Pendlebury – in reaction to Paul Kicaid’s Colourfields, lists ten sf books that Roseanna Pendlebury found important in her own literary journey, but also four that everyone else likes and she didn’t. “I was a relatively uncritical reader as a child (as I think many children are), and this didn’t really begin to shift until my early twenties. I like to think five years of dissecting texts in other languages did something to the ol’ brain chemistry and made my thoughts turn those newly minted critical faculties back onto the things I read for pleasure in English.”
“Neither Girls Nor Friends: the Artificial Women in American Science Fiction”, by William Shaw – takes us from Helen O’Loy to Annie Bot, a very specific topic; and although I didn’t feel the journey was that far, persuaded me that it is at least interesting. “The artificial woman, in all of these stories, is caught in a contradiction; torn between her creators’ desires both for a perfected version of an exploited underclass, and for that perfection to still, ultimately, be subservient.”
I’m skipping this category because I haven’t yet listened to any of it. Big Finish fans failed to get organised this time around to get anything on the ballot.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
Two of the best Doctor Who novelisations from last year are on this list, Lux by James Goss, who I consider the best Who writer currently active, and The Robot Revolution by Una McCormack, and I’m voting for both of them. I haven’t read any of the others yet. (Links to my own reviews.)
Best Collection
I haven’t read any of the nominees, so far.
Best Short Fiction
I gritted my teeth and read about 60 of the 76 nominees here. I personally nominated Salvage by Emily Tesh (link is to my review), published as a chapbook at Novacon, but I’m not going to vote for it because I suspect that very few others will have ad the chance to read it. Instead I will vote for:
“Missing Helen”, by Tia Tashiro, a well imagined story of what happens if your ex gets off with your clone. (I voted for Tashiro for the Astounding Award last year, and I reckon she’s a talent to watch.)
The only one of these that I have read is The Well by Gareth Powell (link is to my review), another Doctor Who novelisation that I am definitely voting for.
I have listed the above, not in the order that they are on the ballot but in what seems to me to be a much more sensible order – art, non-fiction, fiction.
The strange woman watched them, still holding Mrs Skraeveling’s hat. Her antlers were a sort of hat too, Utterly realized. Now that she had got over the first shock of them she could see the wires to which they were attached shining in the woman’s russet hair. It was a peculiar sort of a hat, but then she was a peculiar sort of person altogether. She was one of the troll-people who lived at the north end of Wildsea in the rocky wooded region called the Dizzard. Reverend Dearlove said that it was rude to call them trolls, but Utterly could see why people did, for the woman with the antlers was quite ugly. All the features of her face were too big and too definite, and her thick eyebrows met above her nose. Her eyes were large and deep-set: dark brown eyes with flecks of gold in them.
I got to know Philip Reeve in person at the 2022 Eastercon, Reclamation, where we were both guests of honour. We had a couple of very pleasant dinners together, and ended up sharing a taxi to escape Heathrow. At that point the only one of his books that I had actually read was a Doctor Who short from 2013. He is of course best known for Mortal Engines, of which Minnesota governor Tim Walz is also a fan. I bought this at that Eastercon, but have shamefully only now got around to reading it.
It’s very good. Utterly Dark is a foundling girl brought up on a strange island off the Cornish coast. Her adoptive father, who was the Watcher of the island, keeping an eye out for the Hidden Isles and the creature known as the Gorm, is found drowned, and his brother is summoned from London to take over. Under the new regime, disaster of a YA Lovecraftian type comes ever closer. It’s all very nicely done, and I’ll keep an eye out for the two sequels now. (Oddly enough my reading of this overlapped with Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward, which also features young protagonists and seaside horrors.)
Current Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill
Last books finished Cards on the Table, by Agatha Christie The Dead Take the A Train, by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey (did not finish) The Doctor Who Yearbook 1995, eds Gary Russell and Peri Goodbold Elfland, by Freda Warrington The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments, by Sappho, translated and edited by Aaron Poochigan Country Christie, by Agatha Christie Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown, by Rory Carroll
Next books Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore The Doors of Midnight, by R.R. Virdi The Big Wave, by Pearl S. Buck
This is the next in my sequence of educating myself about the work of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) was born in Denmark, but her father was Norwegian and they moved back to Norway when she was two. She began writing as a teenager, and won the Nobel Prize in 1928, when she was 46, then the second youngest winner after Rudyard Kipling (since beaten by Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, and Albert Camus).
The Nobel Committee is clear that the award was for Kristin Lavransdatter: the citation was “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”. She had been nominated previously in 1922, 1925 and 1926; in 1928 her nomination came not from a writer but from Norwegian psychologist Helga Eng. In her mercifully short acceptance speech, she restricts herself to celebrating the bonds between Norway and Sweden. I find the Chairman of the Academy’s presentation speech somewhat patronising, but he’s clear that Kristin Lavransdatter is the key to Undset’s succcess.
I must say that I approached it with some trepidation. My project to read non-white-male Nobel Literature laureates has not been super successful so far; I have read two short okayish novels by Selma Lagerlöf, some incomprehensible poetry by Rabindranath Tagore and a dull book by Grazia Deledda. And Kristin Lavransdatter checks in at over 1100 pages, and I could tell that it was another tale up upstanding rural folk, like the Lagerlöf and Deledda books. However, I realised that I could just read the first part, published in 1920, for this project, and come back to the second and third parts in due course of my normal rounds of reading.
So, what did I think of The Wreath, the first part of Kristin Lavransdatter? Here is the second paragraph of the third chapter:
Ogsaa Kristin følte at det var en stor lykke de hadde faat med den lille spæde søsteren. Tænkt over at morens tunge sind gjorde det stilt paa gaarden hadde hun aldrig; hun hadde syntes det var som det skulde være, naar moren optugtet og formanet hende, men faren lekte og skjemtet med hende. Nu var moren meget mildere mot hende og gav hende mere frihet, kjælte ogsaa mere for hende, og da la Kristin litet merke til at hendes mor ogsaa hadde meget mindre tid til at stelle med hende. Hun elsket da Ulvhild, hun som de andre, og var glad naar hun fik bære eller vugge søsteren, og siden blev det endda mere moro med den lille, da hun begyndte at krype og gaa og tale og Kristin kunde leke med hende.
Kristin also felt it was a great joy that they had been given her little infant sister. She had never thought about the fact that her mother’s somber disposition had made life at home so subdued. She thought things were as they should be: her mother disciplined or admonished her, while her father teased and played with her. Now her mother was gentler toward her and gave her more freedom; she caressed her more often too, so Kristin didn’t notice that her mother also had less time to spend with her. She loved Ulvhild, as everyone did, and was pleased when she was allowed to carry her sister or rock her cradle. And later on the little one was even more fun; as she began to crawl and walk and talk, Kristin could play with her.
English translation by Tiina Nunnally.
Actually I rather liked it. It’s set in the 14th century, in a valley in central Norway. Kristin is the daughter of Lavrans (as you might have guess from the title); he is a respectable nobleman who betroths her to the neighbours’ virtuous son. Kristin however falls in love with an more mature chap who has children from a previous relationship (Undset’s own husband was also an older chap with children from a previous relationship) and eventually persuades her family to let her marry him, wearing the virginal wreath of the book’s title, though she alone knows that she is several months pregnant (as Undset was when she married).
I thought Kristin herself was very well realised, as were the men and women in her life, and the Norwegian landscape and climate, both of which are significant factors in the story, are vividly depicted. One of the interesting subplots is that Kristin’s younger sister suffers a spinal injury in an accident and remains bedridden for the rest of her short life. One of Undset’s own children had a learning disability, as did one of her stepchildren; I don’t know any more details than that, but for obvious reasons disabled characters catch my attention.
It’s quite a Catholic book. Kristin is sent off to a convent school in Oslo, and the portrayal of the nuns is pretty realistic; in general the church plays a helpful role. Undset herself converted to Catholicism in 1924, to great public scandal in Lutheran Norway. In general it’s a huge contrast with the likes of The Good Wife of Bath, which I bounced off last year. My Catholic days are behind me, but I appreciate calm description rather than polemic.
So yeah, this was the first discovery of a new and interesting writer for me in this project, and I will get to the second and third volumes in good time. Meanwhile you can get Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath here.
‘Katabasis’ means descent to the underworld, and here Alice Law, a Cambridge postgraduate student of magick, enters Hell with her classmate to try and rescue their tutor, who has died in a magical experiment gone wrong. It began rather well, as a carefully constructed fantasy afterworld leaning on Virgil and especially Dante, with a stark sparsely described landscape inhabited by the souls of the dead. Symbolic logic turns out to be key to dealing with both magick and the afterlife.
But the metaphor of Hell being a graduate studies programme is laid on very thick, and there is a section about two thirds of the way through the (very long) book where I began to feel that I couldn’t take it quite as seriously as may have been intended. Also the plot really narrows down quite quickly to the point where only one ending is possible, and it duly gets there.
So I don’t think I’ll be nominating it for the Hugos, though I’m pretty sure it will get on the ballot anyway and, depending on what else is there, it will have a decent shot at winning, as Babel should have done in 2023. You can get Katabasis here.
And so it was that when Karen Berger and Dick Giordano traveled to London in February 1987 to scout talent there were in fact two writers who successfully pitched to them on the back of Alan Moore’s endorsement. The first, of course, was Grant Morrison. The other was a journalist named Neil Gaiman who had struck up a friendship with Moore after interviewing him a few years earlier. And while Morrison would find no shortage of commercial success across their battles with Moore, neither of the great magi would come anywhere close to Gaiman, who is straightforwardly the most commercially successful writer ever to emerge from comics.
This is a 60,000 word essay, a single web page on Sandifer’s Eruditorum Press website. It hasn’t been published separately (though will apparently become part of Sandifer’s projected second volume of Last War in Albion, her history of the magical rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison); but I am treating it as a book for bookblogging purposes.
This is mainly because there is a strong case for nominating it in the Best Related Work category in this year’s Hugo Awards, for which nominations open this week. In general the Hugos should not celebrate last year’s controversies; but this is an analysis of the Sandman comics, and of Gaiman’s other work, especially in the graphic medium, over several decades, taking into account what we now know about Gaiman’s personal life and appalling behaviour. It’s not so much about the scandal (though it is about that), as about how Gaiman constructed his career and everything else.
It’s not framed as a hatchet job. Sandifer starts by sympathetically analysing Gaiman’s childhood in Scientology, and the abuse that he certainly suffered at the hands of his father, Britain’s leading Scientologist. She then goes on to look at the roots of Sandman, and at the high points of the story (of which there are many) and its occasionally troubled publications history.
But the pattern of exploitation and abuse of young fans, and later of other women, began pretty early on – Dave Sim refers to one of Gaiman’s convention flings in the notorious Cerebus #186, in 1992. And it’s not at all difficult to find reflections of Gaiman’s behaviour in his work. We may contain multitudes, but perhaps not all that many.
I was a fan of Neil Gaiman. My first entry in the original version of this blog was about meeting him at a signing in Brussels. I have more of his books in my LibraryThing catalogue than for any other author bar Justin Richards, Roger Zelazny and Terrance Dicks. I had generally friendly if slightly spiky correspondence with him over Hugo stuff over the years (his last time on the final ballot was my first time administering the awards in 2017, and he wrote in 2024 to ask “why Sandman Episode 6 was ruled ineligible for the Hugos at Chengdu?” – a question to which unfortunately I did not and do not know the answer).
I will find it very difficult to open any of Gaiman’s work ever again, and yet I wanted some sort of closure for myself. This essay provides it, acknowledging the high points of Gaiman’s work but linking it to the low points of his personal life. I’m lucky; I barely knew him apart from through his writing. Other friends are much more personally devastated. Sandifer ends the essay with one of Roz Kaveney’s heartfelt poems about the end of her friendship with Gaiman. Here’s another, published on 7 February 2025:
Heart is a traitor even when it breaks. Love friendship given cannot be returned. All that I once thought my friend was once has burned To trash shame ruin. Even his mistakes His sins his crimes are of a piece with all The things I valued. His embarrassed smile His weighted pauses. I am certain while He fucked those girls they’d see the shutters fall Behind his eyes. Some random witty thought Would take him for a moment quite elsewhere. Sometimes I want to slap him maybe swear. He was extraordinary until caught. All the good times, the brilliance flawed. Hearts crack. Yet friendship given can’t be taken back.
To a greater or lesser extent, all of us who liked the man and/or his work will have felt that betrayal, and Sandifer’s essay is an important part of moving on. I’m nominating it for this year’s Hugos, and I hope that you do too.
