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 started the month with a visit to Ireland for the Northern Irish local council elections…
…visiting my 102-year-old great-aunt…
…and more planning for the Dublin Worldcon.
To England again for our old friend K’s wedding to another K:
I voted in the European and national elections:
And then it was back to Northern Ireland for coverage of the European election count in Magherafelt. (Here with partner in crime Mark Devenport and former Justice Minister and Alliance leader David Ford, who kindly brought us both tea.)
I was very pleased with this picture of the three newly elected MEPs. I had already taken one with them all looking in different directions, but then Martina Anderson (in the middle) called out my name and Diane Dodds (left) and Naomi Long (right) both turned to look at me – funny thing really as I do not know Martina as well as I know the other two.
Current The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness
Last books finished Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton Doctor Who: Origin Stories (ed. ?Dave Rudden?) ω1 Doctor Who and Warriors’ Gate, by John Lydecker Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen α2 Doctor Who: The Romans, by Donald Cotton
Next books Zink, by David Van Reybrouck “Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger
The Martian won both the Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, in 2016, but not the Bradbury Award which went to Mad Max: Fury Road. It was way ahead at the nominations stage, and comfortably ahead on the final ballot, with Mad Max: Fury Road in second place, Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens third, Ex Machina fourth and The Avengers: Age of Ultron fifth in both final ballot order and nominations. This was the last year that there were only five finalists in each Hugo category.
This is one of the most star-heavy Hugo winners that is not based on The Lord of the Rings. All of the returning actors are men. Matt Damon, in the lead, was Colin, the organised crime mole within the police in The Departed, ten years before.
Jeff Daniels, here NASA chief Ted Sanders, was Debra Winger’s husband Flap Horton thirty-two years ago in Terms of Endearment.
Michael Peña, astronaut Rick Martinez here, was in back-to-back Oscar winners a decade before, as Daniel the locksmith in Crash(almost the only interesting character in the film) and was also (with more hair) Omar in Million Dollar Baby.
Chiwetel Ojiafor, here Vincent Kapoor, was the protagonist in 12 Years a Slave and the antagonist in Serenity.
Farther down the credits, Enzo Cilenti, Mike Watkins here, is barely visible in Guardians of the Galaxy as a guard. Gruffudd Glynn, Jack here, had a small part in the Doctor Who episode The Woman Who Lived. Brian Caspe, the timer controller here, had a small part in Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror. I can’t be bothered to get photographs, I’m afraid.
I went to see this in the cinema with F when it came out, and wrote then:
F and I went to see The Martian last night. I had read the book for the Clarke Award, and enjoyed it very much (though obviously not quite as much as the ones we shortlisted); it was by far the most widely owned of all the books submitted on both LibraryThing and Goodreads. The film did what I hoped it would do, and included almost all of the set piece scenes from the book, making them at least as good as they had been in my head. I’m not going to claim that it’s Great Art, but I do think it’s Hugo-worthy and I expect it will be on my list for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) – the only other film I’ve seen in the cinema this year was The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, which came out in 2014 and so would have been eligible for this year’s Hugos (but didn’t even make the top 15).
I enjoyed it on rewatching as well – the effects are fantastic and it is very well paced, but was a struck by a couple of negatives. First off, the acting isn’t all that brilliant actually. Jeff Daniels in particular, as the director of NASA, seems to have only one expression on his face.
Second, it’s another case of ethnic erasure I’m afraid. Chiwetel Ojiafor’s character, Vincent Kapoor, is clearly Asian (Venkat Kapoor) in the book, as is Mackenzie Davis’s character, Mindy Park. Another Asian actor playing one of the NASA controllers had all of her speaking scenes cut out in editing. Ridley Scott is entitled to make his own editing decisions, but the rest of us are also entitled to point out when several of them go in the same direction.
I still enjoyed it enough to put it in the top of half of my table of Hugo, Nebula and Bradbury winners, ahead of Stardust but behind The Truman Show.
As previously mentioned, I’m going to draw a close to this sequence of film reviews now. The subsequent winners are:
2017 Hugo and Bradbury: Arrival. It was convincingly ahead of the field in both Hugo nominations and the final ballot, and I certainly voted for it myself (I was also the Hugo administrator that year). I’m putting it in my top ten, below Terminator 2: Judgement Day but above Galaxy Quest.
I thought Get Out was brilliant – taking an old sf trope, injecting it with the dynamic of the current debate about race, and Josh Lyman from The West Wing as a genial but completely mad scientist. Daniel Kaluuya is particularly good as the protagonist. Maybe a bit too close to the horror side of the genre for my personal taste.
I still ranked it only half way down my Hugo ballot that year, and I’m doing the same with my overall rankings.
2018 Hugo: Wonder Woman. I saw it in the cinema, and wrote:
I went to see Wonder Woman last weekend in my local cinema. I haven’t been following the DC movies recently — the last I saw was The Dark Knight Rises five years ago — and went into it pretty unspoiled with no expectations. I really enjoyed it, and heartily recommend it to everyone.
Spoiler alert!
I had no idea that the film is largely set during the closing weeks of the first world war, in November 1918, with almost all of the second half set in a fictionalised Belgium. Although we Belgians have contributed greatly to the comics tradition, we’re not used to seeing our country in superhero movies.
The fictional Belgian village of Veld, typically for Flanders of the time, has shop signs in French but the villagers mainly speak Flemish to each other — and a frisson went around the movie hall as Wonder Woman spoke to them in their own language. Later in the film, the audience went very quiet at one point.
The resonances were pretty strong. The cinema I was sitting in (which committed a major faux pas on the film’s opening night) was built on the site of buildings destroyed during the invasion of August 1914, close to the monument to the 272 civilians in our town killed during that terrible month. The movie’s interrogation of the rationale for war hit very close to home.
I’m glad to say that the century-old chemical weapons don’t come near our local headquarters, but are kept in Poelkapelle, 150 km west of here. They are currently working through a significant backlog with their new disposal chamber, which started working only last April after the previous one got blown up in 2012.
Coming from where I do, I’m used to writers taking my own cultural heritage and mangling it horribly. I think Wonder Woman very successfully avoided this trap as far as Belgium goes (though the castle where the military gala ball takes place appears to be in a very un-Belgian landscape). (And I did wonder about Themiscyra apparently being within a day or so of both Turkey and London.)
It’s fundamentally a funny, witty action film with a light approach to actual history; but it does the serious bits very well. As I said, strongly recommended.
On reflection, I was giving it a lot of bonus points for being set in Belgium, and I think I’d actually rank it below Get Out today, but still near the middle of the table.
2019: Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (both Hugo and Bradbury). I was the Hugo administrator again this year, so did not write this up at the time. I enjoyed it a lot, and it (just) gets into the top half of the table of winners. This was the most recent film to win the Bradbury Award – it went to TV episodes in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
2020: The Hugo went to a TV series and the Bradbury Award to and episode of the same TV series, so no entry in the list. (I was deputy Hugo administrator that year.)
2021: The Old Guard (Hugo). I was involved with the process throughout the nominations stage, but left shortly after votes on the final ballot started coming in, and wrote:
Charlize Theron and her co-stars are very cute immortal fighters in today’s world, and do a lot of biffing, for no reason that I could really detect.
I found this film incomprehensible, and am ranking it right at the end of the table, ahead of only The Sixth Sense and some of the sillier Retro Hugo winners.
2022: Dune (Hugo). I was deputy Hugo administrator again this year, and Dune was an early favourite. I went to see it when it came out, and wrote:
Well, well, well – I had not realised that Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune is not yet out in the UK or America. My British and American (and I guess also Irish) friends, you have a treat in store.
F and I went to see it yesterday in the IMAX near the Heysel stadium. I think in retrospect I’d have gone for the 3-D experience rather than the IMAX; it is such a huge film that one rather gets lost in the perspective.
You have surely read the book, so the only important thing to say about the plot is that we get only halfway – although the film is being advertised as Dune, tout court, it’s actually only the first half, up to the point where Paul and Jessica are adopted by the Fremen. So assuming that the opening night in the US in October is successful (and I think it will be), there’ll be a part 2 next year, or in 2023.
What to say: it looks fantastic. Sets, effects, planets, big buildings, big bangs, ornithopters you can almost believe in, and of course the sandworms. (F wondered if the film-makers had drawn inspiration from SpongeBob’s Alaskan bull worm; it’s pretty clear that SpongeBob in this instance was inspired by Frank Herbert.) Here’s the trailer which gives you some idea (though you really have to see it on the big screen).
So, other things to comment on. The casting is good. I want to particularly note Rebecca Ferguson, who despite her name is Swedish, as Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother. She is less hard-edged than the character in the book, but I think deeper for it. Charlotte Rampling basically just gets one scene as the Reverend Mother, but steals it completely. Javier Bardem is Stilgar, leader of the indigenous Fremen, and is superb – the first scene where he brings the “gift of water” sets the tone. (I helped him with an event in the European Parliament in 2012 – see here at 0:37.) Jason Momoa is great as Duncan Idaho. Slightly less convinced by Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck. The nobles – Oscar Isaac as the Duke, Stellan Skarsgård as the Baron – are fine. Sharon Duncan-Brewster, who I last saw as Daniel’s friend and Edith’s girlfriend Fran in Russsell T. Davies’ Years and Years (which I don’t seem to have written up), plays a genderflipped Liet Kynes. The two young leads, Timothée Chalamet as Paul and Zendaya as Chani, are good to look at and manage to carry off the freighting of youth combined with destiny very well. There is justifiable commentary that although the Fremen are ethnically diverse, none of them are actually played by actors whose ethnicity comes from the desert.
But the casting is secondary just to the staging and cinematography. All the key moments are there; some of them look as good as I had hoped, most of them look far better than I’d hoped. The music is just right too, though I was a little sorry that the Pink Floyd from one of the trailers didn’t make it to the big screen:
I still think it’s pretty good, and am putting it also in my top ten, just behind Arrival.
So, here is my definitive list of the films that have won the Hugo, Nebula and Ray Bradbury Awards, in reverse order, starting with the bottom half of the table:
That day she also took Communion in the Nine Lives old people’s home, and attended the rehearsal for the crib service. This involved the junior school and nursery children, so Lizzie had to put on an especially big smile when she saw Jamie Dunning in the audience. She was even called upon, as she ran the children through their parts, to put a doll in the manger. It turned out to be relatively easy not to think about what would happen the next time Jamie was in this building. There was, since Arthur had said those words to her in a different voice while Autumn was away, now something in her head to let her deal with all that. She wasn’t compelled to hurt her hands, and that was a great relief. She could barely hear that small part of herself that was still free, screaming inside a distant room in her head. The actual crib service, since it was scheduled after the wedding on Christmas Eve, would of course never come to pass. But there was no point in letting the cat out of the bag about that.
I voted for the first of this series for the BSFA Awards, and bought the next three at Gallifrey One in 2020 just before the pandemic. I really enjoyed this as well – the village of Lychford becomes the focus of dark forces seeking to destroy the world through a small local child, and the Witches of the first story need to prevent it. Humanely told, as usual with Cornell. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Penric’s Progress, by Lois McMaster Bujold.
I hope you can see a small point of light high in the sky here? It is the planet Jupiter, taken from Het Torenvalk, our local nature lookout point, at 5pm this afternoon, half an hour after sunset.
This month is a great opportunity to see all five of the classical planets in the early evening. Jupiter is bright and high a bit east of south; Mars also bright, red and glowering in the east. Saturn is a bit dimmer, but still brighter than most other things in the sky, a bit west of Jupiter.
For Venus and especially Mercury, you’ll have to be lucky with clear horizons and clear skies in the 30-60 minutes after sunset, in the southwest. This evening both had dipped below the treeline at Het Torenvalk by the time it was dark enough for either to be visible. But as the month wears on they will become less difficult to find. On Christmas Eve, 24 December, the crescent moon will be very close to both of them – so if that is a clear evening where you are, pop outside a bit after sunset and have a look.
(Also NB despite summer brightness there will be a better view in the Southern Hemisphere as the planets are at a better angle to the horizon.)
(Also a good astronomy app will help. I’ve been using the free versions of SkyView, Night Sky and Sky Guide, but there may well be better options out there.)
He was right to warn me: beyond Zagreb the autobahn fed right into the type of road I was doomed to travel for the remainder of the journey: a narrow ribbon of crumbling asphalt that was barely wide enough for two cars abreast, much less the dense traffic of cargo trucks that are constructed more of lumber than of steel, buses that look like something that was just pried off the Titanic, and horse-drawn wagons carrying four-story haystacks. Of course, there are other obstacles, such as steep mountains, shoulders seeded with PMA-2 antipersonnel land mines, random police checkpoints that always seem to be located at the end of a patch of road-top gravel on a blind curve, sudden narrow business districts springing from the hillsides as if from a children’s pop-up book, and a motley collection of pedestrians in various stages of fatigue-induced dementia staggering in the roadway … usually leading a herd of goats and hens and carrying a stack of 2-by~4s. All this is navigated at breakneck speeds and a thorough disregard for safety and curves.
Returning to the Balkans, I had a good read of this book by a Colorado journalist, sent to the Balkans by the Boulder Weekly and immediately immersed in a conflict that he struggled to understand. Of course, he is writing for the well-meaning Colorado reader who wants to be thrilled and informed, and not for me; I found the breathlessness a bit exasperating at times. (Though I did cheer on the couple of occasions when people who I know personally appeared on the page.)
I’ve read a lot of Balkan war stories over the years, and this one stands out for two paradoxical reasons. First, Campbell totally absorbs and regurgitates the collective narrative of the Balkan press corps at any given time – so he accurately reflects the media consensus without especially critiquing it. But second, he has a good eye for human detail, even if he doesn’t always put two and two together. His chapters on Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 are particularly good on incidental observation. So I was duly entertained by it, if not always in the way the author had intended.
Since 2005 I’ve been keeping a tally of the number of different places I have spent a night away from home in the course of the calendar year, and more recently also tallying the number of countries that I set foot in whether or not I stayed overnight. I have no further travel planned for 2022, so it’s going to end with a relatively modest total of 14 places in 10 countries, the second lowest of any non-pandemic year. Places (well, just the one place this year) where I spent multiple non-consecutive nights are marked with an asterisk. Edited to add: and in fact I did have one more trip to Amsterdam, so that’s 15 places.
I also changed planes in Canada and Austria and visited both France and Luxembourg without staying overnight, so, not counting Belgium, my country tally for the year is also 14, the third lowest of the thirteen years I have been counting. I expect that next year will be a little higher, as travel returns to normal post-COVID and assuming that work keeps me as busy as in previous years.
Second frame of third story (“A Religious Experience”, by Tim Quinn and John Ridgeway):
I had bought this in hard copy ages ago, and had not appreciated that the title story, a Twelfth Doctor / Bill Potts adventure, is a direct follow-on from the previous Twelfth Doctor volume, The Phantom Piper, which I have not read yet. The arc also depends quite heavily on continuity from earlier stories in Doctor Who magazine, most of which I had read but long ago.
But I got over it and very much enjoyed the title story and the collection as a whole. There is a whole arc about Cybermen, which comes close to making them interesting. There is a First Doctor story, a couple of Fourth Doctor stories, and a Fifth Doctor story by Paul Cornell. There are some interesting endnotes by the writers and artists, reflecting on what worked and what didn’t, and why. I still wish I had got the previous volume but I don’t regret reading this. You can get it here.
This was my top unread English-language comic. Next in that pile is Alternating Current by Jody Houser et al, a Thirteenth Doctor volume, but I may have to reassess my approach.
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.
The following weekend, I struggled into Brussels for a tour of the city as Charlotte and Emily Bronte would have known it. Totally fascinating.
And it being Easter, we had Eastercon at Heathrow which once again I thoroughly enjoyed, counting the BSFA votes among other things. I finished the month ready to fly to Ireland once again; but more of that anon.
6,700 pages (YTD 17,700) 11/22 (YTD 23/58) by non-male writers (McIlwaine, Yanagihara, “Eliot”, Williams, Wells, Novik, Ireland, Rayner et al, Walden, Doran, de Jongh) 3/22 (YTD 7/58) by PoC (Yanagihara, Ireland, Koomson)
A lot of really good books this month. I think I will single out Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, which you can get here; Time Was, by Ian McDonald, which you can get here; and Alarums and Excursions, by Luuk van Middelaar, which you can get here. On the other hand I completely bounced off The Land of Somewhere Safe, by Hal Duncan; you can get it here.
So, I’m rather far behind with writing up my recent Big Finish listening – last time I mentioned it was in July. Three boxed sets of audio plays to cover quickly in summary here.
My favourite of these is a set of three stories with the Tenth Doctor and Classic Companions. All three bring David Tennant together with John Leeson as K9. The first, Splinters by John Dorney, features Louise Jameson as Leela; the second, The Stuntman by Lizzie Hopley, has Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, and the third, Quantum of Axos by Roy Gill, has Sophie Aldred as Ace. All three stories have fantastic chemistry between Tennant and the others – the arrivals of Leela and K9 are the first changes to the regular cast he remembers as a young fan, and clearly everyone is thrilled to bits to be performing with each other. It was also interesting that all three stories play with themes of identity, memory and nostalgia, which always appeal to me too. Dorney, Hopley and Gill are among Big Finish’s more reliable writers, and they have delivered here. Strongly recommended. Here’s a trailer to whet your appetite.
Another New Who spinoff comes in the form of The Year of Martha Jones, set during the year that Martha travels the world while the aged-up Doctor is the Master’s prisoner. We’ve already had a print anthology set in this period; this however is better, getting off to an excellent start in The Last Diner by the always reliable James Goss, a more Western-y The Silver Medal by Tim Foley, and a well-executed climax in Deceived by Matt Fitton. Martha is joined by Adjoa Andoh playing her mother Francine, who has apparently escaped the Master, and Serin Ibrahim as old friend Holly. (Also Clare Louise Connolly plays the Toclafance in all three stories.) Guest stars include Marina Sirtis, best known as Deanna Troi in Star Trek, in the first episode.
The fifth set of Ninth Doctor adventures, Back to Earth, sees Christopher Ecclestone’s time as the Doctor on audio overtaking his record on TV. To be honest I was less wowed by this trilogy than by some of the others, but these are all decent enough stories. Station to Station by Robert Valentine has the Doctor helping a young woman (Indigo Griffiths) out of a strange predicament in a deserted railway station. The False Dimitry by Sarah Grochala brings a Whovian spin to a corner of Russian history, the title character playedby Alexander Arnold. And Auld Lang Syne, another one by Time Foley, has a spooky New Year’s Eve party where all is not what it seems; veteran Wendy Craig makes an appearance as the great-aunt. I got the sense that Big Finish is trying out younger writers and actors in this range, which is fine. Here, again is a trailer.
I’m also way behind on noting the Fourth Doctor box sets that I have been listening to, but I think I’ll save those for another post – the above three are all worth getting anyway.
Current Doctor Who: Origin Stories (ed. ?Dave Rudden?) Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen ω1 The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness
Last books finished A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko φ1 The Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal χ1 (did not finish) Filter House, by Nisi Shawl ψ1
Next books Rise of the Dominator, by Robert Mammone Zink, by David Van Reybrouck “Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger
Time to catch up briefly on some other media that I’ve been consuming of late. (Like, over the last few months.)
Literally the first book blog entries that I wrote, back in 2003, were my first reading of the Sandman comics. My wife and son have never read them, but Neil Gaiman’s name carries credibility and we had a good few hours watching this year’s TV series. Some very interesting casting, making the characters much more diverse, which I did not have a problem with at all. The best single episode was “The Sound of Her Wings”, with Kirby Howell-Baptiste excelling as Death; I had completely forgotten that she was also in The Good Place as Chidi’s girlfriend Simone. But most of the others were good too – Tom Sturridge manages to avoid going over the top as the title character, Vivienne Acheampong and Vanesu Samunyai are great as Lucienne and Rose Walker, credible dynamic between Derek Jacobi and Arthur Darville in the Calliope episode, Gwendolyn Christie watchable as ever, nice cameos from Stephen Fry, Charles Dance and Ian McNiece. Not totally convinced by Jenna Coleman, I’m afraid, but otherwise I though it was a good example of taking a story from one medium and adapting it to a new one. I’ll be nominating “The Sound of Her Wings” for the Hugos.
I wasn’t able to tempt either wife or son to Wakanda Forever in the cinema. It was pretty courageous to make a superhero film sequel which starts with the death of the main character from the previous film, but it certainly came out right – no doubt they could have recast T’Challa, and told a completely different story, but fans would have had difficulty with any new male lead and the film ended up as a story led by Black women, which carries its own power; I could watch Letita Wright, Danai Gurira and Angela Bassett all day. I felt a little adrift at a couple of points which I suspect depended on knowledge of the wider MCU mythology – were we supposed to know who Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is? Were we supposed to know why Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) is in Haiti? But apart from that it was really thrilling to see a film subverting a lot of traditional political themes through the action trope, with the Namor / Talokan plot supplying an extra dimension to that.
More traditionally, we went back and rewatched Firefly, which we had first seen in November 2005, three years after it was broadcast. Young F was six years old then, and too young, we felt, to appreciate it; now he is 23 and enjoyed it as much as we did. The setup makes no sense astronomically or economically, Inara’s business model doesn’t hold water, the occasional graphic violence is squicky, and we now know what an asshole Joss Whedon is in real life, but on the other hand the scripts and acting are generally top notch. My favourite episode, I think, is Jaynestown, but there are other strong contenders. Sometimes it’s worth going back to scenes of previous enjoyment.
As he approached the end of his life, Ian Paisley really wanted to be the man who was seen to have brought an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
In the last few years I’ve become friendly with John Bruton, former Taoiseach and former EU ambassador to the United States, and he kindly gave me this volume of his collected writings a few years back. Most of the pieces first saw the light of day as blog posts, newspaper articles or lectures, so it is all very digestible. Little will come as any surprise to readers who have followed Bruton’s career; he’s defensive of Ireland’s record as a nation (especially when he was in office, starting in 1973); he’s a convinced European, but troubled at the difficulty of herding cats (he has been at both ends of this dynamic, as a national leader and a senior EU representative); he takes economics seriously but is not obsessed by it.
A couple of points jumped out at me. First, his controversial but well-argued point that if there had been no Easter Rising, by 1930 or so Ireland would probably have ended up in the same place as in our time-line – a Home Rule government would have pushed for full independence and London would have been compelled to concede in the context of Canada, Australia and New Zealand getting similar powers.
I’m not so sure; part of the motivation for 1916 was the Nationalist perception that the UK had consistently failed to keep its promises to Ireland and the known risk that a post-war Conservative and Unionist government might revoke Home Rule before it was implemented, and this perception has some basis in reality. But Bruton makes a fair point that the achievement of Redmond in getting Home Rule onto the statute book in the first place deserves greater recognition.
Secondly, I was struck by the essays in his last section about Christianity and politics. It’s all fairly sensible stuff, arguing the need for an ethical framework to politics and government, and advocating the virtues of a faith background. He does not mention abortion or same-sex marriage. If church leaders were to follow his example and talk more about ethics in the broadest sense, they would have more credibility.
You can get it here. This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. (Sorry, John!) Next on that list is The Ahtisaari Legacy, edited by Nina Suomalainen.
When I first watched The Dalek Invasion of Earth in 2006, I wrote:
Bought this in London last week. Excellent value – six Hartnell epsiodes of classic story, plus various mini-documentaries, including a short silent film shot by Carole Ann Ford on her last day as Susan (featuring William Hartnell with no wig and looking ten years younger).
The Dalek Invasion of Earth is good – in fact, the first three episodes are excellent, with the Dalek coming out of the river at the end of episode one, and episode three a real high point, with the scenes of the Daleks in London, wandering past Westminster, congregating in Trafalgar Square, and patrolling the Albert Memorial (having obviously somehow got up the steps) particularly effective. That is also the episode where Susan tells David of her feeling of dislocation: “I never felt that there was any time or place that I belonged to. I’ve never had any real identity.” And the incidental music is great – I hadn’t heard of the composer Francis Chagrin before but he was apparently a well known film composer; shall look out for his other work. There is a real feeling of occupied Europe resisting the Nazis (and I write this in a village which experienced that directly rather than just in the cinema).
It is a bit let down by episode four, with no Doctor in sight and the rather rubber-suited Slyther, and the Daleks’ actual plan when revealed stretches our suspension of disbelief. But the pace is kept up (especially by Jacqueline Hill as Barbara).
And finally the departure of Susan. Beautifully done, the first time that a member of the regular cast had left the show. “Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine,” says the Doctor, promising to return, but we know he never will.
When I rewatched it in sequence four years later, I wrote:
After a couple of frankly ropey sf stories (The Keys of Marinus and The Sensorites) we have a very marked improvement with The Dalek Invasion of Earth. As with Planet of Giants, we are on familiar English territory, but this time warped by the passage of time rather than perspectives of scale. There are lots of brilliant moments here, and the whole is for once equal to the sum of its parts. The impact of the Dalek emerging from the Thames at the end of the first episode is slightly lost if we know what the name of the whole story is, but several people who saw it first time round in 1964 have picked this as the most memorable moment in all of Old Who. Myself, I just love the sequence of Barbara, Jenny and Dortmun dodging Daleks across London to Chagrin’s haunting tortured incidental music in the middle of episode 3; I could watch that again and again. And at long last, as she leaves, Carole Ann Ford is called upon to do some acting, and rises to the challenge. Susan’s departure scene is really rather moving, especially watching it (as I now have done, and as original viewers had to do) as the 51st episode in sequence rather than the last of a vintage 6-part DVD. One point lost on 1964’s viewers that strikes one forcibly today is Peter Fraser’s eerie resemblance, as David Campbell, to David Tennant (who of course was not born until 1971).
Since then of course I’ve also watched the great 1970s TV series Secret Army, which is about the German occupation of Belgium; it’s possible that Gerald Glaister watched Doctor Who in 1964, but both stories are drawing from a common well of war narratives. I enjoyed watching it again, and the scene of evading the Daleks in the third episode is thrilling every time.
Terrance Dicks’ novelisation was, I think, the very first Doctor Who book I bought for myself, shortly after it came out in 1977, at the Blackpool exhibition. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
When he’d grabbed Barbara at the steps, he’d released her almost at once, saying he’d just wanted to make sure she didn’t scream. ‘They’ had their patrols everywhere, and he’d already carried Susan to shelter so she wouldn’t be spotted.
When I reread it in 2008, I wrote:
Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth leans a bit on the Peter Cushing film as well as on the originally broadcast story. Its most remarkable innovation, and improvement on the screen version, is the Daleks’ pet monster, the Slyther, which is much more terrifying on the page. But unfortunately a lot of the good bits of the TV story – the desperate chase across a deserted London in episode 3, and even the Doctor’s farewell to Susan at the end – are truncated and lose their effect. It’s still a good story but this comes across rather in spite of than because of Dicks’ efforts.
I was not entirely fair here. The opening paragraph is one of Dicks’ real crackers:
Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man. His clothes were tattered and grimy, his skin blotched and diseased over wasted flesh. On his head was a gleaming metal helmet. He walked with the stiff, jerky movements of a robot—which was exactly what he had become.
And the prose is taut as 150 minutes of screen time are condensed into 142 pages. The cover is fantastic too (and unrealistically raised my ten-year-old expectations for the look of the original TV series). You can get it here.
This is one of only two Doctor Who stories to have been converted to the big screen, as a film starring Peter Cushing as the human scientist Doctor Who, Bernard Cribbins as policeman Tom Campbell, and Roberta Tovey and Jill Curzon as Dr Who’s granddaughter Susan and niece Louise. I had seen it on TV as a kid; when I rewatched it in 2010, I wrote:
It is much inferior both to the original six-part TV Dalek Invasion of Earth and to its own predecessor which I reviewed earlier. Somehow where the TV series succeeded in making the sets appear a realistic future occupied England, the big screen fails to do so; the sequences around the mines are particularly striking, where the original show achieved five times the effect for perhaps a tenth of the money. The music is often terrible, though of course the TV version had some of the best incidental music ever to feature in Who. Peter Cushing and Roberta Tovey, returning from the previous film, are much less effective; the more striking performances are Jill Curzon as Dr. Who’s niece Louise, Philip Madoc as a short-lived black marketeer, Andrew Keir as a Scottish freedom fighter, and particularly Bernard Cribbins as Tom Campbell, a 1960s policeman who accidentally enters Tardis thinking it is a police box and gets swept forward to 2150.
I have some suggestions as to why this film manifestly fails where its predecessor did not, and where the TV story succeeded. First off, the TV series has an ensemble of regular characters with established relationships; the film loses time and momentum setting that up (and also has no particularly good reason for it). Second, the switching round of the narrative strands fails to work in the film’s favour. Here, Tom and Louise, rather than Ian and a local, head up to Derbyshire in the Dalek saucer; and Dr. Who and granddaughter Susie travel by land separately rather than together. (Susie follows roughly the route of Barbara on TV, accompanied by Weir’s Scottish resistance fighter.) Opportunities are missed to generate much spark between Tom and Louise, let along their terrestrially travelling friends. Of the good scenes from the TV story, only Dortmun’s last stand and the treacherous women in the woods survive, and are done less well. (The women are played by Eileen Way and Sheila Steafel.) Finally, the geology of the Daleks’ plan actually – and this is difficult to believe – makes less sense than the original TV version.
Rewatching again, the changes to the narrative annoyed me even more. But on the other hand I appreciated the thrill of seeing Doctor Who in colour, years before the TV show got there (in 1970).
Along with the Black Archive sequence, Obverse Books have produced four “novelisations” of films starring the Peter Cushing Doctor, only two of which were actually made of course. The author is the pseudonymous Alan Smithee. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
‘Run,’ Dr Who whispered under his breath. ‘Run!’ he said again, far more forcibly this time.
The mysterious “Smithee” has done well here, adding quite a lot of background detail about a number of the human characters and how their lives were affected by the Dalek invasion – something that I now realise is missing from the Dicks novelisation (unlike his books with more contemporary settings). You can get it and the other three here.
Before I get to the main business, I’m also going to mention the recent Big Finish play, After the Daleks, which I listened to recently and will write up properly Real Soon Now. It’s set in the aftermath of the Dalek defeat, and features Susan and friends attempting to reconstruct society. Some monsters are human in shape. You can get it here. Edited to add: Silly me! I had already written it up.
LibraryThing tells me that I have 42 books and audio plays by Jonathan Morris, and I know I have not been diligent about logging my audio collection there, so the real total is a bit higher. I really loved his early Big Finish play Bloodtide and his Fourth Doctor novel Festival of Death, but this Black Archive monograph on The Dalek Invasion of Earth is the first non-fiction that I have read by him.
Unlike most of the other Black Archives, this concentrates largely on the development of the script and the story in its various iterations. Morris does enlarge on something I had learned from the DVD commentary. Originally the character of Jenny, played by Ann Davies (whose husband was Richard Briers), was to be a much younger Anglo-Indian girl, played by Pamela Franklin, who was then only 14, and would have ended the story replacing Susan by stowing away on the TARDIS. But the BBC bureaucracy screwed up on the contracts, and it didn’t work out.
On the one hand, it would have been great to have a non-white companion forty years before Martha Jones. On the other, we may have dodged a bullet: my impression is that Pamela Franklin, though born in Japan, has exclusively European ancestry, so she would have needed make-up for the role, which would have been very dubious indeed. She hit the big time a few years later as one of the pupils in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
The books has the following chapters, all fairly short:
An introduction where, like me, Morris reveals that the novelisation was the first Doctor Who book he ever bought (he was seven, I was ten)
Chapter 1, “The Return of the Daleks”, looking at the instability around the show and its place in the BBC in mid-1964, and the role of the Daleks in securing its future;
Chapter 2, “Doctor Who and the Daleks’, looks at the roots of the story in war stories, H.G. Wells and Earth vs the Flying Saucers;
Chapter 3, “The Invaders”, looks in detail at Terry Nation’s original script. The second paragraph, and the quote it introduces, are:
Nation’s delivery date for his draft scripts was 19 June. The existing paperwork doesn’t record when he delivered them, but it seems reasonable to assume that he didn’t deliver them before that date. Interviewed in 1973 2, Nation recalled: ‘I was in demand from all sides, besieged by offers to write comedies, plays, science fiction. We worked out that there was some work of mine shown on television for 40 weeks out of 52 that year. Fortunately I work very fast, and work best under pressure. The [Doctor Who] scripts became my Saturday job. They were written one a week, each Saturday. 2 For the Radio Times Special celebrating the series’ 10th anniversary.
Chapter 4, “Serial K”, looks in detail at the changes made by David Whitaker to the script;
Chapter 5, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, looks at the changes to Whitaker’s script made by director Richard Martin and others as it was being filmed;
Chapter 6, “The Daleks are here!”, briefly looks at the way the story was marketed;
Chapter 7, “Daleks Invade Earth”, looks at Milton Subotsky’s original draft of the film script;
Chapter 8, “Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD“, looks at how the shooting script differed from Subotsky’s original draft;
Chapter 9, “Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth“, looks at Terrance Dicks’ novelisation;
and Chapter 10, “Legacy of the Daleks”, looks at how this story more than almost any other has been referenced explicitly and implicitly in later Doctor Who stories, both on and off screen. The book was written before the 2021 Big Finish play After the Daleks, but references among others Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman?, a BBC play in which she returns to our time and becomes a European Commissioner.
The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete. There were no windows, just two narrow shafts Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
I met Seamus Heaney only once, a chance encounter in a pub (the Foggy Dew in Temple Bar in Dublin, some time around 1989); he offered to buy me a drink on the basis of having known my parents in his Belfast days, but I was too shy to accept. I wish I had. I would have learned something from even ten minutes’ conversation with him. I also once sat opposite his wife Marie at a dinner, but did not pluck up the courage to say much to her.
He came from Bellaghy, 30 km up the River Bann from my own ancestors in Aghadowey, and this first collection is very much about growing up there and growing into his role as a poet. I knew a few of them from school days: the opening “Digging”, where he sees his vocation as poetry rather than agriculture:
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.
The heart-wrenching “Mid-Term Break”, about the death of his younger brother in a car accident:
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four foot box, a foot for every year.
The rather regrettable “Docker”:
Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets; God is a foreman with certain definite views
Reading the full collection is well worth it. There’s a real underlying narrative, of a shift from his family heritage on the farm and boyhood fascinations with the land, to adulthood and poetry, There are some lovely natural images, such as “Waterfall”:
Simultaneous acceleration And sudden braking; water goes over Like villains dropped screaming to justice.
And romance in a sequence beginning with “Twice Shy”:
Her scarf à la Bardot, In suede flats for the walk, She came with me one evening For air and friendly talk. We crossed the quiet river, Took the embankment walk.
And at the end, another moment of self-dedication in “Personal Helicon”:
I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
I don’t read a lot of poetry, and I should read more.
And there are those who say: chaotic. This interpretation seems to allow the words, which are all that we have of the beginning, their voice. Tohu vavohu. Higgledy-piggledy. Upside down. Inside out. Hither and thither. The Creator wanted to show us the first contraction of all-that-is. All modes of expression were open to Him, every human sense. He chose words—tohu vavohu. Tumble-jumble.
I’ve read two other books by Naomi Alderman, a Doctor Who story and a novel where all women have the power to strike down their enemies, and enjoyed them both. Disobedience is not sf; it’s a closely observed story of a Jewish woman returning to London from New York after her rabbi father’s death, and becoming simultaneously enmeshed in and rejected by the dynamics of the Jewish community in which she grew up, where the new rabbi is her cousin who has meanwhile married the girl she loved as a teenager. The dynamics of grief and disruption of a conservative community are very well described; the Hendon synagogue isn’t quite the Satmar sect of Unorthodox, but that actually means it is recognisably closer to the Irish Catholicism that I experienced growing up. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was the top unread book by a woman on my shelves. Next on that pile is Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright.
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 started the month with Brussels Comic Con, and got photographs with both Billie Piper and Michelle Gomez.
The following weekend I went to Kosovo for a conference (dubbed into Albanian from 38:00 here) and caught up with my former intern – now the same age as I was when she worked for me, fifteen years before.
But my big trip that month was to Nashville, Tennessee, to give a lecture on Brexit, which I linked with a couple of days in Washington where I admired the portrait of Alice Roosevelt Longworth in the Willard Hotel.
In Nashville, the goddess Athena inside the replica of the Parthenon is very disturbing.
I took B and F for a walk in the park, and frites.
I ended a month of much travel in Dublin, filming the Hugo announcement video. Our last filmed segment was on Howth Head with the legendary artist Jim Fitzpatrick.
The grimmest news of the month was the murder of Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee. I did not know her, but we had a lot of mutual friends.
It being the month when Hugo nominations closed, and when the Brexit drama was occupying much of my thinking time, I read only five books.
1,500 pages (YTD 11,000) 1/5 (YTD 12/36) by non-male writers (Newman) 2/5 (YTD 4/36) by PoC (Lee, Thompson)
With only five books I won’t go into great detail about what was bad and what was good, but Rosewater by Tade Thompson was good, and you can get it here.
Hoegaarden is a white beer for most of us, and a small town near Tienen for some of us; it is the home of my daughter’s secret boyfriend. I also discovered, via the Megalithic Portal site, that it has a potential menhir, standing by the river of a side street. There is very little detail available about this stone (some mutter darkly that it’s a deliberate imitation of the Pierre de Brunehaut, the largest menhir in Belgium). The Megalithic Portal site says that it was “found at the end of the 1990’s, a bit further down the road, near the river where it was lying flat. Hardly documented so far, and little known. Its overall shape and type of stone are common characteristics of several menhirs found in the region.” There used to be a much bigger megalith in the neighbourhood, but it is long gone.
So I went to see it with B. It was a cold day and she was not prepared to give me a smile, but she gives the stone a sense of scale.
As Spın̈al Tap almost put it,
No one knows who they were or what they were doing But their legacy remains Hewn into the living rock… Of Hoegaarden
We stopped off to visit B’s secret boyfriend as well. He got a bit of a smile.
Current A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg φ1 Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko Filter House, by Nisi Shawl
Last books finished υ1 The Road To Kosovo: A Balkan Diary, by Greg Campbell The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell Song of Time, by Ian R. MacLeod
Next books Doctor Who: Origin Stories (no editor given) Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen “Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger
Mad Max: Fury Road won the Ray Bradbury Award in 2016; it was on the Hugo ballot, but beaten by The Martian. Also on both ballots were Ex Machina and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, with Inside Out and a Jessica Jones episode rounding out the Bradbury list. More important in the wider scheme of things, it won six Oscars, more than any other film that year – the Best Picture winner, Spotlight, won only two. IMDB users rate it top film of the year on one ranking and third on the other.
I found only one actor who had been in a previous Bradbury/Hugo-winning film, and none who had been in Oscar-winners or in Doctor Who. But it’s a big role: Max himself is played by Tom Hardy, who was the forger Eames in Inception.
I don’t often drift into real-world politics in these reviews, but during the worst agonies of the Brexit debate back in 2018, British minister David Davis incautiously promised that the UK, after leaving the EU, would not be plunged into a “Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction”. Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times had great fun with this:
To the undoubted relief of everyone concerned, David Davis, the Brexit secretary, announced on Monday that the UK was not seeking a dystopian “Mad Max-style” Brexit. At one level this is a shame because the cars in that movie are well cool. Kudos, though, to Mr Davis, who was of course trying to mock the fears of Brexit’s opponents, for an A-grade effort in expectation management. However bad it may be, Brits can rest easy that Brexit will not be a post-apocalyptic dystopia characterised by societal collapse, murder and Jacob Rees-Mogg and his gang terrorising the roads in pinstriped suits and Bentleys.
Then again, there was a disturbing specificity to Mr Davis’s point. He did not rule out all dystopian visions. Only Mad Max. While murderous biker-gangs form no part of the Brexit planning, this column understands that several other movie dystopias remain on the table. Indeed, the 62 Conservative MPs in Mr Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group are said to be urging the prime minister to hang tough on the “dystopia red lines” they consider to be part and parcel of a hard Brexit. The Financial Times has seen a secret memo listing the options:
The options include:
the Hunger Games Brexit (24 children from Remain enclaves are chosen by ballot and offered each year as tributes to the European Commission in return for continued British access to the single market)
the Fahrenheit 451 Brexit (the fire service no longer exists to put out fires, but to burn books and reports issued by the Bank of England, the Treasury and any other economic experts)
the Blade Runner Brexit (it is always raining.)
the Terminator Brexit (a robotic terminator is sent back from the future to the year 1972 to murder Sir Edward Heath before he can sign the Treaty of Accession)
the RoboCop Brexit (a frictionless technological solution for policing the Irish border)
The Matrix Brexit (UK citizens are implanted with devices which make them believe everything is normal and that life is good)
and worst of all the Real Life Brexit.
Anyway. Mad Max: Fury Road is an unashamed action film, which basically consists of an extended chase across the desert in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone seems to be white. Good Max and his good ally Imperiosa escape from the evil Citadel with the five wives of evil Joe. Imperiosa finally finds the all-woman clan from which she originally came and together with other good people they capture the Citadel and kill evil Joe. Max and Furiosa do not wander romantically into the sunset together but respectfully part company at the end.
There’s a lot of action here, and a lot of special effects. The most striking special effect is small in scale but big in impact: Imperiosa is missing a hand and arm below the elbow, while Charlize Theron who plays her is fully endowed. This was achieved by her wearing a green sleeve which was then edited out by CGI. At one point she accidentally broke co-star Tom Hardy’s nose by hitting it with the sleeve, which was hard.
Although Hardy’s Max is the title character, the central figure is the story is definitely Theron’s Imperiosa, whose personal journey is much more interesting. Max has only 52 lines in the entire film. Hardy was apparently difficult during filming, and later made a public apology to Theron and director George Miller for his behaviour. (Meanwhile Theron and Hardy’s stunt doubles fell in love and got married.)
It’s good to see a successful rebellion against an oppressive patriarchy led by women, even if they are all white. But I prefer a little more plot and characterization in my movies, and although the stunts and effects are spectacular (and as the FT said, the cars are well cool) I don’t think I’ll rewatch this film often in the years to come.
I’ve decided that I’m going to stop my sequence of rewatching Hugo, Nebula and Bradbury-winning films after The Martian, which is next, because I saw all of them shortly after they came out, which was in the last five years. I might go back and rewatch the Retro Hugo winners which I never wrote up, but I didn’t actually like them all that much so I’m not in a big rush.
As my regular reader knows, I like to preface my write-ups of the Black Archive series of monographs on Doctor Who stories with my previous writings on each story. In this case, the two-parter that opened Matt Smith’s second season as the Doctor in 2011, I seem to have failed to write anything much about it previously. I watched it on first broadcast and again before reading the Black Archive.
If you saw it, you’ll remember that The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon is the story that starts with the Doctor apparently being killed by a mysterious astronaut, and then reappearing as a younger self; it turns out that a mysterious alien race called the Silents have been infesting humanity for a very long time, but people forget that the Silents exist as soon as they stop looking at them. The TARDIS team (Eleven, Amy, Rory, River Song) discover this while visiting Richard Nixon as president in 1969.
The Doctor embeds a subliminal message in the broadcast of the first moon landing encouraging humanity to rise up and destroy the Silents, and meanwhile a little girl who has been phoning the Oval Office regenerates a la Time Lord.
I’ll be frank. Series 6 is my least favourite of the three Matt Smith seasons, and my second least favourite of New Who as a whole (after last year’s Flux), and the opening two-parter is a large part of that. It’s difficult to take the supposed shock of the Doctor being killed too seriously; we know he’s going to be bouncing around again for more adventures after it’s all resolved. Too many threads are left hanging after the second episode (and resolved in haste months later at the end of the series). Steven Moffat is working so hard on trying to make us interested in the complex scenario that he has dreamed up that he forgets to be funny.
And to be honest, the Silents don’t actually seem to be very evil; sure, they look scary, and one of them vaporises a White House staffer, but if we decide that we’re going to exterminate any species where one of them has vaporised a White House staffer, where will we stop?
One casting comment – we’ve been watching Firefly, from a few years earlier, and it’s been amusing to see Mark Sheppard as Badger there; here he is the 1969 version of FBI agent Canton Everett Delaware (the 2011 version being played by his father, William Morgan Sheppard).
The story came in at a respectable 85th in last year’s rankings of all Doctor Who stories, run by Twitter user @Heraldofcreatio, below Robot and ahead of The Seeds of Death, but I’d put it lower myself.
John Toon had previously written the Black Archive volume on the Tom Baker story Full Circle; I commented then that it was largely about the intellectual ideas behind the story rather than on how the story was actually made, and why certain things were done or not done in the course of production, and the same is true this time. There are indeed a lot of ideas in this story, but they are not as well executed as they might have been; Toon does a good job of pulling them into the light, without going into too much agony about the story’s disappointments.
A short introduction talks about withholding key information from the audience, and conspiracy theories.
The first chapter, “Who World Order”, briefly looks at conspiracy theories around the Moon landings, Men in Black, Area 51, fake celebrity deaths, secret underground tunnels, government mind control, subliminal advertising, the Templars and Freemasons, and (at more length) Watergate.
The second chapter, “A Conspiracy of Silents”, looks at the general phenomenon of conspiracy theories, and in particular how they have fed into and been presented in Doctor Who over the years.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “Killing in the Name of the Doctor”, is:
The term ‘genocide’ has been in circulation for less than a century. It was created in 1944 by Raphäel Lemkin in a book describing the murderous social policies of the Nazi regime that would later come to be known collectively as the Holocaust; genocide was first recognised as a crime under international law in 1946 and codified as such by the United Nations in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II of that convention specifies that genocide is an act ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ and lists five behaviours that could be defined as genocidal: ‘a. Killing members of the group; b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’3 3 ‘Definitions: Genocide’.
The chapter looks at the dubious ethics of the Doctor’s instruction to humanity to kill the Silents, and whether or not the audience is intended to question the Doctor’s morality. He doesn’t go on about it for fifty pages, at least.
The fourth chapter’s title is “‘Waste No More Time Arguing What a Good Man Should Be. Be One.'” It attempts to find a justification in plot terms for the Doctor’s actions against the Silents, looking also at other similar plot twists in the Moffat era. The discussion is interesting but the justification is not really found.
The fifth chapter, “Controlling the Narrative”, looks at the Moffat-era shift to the Doctor finding more aggressive solutions in general, and also speculates that the Silents are a metaphor for a particular type of fan, closing the main thread of discussion in the book.
The sixth chapter, “When the President Does It, It’s Not a Celebrity Historical”, switches tracks completely and asks if the story can be considered a “celebrity historical” story in the same was as The Unquiet Dead (Dickens), Tooth and Claw (Queen Victoria), The Shakespeare Code (I needn’t say) and Victory of the Daleks (Churchill), if we grant that The Girl in the Fireplace (Madame de Pompadour) may not fit that category. The answer is, probably yes.
So, I felt that the book is a valiant attempt to look at themes of interest in a story that doesn’t quite deliver. You can get it here.
Third of the four books in the prequel series to Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, by the much less gifted writer John Betancourt. Oberon, our hero, starts to put together a governing regime for Amber, the new magical centre based around the mysterious Pattern. I confess I had lost track of all of his brothers and sisters, and they are pretty indistinguishable as characters – apart from the one who is obviously going to perpetrate a sudden yet inevitable betrayal, and duly does so. Unnecessarily confusing that there is a princess called Blaise here and the original Chronicles had a prince called Bleys. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is the fourth and (thank God) last of this sequence, Shadows of Amber.
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 31) The Danger Men, by Nick Walter Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terrance Dicks Dr Who: Dalek Invasion Earth 2150AD, by “Alan Smithee”
7,400 pages (YTD 69,400) 9/32 (YTD 100/268) by non-male writers (Çerkez, Alderman, North, Scarborough, μ1, ν1, ο1, ρ1, σ1) 2/32 (YTD 35/268) by a non-white writer (ν1, ρ1)
395 books currently tagged “unread”, 15 more than last month, with more Clarke Award submissions
Reading now A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg φ1
Coming soon (perhaps) Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott et al Doctor Who: Origin Stories (no editor given) Rise of the Dominator, by Robert Mammone Doctor Who and Warriors’ Gate, by John Lydecker Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins Doctor Who: The Romans, by Donald Cotton The Romans, by Jacob Edwards Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen Zink, by David Van Reybrouck Shadows of Amber, by John Betancourt The Ahtisaari Legacy, ed. Nina Suomalainen Filter House, by Nisi Shawl “Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger Metamorphoses, by Ovid What If? by Randall Munroe All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross Alternating Current, by Jody Houser et al Penric’s Progress, by Lois Bujold The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells Neptune – Épisode 1, by Leo Roadside Picnic, by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky Ratlines, by Stuart Neville Complexity, by John H. Holland Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C Clarke A Ship is Dying, by Brian Callison
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.
sf (non-Who): 4 (YTD 12) The Fire Sermon (sample), by Francesca Haig Tess of the Road, by Rachel Hartman Bitter Angels, by C. L. Anderson The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse
Several really good books this month; I’m going to single out Tess of the Road, by Rachel Hartman, which you can get here, and Astounding, by Alec Nevala-Lee, which you can get here, both of them on the Hugo ballot. I’ll draw a veil over the less worthy.
‘Sorry? Sorry?’ The other man looked at him as if he were insane. ‘Say what?’
Next in the sequence of Lethbridge-Stewart books, though this one barely features the Brigadier. Lethbridge-Stewart’s chum Bill Bishop is swept back in time to the distant days of 1999 and finds himself in the body of a British spy on a mission which may or may not be officially sanctioned. It’s well enough told, but has practically no connection with the Whoniverse, apart from references to concepts such as the beryllium clock (from The Movie). You can get it here.
“After a hundred years of deliberation,” said a dry old gentleman who sat by me, and in reply to a remark, a half shrink, rather, of mine— “the English ladies of 1922 razed to the ground what the English ladies of 1822 set up against the skies. It was a late vindication of their sex’s character.” “Pardon me,” I replied, only half comprehending how this could have chanced, “but I was never inclined to agree with the objections to the fine nakedness of that fine statue. Much sarcasm and many witty things were squibbed off against it: national decorum was outraged, the critics said, and national modesty assaulted, by the coup-de-ceil. But I fear there was false taste, or worse affectation in all this; certainly it would prove us the merest simpletons, or else the very best or very worst connoisseurs, inasmuch as the statue had been admired by the whole civilized world, until it fell under the more rigid or discerning eye of our British critics; and, further, had never been known to cause much national depravity. Did the society for suppressing vice prosecute, sir?” I asked. The old gentleman snappishly answered, “no.” “Then,” said I, “let us say no more about the abstract question of immorality; and I only remark, that I should think just as well of the virtue that looked on a brass or marble figure without any predominant indulgence of sensual association. It is to be feared, that the modesty which is foremost to appear alarmed and fidgety, is not always the true modesty. Moreover, are we to stay away from Somerset House, altogether? I once saw a sleeping Bacchanal and other things there, just as naked as this was; for that matter, ‘the taking down,’ by Rubens, is a sin against maids and matrons; and asking your excuse for the unseemly abruptness of the transition, sir, the two little men who strike the chimes at St. Dunstan’s are almost as impudently undressed as any specimen of good sculpture in the world.”
I have started looking at fiction set in 2023, and found a few sf novels set next yer and written in the last few decades; and then came across this curious work, published in 1824, written by the Irish writer John Banim and largely set 199 years in the future. (Strictly, he specifies 198 years and a quarter, but he also specifies 1824 and 2023 as his anchor points, so he must be starting from the end of 1824 and ending up at the beginning of 2023.)
The narrator puts himself into a fasting-induced trance, aided by ingesting mystical clay supplied by a friendly Otomac tribe (in present-day Venezuela). He is transported to London in 2023, where the first thing he notices is that the “Bronze Colossus”, which we know as the Wellington Monument at Hyde Park Corner, is no longer there. (Not quite the first thing actually; on his way in from his materialisation point on Putney Bridge, he notices that Fulham has completely disappeared and been replaced by a common, though Kensington has got much bigger.)
Most of the book concerns sardonic observations by the artistic community of 2023 London, telling our narrator that he (and therefore his contemporaries) have totally misunderstood the painters, writers, sculptors and actors of their day, and that the tastes of the future will run completely contrary to those of the early nineteenth century. It is a bit tedious (even a contemporary reviewer thought so) and reminded me of the way the Book of Mormon, which was written about the same time, presents supposedly ancient rebuttals to theological debates which were of interest only in 1820s America and not before or since.
I did find some points of interest even in this section. A comment was made that actors of the 1820s were overpaid: “Some of them were allowed a salary beyond that of a judge of the land, and of the first personages in other countries; beyond that of the president of the United States, for example.” The President of the United States then had a salary of $25,000, $800,000 in today’s money (the current President gets half of that). There are indeed actors today who earn more, but not very many. In Banim’s 2023, actors’ salaries are capped by law at £12 per week (£1550 per week in our money, or £80k annually, which could be worse.)
It’s also intriguing that the one contemporary painting that Banim singles out for unalloyed praise is one that survives today in the bowels of the Tate Gallery in very poor condition: The Raising of Lazarus, by Benjamin Robert Haydon.
There are various other cultural developments in Banim’s 2023. You know the way wig-makers in 1824 display their wigs on the busts of classical figures like Caesar or Demosthenes? Well, in 2023, get this, they use busts of contemporary political and cultural figures as well. Crazy times, eh?! MPs and peers sort out their differences in public boxing matches. The courts deliver blatantly perverse judgements. There is a fashion for holding mock public funeral processions for people who have not died, or perhaps who never lived. It’s not, actually, all that exciting.
Given that high politics and technology were not Banim’s main interest, it’s intriguing to see what innovations he does allow for his 2023, which is otherwise 1824 with less Fulham and more Kensington (and more parliamentary boxing). We are told that in the 1830s, Britain once again intervened in Spain, with Russia then mounting a successful invasion of the undefended east coast and demolishing the Tower of London. Napoleon, who it turned out was not dead after all, came out of hiding and joined forces with the Duke of Wellington to throw the Russians out, and then retired to comfortable obscurity in Yorkshire. Meanwhile an Orange rebellion in Ireland was quashed by the militant women of Dublin, in return for which a grateful Britain granted Catholic Emancipation. At that point Banim’s imagination runs out, and he changes the subject.
He has a few robotic gadgets – when the narrator first sits down for a meal, he is astounded by the automatic cutlery that cuts up his food and feeds it to him; and walking around the streets, automated brooms sweep the pavements and automatic hurdy-gurdies replace the need for beggars to play them. Mr Drudge, the narrator’s friend in the future, speculates about armies of automata, but it’s clear that technology is not there yet. Meanwhile in central London, freight waggons are drawn by camels rather than by horses.
Most startling of all, Mr Drudge and another friend, Mr Angle, reveal at the end of the book that in the last three years, English balloon-ships have successfully colonised the Moon, to the envy of Alexander V of Russia and Ferdinand XII of Austria, who are now about to go to war in space in a dispute over their own claims on lunar territory; the colonised lunar inhabitants having no say, of course, and Britain still being Top Nation.
“Ti’s a pretty little planet, only very bare in timber,” said Mr. Angle: “and the manners and minds of the poorer inhabitants unsettled, predatory, and, according to our scale, necessarily immoral and benighted. When I was last there, however, the prevalence of Bible societies, and the general adoption of Mr. Owen’s villages in our colony, seemed to promise a speedy amelioration.”
“Indeed so congenial and attractive are the soil and atmosphere, that the constant emigration thither has seriously thinned the motherplanet; we have scarcely left among us a conscientious dealer, a just judge, a handsome woman, who is not vain, a virtuous wife, an humble priest, a sincere patriot, or a disinterested friend; almost all have gone to the moon, long since,” said Mr. Drudge.
And – with apologies for the massive spoiler, but you weren’t really ever going to read this, were you? – just as we are getting into the details of future war and lunar colonisation, and the balloon-ship artillery starts firing, our narrator wakes up and he is back in 1824 again, leaving his pregnant wife abandoned in the future. One feels that Banim had just run out of things to say.
So that’s it – a look at 2023 from almost 200 years in the past. I’ll hope to work my way through a few more recent looks at 2023 before the end of the year:
The Carnival of Immortals, by Enki Bilal (1980)
Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling (1988)
The Turing Option, by Harry Harrson and Marvin Minsky (1992)
Killing Time, by Caleb Carr (2000)
The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson (2001)
I’m not counting anything written in the last twenty years.
Current Song of Time, by Ian R. MacLeod A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg
Last books finished π1 (did not finish) Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terrance Dicks ρ1 (did not finish) Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman Dr Who: Dalek Invasion Earth 2150AD, by “Alan Smithee” σ1 (did not finish) Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney The Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Jonathan Morris Faith in Politics, by John Bruton τ1 The Clockwise War, by Scott Gray Revelations of the Dead-alive aka London and Its Eccentricities in the Year 2023, by John Banim
Next books Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott et al Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
Birdman won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2014 and three others, Best Director (Alejandro G. Iñárritu), Best Original Screenplay and best Cinematography. The Grand Budapest Hotel also won four Oscars that year. It was one of the other contenders for Best Picture, the others being American Sniper, Boyhood, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything and Whiplash. I have seen both The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Theory of Everything and to be honest I liked them both more.
It’s another year from which I have seen very few films. Apart from The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Theory of Everything, noted above, and Guardians of the Galaxy, noted two weeks ago, I’ve seen The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, The Lego Movie and Annie. I liked Birdman more than Guardians of the Galaxy, and maybe about the same as the third Hobbit movie, but less than the rest. (Everything is special!!!) IMDB users rank Birdman12th best film of the year on one ranking and 22nd on the other. Interstellar tops both rankings, and another nine films are ahead of Birdman on both.
Here’s a trailer:
Surprisingly, none of the cast had previously been in Oscar, Hugo or Nebula/Bradbury-winning films. There is a crossover with Doctor Who: Lindsay Duncan, who plays theatre reviewer Tabitha here, was Adelaide Brooke four years earlier in the Waters of Mars special.
It’s the third year out of four where the Oscar went to a film which looked at show biz (after The Artist and Argo), and I slightly suspect the Academy of rewarding story-telling about their own industry. The film is about a washed-up actor known for his superhero films from two decades earlier, trying to regain his credibility by staging a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story, haunted by the Birdman, a superhero who he played on film many years ago, and by various family and professional insecurities.
I’m sad and surprised to write this about such a recent film, but I don’t think there’s a single African-American with a speaking part, and the Asian-Americans all have very minor roles – in a film set in New York in 2014.
I also have to say that the film as a whole didn’t really grab me. It shifts between three realities – 2014 New York, the stage play which is at the core of the plot, and the Birdman fantasy – and maybe I’ve just read too much sf not to find it all a bit glib. The central character is not very attractive and it’s difficult to sympathise with his (largely self-inflicted) problems.
The star is Michael Keaton, who of course had played Batman in a similar timeframe to his character’s Birdman. There’s a very good dynamic in his interactions with his girlfriend, played by Andrea Riseborough, his ex-wife, played by Amy Ryan, his co-star, played by Naomi Watts, his rival actor, played by Ed Norton, and especially his daughter, played by Emma Stone. Stone is in only a couple of scenes but really stands out.
The big gimmick is that it’s presented as if it’s been filmed in (almost) a single take, so the pacing is very intense, and we get a lot of close-up dialogue shots (while presumably props and scenery are being rapidly moved around behind the camera). Not having seen many of the other contenders, I can well believe that it deserved the Oscar for Best Cinematography. The music is also good, but was ruled ineligible for the Oscar on a technicality. (The Grand Budapest Hotel won that category.)
However, it’s not one of my favourite films, and I’m putting it in the bottom 25 of my list, between two other films set in New York about self-centred male protagonists, Annie Hall and Gentleman’s Agreement.
Next up will be the award-winning films of 2015: Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian and Spotlight.
It is tempting but misleading to see the seventy-year Soviet experiment as just a second Russian imperial project. Ultimate power resided in Moscow and Russia played the role of big brother, but the Soviet Union was much more complex and contradictory. The Soviet state modernized, terrorized, and Russified the Caucasus but also gave it new kinds of nationalism. It also went through radically different phases: from the Bolshevik would-be utopia of international class liberation to the Stalinist authoritarian state of the 1930s to the corrupt, Brezhnev-era multinational state. Modernization meant both the destruction of old traditions and emancipation for women and technological progress. Policy toward the nationalities veered from the implementation of a liberal “affirmative action empire,” which gave new opportunities to non-Russian nations, to genocide. While some small ethnic groups benefited hugely from “nativization” programs, others were subjected to deportation and mass terror.
I have known Tom de Waal for many years, going back to my own intense Caucasus engagement in 2003-06 and again in 2012. He is lambasted by Armenian activists for being too pro-Azeri, and by Azerbaijani activists for being too Armenian, and by all sides in Georgia for favouring their opponents. I think he is generally right. I had been looking forward to this book for ages and attended its Brussels launch in 2019; my memory is that we went for a very nice dinner afterwards.
To get the obvious point out of the way, unfortunately one of the core sections of the book now needs to be updated after the Nagorno-Karabakh war of late 2020. This occasioned one of the few points of disagreement between us, and I actually wrote to de Waal to say that I thought the “both-sides” narrative which was prevalent in the early weeks of the 2020 conflict was obscuring the important fact that Azerbaijan was winning.
But I don’t think he can be faulted for not seeing precisely into the future when writing the book. In any case, he, and I, and many others, had been warning of the likelihood of a bloody denouement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict for many years (here’s me and Damien Helly in 2004, and me and Sabine Freizer in Russian in 2006). In 2004 the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan told me to my face that they were saving up their profits from fossil fuels in order to upgrade their armed forces to drive Armenia out of their territory by force, and if he was saying that to me, he was saying it to a lot of other people. This was not a difficult war to predict.
So, could the conflicts in the region have been averted or mitigated? I get the gloomy feeling from de Waal’s narrative that the forces of political gravity generally favoured violent conflict. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought hard-line nationalists to power in all three countries, and eliminated the political habits and institutions that might have channeled the energy of disagreement away from the precipice of war. I found his analysis of the 2008 South Ossetia conflict particularly interesting, as it happened after my first round of Caucasus engagement. His view (in crude summary) is that Saakashvili decided to pick a fight quite early on, and the Russians decided to give it to him.
It’s fair to say that international engagement with the conflict has often been less than vigorous. It seemed to me grimly appropriate that the OSCE mechanism to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, co-chaired by the USA, Russia and France, was named after a conference that never actually took place. But I know individual officials who have made great efforts, and in any case it’s easy to think of better-known conflicts where huge investment of time and energy in international mediation has failed to pay off.
Anyway, recent developments aside, de Waal’s book is a warmly engaging look at the three South Caucasus countries – Georgia (including South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Adjara), Armenia and Azerbaijan (including Nagorno-Karabakh) – in their historical context between Russia, Turkey and Iran, with the Russia relationship being the most important for all three cases. (Though other powers got involved too – Azerbaijan was briefly a British protectorate, with democratic elections, women’s suffrage and proportional representation in 1918-1920.) He concentrates on the political history, but also explores the rich literature of all of the region, and touches on the cuisine as well (I personally love Georgian cooking). He argues that the important regional context has been lost, with the independence of the three states inevitably making them look inwards rather than at their neighbours. It’s a good and informative read. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is Complexity: A Very Short Introduction, by John H. Holland.
On leaving Miss Maxwell’s ‘Academy’, I followed [his brother] Michael to Aldro, a boarding school in Eastbourne. I was about seven and a half and not at all happy at the idea of being so far from home. There was a kind old master there called Mr Craft, who closely resembled Rudyard Kipling; well, he seemed old, but as I received Christmas cards from him for twenty years afterwards, he was probably only about thirty-five at the time. To me he represented kindness. Mr Hill, the Headmaster, on the other hand represented unkindness, for I was often to be caned by him. ‘Go and change into gym shorts and wait for me in the gymnasium,’ he would order. That wait was more terrible than the thrashing. Even at seven and a half, I could take the beating, but the waiting made me sick with apprehension.
First volume of Jon Pertwee’s autobiography, though he did not write much more apart from an out-of-print account of his time on Doctor Who. It’s an entertaining set of anecdotes about his early life, difficult relations with parents (he did not actually know that his father‘s friend was his biological mother), his wartime service in the navy (which takes up almost half of the book), his love of girls and cars. If I had been editing it, I might have taken out some of the exclamation marks.
Lots of names are dropped, many of them of showbiz figures now long forgotten, though a couple stood out; visiting his father’s friend A.A. Milne as a child, Milne’s son “was good enough to introduce me to his toy animal friends, Piglet, Owl, Kanga, Kanga’s son Roo, and best of all, his teddy bear, Winnie the Pooh.” At the other end of the book, when he is assigned to Naval Intelligence, one of his office-mates is future prime minister James Callaghan. (Callaghan, who lost the 1979 election, is the most recent prime minister to have served in the armed forces and the only one to have been in the Navy.)
But Doctor Who fans like me won’t find much to chew on here. Pertwee did not really have hidden depths; what you saw was what you got, and that personality is on display in his book. You can get it here.
