This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
This is the second last post in this series. Six days from now is the last day of this month, and the end of a four-year project to re-chronicle twenty years of reading. When I started, I was dredging up memories of sixteen years before; now it’s only a couple of weeks. It’s good to have a project with a defined end.
So what did I do and read last month? I had two trips to the UK, one for a Worldcon planning meeting at Heathrow, and one combining a family party in Northern Ireland with work meetings in London.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 64) Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier The Night of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton The Day of the Doctor, by Alasdair Stuart Dispatches from Chengdu, by Abdel LeRoy Charmed in Chengdu, by Michael O’Neal (did not finish)
Non-genre 4 (YTD 21) Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson Death Notice, by Zhou Haohui
SF 7 (YTD 146) The Bruising of Qilwa, by Naseem Jamnia Ocean’s Echo, by Everina Maxwell The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway Shorefall, by Robert Jackson Bennett What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 27) Extraction Point, by MG Harris Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat
Comics 2 (YTD 23) War of the Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al A Doctor in the House?, by Jody Houser et al
5,600 pages (YTD 70,500) 11/21 (YTD 126/288) by non-male writers (Clinton, Kingsolver, Jansson, Jamnia, Maxwell, Shepherd, Sulway, Macaulay, Harris, illustrators of War of the Gods, author and illustrators of A Doctor in the House?) 3/21 (YTD 39/288) by a non-white writer (Zhou, Jamnia, Shepherd)
Second paragraph of third chapter (I’m sorry, this is a long one):
Ivy looked from the End House to her father, surpliced at the lectern, reading the Proper Lesson appointed for Brains Sunday, Proverbs 8 and 9. “Shall not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her word? She standeth in the top of high places, by the way, in the places of the paths. She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming in at the doors…. O ye simple, understand wisdom, and, ye fools, be of an understanding heart…. Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars” (that was the Ministry hotel, thought Ivy)…. “She hath sent forth her maidens, she crieth upon the highest place of the city” (on the walls of the Little Chantreys town hall). “Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither…. Forsake the foolish and live, and go in the way of understanding…. Give instruction to a wise man and he will get wiser; teach a just man and he will increase in learning…. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy is understanding….” Which set Ivy Delmer wondering a little, for she believed her parents to be holy, or anyhow very, very good, and yet…. But perhaps they had, after all, the beginning of wisdom, only not its middle, nor its end, if wisdom has any end. She looked from her father, carefully closing the big Bible and remarking that here ended the first lesson, to her mother, carefully closing her little Bible (for she was of those who follow lessons in books); her mother, who was so wonderfully good and kind and selfless, and to whom old age must come, and who ought to be preparing for it by going in for the Government Mind Training Course, but who said she hadn’t time, she was so busy in the house and garden and parish. And half the things she did or supervised in the house and garden ought, said the Ministry of Brains, to be done by machinery, or co-operation, or something. They would have been done better so, and would have left the Delmers and their parishioners more time. More time for what, was the further question? “Save time now spent on the mere business of living, and spend it on better things,” said the Ministry pamphlets. Reading, Ivy supposed; thinking, talking, getting au fait with the affairs of the world. And here was Mrs. Delmer teaching each new girl to make pastry (no new girl at the vicarage ever seemed to have acquired the pastry art to Mrs. Delmer’s satisfaction in her pre-vicarage career)–pastry, which should have been turned out by the yard in a pastry machine; and spudding up weeds one by one, which should have been electrocuted, like superfluous hairs, or flung up by dynamite, like fish in a river…. But when Mrs. Delmer heard of such new and intelligent labour-saving devices, she was as reluctant to adopt them as any of the poor dear stupid women in the cottages. It was a pity, because the Church should lead the way; and really now that it had been set free of the State it quite often did.
I happened to pick this up at Eastercon, the year before before the plague. It was written during the First World Ward and set very shortly after it, in a Britain where eugenics has been legislated into public policy, and the Ministry of Brains controls who people can marry so that war will become impossible once stupidity has been bred out of the population. There’s a good deal of satire here, and some good observation of what happens when popular support for a political initiative collapses after a strong start; but it’s also a sympathetic observation of human nature and human behaviour, trying to put society together again after the catastrophe of war. Macaulay’s take on global politics is a bit naïve, but she’s good on the human heart; and this slim book was clearly a source of inspiration for both 1984 and Brave New World. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is One Foot in Laos, by Dervla Murphy.
So, back in November 2013, I was having a dull Thursday afternoon in the office when my social media started pinging with news of a new short Doctor Who story on Youtube. I fired up the link and watched it; and watched it again. I don’t think that you can ever recreate the impact of Paul McGann, 18 seconds in, saying “I’m a Doctor – but probably not the one you were expecting.”
The continuity issues raised by precisely which companions were mentioned led me into completely inaccurate speculation about the plot of The Day of the Doctor.
That evening, still excited, I was reading through Big Finish’s online magazine and unthinkingly tweeted the final paragraph of their interview with Tom Baker, which turned into my most retweeted tweet ever (to the point that Buzzfeed ranked it ninth in their list of 16 pictures we can probably stop tweeting in 2014).
Nine days later, we drove to Germany for the showing of The Day of the Doctor in a cinema near Cologne. I wrote:
The cinema is part of the massive Hürth Park shopping complex, and we found food without difficulty at their in-house restaurant. They were showing [The] Day of the Doctor in three different screens, and ours, which was the emptiest when I booked it, was full on the night, so I guess that all three sold out. Sitting beside me were three young women speaking Russian to each other, who gasped with appropriate appreciation in all the right fannish places(such as “Bad Wolf” and “I don’t want to go”). I wondered how far they had come to watch it. Probably not as far as us on the night, anyway.
We cinemagoers also got a lecture from Dan Starkey as Strax about cinema etiquette, showing unfortunates who had been arrested by the Sontarans for using their mobile phones or for trying to record the event, but also rejoicing in the eating of popcorn; followed by Matt Smith and David Tennant demonstrating the 3D while bantering with each other. (It’s perhaps a little regrettable that the 3D glasses were not returnable, at least not where we are; I can’t imagine that we’ll ever use them again.)
And then on with the main feature. Well, I liked it a lot. As everyone has been saying, John Hurt slipped into the part of the missing incarnation utterly smoothly, and in just the right way, portraying a veteran in his own incarnation aware that there would be others to come, and mocking the future Doctors very effectively. I was also relieved that Tennant dialled it down a bit; I felt he sometimes pushed too far in his own stories. And Smith seemed totally energised by the experience, though he must have already decided to go when it was being made.
I was actually glad that Billie Piper didn’t play Rose again (and delighted with the way the script covered that); she actually does well when she gets decent material to work with. Jenna Coleman is a delight. I liked the UNIT subplot (Yay, Jemma Redgrave and Ingrid Oliver!) more than the Elizabethan subplot, but enjoyed both (Joanna Page excellent, if improbable, and softening one of the stupider lines from The End of Time). I remembered the Zygons fondly, and indeed rewatched Terror of the Zygons last weekend to refresh myself; the negotiating the deal moment was perhaps a bit contrived in plot terms, but theoretically sound from the diplomatic perspective. And the shedding of the Time War baggage, both in terms of plot and in terms of liberating the Doctor from what we now know was more than just survivor’s guilt, and possible reintroduction of the Time Lords and Gallifrey is excellent for the future of the show’s storylines.
Not to mention the fan service:
A terrific way of including the former Doctors (who did Harnell’s voice, by the way?)
Just one look from his eyes, but already we know it will be different.
I was spoilered for this, which is probably just as well as I don’t think I could have remained dignified otherwise.
In the global scheme of things, this was one of Moffat’s better Event episodes and probably the best anniversary special. (I know that Moffat has declared that there is only one previous anniversary special, The Five Doctors; he is entitled to his opinion, but I definitely count The Three Doctors, Silver Nemesis, Dimensions in Time and Zagreus, plus perhaps one or two others.) He has always been good at witty banter, and at identity confusion; he hasn’t always been as good at fitting these things to the frame of a wider show, but he did it this time, and I’m a happy fan.
I rewatched both Night and Day of the Doctor in preparation for writing this post, and they both held up really well. The Night of the Doctor packs so much into six and a half minutes. The plot threads of The Day of the Doctor just about tie up properly (this is one of Moffat’s skills). It’s all great fun and rekindled my enthusiasm.
It’s a little sad that there isn’t quite the atmosphere around the 60th anniversary as there was for the 50th, but it’s understandable why; in 2013 we had the first significant milepost since the 2005 reboot, and the show was on a high; but the Chibnall years did not reach the same level of public interest. It should also be said that I’ve heard from sources involved with the production that some at the BBC felt that 2013 went too far, with An Adventure in Space and Time, The Five-ish Doctors Rebooted, and the awful After-party alongside the actual specials. I’m sure that there will be extras around the anniversary this year, but not as many as ten years ago. (Dismayed by the rumours that the next episode will be shown on 11 November, as I will be out of town that day.)
Stephen Moffat’s novelisation, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, actually covers both Night and Day. The second paragraph of the third chapter (numbered Chapter 1) is:
‘He’s here,’ I said, keeping tight rein on the panic levels in my voice. ‘I can hear him, moving about. He’s in Time Vault Zero. The Doctor is in Time Vault Zero.’
The second paragraph of the seventh chapter (numbered Chapter 3) is:
I am writing this account so that perhaps, finally, I can leave it behind.
When it came out in 2018, simultaneously with three other New Who novelisations, I wrote:
Steven Moffat is, oddly enough, the one writer of the four new novelisations who had not previously written a Doctor Who novel. Yep, his previous written Who prose, despite his being the show-runner for the whole of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor eras, and having generated screenplay for more Doctors than any other writer (even if you don’t count the extra five in The Curse of Fatal Death), amounts to only a few short stories, starting with “Continuity Errors” in the 1996 collectionDecalog 3: Consequences, and going on to “What I Did In My Christmas Holidays – By Sally Sparrow“, the short story from the 2006 Annual that became the TV episode Blink.
Of course, I really enjoyed the 2013 50th anniversary special, which in retrospect we now see as a last salute to the Tennant era from almost the end of the Smith era. And I am glad to report that this is by far the best of the four new Doctor Who novels published last month. Moffat has veered further from the script than any of the other writers; the chapters are told by alternating narrators, in non-sequential numbers, interspersed with reports from other characters (Chapter Nine, significantly, is missing); the basics of the storyline (starting with the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration, and ending with the Curator) remain the same, but the transmission to the printed page has been done in a very different way. And there are some lovely shout-outs to odd bits of continuity – Peter Cushing’s Doctor is canonicalised; there is a desperate attempt to explain the black and white era. In general, it’s just good fun, and it feels like the process of writing the book was much more enjoyable for the author than was notoriously the case with the original script. If you are a Who fan, you should get it here.
I stand by that. Several more novelisations down the line, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor remains the best of them – so far.
The 49th and 50th Black Archive monographs on Doctor Who are on The Night of the Doctor, which is James Cooray Smith’s fourth in the series, and Day of the Doctor, by the appropriately named Alasdair Stuart, who I also know as a Hugo finalist and commentator on sf and fandom. To jump to the end, they are both very good and enhanced my appreciation still further for two stories that I already liked a lot.
James Cooray Smith’s monograph on Night is only 73 pages long, but that’s roughly 11 pages per minute of script; compare the volumes on the seven-part stories that are barely a page per minute! There’s a lot to say about these short few scenes, of course, and Smith says most of it.
The first chapter, ‘I’m a Doctor, but probably not the one you were expecting’, reminds us (as if we needed to be reminded) of the excitement around the 50th anniversary and the surprise launch of the mini-episode; and looks at the returns of past Doctors (which turns out to be an even more timely topic in 2023).
The second and longest chapter, ‘What if I get bored? I need a television’, debates whether or not Night counts as TV Doctor Who, looking at other edge cases, of which there are a lot more than you might have thought.
The third chapter, ‘The universe stands on the brink’, looks briefly at the origins of the War Doctor. Its second paragraph is
This assumption, however, fits rather less well with other aspects of ‘The Night of the Doctor’, and the possible discontinuities that result are worth consideration for what they imply about the story and its relationship with The Day of the Doctor, particularly with regards to how much time passes between them. In ‘The Night of the Doctor’, Ohila describes the perilous situation in which the universe finds itself at this point in the Last Great Time War in very stark terms, saying that ‘The war between the Daleks and the Time Lords threatens all reality. You are the only hope left,’ and later insisting that, ‘The universe stands on the brink. Will you let it fall?’
The fourth chapter, ‘What do you need now?’, looks further at the concept of the War Doctor.
The fifth chapter, ‘I don’t suppose there’s any need for a Doctor any more’, looks at the Time War and the character of Cass.
The sixth chapter, ‘Physician, heal thyself’, looks at the last words of various Doctors and at the Doctor as Jesus.
The seventh chapter, ‘Doctor no more’, looks at how the episode fits into the wider Steven Moffat’s wider concept of who and what the Doctor is.
It’s a little cheeky of the publishers to offer this slim volume at the same price as others in the series which are almost three times as long, but the completist will want it, need it and enjoy it anyway. You can get it here.
Alasdair Stuart’s The Day of the Doctor is twice as long. It starts with an introduction, setting out the author’s stall: this is a story involving metafiction and death, and combining Old and New Who. Usually I write my own chapter summaries, but in this case the author has done it for me so I will lazily cut and paste, inserting the chapter titles:
The first chapter [“The Doctor Can See You Now”] looks in more detail at the concept of postmodernism and Who’s own unique flavour of it. Fans of a certain stripe will probably be thinking the word ‘discontinuity’ and they are not wrong.
The second chapter [“The Barn at the End and the Barn at the Start”] talks about the barn, what it represents to the show and also, crucially, the fictional spaces it allows the show to step into. It’s also going to look at the concept of postmodern and metafiction and what that, and 1970s BBC Shakespeare adaptations, have to do with Doctor Who.
The third chapter [“A Man Goes to War”] looks at the War Doctor. He’s arguably the most important incarnation of the Doctor and also one of the least well known. Here we’re also going to explore the idea that each one of these incarnations represents an era of the character.
Just interrupting to say that the second paragraph of the third chapter is:
But before all that, we need to talk about Christopher Eccleston.
Going back to the chapter summaries:
The fourth chapter [“The Man Who Regrets”] turns the attention to the 10th Doctor. Poster boy for the series’ triumphant return! Big-haired righter of wrongs! Lonely god and occasional near mass murderer. He’s also the representation of the show’s past, which is an odd, interesting thing for him to be.
The fifth chapter [“The Man Who Forgets”] focuses on the 11th Doctor and how this is a story which is a prelude to his final bow in The Time of the Doctor (2013) and how it sets up the future of the show. A future which is far more introspective, for both Doctor and Daleks, than it first seems.
The sixth chapter [“Impossibilities, Moments, Revolutionaries and Evolutions”] examines Clara, the Moment, Kate Stewart and Osgood and why the future of the show is carefully, subtly encoded into those four women.
Finally, [in te seventh chapter, “Midlife Crisis of the Daleks”] we take a look at the Daleks and how The Day of the Doctor is a fictional structure through which the past, present and future of both the Doctor and his nemeses are examined and defined.
There’s also an appendix looking at how the 2020 story The Timeless Children affects our understanding of Day of the Doctor now, including also the “Morbius Doctors”.
This is all good, meaty stuff, well worth adding to the thinking fan’s shelves, and you can get it here.
Current No, But I Saw the Movie, ed. David Wheeler Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis Winter, by Ali Smith
Last books finished A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford Earthshock, by Brian J. Moss “Even the Queen” by Connie Wilis The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos, by James F. McGrath
Next books Politics: Between The Extremes, by Nick Clegg Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata
A boyfriend of Resaint’s had once joked, not entirely fondly, that she would be happiest in some kind of high-security lock-up, one hour of human contact a day and otherwise left to her own devices. And OK, fine, maybe she would have been better equipped for it than the average person, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed her time under house arrest on the Varuna.
A vicious yet funny satire on global politics and the environmental crisis, sort of Kim Stanley Robinson but with sæva indignatio added. It’s mostly set in a near-future Europe from which Britain is (mostly) absent; the role played by the Brits become slowly apparent along with much else that is hinted at in early chapters. Written with passion and confidence, and you’ll be thinking of it for ages.
The shortest of the six finalists for this year’s Clarke Award, and in fact the very last of the 96 submitted books to reach my shelves, and the one that we agreed on as the winner. Strongly recommended, of course. You can get it here.
I am in Chengdu for Worldcon, but had a couple of days in Beijing first – mostly for a couple of work meetings, but I took time on Sunday afternoon to go and see the Forbidden City, the old imperial palace complex at the heart of the capital.
(By the way, if you have been trying to contact me, I may not have seen your message or may not be able to respond. Google, Facebook, X, Mastodon, WhatsApp, Signal, and a bunch of others are blocked here. There are odd exceptions – Bluesky, my work email, and even this blog, perhaps because it is privately hosted. I can post to Twitter and Mastodon – and this blogpost will automatically go on both – but can’t easily read replies and cannot respond at all.)
Getting to the Forbidden City from my hotel was already an adventure. The hotel advised that it would take ages to get a taxi, so I braved the subway system. Bad news: the ticket machines literally do not work for foreigners, because you have to scan your identity card to get one. Good news: the human ticket desk is always staffed and it only costs 3 yuan (and it’s about 7 yuan to the euro). Also good news: the station names are given in English as well as Chinese. I did not fancy my chances at picking out 天安门西 from a sea of unfamiliar characters. Though it was only six stops on a direct line, which is within my arithmetical skills.
Even the process of getting in is somewhat ceremonial. You need to book a ticket at least a day in advance (but you only have to specify the day of your visit, not the exact time); everyone’s ID cards were checked as we got out at the Tiananmen West metro station; they were checked again at the outer periphery of Tiananmen square; and at the inner entrance to the square there is a full scan of your belongings and a friendly patdown. Tiananmen Square itself is an impressive and evocative public space, but that’s rather difficult to photograph.
On the north wall of the square, which is the south wall of the Forbidden City, the Great Leader observes us all. Lots of tourists were posing for photos with him in the background, some of them saluting, either military-style or with a clenched fist. I asked a friend later if they were being ironic, but she thought it was perfectly serious.
Two more patdowns on the way into the palace complex, and I got stuck behind a group of Austrian students arguing (unsuccessfully) that they were entitled to a discount due to being on an official exchange, and it is a very long walk from the subway, but once I got in, I must say it is just as spectacular as I had expected. The Last Emperor was one of my lockdown Oscar watches, so I felt a shock of recognition. It is an amazing huge architectural / ceremonial / religious / governmental complex. I took photos of all the buildings, but no image can quite convey the experience of being there.
I tried a couple of selfies but was alarmed at just how out of place the bearded white guy looks. Also my selfie game still needs improvement.
Most of my fellow tourists appeared to be Chinese. A number of them were women dressed in traditional costume. I wondered if some or all of them were museum staff, though some seemed younger than you would expect a full-time employee to be. But two local friends in two separate conversations told me that it’s a newish trend to dress up in historically accurate clothes and go and pose at the Forbidden City on a Sunday afternoon – and then they both confidently identified which era each of the dresses belonged to. Cosplay on a broad scale, I guess. The cellphones may not be 100% historically accurate.
These two actually thought I was asking them to move aside to get a clear shot of the architecture, before they realised that I really wanted them in the picture.
And at the back of the Palace, a little girl was playing hide-and-seek with her slightly bigger sister, and winning.
I regret that I came rather late in the day. Jetlag made it difficult to leave my hotel as promptly as would have been ideal, and the Forbidden Palace closes firmly at 5.30; and there was not enough time to look around the inside of any of the art exhibitions. But having read Puyi’s autobiography, and seen the film, and also read a fair bit about his fearsome grandmother Ci Xi, it was interesting to see the places where they had lived.
The Palace of Heavenly Purity, where Puyi was brought up
Having been kicked out, I walked over to the foreign language bookstore on Wangfujing Street. It is a rather lacklustre affair, with a rather old-fashioned assortment of books and not much effort put into presenting them. But it gave me a chance to experience the prevalence of (mostly Western) big consumer brands in China. By now my feet were killing me and I retreated back to my hotel, which incidentally is right beside the spectacular headquarters of CCTV.
I have made maybe half a dozen guest appearances on CCTV’s show “World Insight with Tian Wei” over the years. This was to have a surprising resonance once I got to Chengdu; but we’ll get to that anther day.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
For the first time in four years, we made our family trip to Northern Ireland, this time by the direct ferry to Rosslare from Dunkirk.
We did many things on holiday, including local megaliths, Derry and nearby attractions, a quick trip to London for me to the Clarke Award ceremony, and an early wedding anniversary celebration.
And I finally put together my photos of the stucco ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche.
Unwinding from an intense period, I read 45 books that month.
Non-fiction 10 (YTD 58) Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor Falling to Earth, by Al Worden Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays, by David Bratman Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan, by Digby Tantam The Stones of Blood, by Katrin Thier Arachnids in the UK, by Sam Maleski Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan (did not finish) Will We Ever Speak Dolphin?, ed. Mick O’Hare Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir, by Wil Wheaton The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul
Non-genre 4 (YTD 18) Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother, by Flann O’Brien Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
SF 17 (YTD 139) A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L’Engle Akata Woman, by Nnedi Okorafor The Outcast, by Louise Cooper Bloodmarked, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish) Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, by Charlie Jane Anders Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett Nettle and Bone, by “T. Kingfisher” Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods, by Catherynne M. Valente What Moves the Dead, by “T. Kingfisher” A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow A Rumor of Angels, by Dale Bailey Into the Riverlands, by Nghi Vo Even Though I Knew the End, by C.L. Polk Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire “Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 25) The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who – The Stones of Blood, by David Fisher
Comics 7 (YTD 21) Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, and Krzysztof Ostrowski Monstress vol. 7: Devourer, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda Major Matt Mason: Moon Mission, by George S. Elrick DUNE: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, by Lilah Sturges, Drew Johnson, and Zid Daleks, ed. Marcus Hearn
10,000 pages (YTD 64,900) 21/42 (YTD 115/267) by non-male writers 6/42 (YTD 36/267) by a non-white writer
Several great books here. From the Hugo ballot, the two novellasEven Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk, which you can get here, and What Moves the Dead, by “T. Kingfisher”, which you can get here; and the graphic novel Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes, which you can get here. Also, newly published Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays, by David Bratman, which you can get here.
On the other hand, I found nothing to like about Hugo finalist Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, and Krzysztof Ostrowski; you can get it here.
Il est tôt, cinq heures du matin, Louis dort. Dans deux heures, elle le réveillera, to wake, woke, woken, elle préparera le petit déjeuner, to eat, ate, eaten et oui, elle reverra avec lui les verbes irréguliers anglais, au programme de sa cinquième. Mais pour l’instant, Lucie remonte en urgence cette scène d’intérieur d’un Maïwenn qu’elles doivent revoir ensemble avant midi. La nuque douloureuse, les yeux asséchés, elle se lève. Le grand miroir sur la cheminée reflète Pimage d’une femme petite et mince, aux formes aériennes de jeune fille, à la peau pâle, aux traits fins, aux cheveux bruns coupés court. Elle porte sur son fin nez grec de grandes lunettes en écaille, qui lui donnent un air d’étudiante. Elle marche jusqu’à la fenêtre du salon. Lorsqu’elle se sent débordée par la vacuité, c’est toujours à cette vitre froide qu’elle va poser son front. Ménilmontant dort, mais la ville l’aspire. Ce qu’elle voudrait, c’est abandonner son corps et se fondre avec tout ce qui est dehors.
It’s early, five in the morning, and Louis’s asleep. In a couple of hours she’ll wake him – to wake, woke, woken – and make breakfast – to eat, ate, eaten – and yes, she’ll help him go through the irregular English verbs in his seventh-grade curriculum. But for now Lucie hastily re-edits the interior scene that she and the director MaIwenn will be looking at together later this morning. She stands up, her neck aching and her eyes dry. The large mirror above the fireplace reflects a small, slim woman with the ethereal figure of a girl; pale skin, fine features, and short-cropped dark hair. On her delicate Greek nose she wears large tortoiseshell glasses that make her look like a student. She walks over to the living-room window. When she feels overwhelmed by the emptiness of it all, this cold glass is where she always comes to rest her forehead. Menilmontant is asleep, but she feels the irresistible draw of the city. She wishes she could abandon her body and dissolve into everything outside.
It’s unusual for a translated novel to be shortlisted for the Clarke Award, and it’s also unusual for the Prix Goncourt to go to a science fiction novel. This is a really good idea turned into a really good novel: an incoming aircraft turns out to be an exact duplicate of one that has already landed, months previously, and we get to explore the problem of dealing with people who are exactly the same but several months apart in experience, with a smattering of We Are Property. Le Tellier is a leading exponent of the Oulipo school and on this basis I will look for more from that source. Like all the finalists, recommended. You can get it here.
Everything was dancing and wavering, her thoughs saturated with too much information, too many people, too many grievances and old records. What steadied her was the job: the analysis of the data so she could find the proof Rice Fish needed. It might not be something she’d ever thought she’d do for pirates, but it was a familiar job: a steadying task she could keep focused on.
A space opera romance, where the extra wrinkle is that the central relationship is between a human woman and the AI of a pirate spaceship. The setup is clear and the emotional perspective of the characters totally convincing. Also the economic and political basis for pirate spaceships controlled by artificial intelligence is pulled off with assurance. Not a book you could imagine Arthur C. Clarke writing, but one you could well imagine him enjoying. Recommended, like all the Clarke finalists. You can get it here.
Two people on an isolated island, exiled with each other for the crime of conceiving a child without a permit; and then their world changes. The build-up of tension just from the routine of isolation is well done; and the shift of perspective as the outside world reasserts itself is really superb. Not a comfortable read, nor a quick one, but very nicely executed. Recommended, like the other Clarke finalists. You can get it here.
Again like an old god – or perhaps an old cat – she was also irascible, capricious, and possibly the least desirable companion for an extended mission. She had also, after ten years, yet to let him forget the time he once flooded her lab as a graduate student. Lucian welcomed any other company.
This was the most Clarkean of the finalists for this year’s Clarke Award. It’s set in the near future on Pluto, where a young mute girl has discovered a deep secret and cannot tell anyone. The interpersonal relationships and science are handled very deftly; there’s a real sensawunda, grand planetary setting (even Pluto is pretty big if you are the size of a small human), isolated base under threat from its own people. A first novel, believe it or not; the author is a nuclear physicist. She assured me that she had not read Imperial Earth, which was the book it reminded me of (and I have a guilty fondness for that one). Recommended, like all the finalists. You can get it here.
I’m in China for Worldcon, so blogging for the next few days has been set up in advance to cover this year’s Clarke Award finalists. (Right now, I should be on the direct flight from Brussels to Beijing.) I’ve already posted my quick reviews of 69 of the submissions, and will hope to come back some time for the other 21…
The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift had by far the fewest owners on either Goodreads or LibraryThing, so few that I was a little suspicious that it might have come from a vanity press. But in fact the explanation is that the publisher sadly went out of business and therefore wasn’t able to do the usual promotional activities. This is a real shame, because the book is a gem. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
She checked the mirror again. The horizon was empty, not a hint of approaching storm. But the dust was always there, at her back. She saw it even on days like today, when there was nothing but the wheel and the road and the infinite red and the depleted husk of country – and yes, the infinite blue. She focussed ahead, let the sky settle in her gaze. Some things never let you go, no matter how far you drove.
It’s set in three timelines, the past, the present and the future, in and around Australia. (Apparently the author has not actually been to Australia, but I couldn’t tell.) The unifying theme is environmental apocalypse, as observed by women scientists; the three plots are each engaging on their own terms, and then the linkage at the end is very satisfying. A real warning about what we are doing to our world and ourselves. It is very much in keeping with the spirit of other recent Clarke winners, and Sir Arthur himself would have appreciated the diving scenes; personally I was especially grabbed by the nineteenth century science. Recommended (like all of the Clarke finalists). You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
One of the rare months (apart from pandemic times) when I did not leave Belgium, or even venture far from my normal Brussels-home-Tienen axis. I wrote about Kurt Vonnegut’s muse, and the top and bottom rated Doctor Who episodes on IMDB.
I did not write it up properly at the time, but Anne and I went to the Musée Fin-de-Siècle in Brussels and were really impressed by a couple of the pieces on display:
Emigrants, by Eugène LaermansPromenade, by Theo van RysselbergheMarketplace, by James EnsorThe Dragonfly, by Isidore Verheyden
Crucially, this was the month that I stopped shaving. Ten days in, it was looking promising, though one or two of my colleagues were more advanced than me.
I read 35 books that month.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 48) Amy Dillwyn, by David Painting After the War: How to Keep Europe Safe, by Paul Taylor The Popes and Sixty Years of European Integration How to End Russia’s War on Ukraine, by Timothy Ash et al Blackpool Remembered, by John Collier Drawing Boundaries, eds John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon and David E. Smith (did not finish) The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell One Bible, Many Voices: Different Approaches to Biblical Studies, by S.E. Gillingham
Non-genre 7 (YTD 14) The Cider House Rules, by John Irving A Burglary, or, Unconscious Influence, by Amy Dillwyn Jill, by Amy Dillwyn Jill and Jack, by Amy Dillwyn Nant Olchfa, by Amy Dillwyn The Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers
Poetry 1 (YTD 4) The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran
SF 12 (YTD 122) The Memory Librarian, ed. Janelle Monáe Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy In the Serpent’s Wake, by Rachel Hartman Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, ed. Paula Guran The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree Tofu Brains: Life on Zeeta 21, by Lars Koch There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle (did not finish) Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut Knights of God, by Richard Cooper The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 21) Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle
Comics 4 (YTD 14) Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadzis et al Saga, Vol. 10, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
8,200 pages (YTD 54,900) 17/35 (YTD 94/225) by non-male writers (Gillingham, Dillwyn x 4, Christie, Sayers, Monáe, Murphy, Hartman, Salaam, Guran, Kiernan, Novik, illustrators of Arena of Fear, Staples, Bonvillain) 2/35 (YTD 30/225) by a non-white writer (Gibran, Salaam)
The best of these was The Cider House Rules by John Irving; you can get it here.
Margery and her husband, Guilhabert, had only one child. She was a child of love and as such bore all the signs of a blessed conception. Her eyes were bright and aware, her small hands curious and slim-fingered, her complexion pinkly perfect. Every inch of her tiny body was perfect. Margery would sit in the garden with her; beside the flowering herbs and the small apple tree they had planted on the day of her birth, and sing the few small songs she knew. Guilhabert doted on her, as fathers often do with their daughters. He would pick flowers for his two beloveds, and for me, each day. He would wander into Gauzia’s room before daybreak and place the small posy by her sleeping face, touching her flushed cheeks with just the tip of his finger.
This won the Tiptree Award in 2014. It’s a complex and richly written story set in several different centuries, involving a woman who is part-human, part-machine and the entanglements that she gets into. I’m afraid it’s a rare “Meh” from me in this sequence of reading. I don’t like cute anthropomorphic androids anyway, and I didn’t quite have the energy to get into the layers of writing. You can get it here.
The Tiptree Honor List included eight novels, a short story by Aliette de Bodard and a music album by Janelle Monáe. I have read two of the novels, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and Hild by Nicola Griffith, and liked them both more. (Personally I don’t think Hild is sf; but it was also a finalist for the Nebula.)
The following year, the Tiptree Award went jointly to The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne and My Real Children by Jo Walton; the BSFA Award to Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie; and the Clarke Award to Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel. That was my first year as a Clarke judge, and I read them all (they were all submitted) but did not write any of them up at the time. So I will return to them now.
I will be in Chengdu next week for the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, and have looked for some contemporary Chinese fiction set there. (Having been deeply unimpressed by a couple of American memoirs.) There’s not a lot available in English, but there is more than nothing.
Death Notice and Fate, by Zhao Haohui, are the first two volumes in a trilogy, featuring the Chengdu Criminal Police and a ruthless serial killer (or killers). The second paragraph of the third chapter (in the original Chinese) of Death Notice is:
Two years prior, Zheng had moved his family out of police housing to a quiet new apartment far from the tumult of downtown Chengdu. Rather than let the aging police apartment lie idle and unused, Zheng still spent nights there whenever he worked overtime. It allowed him to keep in touch with colleagues, and helped to avoid disturbing his sleeping wife and daughter. He called it his second office.
translated by Zac Haluza
Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter of Fate. To my surprise, I found that the original text has a bit more characterisation in it, which did not make it into the published translation.
Captain Pei passed a folder to the commissioner. ‘An unidentified man gained access to our PSB archives yesterday afternoon while masquerading as an officer. He made copies of thirteen files, but this was the one he wanted. From his behaviour and his signature, I’m confident that this man is Eumenides.’
Captain Pei’s expression was calm, and it was difficult to see the emotions in his heart from his face, except that his eyes were slightly red, which was obviously the effect of fatigue caused by staying up late. He pushed a folder in front of Commissioner Song, and while the latter was unpacking the file, he reported: “Yesterday afternoon, a strange man disguised his identity and broke into the criminal investigation archives room. He copied and took away more than ten files, but this one was his real purpose. Judging from his behavior and his signature, we believe that this man is Eumenides.”
Original
Zac Haluza translation
My translation
I have to be honest; I didn’t get a strong sense of Chengdu from these two. There is a certain genre about killers who are superbly able to outwit the forces of law and order – The Silence of the Lambs is the most obvious, but I also recently read Thirteen by Steve Cavanaugh – and there were several scenes where I found it very difficult to suspend my disbelief – though a couple of these are in fact fairly well grounded in local scenery, a murder carried out in full view of the police in front of the Deye Building in Citizens’ Square, and another historical gruesome death at Mount Twin Deer Park, none of which are locations that I have been able to identify on the map. The series is a good enough example of its kind, the tensions between cops from the city and periphery, university graduates and non-graduates, and men and women, all well portrayed against a somewhat implausible backdrop; the means and motivation of their opposition remaining unclear. The situation is sufficiently generic that the first book was adapted without difficulty into a film made and set in Hong Kong, released (after much delay) earlier this year. You can get the two books here and here.
Leave Me Alone, by Murong Xuecun, is a different matter. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I had an ominous hunch that this was Fatty Dong’s trickery. That prat had naturally rushed to sit at the front with the eunuch from Head Office. He looked like an attentive grandson with his notebook spread on his knee, his fat face one big smile. When the time came to make his own report, he gave me another subtle jab in passing: ‘Manager Chen, your skills are great, but you’re not such a good team player.’ I looked at him: the arsehole was wearing an elegant pair of braces, and was bent over writing something in his notebook. I cursed him silently: Are those farts really worth writing down?
translated by Harvey Thomlinson
The novel’s title in Chinese is “Chengdu, Forget Me Tonight“. It is a dark and steamy story of a car salesman who is cheating on his wife with his best friend’s fiancee, among others, and viciously jockeying for position with his colleagues. It was originally published on the online bulletin board of the company where the author worked as, er, a car salesman. Edited to add: The author read this review and contacted me to say that actually he was in HR, not sales, but also that the protagonist was based on a real colleague.
It’s brutally honest self-observation by the main character; not quite Joyce or Salinger, but a gripping window into a society which is not really so very different from ours. Although I suppose a lot of the action could happen anywhere, the setting feels firmly rooted in the sordid suburbs and old-fashioned rural periphery of Chengdu, and the couple of locations that I checked out did seem to really exist. It’s a shame that the protagonist is such an asshole, but of course that is really the point. You can get it here.
The author has since been exiled from China for writing about state corruption and the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. I think we’ll hear more of him in the future.
An interesting feature of all three of these books is the ubiquitous internet bulletin-board, which can be either public or internal to a company or organisation. Zhao Haohui’s Captain Pei reflects on the impact on public discourse:
After all, China was changing. Citizens had more options for obtaining information and were more open-minded than ever. The best way to steer public opinion would be to provide people with more information and let them draw their own conclusions.
The agenda is out for the WSFS Business Meeting to be held in Chengdu. (Here, and here in Chinese.) A lot of amendments to the rules and the constitution are proposed; some of them are good; some of them are pointless; and some of them are wrong. Everyone will agree on that much but not everyone will agree on which is which. The proposals are as follows:
A.1.1.A Marks Authorization
✓ Sensible tidying up of the responsibilities for protecting the WSFS Marks.
A.2.1.A Discussion Items
✓ Allows the Business Meeting to discuss issues raised by its own committees without having to vote on them. This would have avoided the need for some of last year’s shenanigans.
A.2.1.B Business Meeting Contingencies
and other changes
✓ Makes sensible provision for cases where the Business Meeting does not take place or is not quorate. Let’s hope it’s never used, but sensible to have.
A.2.1.C Consistent Change
and more along these lines
✓ Clears up a lot of language which had been made obsolete by the shift to WSFS members as a concept. Won’t satisfy any who opposed that shift but makes life easier for the rest of us.
B. Financial reports
😲 Not a matter for voting, but wow, this year’s NASFic, Pemmicon, had expenditure 40% higher than its income. Doesn’t really endear me to the concept of the NASFiC (on which, more below).
C.1 Bilingual Debate at Business Meeting
🤷 Good as far as it goes to say that bilingual debate should be provided for at a Business Meeting outside an Anglophone country, but not sure that it needs to be encoded into the Constitution in this way, and not sure that this wording is really strong enough if it does.
D. Eligibility extension
✓ Three films that were not widely distributed in 2021 and which the Business Meeting can declare to be eligible for 2022. I am always inclined to be generous.
E.1 The Zero Per Cent Solution (referred for ratification from 2022)
✓ Removes a ticking time-bomb in the constitution which could have led to accidentally No-Awarding less popular categories in a year where there are one or two very high-profile nominees.
E.2 Best Game or Interactive Work (referred for ratification from 2022)
plus some other consequential changes, ending with
✓ There are already too many Hugo categories, but this is an extensively researched and well thought out proposal which will align the awards more closely with what fans are actually doing.
F.1 Convention Time Bracket
🤷 Invokes incapacity of a convention committee where the date slips past December of the year of the convention. Not sure that this is needed, or that it is needed in this form.
F.2 Bid Committee Contactability
🤷 Not clear to me that this needs to be encoded into the constitution, or, if it does, that this is the right information to require.
F.3 Site Selection Ballot Provisions
❌ Two provisions which both tighten up the information that is required to validly fill in a site selection ballot. I think both proposals go in the wrong direction – we should be making it easier to participate, not tougher – and I suspect that either would risk violating EU data protection legislation, as indeed does the current (admittedly unclear) wording. I will vote against both.
F.4 Hugo Awards Criteria for Non-English Works Eligibility
✓ A helpful clarification of the rules, formally adopting a decision already taken by this year’s Hugo administrators. But I will vote against any attempt to further formally quantify the conversion ratios.
F.5 Best Fancast Not Paying Compensation
✓ Seems to me sensible that the Fancast ballot should not include professional productions.
edited to add: I am changing my vote here to an ❌. Subsequent discussion on File 770 made it clear to me that there are nuances here that need to be taken into account, and that it is a bad idea to try and hardwire a general over-arching definition of fan vs pro activity into the Constitution, as was advocated by some last year. The fan/pro line falls rather differently between zines, ’casts and art, and the definition of each category should clarify the boundaries for that category only; there is no need to make a general rule.
F.6 Best Young Writer
❌ There are already too many Hugo categories. Creates a new award for a writer under 24 who has got published in the last year. From what I’ve seen of some previous nominees in that age bracket, this is going to be about boosterism rather than quality.
F.7 Clarifying Language Requirements
✓ Goes without saying, but sometimes these things need to be said. This and the next proposal are discussed in this File 770 thread.
F.8 Remove Regional Limitation
❌ The proposal seems to be based on a misunderstanding – the current system actually benefits non-US works over US works by giving them a second chance to get on the ballot. If we ever have a situation where North American voters are not consistently the largest bloc among the Hugo electorate, we can look at whether this is still needed, but for now it’s a protection against US dominance, and should not be changed.
F.9 Establishment of ASFiC
and several more paragraphs
❌ Having an ASFiC is a great idea, but WSFS should not be in charge of it. Likewise, WSFS should not be in charge of NASFiC, which should instead be abolished in its present form. See this File 770 discussion thread.
F.10 Best Game Category
🤷 Hopefully E2, which is better worded, will pass and this won’t need to be considered.
F.11 Independent Films
❌ There are already too many Hugo categories. Not everything needs to get a Hugo. Having not one but two awards for independent films is definitely excessive, and the definition of what is and isn’t an independent film will be a major headache for administrators.
No doubt the Business Meeting will take a different approach. (It usually does.) But the above is how I think I will be voting.
Accustomed to depending on the largesse of his family, Pierce [Butler, Fanny’s husband] lacked independent wealth, vocation, or even direction for his life. His brother, John, was also “a mere idler … totally without education or intellect,” but he had married an heiress, Gabriella Morris, and was comfortably fixed “in dress, house & equipment.”
To refresh your memory, when Fanny Kemble was born in 1809, her father’s family completely dominated the British theatre world; her aunt was the famous actress Sarah Siddons, the oldest of a dozen Kemble siblings who all went into show business. The family fell on hard times in the 1820s and ruthlessly marketed her as Juliet, both in London and in North America. She married a charming American in 1834, but discovered that the foundation of his wealth was slavery; they separated and eventually divorced. Her ex-husband also fell on hard times and auctioned off 436 slaves, the largest slave auction in American history, in 1859. Her book about life on the plantation, based on letters written in 1838-39, was published in 1862 and effectively deterred British sympathy for the Confederacy. She returned to London in 1877 and lived there for the rest of her life, performing on stage occasionally, but usually doing solo readings (she was clearly very good at it). She died in 1893.
I’m glad to say that I’ve finally found a book about her that I can recommend to the curious. Like Constance Wright, Catherine Clinton in Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars concentrates on her American experience, but gives a lot more context and depth, and gives due regard to the English parts of her life. (We think of her as English, but her mother was born in Vienna to a Swiss mother and French father.) She does not shy away from the political side of Kemble’s life, and it’s made clear that a large part of what drove her was determination to improve the situation of women (though she rejects “organised feminism” on page 235). As I mentioned in one of my previous reviews, while audiences (and her husband) loved to see her as Juliet, her favourite Shakespeare character was Portia. (Merchant of Venice Portia, not Brutus’ wife in Julius Caesar.)
Clinton also adds much more about Kemble’s family than I think I had seen before. The fact that her favourite aunt died as the result of a coach accident soon after they had arrived together in America must have resonated profoundly for her. Clinton also traces her and her siblings’ descendants in America – her two daughters were estranged to different degrees by their parents’ bitter separation, and ended up basically on opposite sides in the Civil War; in 1874, her English nephew married the daughter of the President of the United States in a ceremony at the White House.
Due to my interest in Doctor Who, I’ve read a fair number of showbiz memoirs, and I have come to the conclusion that most actors are interested in themselves and in acting, usually in that order, and in not much else. I think it’s appropriate that Clinton treats Kemble’s theatrical career as of secondary importance to her writing and her activism. Although Kemble is always remembered as an actress, in fact she spent only five years out of her eighty-four as a regular performer in plays; but she leveraged the reputation that she had earned for the rest of her career. (And the revenue from her later solo readings cannot have done her any harm.) She enlivened a rich life experience by writing well, and I should start reading some more of her original work. Meanwhile, you can get Clinton’s biography here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Politics: Between the Extremes, by Nick Clegg.
Current About Time 9, by Tat Wood and Dorothy Ail Fate, by Zhao Haohui 2024, by Robert Durward
Last books finished Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Facing Fate: Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al Locklands, by Robert Jackson Bennett Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin
Next books Doctor Who: Earthshock, by Ian Marter No, But I Saw the Movie, ed. David Wheeler A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford
On 20 July, the day before our public holiday for Belgium’s National Day, I shaved my entire lower face and neck for the last time. The last time forever? I don’t know. The last time to date, anyway.
Photo taken in London by my colleague Andrei Goldis
I had tried this a couple of times before. In 1985, aged 18 and fresh out of school, I grew a moustache, which I kept until 1994; it defaces our wedding photographs, unfortunately.
Indeed, living in Germany in 1986, at the point I turned 19, I even grew a beard; not terribly successfully.
I had thought of giving the beard another try over last Christmas, and stopped shaving on 15 December; but then a crucial work meeting came up on the 20th, and I decided that I couldn’t really do it with five-day stubble.
I don’t really like the way my mouth looks in these pictures, and that was one more reason to try and grow a beard, to conceal the tight grimace I sometime unconsciously slip into.
Why? Well, I am 56 and can’t really carry off the “smart young man” look any more. My once fine head of hair has been thin on top for many years. I was interested to see whether, almost four decades on from my last attempt, the results might be different. I was also somewhat inspired by a former colleague who is about the same age as me, and pulled off the transition to distinguished beard a few years back.
Part of it also came from my genealogical researches. My father grew a beard one summer when he was 52, a bit younger than I am now, but was unsatisfied with the outcome and shaved it off again at the end of the holiday. My mother’s father was clean-shaven, and so were both of her grandfathers, at least in all surviving photographs and memories. My father’s father had a neat military moustache for most of his life. But both my father’s grandfathers sported splendid whiskers. (They never met each other; John Joseph Whyte had been dead for over a decade by the time his son met Henry Deming Hibbard’s daughter in 1927.)
My great-grandfather John Joseph Whyte (1826-1916)My great-grandfather, Henry Deming Hibbard (1856-1942)
So there is some cause for hope from my genetic heritage. (Both salt rather than salt-and-pepper, at least in the evidence we have.)
For completeness, here are my beardless forefathers of the last three generations.
Left: my father, John Henry Whyte (1928-1990); top centre, my paternal grandfather, William Henry Whyte (1880-1949); bottom centre, my maternal grandfather Sean Francis Murray (1909-1976, bottom); right, my maternal great-grandfathers, William Murray (1876-1956, top) and James Stewart (1885-1954, bottom)
A majority of my male work colleagues have beards of varying degrees of success – here is a photo from an office outing to the pub last week, and as you can see beards outnumber the cleanshaven by eight to five among the adult men. (The smallest male in the picture is too young to shave. Another very young chap was also present, but didn’t catch the photographer’s eye.)
I feel right now that I’ll probably keep the beard for a bit. I was perhaps hoping for a salt-and-pepper effect, but in the end I got only salt. It’s been a little weird to adjust to the fact that the edge of your body is no longer quite where it used to be. But I can adapt to that; people adapt to much worse, after all. I also just like stroking it – it’s a completely natural gesture. It does occasionally itch; but everything occasionally itches.
And the key stakeholder approves, so that’s a decisive factor.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I had three trips outside Brussels this month, the first to Zagreb for a conference commemorating the tenth anniversary of their EU membership:
I then had a business trip to Paris, and a combined business / Clarke tip to London, taking the day in between to catch up with my cousin in Dover.
We ended the month with a work outing swinging from trees in Wavre, which I had done a couple of times before. My actual swinging was not so effective but I am good at waiting for my turn on an elevated platform.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 40) A Brief History of Stonehenge, by Aubrey Burl Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard The Shape of Irish History, by A.T.Q. Stewart The Robots of Death, by Fiona Moore City of Soldiers, by Kate Fearon The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, by Philip Bates Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610: Politics, Migration and Trade, by Mary Ann Lyons Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder
Non-genre 3 (YTD 7) Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin The Rebecca Rioter, by Amy Dillwyn Chloe Arguelle, by Amy Dillwyn
SF 10 (YTD 110) The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross Plutoshine, by Lucy Kissick Metronome, by Tom Watson Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman The Red Scholar’s Wake, by Aliette de Bodard The Anomaly, by Hervé le Tellier World’s Fair 1992, by Robert Silverberg “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Aurora: Beyond Equality, eds Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Anderson The Hemingway Hoax, by Joe Haldeman
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 19) K9 Megabytes, by Bob Baker Doctor Who and the Robots of Death, by Terrance Dicks Corpse Marker, by Chris Boucher
Comics 1 (YTD 10) The Endless Song, by Nick Abadzis et al
7,200 pages (YTD 46,900) 12/26 (YTD 78/191) by non-male writers (Beard, Moore, Fearon, Lyons, Bruder, Zevin, Dillwyn x2, Kissick, de Bodard, McIntyre / Anderson, Endless Song illustrators) 2/26 (YTD 28/191) by a non-white writer (Zevin, de Bodard)
I really liked all five of the Clarke shortlistees that I reread this month – Plutoshine, by Lucy Kissick (get it here); Metronome, by Tom Watson (get it here); Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman (get it here); The Red Scholar’s Wake, by Aliette de Bodard (get it here); and The Anomaly, by Hervé le Tellier (get it here).
I also really liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, which was a Clarke submission but not actually sf (get it here); and Nomadland, by Jessica Bruder, on which the Oscar-winning film was based (get it here).
However you can skip World’s Fair 1992, by Robert Silverberg. (Or get it here.)
The rest of the day had been nothing short of torture. Nell had spent hours answering Lieutenant Cabe’s endless questions and accepting Swann’s comfort, the whole time not daring to open her bag to take out her spare granola bar, or phone, or even her lip balm, lest she draw attention to what was also inside. After Lieutenant Cabe had finally let her go, she’d had to return to Classic, where Humphrey had told her she was now on bereavement leave for the rest of the week. She’d argued that she didn’t need it, but family was family, he’d said, and refused to believe she was fine. He was from a gigantic one, several generations all crammed together in the same ancient house on Long Island.
One of the books submitted for the Clarke Award which was clearly not science fiction; a New York map specialist discovers the magical effects of a map owned by her father, also a map specialist who dies mysteriously at the start of the book. It has sold massively well, but I didn’t think it was all that special – implausibly kept family secrets don’t often convince me; maybe it appeals more to people who haven’t read much liminal fantasy before. You can get it here.
This hit the top of four of my lists simultaneously: top unread book acquired this year, top unread book by a woman; top unread book by a non-white writer; and top unread sf book. (All as measured by number of owners on LibraryThing). Next on those piles respectively are Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne; Winter, by Ali Smith; Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata; and Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones.
— Gick det bra? frågade Ina. De var för många. Och varför skulle de ha småbarna med sig, det var ju en minneshögtid? Vi glömde salladen.
“Did it go well?” Ina asked. “There were too many of them. And why did they bring the younger children? I mean, it was a memorial service. We forgot the salad.”
translated by Thomas Teal
A short book of great short stories by Tove Jansson, written in her seventies, reflecting on age, art, nature, gender, sexuality and life in general. None of these is long and they are all digestible; none has a sneaky twist but all are humane and insightful. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was both the shortest book acquired in 2017 which I had not yet read, and the non-genre book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are 2024, by Robert Durward, and No, But I Saw the Movie, ed. David Wheeler.
Chapman had been in Harrod’s recently when a salesperson asked him to try a cologne just introduced by Armani. The advertisements made much of the fact that this new fragrance, simply named Amore, combined the most striking elements of other famous Armani scents: a trace of Code, a hint of Mania, overtones of Acqua di Gio, and plenty of Attitude. Chapman thought it quite manly, but to Keats it sounded like nothing but a mélange of incompatible odors. “So”, he sniffed dismissively, “what they’re telling us is Love is Armani’s blended thing.”3
3Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing Title of a 1955 movie, and the theme song by Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain
A fannish tribute to Flann O’Brien’s Keats and Chapman stories, though I am not super convinced that it was worth the effort. You can get it here. The shortest unread book on my shelves that I had acquired in 2017; next on that pile is Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson.
Really good climax to a multi-volume Tenth Doctor story, involving the Osirans and all the recurring characters from the previous installments of this sequence. Also includes a less impressive story bringing the Tenth Doctor to London to meet his previous companions (or are they). You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
We started the month in France, for a lovely 24-hour trip to a neglected corner across the border for my birthday. We found many things there including the grave of Wilfred Owen.
I found myself at the British Ambassador’s residence twice in a week, once for the Coronation reception and once for Eurovision.
Closer to home, our mayor commemorated the RAF men killed in a wartime crash in the next village to ours, eighty years before.
Back home in Northern Ireland, the local government elections took place and for the first time Nationalist parties got more votes than Unionist parties; I managed to get this data out before anyone else did.
I read 23 books that month, relaxing a bit after the Clarke frenzy.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 32) Johnson at 10: the Inside Story, by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell The John Nathan-Turner Doctor Who Production Diary, 1979-90, by Richard Molesworth American Gridlock, eds. James Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka Vengeance on Varos, by Jonathan Dennis The Rings of Akhaten, by William Shaw
Poetry 1 (YTD 3) Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles
SF 13 (YTD 100) Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister Love And Other Human Errors, by Bethany Clift The Hunt – For Allies, by David Geoffrey Adams (did not finish) Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett The Violence, by Delilah S. Dawson (did not finish) Where it Rains in Color, by Denise Crittendon The Race, by Nina Allan A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell The Animals in That Country, by Laura Jean McKay The Coral Bones, by E.J. Swift The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Fredrik Pohl
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 16) Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos, by Philip Martin Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, by Philip Martin
Comics 1 (YTD 9) The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis et al
7,000 pages (YTD 39,700) 9/23 (YTD 66/165) by non-male writers (Giles, Clift, Dawson, Crittenden, Allan, Marske, Serpell, McKay, Swift, Casagrande/Florean) 3/23 (YTD 26/165) by a non-white writer (Yoshinaka, Crittenden, Serpell)
I had not previously read the three most recent Clarke Award winners, but I thought they were all fantastic: The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell, which you can get here, The Animals in That Country, by Laura Jean McKay, which you can get here, and Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles, which you can get here. As homework for this year’s award I also reread The Coral Bones, by E.J. Swift, which you can get here.
Even completist Doctor Who fans can skip Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, by Philip Martin, but you can get it here.
Current Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin Facing Fate: Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al Locklands, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Last books finished Shorefall, by Robert Jackson Bennett What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay Leave Me Alone, by Murong Xuecun
Next books About Time 9, by Tat Wood 2024, by Robert Durward A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford
I voted No Award for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Series. I think the category is a bad idea in principle which is now showing its limitations in practice. My objections are as follows:
The Hugos ought to celebrate the best activity of the previous year, and only the previous year. For some of the other categories (Semiprozine, Fanzine, Fancast), earlier work is taken into account to determine eligibility, but the award is clearly for achievements of the previous calendar year. Best Series is inevitably an award for a multi-year set of activities.
It is impossible for the diligent reader to read all of the work nominated for Best Series in a given year. By giving the award we are deliberately engineering a situation where voters cast their votes based on imperfect knowledge of the finalists.
We are now seeing repeat nominations for series that have been unsuccessful finalists before. I feel sympathy for authors who must feel that they are waiting for their turn, but that’s not the way an awards system should run.
The arguments made in favour of creating the category are now out of date. (See the Minutes of the 2016 WSFS Business Meeting, pages 136-140. I align myself completely with the minority report of Mark Olson at the end.) The proposers in 2016 said:
Looking at Best Novel finalists over the past decade or so, series novels represent a majority of the nominees, yet only a handful of the winners, with later installments particularly disadvantaged. Clearly, the Hugo nominators feel that high quality work is being done in series novels, yet the Hugo voters have a taste for standalone novels, or at least novels that can be approached without any background. This represents a change from earlier eras, when the publishing field was smaller and readers tended to be able to consume a higher proportion of it. In decades past, series novels managed to hold their own against standalones, even dominating the Best Novel category at times.
That was in 2016, the year the first volume of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy won Best Novel. Everywinner of Best Novel since then has been part of a series. Four of the six have been later installments rather than the first book – to name them, Jemisin’s own The Obelisk Gate (2017) and The Stone Sky (2018), Martha Wells’ Network Effect (2021) and Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace (2022). So the taste of Hugo voters appears to have changed again. If anything, it is the standalone novels that could complain of being discriminated against. (Having said that, five of this year’s six finalists appear to be standalones.)
A weaker argument, though one that is sometimes made, for having a Best Series category is that it supposedly reflects the publishing market. The Hugos cannot, do not and should not cover everything that goes on in the genre. They should and usually do celebrate the achievements of the previous calendar year, and that should be as determined by fans, not the real or imagined wishes of the publishing industry.
I voted against ratifying Best Series in Helsinki in 2017, and I would have voted to sunset it if I’d been in Washington DC in 2021. At least the awful amendments proposed in Chicago last year, which would have excluded popular and long-running series and created many headaches for administrators, were rejected. But if there’s ever a move to scrap the category again, I’ll support it. And if there is one thing I can do this year to accelerate the abolition of the category in a future year, it’s to vote No Award.
So, on to my vote in this year’s category.
7) October Daye, by Seanan McGuire. I have rehearsed previously why I bounced off this and don’t need to do so again here.
6) The Locked Tomb, by Tamsyn Muir. I really bounced off the first two books of this series, but surprised myself by liking the first part of the third book, until the action returned to the setting of the previous two and I got lost again.
4) The Founders Trilogy, by Robert Jackson Bennett. The publisher kindly made all three volumes available to voters, and I had time to read two of them before the deadline. Well put together fantasy with a complex magical system, but I preferred his previous trilogy.
3) Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovich. I didn’t read or reread any of these before voting closed, but I really enjoyed the books of the series that I have previously read.
2) Children of Time Trilogy, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I read all three of theses and thought that they were brilliant. Fantastic aliens, good grasp of inter-species and intra-species politics, superb world-building. I hope it wins. (I don’t have strong expectations for No Award.)
1 ) No Award, as explained above.
On the latest Octothorpe, John Coxon makes the point (at 21:30) that this year’s Best Series ballot contains some items – he specifies the Children of Time trilogy, and the first volume of the Founders trilogy – that are better than anything on the Best Novel list. I think that’s true, but it doesn’t change my view about keeping Best Novel and deleting Best Series.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 64) Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier The Night of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton The Day of the Doctor, by Alasdair Stuart Dispatches from Chengdu, by Abdel LeRoy Charmed in Chengdu, by Michael O’Neal (did not finish)
Non-genre 4 (YTD 21) Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson Death Notice, by Zhou Haohui
SF 7 (YTD 146) The Bruising of Qilwa, by Naseem Jamnia Ocean’s Echo, by Everina Maxwell The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway Shorefall, by Robert Jackson Bennett What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 27) Extraction Point, by MG Harris Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat
Comics 2 (YTD 23) War of the Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al A Doctor in the House?, by Jody Houser et al
5,600 pages (YTD 70,500) 11/21 (YTD 126/288) by non-male writers (Clinton, Kingsolver, Jansson, Jamnia, Maxwell, Shepherd, Sulway, Macaulay, Harris, illustrators of War of the Gods, author and illustrators of A Doctor in the House?) 3/21 (YTD 39/288) by a non-white writer (Zhou, Jamnia, Shepherd) 1 reread (Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor)
352 books currently tagged unread – down 7 from last month.
Reading now Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor Leave Me Alone, by Murong Xuecun
Coming soon (perhaps) Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al About Time 9, by Tat Wood Doctor Who: Earthshock, by Ian Marter Earthshock, by Brian J. Moss The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos, by James F. McGrath A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin 2024, by Robert Durward No, But I Saw the Movie, ed. David Wheeler Politics: Between The Extremes, by Nick Clegg The Road to Amber — Volume 6: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford “Even the Queen” by Connie Wilis Winter, by Ali Smith Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort My Real Children, by Jo Walton One Foot in Laos, by Dervla Murphy Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray et al Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton
We were moved around in buses a lot. I looked out through rows of slanted windows, lined in shoddy chrome, to see sand and cactus swirling subtly in the distance as we made our way up mountain roads. I imagined being a photon, my path perturbed by desert thermals.
I think I got this for F ages ago, and it wasn’t an especially good choice by me for him; it’s by one of the evangelists of virtual reality, and his life story up to the early 1990s, so twenty-five years before the book was actually published in 2017. I have no special interest in VR; my most intense experience of it was three years ago with F in Paris, where Ubisoft, the makers of Assassin’s Creed, had set up a headset for you to experience Notre Dame as it would have been in 1789 (the real Notre Dame still being under repair then and now). And I’ve dabbled a bit in Second Life and the like, but that’s not quite the same.
Like a lot of online reviewers, I found it much more interesting to read about the author’s journey from rural Arizona to Silicon Valley, the tragic family circumstances, difficult educational and business decisions, and mostly failed romances and friendships that got him to the point of selling his startup at a huge profit that has enabled him to do what he likes for the rest of his life. His ideas are less interesting than his story, but it’s easy to skip the more technical (and visionary) chapters.
I still wouldn’t especially recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already have a deep fascination with the social and economic dynamics of innovation; it is an important topic but this is n0ot the way into it. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is another autobiography, A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin.
