Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Key sections of the lengthy technical document focussed on a comparison between setting up a Stormont-run RHI scheme, or a grant-based scheme, called a challenge fund. The challenge fund would competitively allocate the available funding from the Treasury each year, allowing the market to provide the most cost-effective means of using the money. Once the funding ran out each year, it would shut, making it impossible to overspend. The alternative, an RHI scheme, would by contrast provide ongoing payments over 20 years to each boiler owner, with the payments linked to how much heat they produced. Having examined the numbers, it was clear to CEPA that the challenge fund provided vastly superior value for money.

This is a tremendous expose of the colossal scandal that brought down the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive government in early 2017, taking another three years before it was restored (and then it was gone again in two years, being restored only a year ago). The guts of the story are that a subsidy for using renewable heat sources for commercial purposes was perversely structured so that the state effectively paid users to burn biomass; “cash for ash” as it was dubbed.

McBride was at the forefront of breaking this story through the News Letter, and the BBC was also particularly strong on the case (to the point that when I bumped into Arlene Foster in 2019, with a BBC journalist by my side, she chatted pleasantly with me while totally cutting my companion). It still doesn’t get to the bottom of the question – did anyone consciously legislate for this bottomless subsidy to arise? – but there is one obvious key beneficiary.

Once it became clear that far from subsidising the vast cash giveaway, the UK government was going to claw it back from the Northern Ireland budget, the shit hit the fan and politicians and ministers began manoeuvring not just to avoid blame but also to extract the maximum amount of money from the system before it was closed. As a BBC journalist put it:

‘Those ongoing costs are likely to be at least £400 million. That could have paid for the new Omagh Hospital, the dualling of the A26 at Frosses [between Ballymena and Ballymoney], the York Street Interchange and the Belfast Rapid Transit System. With £15m left over.’

McBride despairs over the incompetence of the Civil Service in allowing the system to have arisen in the first place, and the incompetence of ministerial oversight. Jonathan Bell, the DUP minister who actually exposed the scandal in the first place, is himself exposed as bad-tempered and over-indulging in alcohol, under-briefed and displacing responsibility. Arlene Foster, on whose watch the scheme was set up and who then became First Minister, seems to have been curiously indifferent to the potential problems.

If Arlene Foster had followed the example of Peter Robinson, and stepped aside for a few weeks for a preliminary investigation to clear her of personal misconduct, devolution would have continued and the DUP would likely still be the largest party in Northern Ireland. As it was, she let ego override strategy, not for the first or last time. Sinn Fein also come in for criticism for their management of the financial side, and for the fact that ministerial decisions are still apparently being signed off by non-elected individuals.

I won’t embarrass them, but I am glad that the two people who I know best out of the whole disappointing story, a senior DUP special advisor and a senior civil servant (now retired), come out rather well; my DUP friend was only peripherally involved by all accounts, and my civil servant friend was one of the first to realise how badly things had gone wrong and, crucially, to accept responsibility.

I felt at the time that it was actually quite healthy for a Stormont government to fall over an actual issue of governance, rather than something related to the Norn Iron Problem – the only precedent is the deposition of John Miller Andrews in 1943. McBride however shows that the Norn Iron Problem includes the problem of a very small pool of political and administrative talent in a territory with such a small population, and this was one of the factors in the RHI scandal.

This is something that I have observed in my dealings with other small states. The issue isn’t whether the polity is economically viable, it’s whether there are enough smart people around to run it properly. I think the critical mass is probably around 2 million, the size of Slovenia, unless you have positive immigration boosting the numbers (eg Luxembourg). Northern Ireland, at 1.7 million, isn’t quite there yet.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2019; you can get it here. Next on that pile is A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell.

Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain

Second frame of third chapter:

End of this very enjoyable series of graphic novels, which tells the story of the reawakening of King Arthur as an evil undead monster and the efforts of our plucky heroes (grandma, grandson, grandson’s girlfriend) to contain the situation. Loads more archetypes from English cultural history get thrown in here, notably King Lear and T.S. Eliot, and the ending is suitably dramatic and more or less final. It’s nice to see a project like this reach a satisfying ending. You can get it here.

Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard

Second paragraph of third chapter:

As to the others… Bảo Duy was endearing but reckless, and Lành was extremely difficult to deal with or protect, which added to the annoyance.

A lovely dark story about four women from different Vietnamese spacefaring clans, who get thrown together to ward off an unspeakable horror which threatens them all, with undercurrents of deadly inter-clan politics and internal romance. The protagonist is subtly coded as autistic as well. The novella is often the ideal length for a story like this, allowing the writer to put in enough world-building and characterisation and yet not get lost in too long a plot. You can get it here.

Wednesday reading

Current
A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell
Inside the Stargazers’ Palace, by Violet Moller
Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee

Last books finished
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells
Ithaca, by Claire North
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin 
De bondgenoten 1, by Brecht Evens
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Richard Dinnick et al
Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh

Next books
Doctor Who: TARDIS Type Forty Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson
Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells
Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott

The Ultimate Earth, by Jack Williamson

Second paragraph of third section:

“Sandor’s Tycho Memorial!” Pepe jogged my ribs. “There’s the old monument at the American capital! I know it from Dian’s videos.”

This won the the 2001 Best Novelette Award in both the Hugos and the Nebulas, the author having been born in 1908, making him certainly the oldest person to win either award in, I suspect, any category (Retro Hugos aside). These were the only final ballot places for fiction that Williamson ever got in his long career (his autobiography won a Hugo for Best Nonfiction Book sixteen years earlier, in 1985).

I wrote at the time of the Hugo final ballot that although I preferred Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” and Greg Egan’s “Oracle”:

None of the others were real turkeys though. “The Ultimate Earth” didn’t have a very satisfactory ending but that seems to be standard for stories about nanotechnology.

“The Ultimate Earth” came eighth in the Locus poll, which normally hews closer to the Hugo and Nebula rankings, and only fourth in Analog‘s own readers poll of novellas of 2000. (The Locus poll was won by “Radiant Green Star” by Lucius Shepard, and the Analog poll by “A Roll of the Dice”, by Catherine Asaro, both of which were also Hugo and Nebula finalists.) Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” surely has shown more staying power; likewise Greg Egan’s “Oracle”.

Looking back now, it’s clear that the Hugo and Nebula voters of the day were honoring Williamson’s career rather than the qualities of this particular story, which is rather old-fashioned despite the use of nanotechnology.

After disaster strikes Earth, a group of clone children who have been raised on the Moon steal a spaceship to go back to the home planet. They find it is not what they expected (this is where the nanobots come in) and head off into the stars. Not very new ideas, and not really done in a new way. But you can get it here.

The Hugo for Best Novel went to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; the Nebula to Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose, neither of which are brilliant choices. There is better luck in some other categories – Dave Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness” is a jewel of a short story Hugo winner, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won both Hugo and Nebula

Next in this series of joint Hugo/Nebula winners will be “Hell Is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang. After that, I will skip American Gods and Coraline and go straight on to Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde

Second paragraph of third chapter:

But now I have to say, just to clear my conscience, that sometimes I was in charge of the installations-strong technologies made for the insides of boys’ heads. Every batch was mass-assembled somewhere in [redacted], and when Èkó had marked them, had storied them in full, we inserted the chips pre-loaded with information on how boys would and should be. I watched the new skulls move through the conveyor belt in a cyclical choreography—perfect carbon copies. Some of us messengers were responsible for coding these cultures in the lab; others of us were in charge of delivering them, of fixing them in boys’ heads as soon as we were sure they’d at least live long enough to become men.

Interesting to come to this soon after Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, which is also sf (well, fantasy really) set in Nigeria. There are big differences, though; the protagonist(s) of Freshwater move back and forth across the Atlantic, whereas the vagabonds of Vagabonds! are swimming around the murky middle and lower reaches of society in Lagos.

I made a mistake in reading it, in that I did not realise that it was more a collection of linked short stories than a novel, and got frustrated that later chapters introduced new characters without giving closure to earlier plot lines. That’s partly on me (though to an extent also on the publisher for describing it as a novel on the dust jacket). But I think the writer can sometimes demand too much of the reader in discerning the book’s structure.

It’s a very intense description of life at the margins, especially the queer margins, in a developing city economy. The deities Èkó and Tatafo guide us through the narrative (which is why the Clarke jury felt that it fell on the fantasy side of the line), but they don’t intervene much, allowing humans to make their own mistakes. The book is fuelled by an energising rage against injustice. It’s passionate and well-described; but as mentioned, I felt the last couple of steps to make it fully coherent were missing. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on that pile is DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee.

The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue paper.

Another in my dwindling pile of minor Wellsiana, this 1917 novel concerns the Reverend Edward Scrope, Bishop of Princhester, whose faith is challenged by its irrelevance to the people of his industrialised diocese and by the horrors of war. Scrope deals with this difficulty by falling under the influence of an attractive and rich parishioner, and taking mind-altering drugs. He resigns from the Church completely, goes through further spiritual wrestling and finds his own accommodation at the end, though one feels that his wife is unenthused by the new state of affairs, never mind their five daughters.

One of the few unexpected things I learned about the English way of life when I went to study at Cambridge aged 19 is that there are a lot of people, if a minority, who take the Church of England seriously, something that was not apparent from the popular culture that I had absorbed growing up in Belfast. Wells isn’t quite sure how funny he should be here. He finds the Church itself ridiculous, but wants to make us sympathise with the bishop’s spiritual torment (which is expressed at length). The story ends up falling between two stools, and has been justifiably forgotten over the last 108 years. But you can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is another H.G. Wells novel, Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump.

The Atlas of Unusual Borders, by Zoran Nikolić

Second paragraph of third Unusual Border:

Brezovica Žumberačka has only a few houses, with thirty or so inhabitants, occupying an area of less than two hectares, but with the ‘neighbouring’ Slovenian village, Brezovica pri Metliki, it forms one place. Interestingly, it seems that the Croatian and Slovenian authorities are not entirely sure exactly where the border line is. It is even possible that there are currently a few more miniature enclaves and exclaves. Although this situation is less of an issue now that Slovenia and Croatia have entered into the European Union, a bizarre possibility is the fact that one house, together with the land around it, does not belong to either country. This would make it the so-called terra nullius, namely, no man’s land. This has created an opportunity for the proclamation of an independent country, which was exploited in a virtual way. A website for the newly formed Kingdom of Enclava emerged on the Internet, though it had nothing to do with the inhabitants of the house itself. After the Slovenian government officially declared it to be their territory, the Enclava moved to one of the disputed islands in the River Danube, on the border between Serbia and Croatia.

This is a very attractive book listing 47 cases of unusual borders around the world. As a map geek myself of many years’ standing, I was aware of most of these (and sorry that a couple of my favorites were missed, the Iliemi Triangle, the Drummully salient, and the now resolved case of the Chiṭmahals), but they are all sensitively explained and well illustrated. There is lots of potential for trivia here: where, for instance, is there a direct land frontier between the Netherlands and France? (In the Caribbean.) It would also be interesting to know what daily life is like in a situation like Baarle. Anyway, it’s a lovely production, and you can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Yemen

See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Yemen, as explained further below.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
I Am Nujood, Age 10 and DivorcedNujood Ali 23,6271,231
Salmon Fishing in the YemenPaul Torday 16,4611,631
The Panther Nelson DeMille 23,1581,125
The Monk of MokhaDave Eggers 20,958754
SoldZana Muhsen 7,759464
Henna HouseNomi Eve 4,266215
Motoring with MohammedEric Hansen1,611343
The Woman Who Fell from the SkyJennifer Steil 1,432153

Yemen has not been well served in the literature available in the West. Two of the above are about child slavery and sexual abuse (I Am Nujood and Sold) and the rest are all by foreigners (Jennifer Steil’s memoir of teaching journalism sounds particularly dire).

I excluded a lot of books which cover Yemen along with other places. Three of these were fiction: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (mainly set in Ethiopia), The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, which is set all over the Indian Ocean (but with Oman rather than Yemen as the heroine’s home base), and Black Mamba Boy, by Nadifa Mohamed, which starts in Yemen but is mostly set in East Africa.

The rest were non-fiction; War on Terror punditry (The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright; Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill), regional travelogues (Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger; Baghdad Without a Map, by Tony Horwitz), and general reporting (Our Women on the Ground, ed. Zahra Hankir). I am also sad to have to disqualify Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767, by Thorkild Hansen, which looks fascinating, but only 90 pages out of 370 are actually set in Yemen.

One case of huge divergence between Goodreads and LibraryThing: The Handsome Jew, by Yemeni writer Ali al-Muqri, has 2,955 raters on GR, but only 8 owners on LibraryThing, which clearly has failed to penetrate the Yemeni market. The more traditional travel books score comparatively better on LT.

Next up: Canada. This will not be at all surprising.

BSFA Long Lists – the Goodreads / LibraryThing stats #BSFAAwards2024

The BSFA long lists are out again. Some of them are longer than others. As usual, I’ve run them through the Goodreads and LibraryThing catalogues to see which of the longlisted works have scored on the two biggest book reviewing websites.

Not very surprisingly, this doesn’t work for the 23 longlisted works for Best Artwork, nor for the 26 longlisted works for Best Short Non-Fiction, none of which have been logged as separate publications by GR or LT users. For the other categories, the highest and median numbers for each system are as follows:

CategoryGR highestGR medianLT highestLT median
Best Novel102,9563981,43235
Best Fiction for Younger Readers88,111428.587830
Best Shorter Fiction5,26071861
Best Collection5,253111584
Best Non-Fiction (Long)1292311
Best Short Fiction1640100
Best Original Audio Fiction53030

Unlike last year, thee of the eight long-listees for Best Original Audio Fiction do feature on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. All three are Big Finish audios.

Title AuthorGRLT
Doctor Who: The Quin DilemmaChapman, Valentine, Rayner533
Torchwood: The Hollow ChoirMarshall, Devlin272
Torchwood: Bad ConnectionAaron Lamont232

The Best Short Fiction longlist features no less than 80 stories, of which I was able to find three which have been published separately and thus feature in the online catalogues.

Title AuthorGRLT
SpillCory Doctorow16410
Evan: A RemainderJordan Kurella782
Unquiet on the Eastern FrontWole Talabi152

Ten of the seventeen long-listed works in the Best Non-Fiction (Long) category are on either Goodreads of LibraryThing or both. Two of the other seven are podcasts, which wouldn’t usually score anyway. The ten which do feature are:

Title AuthorGRLT
Everything Must GoDorian Lynskey12931
Speculative WhitenessJordan S. Carroll234
Track ChangesAbigail Nussbaum85
Spec Fic for Newbies Volume 2Angus, Nolan53
The Book BlindersJohn Clute33
Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative FictionEugen Bacon (ed)23
Urban FantasyStefan Ekman21
Utopia on the TabletopJo Lindsay Walton02
The Boom and The BoomGuanghzhao Lyu10
Three, Two, One, Let’s Jam! Satoru Stevenson10

I was able to find 48 of the 51 long-listees for Best Collection on one system or the other.

Title AuthorGRLT
Your UtopiaBora Chung3140158
She’s Always HungryEliza Clarke525362
Mystery LightsLena Valencia53240
New Adventures in Space OperaJonathan Strahan (ed)19631
Convergence ProblemsWole Talabi20928
The Inhumans and Other StoriesBodhisattva Chattopadh(ed)4822
I Want That Twink ObliteratedChris McCartney4113
North Continent RibbonUrsula Whitcher339
A Jura for JuliaKen Macleod1114
Pick Your PotionEphiny Gale503
Deep DreamIndrapramit Das (ed)147
To the Stars and BackIan Whates (ed)147
Calvaria FellSparks & Warren127
Limelight and Other StoriesLyndsey Croal382
Elephants in BloomCecile Cristofari710
Back Through the Flaming DoorLiz Williams88
Discontinue if Death EnsuesGyzander & Taborska (eds)173
The Butterfly DisjunctStewart C. Baker411
Nova Scotia Volume 2Williamson & Wilson (eds)66
HeartwoodDan Coxon (ed)311
Laughs in SpaceDonna Scott (ed)74
The Utopia of UsTeika Marja Smits (ed)55
Drive or be DrivenAliya Whiteley38
The Mad Butterfly’s BallGrassman & Kelso (eds)73
Our Savage HeartJustina Robson210
Bestiary of BloodJamal Hodge (ed)141
Different Kinds of DefianceRenan Bernardo141
Egypt + 100Ahmed Naji (ed)141
All Tomorrow’s FuturesBenjamin Greenaway (ed)43
Schrodinger’s Wife (And Other Possibilities)Pippa Goldschmidt52
Little Sisters & Other StoriesVonda N. McIntyre33
GallusFaulds, Milton & Williamson (eds)42
A Stitch Between WorldsFrazier Armitage71
Cursed ShardsLeanbh Pearson (ed)32
Human ResourcesFiona Moore14
Three Curses & Other Dark TalesLeanbh Pearson11
The NeurodiverseiverseFrancis & Olmsted (eds)180
A Night so Dark and Full of StarsNikky Lee120
Fight Like a Girl 2Clarke & Hall (eds)80
Offshoots: Humanity TwiggedJuliana Rew80
The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2023)Ekpeki & Eziaghighala (eds)70
A Place Between Waking and ForgettingEugen Bacon50
Extrasensory OverloadChun Hyon Lee (ed)30
Sunflowers in the SnowDawn Bonnano30
Different Times and Other PlacesJuliet Mckenna10
Out of the Window Into the DarkMarian Womack10
Triangulation: HospitiumBrandon Ketchum (ed)01
Weathering YouthDawn Vogel10

In the Best Shorter Fiction category, 23 of the 41 long-listed works feature on LibraryThing and 25 on Goodreads; almost all of the rest are periodical or website publications.

Title AuthorGRLT
The Butcher of the ForestPremee Mohammed5,260186
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s OverAnne de Marken4,733122
The Imposition of Unnecessary ObstaclesMalka Older2,090159
The Practice, The Horizon and the ChainSofia Samatar1,455102
Lost Ark DreamingSuyi Davies Okungbowa98258
Saturation PointAdrian Tchakovksy1,45934
Navigational EntanglementsAliette de Bodard48064
CountessSuzan Palumbo34135
Unexploded RemnantsElaine Gallagher20130
The Dragonfly GambitA.D. Sui13512
A Cursed HuntRebecca Grey964
12 HoursL. Marie Wood424
Charlie SaysNeil Williamson283
Elephants in BloomCecile Cristofari710
Songs for the ShadowsCheryl S. Ntumy134
Ghost ApparentJelena Dunato511
The Year of ReturnAkotowaa Ivana Ofori411
No SympathyEoin Dooley321
The Last to DrownLorraine Wilson291
Star Pattern TravellerJoyce Ch’ng64
LunaAllen Stroud102
Waypoint SevenXan van Rooyen61
The Runemaster’s DaughterLawrence Schoen21
JezeroAllen Stroud70
ChimeraChinaza Eziaghigala10

All fourteen of the long-listed works in the Best Fiction for Younger Readers category score on both systems.

Title AuthorGRLT
Somewhere Beyond the SeaT J Klune88,811878
Immortal DarkTigest Girma11,881462
SnowglobeSoyoung Park4,177163
Blood at the RootLaDarrion Williams2,767112
SonglightMoira Buffini1,34467
Until We ShatterKate Dylan94685
The Dividing SkyJill Tew49128
RedsightMeredith Mooring36632
Doctor Who: CagedUna McCormack16113
Benny Ramirez and the Nearly DepartedJose Pablo Iriarte11311
BraidedLeah Cypess534
WayfindersBryan Chick593
Rebel DawnAnn Sei Lin402
The Rarkyn’s FallNikky Lee161

And finally, with apologies for the length of this post, all 61 of the works long-listed for Best Novel are on Goodreads and/or LibraryThing. (59 on GR and 60 on LT.) On the version of the long-list I was working from, one novel was actually listed twice, but I’ve only listed it once here (and there’s another which also features in the Best Shorter Fiction list).

Title AuthorGRLT
The Ministry of TimeKaliane Bradley102,9561,432
Emily Wilde’s Map of the OtherlandsHeather Fawcett64,5691,022
A Sorceress Comes To CallT. Kingfisher25,913716
An Education in MaliceS. T. Gibson16,561400
The Teller of Small FortunesJulie Leong11,357521
The Book of LoveKelly Link7,027378
Someone You can Build a Nest InJohn Wiswell8,063278
Alien ClayAdrian Tchaikovsky6,253218
AbsolutionJeff Vandermeer4,517279
FathomfolkEliza Chan3,341365
Private RitesJulia Armfield5,658155
Floating HotelGrace Curtis2,790177
The Mars HouseNatasha Pulley2,666167
House of Open WoundsAdrian Tchaikovsky2,347163
Machine VendettaAlastair Reynolds2,978128
Womb CityTlotlo Tsamaase2,193132
The Principle of MomentsEsme Jikiemi-Pearson1,209200
The Great WhenAlan Moore1,196195
The Briar Book of the DeadA G Slatter2,163105
The BezzleCory Doctorow1,789125
RakesfallVajra Chandrasekera62291
Deep BlackMiles Cameron1,28341
AsunderKerstin Hall79557
The Wings Upon Her BackSamantha Mills61573
Lady Eve’s Last ConRebecca Fraimow59469
Navigational EntanglementsAliette de Bodard48064
CalypsoOliver K. Langmead42247
The Legacy of Arniston HouseT. L. Huchu52636
On Vicious WorldsBethany Jacobs58824
The Last ShieldCameron Johnstone39831
RedsightMeredith Mooring36633
Beyond the Light HorizonKen Mcleod41527
The Siege of Burning GrassPremee Mohammed28137
Lake of DarknessAdam Roberts23532
The Collapsing WaveDoug Johnstone36117
Three Eight OneAliya Whiteley20130
The NightwardR. S. A. Garcia16136
Archangels of FunkAndrea Hairston14735
MorphotrophicGreg Egan20311
The Book of GoldRuth Frances Long10121
ArchipelagoH. R. Hawkins2017
Ninth LifeStark Holborn10311
The Tapestry of TimeKate Heartfield10610
ExtremophileIan Green9411
The Green Man’s WarJuliet Mckenna1088
Grim RootBonnie Jo Stufflebeam1217
Sleeping Worlds Have No MemoryYaroslav Barsukov918
We Are All Ghosts in the ForestLorraine Wilson926
The Heart of WinterShona Kinsella856
ConquistDirk Strasser405
InversionsM.V. Melcer363
VigilanceAllen Stroud166
Dark ShepherdFred Gambino136
Rabbit in the MoonFiona Moore55
Her Gilded VoiceK.C. Aegis241
Three Men in OrbitSandra Bond46
WatermythAnita Harris Satkunan82
The HeadlandAbi Curtis101
The FactoryIhor Mysiak04
Dakini AtollNikhil Singh02
That Perfect WorldBXMN10

As I said last year, I don’t really know how useful a long-list of 51, 61 or indeed 80 can be. I appreciate that awards can call attention to otherwise overlooked work, but a) I’m not convinced that an award decided by popular vote, as the BSFA and Hugo Awards are, is the best vehicle for doing that and b) this is best done with a short list, not a long list where the most interesting stuff risks getting lost in the crowd.

January 2025 books

Non-fiction 8
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy
Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan
Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith
Fifty Years On: The Troubles and the Struggle for Change in Northern Ireland, by Malachi O’Doherty
The Atlas of Unusual Borders: Discover intriguing boundaries, territories and geographical curiosities, by Zoran Nikolić
Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride
The Atlas of Unusual Languages: An exploration of language, people and geography, by Zoran Nikolić
How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir, by Hans Rosling

Non-genre 5
A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll
The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells

SF 10
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow
Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman
The Song, by Erinn L. Kemper
Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde
The Ultimate Earth, by Jack Williamson
Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard
Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon
The Lights Go Out in Lychford, by Paul Cornell 
Ithaca, by Claire North

Doctor Who 4
Doctor Who annual 2025
, by Paul Lang
Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons
On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell (audiobook)
Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones (audiobook)

Comics 2
The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond
Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain

7,200 pages
10/29 by non-male writers (McNicoll, Datlow, Harvey, Harpmann, Kemper, Osunde, de Bodard, Solomon, North, Bonvillain)
4/29 by non-white writers (Vuong, Osunde, de Bodard, Solomon)
2/29 rereads (The Ultimate Earth, Killing Ground)
247 books currently tagged unread, down 14 from last month, down 58 from January 2024.

Reading now
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read, almost finished!)
De bondgenoten, by Brecht Evens
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

Coming soon (perhaps)
The Eye of Ashaya
, by Andy Diggle et al
Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee
Doctor Who: TARDIS Type Forty Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson
Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Kevin Decker and Ryan Parrey
A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell
Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells
Braver, Greener, Fairer: Memos to the EU Leadership 2019-2024, ed. Maria Demertzis
The Secret Places of the Heart, by H. G. Wells
Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh
Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott
DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee
Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis
Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by Dr John Barton
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
“Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham
Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al

(Books in italics were also on last month’s list.)

Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She had been in Madden’s Bar in Belfast and had turned to a man she thought was me and said hello.

I was lucky enough to be in Northern Ireland on the day that this book was launched, attended, bought it and got it signed. I know the author if not very well; I guess we have been on each other’s radar for a long time.

It’s about the fifty years in Northern Ireland, more specifically Belfast, from 1969 to 2019, of which the first thirty were consumed with the Troubles and the next twenty with the new post-peace process society as it develops. It’s a big book – almost 400 pages – and covers not only the politics of violence, and the constitutional question, but also the more fundamental shifts to what was a very conservative society in the 1960s: women’s rights, gay rights, language rights.

It’s a very personal tale, explaining better than I’ve seen from anywhere else how very much the outbreak of violence in the late 1960s was a bolt from the blue, unanticipated by anyone including the perpetrators, and how the prelapsarian geography of Belfast got reshaped by sectarian brutality. As well as recounting his own memories, O’Doherty interviews a lot of current players with different views than his own, including on the diehard Loyalist side, and gives them space to articulate their perspective.

I was inwardly amused that the people in the book who I do know personally are concentrated in the feminism / gay rights chapters rather than the more political chapters. Though on reflection perhaps this does point to a gap in the perspectives presented; I miss any mention of integrated education, mixed marriages, or the growth of the vote for non-aligned political parties. Less exciting perhaps, but not unimportant.

I see some reviewers complaining that if you don’t already know much about Northern Ireland, the wealth of information and number of personalities make it difficult to follow. I’m not in the at-risk category of not knowing enough about Northern Ireland, and I very much enjoyed it, and even learned a few things from it. You can get it here.

This was (shamefully) the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread pile. Next up there is Braver, Greener, Fairer: Memos to the EU Leadership 2019-2024, ed. Maria Demertzis.

Wednesday reading

Current
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read, almost finished!)
Ithaca, by Claire North
De bondgenoten, by Brecht Evens
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

Last books finished
Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride
The Atlas of Unusual Languages: An exploration of language, people and geography, by Zoran Nikolić
How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir, by Hans Rosling
The Lights Go Out in Lychford, by Paul Cornell 

Next books
The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al
A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell
Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis

Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith

The 2009 Hugos were the only year of the seven from 2006 to 2012 where a Doctor Who episode failed to win, comprehensively thrashed by Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, though with Turn Left coming third. (Sorry that the final ballot stats on the right are cramped, but you can click to embiggen.)

When I first write about this TV story in 2009, I said:

Unlike a lot of people I wasn’t overwhelmed by Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. On re-watching, I enjoyed it more, but still feel it is weaker than Moffat’s previous New Who stories. Perhaps I am being unfair, and I guess that expecting another Blink is not reasonable. I must admit that as sf, its concept works very well – the intersecting levels of reality, the time-traveller who meets a lover from his own future; and as drama it is pretty effective, with Alex Kingston and Catherine Tate particularly strong, and the utterly horrible creepiness of the ghosting data chips (“Who turned out the lights?”, etc).

My two problems with it are both to do with River Song’s story. To get the easier one out of the way, her ending is not a particularly happy one; she is still dead, and gets to spend an ersatz afterlife in the computer’s memory with her crew rather than with the man she loves. (If you work or have ever worked in a team with other people, just consider for a moment whether you would prefer to spend eternity with them or with your lover.) The script didn’t quite do justice to the tragedy of River’s story for me.

My other problem is that while the story works as sf and (apart from the above niggle) as drama I’m not so sure it works as Doctor Who. Back in 2006 I enjoyed The Girl in the Fireplace, but rated it below School Reunion, because one of my sources of enjoyment in Who is its dealing with its own mythology, and another is the relationship that we as viewers build up with the regular characters, and TGitF did not deliver much on the second and nothing on the first of these. Now, where at least TGitF had a decent start and closure to the Doctor’s love story, with Renette’s death ending their relationship, SitL/FotD cheats us because we are asked to care very deeply about the Doctor/River dynamic, without getting the payoff of it becoming a regular plot theme. (No televised return to explore River’s past relationship with the Doctor seems likely now, and anyway it would hardly get satisfactory treatment in the time we have left.) So while this episode may well get strong support from Hugo voters who are not regular Who watchers, I was and am surprised by the favour it has found among fans.

It’s rare that I come back to a review and admit that I was completely wrong, but as it turned out, I was completely wrong. River Song went on to be a fixture of the Eleventh Doctor’s era, her origins were a major plot line for Series 6, and she has made the occasional appearance since then (plus a well-received set of Big Finish spinoff audio plays). Looked at now, the story is a clever pitch-rolling for the future arc of the show. An important data point is that it was written precisely at the moment that Stephen Moffat was deciding whether or not to be the new show-runner.

And I mentioned it in my first paragraph, but did not give enough credit to the story’s success as drama. The ghosting data chips are truly horrible and awful and compelling, and Donna’s alternative history rather moving (capped with Lee’s inability to get her attention at the last moment). Midnight is still my favourite episode of a good season, but Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead succeeds better than I allowed at the time.

Dale Smith’s Black Archive on the story ranges far and wide across Stephen Moffat’s œuvre, not only in Doctor Who but in Press Gang, Coupling, etc, to explore where the themes of the story come from. The first chapter, “An Irrational Fear of the Dark”, considers Moffat’s vision for Doctor Who as fairy tale, not at all in a negative way.

The second chapter, “Please Tell Me You Know Who I Am”, looks at the origin and subsequent life of Rover Song, and at Moffat’s attitude to time-travel and continuity.

The third chapter, “Nothing More Than Virtual Reality”, looks at the philosophical and biological basis of identity, and death. Its second paragraph is:

The idea that real life is a simulation is one with a long history, from 1 Corinthians 13:123, via Descartes’ evil demon4, to the more SF idea of the brain in a vat, fed false images of the world it is living in5, like Morbius if Solon had been of a more philosophical bent. It’s an extension of any number of conspiracy theories that provide comfort by putting somebody secretly in charge of the apparently arbitrary randomness and cruelty of real life, only better because it is unprovable: whoever runs the simulation has complete control over our ability to perceive that we are simulations, and so anything that might seem to disprove the idea can simply be re-assimilated as proof of the opposite. It is the perfect teapot in space6, an idea maintained by faith alone and with so little impact on day-to-day life as to be completely useless. But in Silence / Forest, it is uncomplicatedly positive: a chance to cheat death and live for as long as there is a Lux family willing to ensure the real-world hardware doesn’t go down.
3  ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly’, The Bible, King James translation.
4  Descartes, René, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’.
5  Putnam, Hilary, ‘Reason, Truth and History’.
6  Russell, Bertrand, ‘Is There a God? [1952]’, In Slater, John G. (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11, pp 542-548.

The fourth chapter, “It Can’t Be the Books, Can It?” looks at books and archives, with a diversion into classification systems, and the power of the written word.

The fifth, final, and longest chapter, “Brilliant and Unloved”, looks at how Stephen Moffat writes women, how he writes men’s relationships with women, and how this all adds up to the writing of River Song.

This is an unusual Black Archive in that it ranges far beyond the story in question to look at the work of the story’s writer. But Stephen Moffat is one of the two most significant writers of New Who (I’ll not choose here between him and RTD as to who is #1 and who is #2), and so it’s definitely worth the excursion into the bigger picture. It does mean that the book isn’t as much about the actual story in question as most of the Black Archives are, but there is no harm in variety. You can get it here.

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

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong

Second paragraph of third chapter:

A woman, not yet thirty, clutches her daughter on the shoulder of a dirt road in a beautiful country where two men, M-16s in their hands, step up to her. She is at a checkpoint, a gate made of concertina and weaponized permission. Behind her, the fields have begun to catch. A braid of smoke through a page-blank sky. One man has black hair, the other a yellow mustache like a scar of sunlight. Stench of gasoline coming off their fatigues. The rifles sway as they walk up to her, their metal bolts winking in afternoon sun.

I came across this when compiling my list of the best known books set in Vietnam; it wasn’t clear to me from online commentary if it satisfied my criterion of more than 50% of it being set in the country. Now that I’ve read it, I can tell you that it doesn’t; the majority of the book is set in Hartford, Connecticut, with a fair bit of back-story in Vietnam and a bit in New York at the end.

It’s quite a tough read. The protagonist is growing up queer and Asian in a very white and straight town. His mother endured unspeakable traumas in Vietnam and passes these on to him to a certain extent. The language is lyrical and convincing but the content rather gruelling. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that pile is Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott, the best-known book published in 1875.

Two Fifteenth Doctor audiobooks – On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell, and Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones

There’s a whole run of original Doctor Who audiobooks which I have only recently discovered. (List on Tardis.wikia, as there doesn’t seem to be an official listing page.) I had listened to several of them without realising it, but now that I have a full list I can go through them systematically.

I am starting, of course, at the end, with two recently produced stories of the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby. On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell and read by Susan Twist, takes the two of them to the County Durham coastline in 1958 where they get tangled up with a ghost story and deal with intruders from another dimension. It’s nicely done, though Susan Twist makes the Doctor more Scottish than Ncuti Gatwa actually sounds. You can get it here.

Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones, read by Genesis Lynea, did not satisfy me as much. The TARDIS lands in contemporary Washington State, where we encounter a park ranger and Bigfoot hunter. Inevitably the Sasquatch turn out to be aliens on their own mission, dealing with rather yukky parasitic telepathic worms. I think the story is basically fine, but Genesis Lynea (who played Sutekh’s Harbinger in The Legend of Ruby Sunday) took some time to get into her stride in the reading, starting off rather flat and oddly paced; it’s quite a different skill from stage acting. So it’s less warmly recommended, I’m afraid. You can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Afghanistan

See here for methodology. I am excluding books not actually set in the current borders of Afghanistan, but there were only two of these (I think).

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
The Kite RunnerKhaled Hossaini3,297,43754,360
A Thousand Splendid SunsKhaled Hossaini1,618,31731,331
And the Mountains EchoedKhaled Hosseini386,0107,583
Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10Marcus Luttrell 97,0293,293
The Bookseller of KabulÅsne Seierstad 54,9285,751
The Breadwinner Deborah Ellis 29,8953,002
Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat TillmanJon Krakauer 41,0002,038
The Pearl That Broke Its ShellNadia Hashimi 49,1951,106

This week’s winner is not at all surprising. The Kite Runner‘s 3.3 million Goodreads raters beats any book I have looked at so far in this sequence, apart from Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (Italy), and the top books set in the UK and USA. On LibraryThing, its 54,000 owners beat all books other than Romeo and Juliet (also Italy), and again, the top books set in the UK and USA. It really is quite a phenomenon.

As noted, I excluded two books: Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea, which qualified previously under Pakistan, and Laurence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which covers many places besides Afghanistan.

I’m relieved that there are only two US military stories on the list, and one of those (by Jon Krakauer) is distinctly dissident. But one feels that, were it not for Khaled Hossaini, the literature available to Goodreads and LibraryThing users would almost exclusively portray Afghanistan as a place where white people go and do things which may or may not involve dead locals. Flashman was not much further down the list.

Next is Yemen, which I am surprised to learn has a bigger population than Canada or Poland.

India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan

Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan

Second paragraph of third chapter:

There is, however, much to learn yet if Paddy Mac is to succeed in the tricky task of acquiring the sort of profile that can help carry him to the Taoiseach’s office. One critical thing our Aspirant Prince must embrace is the role of art in high politics. Before Paddy Machiavelli gets nervous, we are referring to art as in the learning of a profession, rather than writing poetry or painting or suchlike. He can, of course, go a long way in Irish politics without treating it as a form of art. Talent (rarely), hard work (occasionally), or the sort of hard neck more common in a timeshare salesman may bring Paddy Mac as far as the cabinet table. But, unless he brings some form of artistry to his public discourse, when it comes to the great prize, he will be like a pony trying to jump an eight-foot fence and win the Puissance.

Some kind person, I know not who, sent me this just before Christmas, correctly guessing that I would enjoy it a lot. I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t familiar with Drennan as a journalist; he came to prominence only after I had left Irish politics, and he mostly wrote for the Sunday Independent which I rarely read. I think I have been missing out; his witty takedown of the entire Irish political system and its leaders over the years is also passionate and well-observed. It’s easy to be cynical, and to accuse others of being cynical; but I don’t think that is the point of this book, which is holding up a mirror to the Irish political process and describing it in painful detail. Here, for instance, near the end, Drennan reflects on the preference of Irish voters for older leaders in typical style:

…in Irish politics, with rare exceptions, youth will not have its fling. The U.K. and America may have a tradition of youthful leaders, such as Thatcher, Blair, Obama, Clinton and Cameron. We, however, prefer our leaders to resemble the elderly habitues of a bishops conference. That FG soberside, Liam Cosgrave, even when he was young, was not youthful: Garret was a national grand-uncle; Jack Lynch came draped in the sepia of de Valera’s Ireland; whilst Albert, though lively, was a child of the showband era ruling a country nudging the envelope of the Celtic Tiger. Lemass might have been in a hurry, but he was an old man. Haughey too was past his best by the time he secured power, though that might have been a good thing. Mr Bruton, though youngish in years, was a figure who gave the impression of a man who would have been more at home within the Irish Parliamentary Party. Bertie Ahern was seen to be a man who belonged to a youthful age, but he too was a creature who resided intellectually in the age of putting posters of de Valera up by gaslight. As for Enda, he is a child of flaming turf sods and Liam Cosgrave.

The book was published in 2014, in the middle of Enda Kenny’s unexpected / long-awaited (delete as applicable) term as Taoiseach, so Drennan failed to take into account the ascension of Leo Varadkar (Taoiseach at 38) or Simon Harris (Taoiseach at 37). But despite that, it’s a good summary of the popular wisdom about each of the leaders of the last fifty years, based on anecdote and experience. I have encountered a small number of the many people who he talks about (only briefly in most cases, though I was friendly with John Bruton), and felt in every case that he is writing about the people who I met.

I fear this is not a book for people who don’t know or care much about Irish politics, and it also won’t satisfy anyone who is hungering for political change; it’s about the internal workings of the old parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, and to a lesser extent how they manage their coalition partners in office. But personally I tend to feel that a swing back to the default state of dominance by the older parties is more likely than not; so this may turn out to be as useful a guidebook to the future as to the past. You can get it here.

Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The worry and the lack of sleep were making him nauseous. Madrox didn‘t help. He had summoned Taggart to a cell and made him witness to a brutal interrogation. The victim was the man in whose care the shattered rebel leader had been placed a decade and a half ago, to live out his days as an example to dissidents. Madrox had bullied him, bribed him and punched him, but his opponent had kept an obstinate silence. When finally he removed his blaster from its holster, Taggart felt like attacking him, disarming him, killing him. But he didn‘t.

Second last in my run of re-reading Sixth Doctor novels which I failed to blog in 2015. It features Grant Markham, a books-only companion, who the Doctor takes back to his home planet which is under attack from horrible metal creatures. It is a gritty tale of Cybermen; people who want to be like Cybermen; and people trying to fight Cybermen by becoming worse than Cybermen. Some chilling moments, and thought-provoking considerations of what it is that the Cybermen actually want and mean. You can get it here.

Next up: Mission: Impractical, by the much-missed David A. McIntee.

Lost Brussels architecture

I recently discovered the lovely Bruciel website, which allows you not only to compare and contrast aerial photos of Brussels from decades ago to the present day, but also to look at historic streetscapes from the archive of photographs. There’s lots to explore, but my attention was particularly caught by a pair of buildings on opposite corners of the intersection where my office stands, between Rue de la Science / Wetenschapsstraat and Rue Montoyer / Montoyerstraat. These two photos are undated but both have Rue Montoyer on the right and Rue de la Science on the left.

Bruciel’s aerial photograph from the 1930s clarifies the layout, and the two blue tags mark the places from which the two photographs were taken. The buildings are those on the upper right (northeastern) and lower left (southwestern) corners of the junction.

Both buildings appear to be two-storey residential houses, in both cases with access via the gardens further along Rue de la Science. They are architecturally quite similar but far from identical – the house on the northeastern corner is significantly bigger than its southwestern counterpart, but also lacks a direct opening onto the street – presumably people went either through the garden or through the side entry. The southwestern house has a big door onto Rue Montoyer, and the garden entrance looks less formal. I note that both buildings sport large flagpoles.

northeastern corner
southwestern corner

The definition is not good enough to read the street signs on the two houses, but I’m pretty sure that the northeastern one has “RUE MONTOYER / MONTOYERSTR” and the southwestern “RUE / MONTOYER / STRAAT”.

The Bruciel archive’s next photos are from 1944, and the northeastern building is still there and I think that the southwestern one is too, but it’s a bit indistinct.

By 1953, however, both had been replaced by office blocks, like most of the rest of the district. The southwestern corner is now the LUCIA building at Rue de la Science 4, and the northeastern corner, Rue Montoyer 34, used to be occupied by DG JUST of the European Commission, but is currently being renovated for more office space. The only old building left at the intersection is the Armenian Embassy at Rue Montoyer 28.

I Who Have Never Known Men aka The Mistress Of Silence, by Jacqueline Harpman

Second paragraph of third section:

Moi, je n’avais jamais rien entendu de semblable, mais les femmes se figèrent aussitôt car elles avaient reconnu la sirène d’alerte. C’était une clameur énorme qui montait interminablement en arrachant les oreilles. Je fus saisie de stupeur et je crois que, pour la première fois depuis que je l’avais acquis, je perdis le décompte du temps. Les femmes qui étaient assises se levèrent d’un bond, celles qui étaient à la grille pour prendre la nourriture reculèrent. Le gardien lâcha son trousseau en le laissant dans la serrure et se retourna vers les autres. Ils se regardèrent un instant puis, d’un même mouvement, prirent leur élan et coururent vers la grande porte, poussèrent les bat-tants devant eux en les ouvrant tout à fait, ce qui n’avait jamais eu lieu, et sortirent.I’d never heard anything like it, but the women froze, because they’d recognised the sirens. It was an ear-piercingly loud, continuous wail. I was dumbstruck and I think I lost track for the first time since I’d acquired the ability to count time. The women who were seated leapt up, those who were at the bars collecting the food, recoiled. The guard let go of the bunch of keys, leaving them in the lock and turned to face the others. They looked at one another briefly, and then they all rushed towards the main exit, flinging the double doors wide open – something they’d never done before – and ran out.
translation by Ros Schwartz

Our unnamed protagonist has spent her entire life locked up with with thirty-nine adult women in a cage in an underground bunker. The first third of the short, punchy book sets that up in some detail. And then, suddenly, it all changes. The guards disappear and the women manage to escape – but to where? Are they on Earth? Is there any chance of rescue? Is there anyone else left alive at all? It’s not a very happy book, but it is gripping, and you can get it here.

I’m astonished that I had never heard of this before. Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian psychiatrist, also wrote Orlanda, a gender-switching fantasy which I enjoyed last year. Unfortunately those are her only two books which have been translated into English. Her others include La Dormition des amants, which is set in the Spanish court in an alternative sixteenth century; and Mes Œdipe, a retelling of the Oedipus myth. Sadly I don’t think my French is quite up to attempting them.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh, which I have actually read before but I’m going to take it together with its sequel.

Ninth Doctor Adventures: Shades of Fear

More Ninth Doctor audio plays from Big Finish, this time a trilogy with a very good beginning and end and a weaker middle. Here is a promotional video, not so much a trailer as a teaser with Frank Skinner doing a voiceover.

The Colour of Terror by Lizzie Hopley

This has the Ninth Doctor meeting Frank Skinner and Susan Penhaligon in a charity shop somewhere in England, where the colour red is taking on sinister and awful characteristics. It’s very well done, with a top guest cast, including also Laura Rollins and Dinita Gohil as a couple who get caught up in the situation. Coming back to Frank Skinner though – he’s obviously loving every minute of it, and it’s a joy to hear.

The Blooming Menace, by James Kettle, is the one that doesn’t quite hit the mark; it’s set around a young fogeys’ club out of P.G. Wodehouse, with carnivorous plants. The star guest here for me was Milanka Brooks, playing a chap who isn’t actually a chap.

But we’re back on track again with the finale, Red Darkness by Roy Gill. To get to the best bit first: it brings back the Vashta Nerada from Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. You might have thought that such a visual monster might not work well on audio, but with good scripting and acting it is a real hit. The Doctor comes to the rescue of a doomed colony with the help of partially sighted Callen (played by Adam Martyn) and his talking dog (played by Karki Bhambra).

The strengths of the first and third of these more than make up for the weakness in the middle, and I recommend the set. You can get it here.

Wednesday reading

Current
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read)
Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
Burned, by Sam McBride

Last books finished
The Song, by Erinn L. Kemper
The Atlas of Unusual Borders, by Zoran Nikolić
The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells
Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde
The Ultimate Earth, by Jack Williamson
Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard
Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon

Next books
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells
How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling
The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, eds. Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith.

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

Second paragraph of third chapter:

For today a crew of four is on its way to the moon and has just surpassed the space station’s shallow orbiting distance of two hundred and fifty miles above the planet. The lunar astronauts are catapulted past them in a five-billion-dollar blaze of suited-booted glory.

This book surprised a lot of us by winning the Booker Prize. It’s a short, intimate, realistic account of a day in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station. I almost hesitate to classify it as science fiction, since it’s a description of people in today’s world dealing with today’s technology. But there is also a fictional lunar mission happening in the background, which perhaps pushes it over the edge into sff.

I liked it a lot; quietly humorous, good observation of human nature in a very peculiar environment, sensible treatment of Russian language phrases (unlike some), reflection on What It All Means, also capturing the sensawunda of just having a semi-permanent human outpost in outer space. I’m still surprised that it won the Booker Prize, but I am familiar enough with how juried awards operate that I can see how it could happen.

Recommended, and digestible. You can get it here.

The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond

Second frame of third original issue:

Two completely different stories in a single album here, both featuring the Eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory, both pretty firmly tied into the sequence of events in the TV series.

(And by the way, congratulations to Karen Gillan on the recent birth of her daughter Clementine!)

“The Hypothetical Gentleman”, by Andy Diggle with excellent art by Mark Buckingham, starts with a somewhat disconnected section fighting Nazis in London in 1936, and then takes the team to 1851 and a time-stealing monster. I found the pacing of squeezing two stories into the space for one a bit odd, but the 1851 bit of the story worked perfectly well as Doctor Who.

The second half, “The Doctor and the Nurse”, is written by Brandon Seifert with art by Philip Bond. I didn’t warm to Bond’s art which seemed to me cartoonish and not really looking like the characters. The story is a comedy about the Doctor and Rory having some guy time together, while Amy finds herself dealing solo with the Silents infiltrating the TARDIS. Comedy Who can go horribly wrong, but this one sticks the landing.

You can get it here.

Next in this sequence: The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al.

Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow

Second paragraph of third story (“Whimper Beg”, by Lee Thomas):

They’d spent hours in this space, drinking good whisky and talking about work, their families, fishing, and politics. He’d been introduced to two state senators in this room, both of whom had promptly received a check from Scotty, and both of whom he still supported to this day.

This was one of the books in the 2020 Hugo packet, but I have only now got around to reading it. There are thirty stories here, two of them over a century old (by Ford Madox Ford and F. Marion Crawford) and the rest newly commissioned for this anthology. They are all somewhat spooky, as you would expect from the title, but there are a lot of inventive variations on the standard themes. There was just one story I didn’t like, by an author who I also dislike personally, but it is short. The rest are all great.

I must admit I was looking at the 800-page PDF with some trepidation, and it did take me almost three weeks to read; but I really enjoyed this collection, and found myself positively looking forward to returning to it each time. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is The James Tiptree Award anthology 2, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith.

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When did it all begin? We have an exact date for the start of the Viking Age in Britain: June 8, 793. On that day, Viking pirates who had probably set out from Norway attacked and pillaged a Christian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne off the English coast. They drowned some of the monks in the sea and took others into slavery before disappearing with the monastery’s treasures on their longboats. During the same decade, the Vikings/ Normans, who would eventually give their name to the province of Normandy, appeared near the shores of France. The Viking Age had begun.

I got this soon after the war started, almost three years ago now, but have only just got around to reading it. It’s an important explanation of the story of Ukraine, starting from Kievan Rus and going through the various semi-autonomous realms of the Middle Ages, through the centuries of Russian rule, and then independence up to 2014.

Some interesting nuggets: the daughters of the eleventh century Grand Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav the Wise, and his Swedish wife, married the kings of Hungary, Norway and France, and one of his sons married the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor. I see that there is also a theory that another daughter married an English Saxon prince and was the mother of Edgar Ætheling and Saint Margaret of Scotland, though Plokhii doesn’t mention it.

It was by no means historically inevitable that Ukraine would spend much of its history under Russian rule. Connections northwestward, to Poland, Lithuania and what’s now Belarus, were always strong, and there were always links with Constantinople and to a lesser extent Vienna as well. The Cossack states of the early modern period and the national revivals of the nineteenth century demonstrate that Ukraine is not just something invented in the twentieth century.

Speaking of which, the twentieth century history of Ukraine is pretty awful, and also pretty closely linked to Russia. After losing the 1917-1921 war of independence, Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR, and was economically very important with its concentrations of both agriculture and industry. Khrushchev made his political career there; Brezhnev was born there; Konstantin Chernenko, who briefly ruled the USSR near the end, was born to a Ukrainian exile family.

But Stalin executed almost all of the senior political and intellectual leadership, and then the Holodomor, the great famine, killed millions more. Stepan Bandera, the far right political figure who Russians love to hate, was never in fact very successful, but the Soviets had good reason to worry about Ukraine’s loyalty (and assassinated the exiled Bandera in Munich in 1959 by spraying him with cyanide).

And when both Ukraine’s Communist leadership, and the Ukrainian people when consulted at the ballot box, refused the offers of a new relationship made by Moscow in 1990-91, the result was the disintegration of the USSR as a whole. In the 1991 independence referendum, there was more than a 50% vote in favour in both Crimea and Sevastopol, and more than 80% in Donetsk and Luhansk; those were the four least pro-independence oblasts.

I said many years ago that all European borders are tidemarks in the ebb and flow of empires, and this is particularly so in the case of Ukraine. But that doesn’t make Ukraine a fictional concept, or Ukrainian a fictional language, or Ukrainians a fictional people, as the tankies would have you believe. Ukraine deserves external support to maintain and restore its integrity as a state, and this book is a good introduction to its history. You can get it here.

This was both my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on those piles respectively are Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple, and Ithaca, by Claire North.

The best known books set in each country: Argentina

See here for methodology. I am back to running through countries in population order, after diverting to right past wrongs for the last four weeks. I generally exclude books not actually set in the specific country, this time Argentina, but I’ve bent that a bit here.

TitleAuthorGR
raters
LT
owners
Tender Is the FleshAgustina Bazterrica 266,0532,493
The TunnelErnesto Sabato 80,8752,332
In PatagoniaBruce Chatwin 17,6323,361
Fever DreamSamanta Schweblin 43,5601,329
Things We Lost in the FireMariana Enríquez 47,8651,038
Kiss of the Spider WomanManuel Puig 19,7692,311
Our Share of NightMariana Enríquez 44,504905
The Dangers of Smoking in BedMariana Enríquez 49,004732

To my dismay, I have nonetheless excluded all of the Jorge Luis Borges short story collections, Ficciones, Labyrinths, the Collected Fiction and The Aleph and Other Stories, because a lot less than 50% of each of them is not clearly set in Argentina, and around half of each of them are in fact clearly set elsewhere.

The majority of Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, is set in Paris although there’s a substantial chunk in Argentina at the end. And The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, is set on a fictional island which is clearly distinguished from Argentina. Most of these were far far ahead of the rest on LibraryThing, apart from The Invention of Morel (though even that has 2,654 LibraryThing owners).

My winning novel, Tender Is the Flesh, has as many raters on Goodreads as the next four put together but is only second on LibraryThing. It is not explicitly set in Argentina, but none of its many reviewers seem to think that it is set anywhere else, so I am allowing it the top spot. I note with great interest that another Argentinian woman writer, Mariana Enriquez, also shows a big imbalance between the two website, with around fifty times more raters on Goodreads than owners on LibraryThing. (The normal ratio is more like 20:1.) The two Enriquez books that I have not read also appear to be short story collections, but unlike Borges most of them appear to be set in Argentina.

Next up are Afghanistan and Yemen. I don’t think Afghanistan is going to surprise me.

Christmas Who: The War Games in colour, Joy to the World and the Christmas Prom

It took me a couple of weeks to acquire the newly colorised version of The War Games, the longest surviving Old Who series and the last of the black and white era, which was released just before Christmas by the BBC. I am of course a purist who believes that you should, if you can, watch the four hours of the original story. But in these busy times, who has four hours to sit down to a show made in 1969? So I guess I welcome the fact that it has been made accessible to viewers with less time and patience. Here’s a trailer.

It’s very pleasing, I must admit. I certainly had a jolt of excitement when I saw the first real splashes of colour on screen. There’s no denying that the human eye is naturally attracted to chromatic variation; it represents immense effort by the colourists, and it has paid off.

I’m a little more hesitant about the editing. Sure, cutting four hours down to 90 minutes is going to be a challenge, even if there are several extraneous escape-and-recapture sequences which were ripe for trimming. There is a little jerkiness in continuity as a result, which could perhaps have been smoothed over with a caption or a voiceover – thinking particularly of Vilar who comes out of nowhere.

But the ending is where the editors have added rather than taken away. We get nods to New Who at a crucial moment in the trial scene, and the two extra minutes inserted between the last seconds of the last black-and-white Doctor Who episode, and the first canonical appearance of the Third Doctor, are a delight – originally developed by a fan on YouTube, who the BBC then brought into the project. Beautifully done.

(Also the line “Too fat!” has been removed, but that’s a good thing.)

I’m not going to do an overall analysis of Joy to the World, but here were some things that struck me.

  • I can’t recall watching anything on screen or stage that addressed the pandemic so directly. It’s not just the explicit “those awful people and their wine fridges, and their dancing, and their parties” line; the Doctor’s isolation for a year in the hotel, sitting chastely distanced from Anita, is a very obvious callback to 2020. In-universe of course, the Doctor could perfectly well have gone to visit with Ruby, or UNIT, or his other self and Donna’s family, since he knows he has a year but doesn’t have to be on the spot. But that’s not the story that Stephen Moffat chose to tell.
    (I’ve read a couple of pandemic-referencing novels – Ali Smith in particular.)
  • Speaking of Anita, although Nicola Coughlan was the top billed guest star as Joy, it was Steph de Whalley who nailed it as the lonely hotel receptionist. She is 37 and has not previously had a major role in her career. Hopefully that will change now.
  • Speaking of other members of the cast, I had seen Joel Fry, who played Trev, on stage as Jodie Whittaker’s secret husband in The Duchess last year.
  • Nicola Coughlan is the first Northern Irish actor to get top billing in a Doctor Who episode. (Edited to add: she is from Galway.) (Edited again: Er, after Dervla Kirwan.)
  • I winced a bit at the Bethlehem scene at the end. But does this mean that the whole New Testament is now an annex of the Whoniverse? Or just the gospels of Matthew and Luke?
  • Annexing another continuity, in case you didn’t know, Silvia Trench (the wopman on the Orient Express) is also James Bond’s London girlfriend in the first two films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love.
  • The usual Moffat problem: nobody ever stays dead.

But in general, I enjoyed it – the good bits definitely outweighing the misfires.

And of course the first Doctor Who content to drop over the Christmas break was the Christmas Prom, introduced by Catherine Tate. Lots of joyous energy in the hall and among the performers; audience clearly appreciating the scary monsters walking among them. The whole thing is online here: