I reached deeper then, to the folds of my mind. I had nothing to fill them with but longed for their old familiarity, and hoped they would help me figure out what to do next.
One of the books from last year’s Hugo packet, this turns out to be the second in a fantasy series in which the protagonist is a professional story teller and also under suspicion of political murder. I bounced off both the prose and the structure and put it aside after fifty pages. If you want to, you can get The Doors of Midnight here.
This was my top book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is Rebellion on Treasure Island, a Doctor Who novel by Bali Rai.
At the moment, Magee was on a break from the war and living in Shannon in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland, a world away from Belfast, 250 miles to the north. Shannon was a collection of housing estates built on reclaimed marshland next to an airport and factories. It was Ireland’s newest town, but poor design gave it no center, no heart, and exposed residents to wind and rain. Magee had moved here several months earlier under instructions to lie low and take it easy, but that plan, too, had design flaws. He was on edge, restless, and gazing north.
In September 1996, I attended the Liberal Democrats’ party conference in Brighton, wearing several hats – I was the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland’s Party Organiser and an aide to their delegation in the talks which resulted in the Good Friday Agreement, but I was also the Chair of the vestigial group of Liberal Democrat party members in Northern Ireland. An earnest BBC radio reporter sat me down for an interview in the Grand Hotel at breakfast time. “The situation in Northern Ireland is rather a distant concern for us here at this conference, isn’t it?” she asked me.
I looked back at her. “This building, where we are sitting right now, was blown up by the IRA twelve years ago.”
I know Rory Carroll, and have occasionally givenhimquotes. In this book he goes in depth into one of the IRA’s most audacious operations, the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in September 1984. She narrowly escaped; five party activists were killed; others suffered life-changing injuries. I vividly remember the coverage of Thatcher’s lieutenant Norman Tebbit being dug out of the rubble.
The book goes into intense detail of how the Brighton bomb, and the bomber Patrick Magee, fitted into the IRA’s overall strategy. The leadership were not immediately convinced of the return on investment of such a high risk act, in the wake of the Mountbatten murder. But in the end they were persuaded and the plot went ahead, with Magee planting the bomb with a slow but precise timer weeks in advance.
Magee himself was one of the IRA’s top bomb-makers, but had a complex personal life. I was interested that at one point, while on the run, he found accommodation and work at Venray in the Netherlands, which is where my cousin Gerard Ryan died and is buried. Carroll also gives vivid details of the police side of the story; the forensic investigation of the fragments of the bomb, the identification of Magee’s handprint from his hotel registration, the mixture of chance and preparation leading to his finally being arrested in Scotland in June 1985, while planning more action with a team including Martina Anderson, who I got to know decades later when she was a Member of the European Parliament.
Assassinations, and attempted assassinations, are big and important events, and Rory Carroll’s book gives answers to a lot of the questions that I suppose I had been vaguely wondering about since 1984. It has a couple of minor flaws – the opening chapters jump around the timeline in a way that could be confusing to readers less familiar with the history, and there are a couple of weird repetitions of detail between early and later chapters. So I rank it just below From A Clear Blue Sky and Say Nothing. But overall it’s a fascinating read about the biggest political bombing in British history. (The Gunpowder Plot doesn’t count, because it was thwarted.)
I went to the National Gallery in London on Friday, and paid a tenner to go and look at the temporary exhibition of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby. I particularly love Wright’s work for its significance in recording the history of science and science education, and I was a little disappointed that the text around the exhibition puts the emphasis his technique of light and shade and use of candles, slightly excluding what it is that the paintings are actually about. (See also a critique by Rebecca Owen-Keats, who unlike me is an actual expert on Wright.)
But it is all great stuff. Here is a scientist pumping air out of a jar in which a bird is desperately fluttering; one of the little girls cannot look, while the other is grimly fascinated.
Here the kids are looking at an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system. I always wanted one of those. The two youngest are complete rapt in the turning spheres.
And three men look at an ancient Roman statue, one of them sketching it.
Two young men exploring a cave find a scraggy philosopher, looking for the meaning of life and death in a skeleton. He will not find it.
The full title of this painting is “The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers”. It does what it says on the tin.
Finally, Wright in his own self-portrait looks out at us from the shadows.
I bought the souvenir book of the exhibition, but have not read it yet; perhaps it will have more on the content as well as the style.
There is plenty else to see in the National Gallery, and my attention was caught by John Singer Sargent’s portrait of seven-year-old Victoria Stanley.
Dressed for hunting, she is clearly ready to have fun but also won’t take any nonsense from anyone.
I was delighted to find that there are two portraits of her from the 1920s, one by Sir John Lavery (in the collection of the London art dealers Colnaghi) and the other by Minnie Agnes Cohen (recently sold at auction). You can clearly see the little girl in the adult Victoria. There are plenty of photographs of her taken during her life, but none captures her character as these portraits do.
Victoria was the daughter of the Earl of Derby; her great-grandfather served three terms as prime minister. Her first husband was Neil Primrose, son of the former Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery and himself a Liberal MP. They married in 1915 and had a daughter a year later, but he was killed in 1917 during the Third Battle of Gaza. During her widowhood, her father was appointed British Ambassador to Paris and she became a fixture in the Anglo-French social scene. She then married Malcolm Bullock in 1919 and they had another daughter in 1920; he too served as an MP (but a Conservative) from 1923 to 1953.
Victoria became a leading figure in the world of horse racing and hunting. Her two daughters were among the first three women admitted to the Jockey Club, and her great-granddaughter Clare Balding is a well known sports journalist, particularly on racing. Her father, her mother, her first and second husbands and her daughters Ruth and Priscilla all have Wikipedia pages, but she does not.
When hunting at Lowesby Hall in Leicestershire on 25 November 1927, Victoria risked riding under a low bridge, and was fatally injured when she hit her head on the stonework. (See report by the local history society.) She was 35.
See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Sweden.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
This was pretty straightforward; there is not much doubt about what books are set in Sweden, and there was not really much doubt about which book was going to win.
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Jonas Jonasson
304,460
8,752
29,072
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry
Fredrik Backman
291,256
5,675
35,205
This week’s winner, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is the first of a trilogy published after the author’s death, about a punk computer genius who helps the viewpoint character Solve Crime. It’s violent, sexy and compelling. The other two books of the trilogy also make the list.
Fredrik Backmann’s books, four of which are on the list, are slice-of-life stories from contemporary Sweden, some of which I suspect may be funny.
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is another slice-of-life story with a humorous tone. I was not quite sure if it met my geographical criteria, but I got a friend who has a copy to count the chapters (thanks, Mike!) and indeed a majority of it is set in-country.
One surprising thing jumps out at me from this list. All eight of the books are by men, ironically for a post on International Women’s Day. Looking through my archives, this has happened four times before: Russia, South Africa, Colombia (a special case) and Spain. Also, for two of the countries where I was only able to compile a list of five rather than eight books, all five were by male authors: Uzbekistan and Guinea-Conakry. On the other hand, I’ve had seven countries where seven of the eight books were by women (nowhere yet has had a clean sweep on that side).
This turns out to be thanks to my including the StoryGraph numbers. On Goodreads and LibraryThing alone, Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren would have made the list; but My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, by Fredrik Backman, has more than twice as many owners on StoryGraph and nipped into the eighth place. Backman is relatively more popular with StoryGraph users; indeed his top two books are very close behind The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo there.
It’s also quite a turnaround from my previous research in 2015, where the only books that scored were the Stieg Larsson trilogy and Pippi Longstocking. Obviously the recent surge in popularity of Fredrik Backmann had not yet taken off at that point. Perhaps surprisingly, Henning Mankel was quite a long way down, both in 2015 and in 2026. The next highest woman writer after Astrid Lindgren was Camilla Läckberg.
For once, I did not disqualify any books – the top eight from my calculations are all set mainly in Sweden. Other countries where I did not disqualifiy any books: Japan, Egypt, DRC, Vietnam, Colombia.
Coming next: three more European countries – Czechia, Azerbaijan and Portugal – followed by Togo.
The BSFA shortlists are out! And my own nominations were not particularly in tune with those of other voters; I voted for two of the shortlisted books for younger readers, one each in the artwork, long-non-fiction, and short fiction categories, and none of the successful nominees in the novel, short non-fiction and shorter fiction categories (I didn’t vote in the rest). So it goes.
As usual, I’ll look at the ranking of the shortlisted books on Goodreads, LibraryThing and (new) StoryGraph, comparing also with my similar analysis of the long lists. I do this not to predict winners, but to assess the extent to which each book (of those which have been published individually as standalone volumes) is notable, to the extent that they have penetrated the market of GR / LT / SG readers.
(I have done this every year for a number of years; since the BSFA Award categories were increased in number, see 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.)
I’m taking this in descending order of the popularity of the top nominee in each category. None of the finalists in Best Audio Fiction, Best Artwork, Best Short Fiction or Best Non-Fiction (Short) has been logged on any of the three websites, which is not surprising. I note that the shortlist for Best Audio Fiction includes both a series and a single story from that series.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins
1,105,150
4,625
171,448
Secrets of the First School
T. L. Huchu
348
34
96
Doctor Who: Lux
James Goss
69
23
14
Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution
Una McCormack
49
23
11
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel
Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson
4
0
0
(ranks of the 17 books on the long list that I analysed: 1st, 8th, 10th, 12th, 16th)
Sunrise on the Reaping has more owners / raters / reviewers on the three websites than all of the other books in this post put together.
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel is one of several books that has made it to the shortlist despite not having a massive pickup on the ownership sites.
I am really puzzled by The Ghost Merchant, by Rick Danforth, which is also shortlisted in this category. When I did this analysis for the long-lists, I recorded that it had 72 ratings on Goodreads, 1 owner on LibraryThing and 24 reviewers on StoryGraph. Now I can’t find anyone listing it on any of the systems. It’s part of a larger publication, The Colored Lens, but it doesn’t have a lot of ratings either. It’s almost certainly my own mistake, but a strange one for me to have made.
Incidentally Rick Danforth has five short-listed works across four categories. Nobody else has more than three.
Best Shorter Fiction
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
The River Has Roots
Amal El-Mohtar
39,893
347
17,074
Cities are Forests Waiting to Happen
Cecile Cristofari
3
2
0
(ranks of the 32 long-listees that I analysed: 1st and 28th)
Only two of the five finalists have been published as standalone volumes, and only one of those has made much of an impact – but what an impact! Leaving aside Sunrise on the Reaping from the previous category, The River Has Roots has more owners / raters / reviewers on the three websites than all of the other books in this post put together.
Best Collection
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories
ed. Andre M. Carrington
84
40
54
Uncertain Sons and Other Stories
Thomas Ha
135
15
27
Who Will You Save?
Gareth . L Powell
28
6
8
Blood in the Bricks
Neil Williamson
7
16
2
Black Friday
Cheryl S. Ntumy
6
6
2
Creative Futures: Beyond and Within
ed. Allen Stroud
4
3
2
(ranks among the 41 long-listees that I analysed: 9th, 11th, 15th, 18th, 23rd, 25th)
A bit more of a spread here, with the winner on Goodreads coming in second on StoryGraph and third on LibraryThing. The top two books are in the same zone as the top two finalists for Best Novel.
Best Novel
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
When There Are Wolves Again
E. J. Swift
163
16
40
Project Hanuman
Stewart Hotston
78
23
31
A Granite Silence
Nina Allan
56
9
11
The Salt Oracle
Lorraine Wilson
36
3
19
Edge of Oblivion
Kirk Weddell
8
0
0
(ranks among the 82 novels on the long-list by my analysis: 59th, 58th, 66th, 70th, and 81st; all of the finalists were in the lowest third of the popularity rankings of the long-list.)
Again, there is a nominee on the ballot which has failed to make a mark with the users of two of the three book ownership sites.
Also I think that the Chair of the BSFA ought to recuse themselves from the awards, or perhaps even be barred by the rules. It is risky for them and for the awards. It’s not so long since the British Fantasy Award scandal. I am not in any way alleging misconduct, I am expressing an opinion about good practice. I expressed this view previously in private to the previous BSFA Chair, and now I am expressing it in public.
Best Non-fiction (long)
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Fantasy: A Short History
Adam Roberts
17
12
3
Writing the Magic
Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst
8
5
2
Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction
Paul Kincaid
6
5
0
That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American With Film
Payton McCarty-Simas
5
0
4
Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre
Joy Sanchez-Taylor
0
1
0
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914
Kate Holterhoff
0
0
0
(ranks among the 18 books on the long-list, by my analysis: 6th, 8th, 10th, 11th, 15th and joint last)
These are low numbers, and none of those who voted for Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914 seems to have logged it on Goodreads or LibraryThing, let alone StoryGraph, whose users seem uninterested in academic literary analysis in general.
I found Kindle prices on Amazon.com for sixteen of the 23 books listed in all the tables above (I didn’t check the three that I already own). Speculation and the Darwinian Method is the most expensive by far – Amazon gives me a price of $59 for the Kindle edition, more than twice the cost of any of the others. At 203 pages, that’s 3.5 pages per dollar. Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre is the second most expensive, both in absolute price and in value for length, $27 for 187 pages, 6.8 pages to the dollar.
At the other end of the scale, the Kindle edition of A Granite Silence by Nina Allan costs $4.52 for 350 pages, 74 pages per dollar, more than twenty times better value than Speculation and the Darwinian Method and ten times better than Dispelling Fantasies. (The median is 31 pages per dollar.)
Again, I am not suggesting malfeasance in any way. I have no reason to suppose that the rules have not been applied. But I think these numbers are a problem for the BSFA Awards. Do they, or should they, reflect the wider judgement of the BSFA membership and Eastercon community, let alone British SFF readers as a whole, about notability? Several of the books listed above objectively fail the notability test of measurable visibility on three popular library sites. If it becomes too easy to get your work on the ballot, the value of the award itself is diminished.
I don’t know to what extent the solution might be a change in marketing, a change to the rules or both. But that is a secondary question; if the BSFA does not think that there is in fact a problem, no action need be taken anyway.
One more data point. I am in London at the moment, for PicoCon today and work stuff on Monday. I popped into the Waterstone’s on Trafalgar Square yesterday, and could not find a single one of the books listed above on the shelves, not even the Suzanne Collins. It’s only one shop, of course, and the SFF section is not huge, and maybe they had all been bought after the announcement last week. I hope so.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Case of the Missing Will”):
She arrived punctually—a tall, handsome young woman, plainly but neatly dressed, with an assured and business-like manner. Clearly a young woman who meant to get on in the world. I am not a great admirer of the so-called New Woman myself, and, in spite of her good looks, I was not particularly prepossessed in her favour.
The subtitle here is “Twelve Devonshire Mysteries”, but in fact several of them are set in Cornwall rather than Devon – just warning anyone who is expecting Dumnonian exactitude. The stories were originally published between 1923 and 1940 – Agatha Christie’s peak – in a variety of different magazines and collections, and they feature individually Poirot, Miss Marple, Parker Pyne and Tommy and Tuppence, so a decent sampling from across the spectrum of her protagonists. The collection was assembled between hard covers only last year.
One story, “The Hound of Death“, is not about crime at all but a horror story involving a Belgian nun in Cornwall. There is a foreword, extracted from her autobiography, about Agatha Christie’s love of Torquay. Some of the short stories depend on an obvious twist, but the point is more about Christie’s convincing portrayal of the West Country’s landscape and society than the actual plot. Worth it for the Christie fan.
Current The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins The Last Resort, by Paul Leonard Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen, by Alice Loxton
Last books finished Appointment With Death, by Agatha Christie Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al Firefall, by Beth Axford De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek
Next books The Tribe of Gum, by Anthony Coburn Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske
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.
