The best known books set in each country: Syria

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Syria.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
As Long as the Lemon Trees GrowZoulfa Katouh91,116890
Sea PrayerKhaled Hosseini 59,241818
L’Arabe du futur 2Riad Sattouf11,251430
Come, Tell Me How You LiveAgatha Christie Mallowan4,918965
Death Is Hard WorkKhaled Khalifa4,548291

Only five this time. As with Niger a few weeks ago, I had to disqualify a lot of books (sixteen in this case) which are (at least in part) about Syria, but not actually set there, most of which dealt with the experience of Syria refugees trying to make their way to and in other countries during the recent war. My rule is that if I have had to disqualify a large number of books before I reach the fifth that is actually set in the country, I leave it there. Normally I would list the top eight books.

I’m glad to see a novel by a Syrian woman actually topping the chart this week, though it does way better on Goodreads. You may be surprised to see Agatha Christie making an appearance; this is a non-fiction account of her experiences observing her husband’s archaeological digging, and it is the top book set in Syria on LibraryThing, though much further behind on Goodreads.

I ruled out the first volume of the graphic novel series L’Arabe du future, which is set in several different countries. However the second volume does seem to be mainly set in Syria, so it’s on the list. Both are on my list of BDs to buy.

The top book on Goodreads with ‘Syria’ tags was Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, and the top on LibraryThing was The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker, both of which are about the experience of Syrian immigrants in the USA; one non-fiction, the other fantasy. There were a few other non-fiction books looking at the region as a whole. I won’t list them all.

Coming next: Mali, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka and (edge case, but it’s listed as a separate country in most lists) Taiwan.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine
Oceania: Australia

2025 Best Poem Hugo; and WSFS Business Meeting Best Poem proposal

2025 Hugos: Goodreads / Librarything stats | Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Graphic Story or Comic | Related Work | Fancast | Poem | Lodestar | Astounding

So, the last literary category in this year’s Hugos that I’m going to write up is the special category award for Best Poem, a one-off for 2025. I found it pretty easy to rank them.

1) Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead. Second paragraph of third chapter:

I spend a while exploring the tall halls,
Searching the archways for an ideal place.
It should be comfortable and intimate;
I always prefer to be warm at church.

This is a tremendous piece of work, 224 pages in length, a narrative about a generation starship and competing visions of the future, making delightful innovations of form and content. I really hope it wins. You can get Calypso here.

The others are all much shorter.

2) Your Visiting Dragon, by Devan Barlow. Third stanza:

Be prepared for your visiting dragon to steal
your scarves, your spoons, your salt shakers
or anything else that captures their fancy
They will, nearly always,
leave them behind at season’s end

Most of these finalists are telling narrative stories; I liked the way that this one is more of a situation, not particularly trying to have a plot. Poetry can be more than stories in verse. (OK, my top vote is going to a story in verse.)

3) We Drink Lava, by Ai Jiang. Third stanza:

It was clear why humans could not drink
lava like we, so unaccepting of their pasts,
so much fear for their futures, where we find
enjoyment experiencing both in the present.
Because to us, that is all that matters.

An interesting portrayal of human emotions and passions as seen and interpreted by lava-drinking gods.

4) A War of Words, by Marie Brennan. Third stanza:

Today it was the water—
the big water that divides us—
we’re losing more and more,
more battles, more words,
all gone across the water I can’t name anymore
because it belongs to them now,
the—
what are they—
I had a word for them this morning, I know it—

A story about words being stolen, or perhaps rather raided, which works effectively as a poem.

5) Ever Noir, by Mari Ness. Third section (arguably):

Sometimes they spill a golden coin or two,
or seven tarnished silver coins. Or a shirt
woven from nettles. Can turn you from a bird,
they say. Or maybe the other way around. A
golden ring that never fits. Boots with
iron soles. A shard from a shattered slipper.

I was not so sure about this, a merger of three different literary discourses – fairy tales, noir and poetry. It’s ambitious and it didn’t quite work for me.

6) there are no taxis for the dead, by Angela Liu. Third stanza:

At home, you don’t knock, just
ping the paper lanterns, one after the other
            like fireflies seeking patterns in summer heat. You sink

I’m sorry, I really didn’t understand what this was about. Some of the individual pieces, sure, but they did not make a whole picture for me.

Speculative Poetry Award

A team of activists have put a lot of work into putting the case for a permanent Best Poem Hugo. The main difference with this year’s special award is that they propose a minimum of one line rather than three. The brief version of their proposal is in item F12 (pages 40 and 41) of the Business Meeting agenda; they have published longer argumentation at the PoetryHugo.com website.

I admire their commitment, but I am probably voting against, because I feel that there are already too many Hugo categories, and I would like to see the Business Meeting trimming some of the excess before adding yet again to the burdens of Hugo administrators.

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al

Second frame of third issue:

“Your kindness touches my heart. Such thoughtfulness is rare these days. What, may I ask, brings such a beautiful couple out on the road? Not running away together, are you?”

Having finished the Titan Eleventh Doctor comics, I’m starting the Twelfth Doctor albums, beginning with this compilation of two two-issue stories, both of which I rather liked.

Terrorformer has the newly regenerated Doctor and Clara visiting a planet which should have been an ice world but seems to have become rather hot; it turns out that there’s an intelligent star behind it all (this made me look up the temperature at the core of the Sun). Clara gets some decent character moments too.

The Swords of Okti is set in both past and future India, and puts Clara aside for most of it to give the Doctor two temporary Indian companions – who I think are the first South Asians to have that role in any medium? The story was originally published as The Swords of Kali, but re-titled after a Hindu group in Nevada protested at the appropriation of the goddess. In any case, it’s a fairly standard aliens-pose-as-gods narrative but with the extra cultural wrinkles.

You can get it here. Next in this sequence: Fractures, also by Robbie Morrison et al.

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: four more constitutional amendments

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I have only five (5) items left to write about from this year’s WSFS Business Meeting agenda. One of them is a proposal for a new Hugo category, which I will deal with tomorrow. The other four are fiddly proposals which I’ll deal with here.

F16 (on page 46 of the agenda) simply prevents committees from lapsing on the event that a Business meeting is not quorate. It seems to me a rather unlikely scenario, but I suppose it may as well be covered. Will vote in favour if necessary.

F17 (pages 47-48) changes the deadlines around when a newly seated WorldCon can allow bid voters to convert their voting rights into attending memberships at a discount. This is basically about preventing a 2021 mistake that didn’t in the end actually happen, and the wording proposed, on my reading, would actually prevent a seated WorldCon from allowing voters to convert to memberships at the convention where the voting took place. This seems to me a good example of a change that isn’t really needed, fixing a contingency that has never happened, isn’t well thought out and is not a good use of Business Meeting time.

F18 (pages 48-49) is more complicated playing with deadlines, poorly explained. The proposers complain that if a committee fails to report, the relevant business is delayed for another year; but several of them have circumvented precisely this scenario this year, by proposing resolution F20. I would prefer to see tighter management of the relevant committees, and I don’t see this one as being a good use of Business Meeting time.

F19 (pages 49-50) addresses the question of reopening certain deadlines (for Site Selection bids and for the submission of Business Meeting items) by requiring that year’s WorldCon to announce the deadline dates at the previous year’s WorldCon, mindful of the contingency that the dates of the convention may change (as they did in 2021 and 2023). This would have prevented the Winnipeg bid in 2021. While I can see that this is a potential problem, I am not convinced that this is the solution. Voting against.

Just Best Poem to go… I may assemble all of these into a single document.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson

Second paragraph of third chapter (“The High Priesthood and the Israelite Samaritan Priests”, by Benyamin Tsedaka):

So, for 112 generations the high priesthood was inherited from father to son in the Phinhas family, heads of the Israelite Samaritan People till 1624 CE. Sometimes the high priesthood was inherited by a brother or uncle in the family if there was not a direct successor to the previous High Priest. Sometimes the High Priest appointed his son as his successor and shared with him the duties during his own time of priesthood.

This was a book of essays on random historical topics that I picked up at Eastercon. Unfortunately the first three that I tried were all too boring to read to the end, so I put it down and won’t pick it up again. If you want to, you can get it here.

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: Site Selection

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

There are several items of business relating to the conduct of Site Selection votes for future Worldcons on this year’s WSFS Business Meeting agenda. I have already dealt with four of them, E5 which would put extra people into the site selection counting process, D7 (page 23) which tidies up the wording of Sub-section 4.4.2, F1 (page 31) which further tidies up Sub-section 4.4.2, and F10 which requires bidding committees to agree on software solutions.

There are another four proposed constitutional amendments on this topic. The first of these is F14 (page 44), and it is co-signed by me and a bunch of other people who have been involved with Site Selection ballot design. Very simply, it abolishes the requirement for site selection voters to provide their postal addresses or other Personally Identifying Information when voting. This extra information gathering is unnecessary, possibly illegal in some jurisdictions, and in others may expose voters’ privacy. Please vote for it.

The next is F15 (pages 45-46), which proposes that only votes cast remotely at least 15 days in advance, or in person at the selecting convention, should be counted for site selection purposes. It would be a huge change to the process of site selection voting. This is ostensibly to prevent a recurrence of the events of the 2021 vote, which however the proposers say that they do not want to relitigate.

I think it’s not unreasonable to remind ourselves of what actually happened in 2021. The Chinese translation of the Site Selection ballot produced by DisCon III was not clearly worded in terms of what information was required for the ‘address’ field, and it was also not clear at the time that the Constitution required voters to actually fill it in for the votes to be valid. There was a flood of last-minute emailed ballots from China, for Chengdu. The Site Selection administrators reported that 1591 of the ballots received from China lacked a street address, but otherwise valid. This number was more than enough to make the difference between the Chengdu bid and its only competitor.

The losing side in the 2021 vote then took an emergency resolution to the Business Meeting (see the minutes of the meeting, pages 31-34) which requested that the Business Meeting rule that votes where the address and other fields were not filled in correctly should not be counted for Chengdu. In my view, this was a very bad abuse of process. The Business Meeting simply does not have jurisdiction over the conduct of Site Selection votes, let alone a vote that is still taking place. Under Subsection 1.6 of the Constitution, that’s clearly a matter reserved for the seated Worldcon. The resolution should have been ruled out of order by the Chair as ultra vires.

In any case, as a matter of equity, if the Chinese version of the form was not clear, that was not the fault of the voters, who should not have been penalised for filling in the ballot form officially supplied by the convention.

However, the last-minute resolution was accepted under the Chair’s discretion; the Chair, having ruled that the resolution was in order, then stepped down from the chair and spoke in favor of it from the floor of the meeting. That seems highly irregular to me. No effort was made to inform the representatives of the Chengdu bid that the Business Meeting was about to try and invalidate most of their votes, on foot of a proposal from their main opposition. That also seems highly irregular to me.

The resolution was passed by 47 votes to 30, but I am glad to say that the WorldCon chair ignored it, rightly ruling that the bid that had got the most votes, ie Chengdu, should be declared the winner. This affair was not a high point of the Business Meeting’s conduct. Weasel words that the vote was purely advisory do not help; if the proposers had not intended it to have any effect, they would hardly have proposed it.

Several of those involved with this affair, including the then Chair of the Business Meeting and the 2021 Site Selection administrator, are proposers of F15. They now tell us that a number of ballots for the winning Chengdu bid “consisted of sequential blocks of ballots with what appeared to be consecutively assigned email addresses, that is, the “username” part of the email address before the “@”, or a subfield thereof, appeared to count up through sequential digits/letters.” It is implied that this information was made public at the time of the 2021 vote, but I have checked the record (minutes of the meeting, pages 63-65) and it was not; this is new information.

It is also implied that these alleged defects applied to all of the controversial votes. This is not the case; I scrutinized them myself as part of the process of integrating the 2022 Hugo nominating electors, and while some of the votes probably did fit this description, many certainly did not. (I did not analyze the data systematically at the time, and no longer have access to it.) The only defect alleged at the time was that the disputed votes lacked a street address.

I know as well as anyone that there have been attempts to cheat on Hugo voting in the past. I can see that the Site Selection process basically allows anyone with enough money to throw at the vote to win. The argument of F15 is that by shifting the deadline back two weeks, administrators will have the chance to toss out clearly fraudulent votes. But personally, I don’t think that someone who is determined to buy themselves a Worldcon is going to be deterred by an earlier deadline.

I think that F15 is fighting the wrong battle (and also, frankly, that the wrong people are proposing it). It would be better to start with an agreed concept of ballot fraud, which we do not have, and take the conversation about necessary steps forward from there. That may well involve adjustments to deadlines and procedures. The whole Site Selection process is anyway based on the needs of an earlier age and probably needs bigger reforms. But essentially this amendment is an effort to keep WorldCons as they have historically been, and to prevent new voices from getting into the system, and that is a recipe for stagnation and death.

In case it was not already clear, I will support any moves to kick this to a committee, and will vote against it if it comes to the plenary.

Finally for now, F20 (pages 50-53) revives a resolution that was kicked to a committee last year, which would restrict Worldcon locations to venues which are positively rated by various internationally published indices of good behaviour. The Committee appointed to examine this issue in 2024 failed to meet or produce a formal report, but its chair has summarized the ideas expressed by members in correspondence on pages 71 and 72 of the agenda. This is a very thoughtful piece of work, and I recommend reading it. In particular, the non-report asks:

Is it true that the Hugo Awards cannot be administered fairly in a country that exceeds an objective threshold of authoritarianism? Could the 2023 Hugo Awards have been properly administered by a different person?

Sites currently undergoing armed conflict still rank as acceptable according to the previously proposed indices. So does the US, which at least some members of the Worldcon community would not deem an acceptable bidding location at this time. Metrics are not real time, and any mechanism is subject to situational change between bid qualification and the time of the vote or convention.

These are good questions and good points. I’m very dubious anyway about hardwiring anything in the WSFS Constitution to external bodies, particularly at a moment when some of the best known human rights organisations are under attack and may not survive (though I really hope that they do). I would also very much regret formally restricting WorldCon to developed and mature democracies, which would be the effect of this change. I’ll be voting against.

Both of these last two resolutions are basically intended to ensure that WorldCon never goes to China again. I am not at all sure that China wants WorldCon again, given the reputational backfire from last time. If you want WorldCon to be restricted to a narrow group of countries, that’s your privilege; but don’t expect me to respect you for having that opinion.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

Second paragraph of third chapter:

A few groups of richly dressed people still lingered standing, like clusters of jewels hung from a woman’s throat, but most were seated. The steward who’d opened the door for Maud cleared his throat meaningfully.

Sequel to A Marvellous Light; I acquired them both as part of the 2022 Hugo packet and have the third still to go. It’s a sorcerous murder story set on an Edwardian transatlantic liner, with a lot of lesbian sex. Tremendous fun. Second of the series, and I had forgotten what happened in the first volume but enjoyed this anyway. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. (And we don’t really know what Homer’s gender identity was either.)

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: Retiring NASFiC

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I’m devoting an entire post to F13 (pages 41-43 of the agenda), the question of abolishing the NASFiC, the annual convention held under WSFS auspices when WorldCon is outside North America. I hope it is clear that I am something of a WSFS minimalist, in that I think WSFS should not be regulating more than strictly necessary. I also think it looks very weird that North America alone should get special geographical treatment in the form of an extra validated convention in compensation if WorldCon is elsewhere.

I saw a proposal a few years ago for WSFS to set up approved conventions for each continent, though I don’t think this was ever formally put to a Business Meeting; and another proposal for an Asian Science Fiction Convention under WSFS auspices was approved in Chengdu but then failed ratification in Glasgow. I am all in favour of everywhere having their own regional convention, as Europe has done for years; I just don’t see why WSFS needs to be involved, or what value WSFS accreditation would add.

Having said that, I am glad that this proposal is going forward at a US WorldCon, in Seattle, and would be ratified next year in the US again, in Los Angeles. I think the optics of non-North American WorldCons voting to take away the NASFiC are not good.

Voting in favour.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Wednesday reading

Current
The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright
Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna 
The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex

Last books finished
Panter, by Brecht Evens
The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore
The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past, by Christopher Hadley

Next books
Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al
The Revenant Express, by George Mann
The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman

The First Doctor Chronicles vol 2

A mixed bag of Companion Chronicle style stories here, though with a strong finish. Released in 2017.

It may just have been the mood I was in when listening to it (generally out of sorts and distracted) but John Pritchard’s “Fields of Terror” failed to click for me. As drama, it is purely Maureen O’Brien wandering the Vendée in the company of a French revolutionary officer played by Robert Hands. I didn’t get into it and the plot didn’t seem to resolve.

The other three are a different matter. “Across the Darkened City” by David Bartlett is a two-hander between Peter Purves as Steven and Nick Briggs as a renegade Dalek. It’s an Enemy Mine situation, with several wrinkles and an unpleasant but shapeless alien menace. It brought me back into the sequence.

And then the third story, “The Bonfires of the Vanities”, with Anneke Wills as Polly and Elliot Chapman as Ben, made me sit up sharply. The TARDIS lands in Lewes on Bonfire Night some time in the 1950s, but it seems that there are dark human forces afoot in the town and dark alien forces out to disrupt the Doctor’s timeline. This was the best of the four for me. I let out a gasp of surprise in the commentary when I discovered that it is by my good friend Una McCormack.

Finally, the same cast are in “The Plague of Dreams”, by Guy Adams, a pre-regeneration story for the First Doctor which invokes Shakespeare in unexpected ways and also brings in a new and unexpected renegade Time Lord, tying in loosely but effectively with the previous story. I felt the second half of this box set generally worked very nicely as a unit.

You can get it here.

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: the Software Committee

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I should have written about the Software Committee and its recommendations earlier in this sequence of posts about the 2025 WSFS Business Meeting agenda. But better late than never.

The Committee was set up in the wake of the 2023 Hugos fiasco, because some of those most closely involved with it blamed their own software for some of the problems with that year’s Hugos. Commentators who enjoy back-seat software design felt compelled to propose new systems of monitoring which would supposedly prevent the same problems from arising again.

Having myself looked into the events of 2023 at some depth, it’s crystal clear to me that the problem was the people operating the software, rather than the software itself. Also, any reform proposals need to take into account the fact that Hugo software is designed to fit the convention registration software (which is the priority for each convention, and usually rewritten afresh), rather than vice versa.

The Software Committee’s report is admirably brief (page 69). It ignores some of the sillier ideas that were being thrown around last year, and makes two recommendations for constitutional change.

F9 (page 39) mandates that all bespoke software used for the Hugos should be mandated to be open source. I am a bit twitchy about this, mainly because I don’t like the WSFS Constitution including references to external bodies. But I trust the proposers and will probably support it.

F10 (pages 39-40) requires the agreement of bidding committees to the use of site selection software. Frankly, the problems that I have witnessed around site selection have been much more to do with bidding committees throwing their weight around, and it seems to me that this would probably make that situation worse. So I remain to be convinced.

There are some more proposals to do with site selection, which I will get to soon.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix

Second paragraph of third section:

She climbed down and followed the tunnel along the outside. After the corkscrew there was another straight horizontal section, longer this time, then more turns, to left and right and up and down, and then something different. A larger chamber, from which the “main” tunnel continued a little offset to the right, but there was also another branch going off sharply left.

A stunning short story about a woman assassin in a Stalin-era prison camp, and the way out offered by the legacy of the Tunguska meteorite. Blew my mind. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2020 (one of many in the Hugo Packet), and also the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my virtual shelves. Next on those lists respectively are Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw, and The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore.

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: four constitutional amendments

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I’ve covered all the C. D and E items of the Business Meeting agenda so far, but that still leaves fifteen of the proposed new constitutional amendments to talk about. I’ll take four of them here.

F1 (page 31) is a clarifying amendment that is itself a bit unclear. The word change proposed is to refine the definition of an “active” Worldcon bid, but the explanation provided talks only about “valid bids”, a term that is used nowhere in the constitution. Assuming that “active” is intended, I suppose it makes sense.

F2 (also page 31) makes it clear that Hugo administrators must act within the constitution, citing claims on social media that this is not the case. I did not see any such claims, so I am surprised that the proposers felt we needed to spend time on this, but since it has been proposed, I hope that it can go through quickly.

F3, F4, F5 and F6 are all proposed by me and Tammy Coxen, and everyone should vote for them, but you can read about them here.

F7 (pages 36-37) spells out a proposed charter of rights for WSFS members. I’m not sure that this is needed and would prefer to see it referred to a committee if we discuss it at all.

F8 (page 38) proposes that any work released after 17 December should count as being released in the following year for Hugo eligibility purposes, provided it doesn’t make the immediately following long list. Two cases where this rule could have made a difference are given. One is a film released over the 1937/38 Christmas holiday, which as far as I know is several years before the Hugos were a thing and therefore hardly relevant.

The other case given is one which I remember well from being on that year’s Hugo subcommittee, where unfortunately the writer had vigorously promoted their own work on social media, not realising that it had been released in late December of the wrong year, too early to be eligible. I regret the upset caused to that writer, but I don’t think it is worth changing the rules over that one case.

This proposal is a solution that will be burdensome to implement, for a problem that barely exists. It creates more work for administrators and will lead to more mistakes being made, with inevitable damage to the reputation of the Hugos. Oppose.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins

Second paragraph of third chapter:

If we look at political Unionism since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, it has been dominated by negativity. There was either defensiveness about the need to sign it, or outright hostility. Never at any point did we see a wholehearted endorsement of it. There has also been a maudlin fascination with death and defeat. To celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Ulster Unionist Council in 190s, the then-leader of the Ulster Unionist Party laid wreaths at the gravestones of each of his predecessors. This form of commemoration does not point to a brighter future, but a trapped mindset focused on the past, with memories of loss. As James Baldwin said, ‘People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them’.⁶⁹
⁶⁹ Baldwin J, ‘Stranger in the Village’, Harpers Magazine, October 1953 Issue, 1953

Interesting polemic by a former Unionist from East Belfast, taking the view that the Union between Great Britain and Northern has passed its sell-by date and that there is therefore a moral imperative on Nationalists to prepare for the coming referendum on a united Ireland, and an equal imperative on Unionists to prepare for that fate. Much description of the advantages of a unitary island state within the European Union (Collins does not think that Stormont should be preserved in a united Ireland). Not quite as much analysis of the errors of Unionism, though there are many. Some parts of the book are a little dated now that the appalling Johnson government is three prime ministers ago, but other parts remain valid.

My own views were expressed in the Irish Times in July 2019, and have not shifted much. I agree that the direction of travel is towards a majority vote for a united Ireland in a referendum, but I think we are further away from it than Nationalists hope and Unionists fear, and I can foresee a nervous equilibrium holding for some time – as Gerry Lynch once put it, “Welcome to the Northern Ireland that won’t vote itself out of the Union but won’t give Unionism majority support.”

I wrote in my 2019 piece that for a unification vote to succeed, three conditions needed to be met:

  1. Brexit works out badly;
  2. Unionists continue to talk only to their own core voters and not to the centre ground;
  3. Nationalists come up with a better offer than the union, especially on health services.

I stand by that analysis; however I think the situation on the ground has changed.

Back in 2019, my first condition, that Brexit works out badly, looked like a slam dunk. But the various deals concluded by prime ministers Sunak and Starmer (but not Liz Truss) with the EU have brought some certainty. The new post-Brexit arrangements are not brilliant for anyone, but they are least worst for Northern Ireland which continues to be able to trade with both Great Britain and the EU. Brexit is still a disaster, but it’s not hitting Northern Ireland as badly as I expected / feared.

The challenge for Nationalists therefore is to explain to Northern Irish voters why their current situation, with trade access to both the EU and the UK, would be improved by erecting barriers with the UK that don’t currently exist, but would be inevitable if Northern Ireland’s status changes. It’s not a fatal problem – in the end this will be decided on sentiment as much as economics – but it’s one that Nationalists need to be able to answer.

Likewise the second condition is a little weaker than it looked in 2019. The DUP have gone back into government with Sinn Fein, accepting the position of Deputy First Minister – and I’ll admit that I wrongly predicted that this could never happen. The DUP’s leader, Gavin Robinson, put out a sympathetic statement on the death of the Pope. Unionism’s instinct is still to reach for the flags and drums, which have less than zero appeal to the crucial centre ground voters, but Unionism’s smarter side has been a little more visible of late.

This could go either way in future. In particular, if hardliners are able to eat further into the DUP vote, the effect paradoxically will be to weaken the Union, as the basis for the DUP’s continued participation in the Stormont executive erodes, and centre voters will become inclined to see Unionism as a blockage to stable government, as it was in the most recent suspension of the Stormont institutions.

On the third point, there has been no progress from Nationalism in spelling out a vision to attract centre ground voters, let alone Unionists. What I see instead is Nationalists blaming each other for the lack of such progress, which is rather a telling sign of blocked thinking. In particular I don’t see any creative ideas around the large share of public sector jobs in Northern Ireland’s economy; will Nationalists propose that the Republic continue subsidising it as the UK does now? Or does a united Ireland mean cutting the public sector too? Some Nationalist commentators think that the UK will provide bridging funding even after the transfer of sovereignty; that seems optimistic to me.

Though curiously enough, as regards healthcare, a doctor friend in County Down tells me that patients are increasingly seeking treatment south of the Border, voting with their feet as it were. But will they vote with actual, er, votes?

Don’t get me wrong – I still think that the direction of travel is clear. But the speed of that travel is another matter, and while it’s probably not irreversible, it could reach an equilibrium point which is short of a majority for a united Ireland, and that could endure for decades. After all, thirty years of violence failed to shift the opinion polls much between Richard Rose’s 1968 survey and the pre-Brexit numbers. Brexit has clearly boosted the case for reunification in a way that the “armed struggle” totally failed to do, but it’s not clear to me that it has reached critical mass.

Anyway, thoughts provoked by the book which you can get here.

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: Business Passed On

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

Section E of the 2025 WSFS Business Meeting agenda has nine items of Business Passed On, all of them constitutional amendments which were passed in Glasgow and require ratification at the Seattle Worldcon Business Meeting. I have already written about six of them. My views on the other three, in short:

E1 (page 26) has to do with the technicalities of transferring memberships. The proposer in Glasgow explained,

As the Seattle in 2025 people were working conversion of voters to members in their database, we noticed there were “guest of” memberships or people had purchased two WSFS memberships with the intention of giving one to someone else, and there was no reason not to give refunds to these members when there was a mistake, and did so on a case-by-case basis. This amendment simply says that until such time as a vote is taking place—whether it be Hugo Award-related or site selection, that these changes may be made.

This seems sensible and uncontroversial and I hope it can be passed quickly.

E2 (also page 26) reverses the recent change to the terminology of WSFS Membership and Attending Supplement from the old terminology of Supporting Memberships and Attending Memberships. It is supported by one of the proposers of the previous change who now thinks it was a mistake. I don’t really understand the arguments, but I too found the old system easier, so I will support this one also.

E6 (page 28) changes the criteria for Best Editor, Long Form from having edited four relevant works in the year of eligibility to having published four relevant works in one’s entire career, including at least one in the year of eligibility. It was approved without debate in Glasgow.

Personally, Best Editor, Long Form is the second category that I would abolish If I Ruled The Hugos (Best Series would be first for the chop) so I feel that the amendment is answering the wrong question. I don’t think Hugo voters are in a position to discern the extent to which a good book has been shaped by a good editor. There does not need to be a Hugo for everything.

It also seems to me that the main justification given, which is that the two Editor categories ought to match each other, doesn’t hold water. Why should they? Editing books and editing short fiction are two completely different activities. When the Long Form category was first proposed, the people proposing it knew perfectly well that they were demanding more of finalists in this category than in the Short Form category.

However I take the point that the current wording restricts the pool of candidates to those who work for the largest publishing houses, so I guess I will accept the change, especially if it can be dealt with as quickly as it was in Glasgow.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

The best known books set in each country: North Korea

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
The Orphan Master’s SonAdam Johnson 101,4834,036
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North KoreaBarbara Demick 90,3433,318
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the WestBlaine Harden 68,9641,854
The Girl Who Fell Beneath the SeaAxie Oh75,4371,291
The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s StoryHyeonseo Lee 93,1351,031
In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to FreedomYeonmi Park 90,747993
A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North KoreaMasaji Ishikawa 58,730924
The Coldest Winter:
America and the Korean War
David Halberstam8,9451,873

This is one I prepared earlier, in a sense, in that I crunched the numbers for both parts of Korea back in November, and I imagine that they have not changed much since. There’s a pretty consistent theme here, whether the writers are Korean or not; the only one I’m not sure about is The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, but my research indicates that it’s set in what is now the North rather than the South. It and this week’s winner, The Orphan Master’s Son, are the only two books on the list which are presented as fiction. Also I’m allowing The Coldest Winter as set on both sides of the line.

As noted previously, I disqualified the top two books tagged ‘Korea’ on LibraryThing and Goodreads; they were Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which is mainly set in Japan, and Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner, mainly set in the USA. Further down the table, The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi, is also set in the USA.

Next: Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine
Oceania: Australia

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: Resolutions

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

There are twelve resolutions on the agenda for this year’s Business Meeting (of a total of 48 items to be voted on). I’ve already dealt with seven of them, so here goes with the other five.

D1, D2 and D3 (on pages 20 and 21) are all pleas for extended eligibility for films released before 2025 which allegedly had only limited release in 2025. I used to incline to instinctive generosity here, but last year the Business Meeting allowed extended eligibility (and then withdrew it) for a film that had missed being on the final ballot by a single vote. So I am looking more critically at these proposals now.

All three proposed cases are of shows that, according to the proposers, were released to streaming networks only in 2025, having been made earlier. However IMDB does not support the statements made in the resolutions.

For D1, IMDB states that the episodes of the second season of Pantheon were available in the United States as well as Australia from October 2023. In that case I don’t see how it qualifies for an eligibility extension.

For D2, the film The End was reviewed by Variety on 31 August 2024, by The Hollywood Reporter on 1 September 2024, by the New York Times on 5 December 2024 and on Roger Ebert’s site on 6 December 2024. So the case that nobody knew about it before 2025 is not really made out.

For D3, IMDB states that the film Rani, Rani, Rani was released in the USA on 28 May 2024, so I don’t see how it qualifies for an eligibility extension.

More broadly, I think we should consider whether eligibility extensions are still relevant in the age of streaming. It’s really rare for something to get on the ballot as the result of an eligibility extension anyway, and it’s one more bit of hassle for the Hugo administrators to deal with.

I have dealt with the next three resolutions already, which takes us to D7 (on page 23), a minor clarification of the rule about accepting site selection ballots. (The word “amendment” has crept into the text here and in the related F1, but I think is not itself meant to be part of the amendment.) I struggle to see the difference in meaning but I guess I would vote in favour to get to out of the way.

Since I’ve already covered the last four resolutions, I’ll finish for today with D8 (on pages 23 and 24), which is a resolution disapproving of the use of generative AI and encouraging future Worldcons to integrate statements on the ethical use of technology into their codes of conduct. This is of course in the wake of the use of AI by Seattle this year and its disastrous handling both internally and externally, which prompted my own resignation from their committee.

Politically I am completely aligned with the resolution. However I don’t relish the WSFS Business Meeting becoming a debating society for the issues of the day. I prefer it to concentrate on improving the rules, which is what it is there for (along with financial accountability for past Worldcons, and announcing the ballot for future Worldcons). So I am not completely convinced that I will vote for this.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

How Christopher Priest wrote for Doctor Who, and what happened next

I met the late Christopher Priest in 2007 at a convention in Leuven, after many years of admiring his writing, and we struck up a friendship immediately, carried on via email with occasional beers together when we happened to be in the same place at the same time.

One of the first things I asked him about was the history of his brief involvement with Doctor Who. He wrote me a couple of long emails about it, which I publish for the first time here, with the permission of Nina Allan. He had already told most of the story to David Langford in an interview in 1995, but there are a few more details and description in the account that he sent me 12 years later.

After I first published this on 21 June 2025, I was sent some very interesting extra material by Tim Roll-Pickering, Jonathan Morris and Richard Bignell (here and here), which I have now incorporated into the text below as of 22 June 2025.

Sealed Orders

I started by asking Chris about the “past controversy” of his involvement with Doctor Who, but he pushed back on that description.

Why do you call it a past controversy? There’s nothing controversial about it, at least as far as I’m concerned. Maybe people elsewhere are arguing about it without involving me?

It’s not all that interesting. I disliked the Dr Who programme from the outset, and still do. Towards the end of the 1970s I was approached by Douglas Adams, who was trying to talk “real” sf writers into writing for the series. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks”, but we enjoyed talking to each other so I went in and met him for a boozy lunch. His plaint was that it was high time Who was overhauled and given some decent scripts, and that he now had the budget and management backing to transform the series. Reluctantly, I agreed, and sent in an outline. It turned out things weren’t as radical as Douglas described, because many of the old prejudices remained. But the money was good and I was broke, so I accepted a commission for a 4-part series. While I was writing it, Douglas suddenly became famous and quit the BBC.

This much is consistent with what I guess is the most canonical version of events in The Complete History vol 33 (page 52), one of Panini Productions’ many publications on the show. In the section on Warriors’ Gate, it states:

Keen to bring ‘serious’ science-fiction into Doctor Who, script editor Douglas Adams approached science-fiction novelist Christopher Priest during 1979. Priest visited Adams and ideas for a four-part serial were developed. In December 1979, Adams left the show – but his replacement, Christopher H Bidmead, had even more of a drive towards science-fiction, and found that Adams had left very few script ideas behind. Priest’s was not among them.

Richard Bignell corresponded with Priest sooner after the events than I did, and his take is slightly different.

He met with both Douglas Adams and producer, Graham Williams (who he both liked) but decided that DW was not for him. Sealed Orders didn’t begin to come about until he met Bidmead.

Shannon Sullivan has the following summary of the plot of Sealed Orders, the first of the two Priest stories, gleaned from past issues of Doctor Who Magazine that I don’t have access to:

A political thriller set on Gallifrey in which the Doctor is seemingly ordered to kill Romana by the Time Lords. A complex plot involving time paradoxes would result in the appearance of a second Doctor (who dies) and lead to Romana’s departure; it also involved the idea of time running into itself, resulting in one TARDIS existing inside another.

If you put this plot summary in front of me, and asked me to guess which well-known science fiction writer was behind it, Christopher Priest would have been among my top choices. The doubled Doctor and intersecting realities are themes that appear in several of his later novels.

Nicholas Smale quotes an interview with Christopher Priest in Dreamwatch with a few more details:

SEALED ORDERS addressed an omission that cropped up in DOCTOR WHO stories: the central characters ride around in a time machine but use it simply as a sort of taxi, travelling from one studio-bound story to another – the curse of low-budget TV. My story was a time-paradox extravaganza, with the TARDIS creating endless complications by going backwards and forwards in time – once even materialising inside itself. In one scene, I recall, there were five Doctors on-screen at once, all with consistent plot-lines to follow: this happened, of course, five times at different points in the story, [so] you saw the scene from the viewpoint of a ‘different’ Doctor each time.

The Tardis materialising inside itself was of course used by Bidmead in Logopolis later that year.

Back to Priest’s account:

They replaced him [Bidmead] with a new script editor, but more importantly a new producer was also appointed. This was the famous John Nathan Turner, now deceased, so I am free to say he was a loathsome little BBC hack who had aspirations above his abilities. He happily adopted the mantle of “Mr Dr Who”, if you see what I mean, beneath whose brilliance everyone was subordinated. Almost the first thing he did was to commission a book about himself: a day in the life of Dr Who’s new producer, or somesuch narcissistic stuff. [A Day With a TV Producer, published 1980.] While he was queening around in his moonboots and padded jacket, my story was forgotten. Someone changed the brief (background story), and the story languished unproduced. When the brief changes, anything written within it obviously becomes unusable.

The Complete History has a slightly different version of how events unfolded.

Reading a Priest novel, Bidmead was impressed with its creativity and while Priest had no television experience, he decided he could be worth suggesting to Nathan-Turner. Contacted by Bidmead, Priest revived the storyline discussed with Adams; this was formally commissioned as a scene breakdown entitled Sealed Orders on Wednesday 27 February 1980. Bidmead was delighted with the hard science-fiction concepts Priest offered. He commissioned the four scripts for Sealed Orders on Monday 24 March; this serial would be made and run fifth in the 1980/1 series and conclude the E-Space. Aware of Priest’s lack of scripting experience, Bidmead worked closely with him and was excited by the idea of a prominent writer working on Doctor Who, but he underestimated the attention Priest required. When the first drafts were delivered, the concepts were excellent but the work was that of a novelist, with scenes that would not play well on television. Priest withdrew from the project in April.

There’s a significant variation between these two accounts. Chris Priest suggests that his story was “forgotten” and “languished unproduced”, whereas the Complete History, no doubt using Bidmead’s memories and BBC records, has several fairly intense weeks of work by both Priest and Bidmead on the story before Priest gave up. The story was formally commissioned on 24 March, and we are told that it ended in April, so that could be a week later or five weeks later.

Originally I thought that the crucial point was the introduction of Adric; Matthew Waterhouse’s casting was announced on 25 April 1980, and I suspected that Chris Priest was not sufficiently interested in the project to rewrite Sealed Orders, which sounds like a fairly tight Doctor / Romana story, to include a third companion. Also, he had already been paid. Warriors’ Gate was written as the replacement story, which worked out well.

Tim Roll-Pickering, however, has pointed out to me that the character outline for Adric was issued on 30 January 1980, before Sealed Orders was commissioned. Richard Bignell thinks that the failure of Sealed Orders “was more likely down to the fact that it had to wind up the E-Space trilogy”. Both suggest that the production team’s (ultimately unfulfilled) desire to bring back an old companion was an additional complicating factor.

The Enemy Within

The second Christopher Priest story was The Enemy Within (also one of the variant titles for the TV movie of 1996). Again, Shannon Sullivan has a summary:

Concerned a monster at the heart of the TARDIS which embodies the Doctor’s deepest fears. The story featured characters called Timewrights, and ended with Adric’s demise.

Christopher Priest’s slightly longer summary has some differences but is coming from the same direction:

THE ENEMY WITHIN was structurally much simpler, but contained what I thought was an interesting psychological argument. The BBC was always getting letters from viewers speculating about how the TARDIS was powered. I decided to answer that, dispensing with all the cheapo sonic screwdrivers, dimensional warps, etc, and suggested that the TARDIS was powered by fear. In other words, somewhere within its multi-dimensional spaces lurked the one creature in the universe that struck mortal terror into the Doctor. The story was about his journey into phobia, a descent into inner hell, to confront this enemy.

Christopher Priest’s version of events, as told to me in 2007:

        A few weeks later someone realized what had happened, and I was invited in to write a second 4-parter, to make up for the cock-up on the first. Things were different, though: where Douglas had been an amiable, slightly subversive, amusing and amiable guy to work with, the new crew were standard BBC hacks of a low order … but the money was still good (better), and it saved my bacon that year. Forewarned, I sent in each episode as I completed it, and waited for authorization to write the next. This happened, with a few small changes on the way, which I incorporated. After I had sent in the final episode, a long silence ensued. I started work on other projects, visited Australia, started a new novel, etc. I assumed the script was in progress of being produced and shot. One day I took a phonecall from Turner, demanding to know when I was going to deliver the rewrite. I said “What rewrite?”, and Turner went into an amazing display of petulance and bad temper, claiming that my script was unusably illiterate and badly written, and that the whole thing had to be rewritten from start to finish. I told him that as far as I was concerned I had submitted each episode and had had it accepted by him, before moving on to the next, and therefore as a member of the Writers Guild was not expected to undertake a rewrite without more payment. He shouted that he wasn’t going to waste any more valuable programme money on me, and hung up.

Again, The Complete History vol.35 (page 70) has the BBC’s perspective:

For some time, Sealed Orders was kept on the list of active scripts until being abandoned in the autumn. However, producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Christopher Bidmead still wanted Priest to write for the series. On Friday 5 December 1980, Bidmead commissioned a breakdown for a further four-part serial entitled The Enemy Within. The story revealed that the motive power of the Doctor’s TARDIS was in fact fear – generated by the Doctor and his companions as they travelled. Again, Priest completed and delivered the breakdown as required, but Bidmead had left at the end of the year. He had been replaced on a temporary basis by Antony Root, who had different requirements for the serial (then planned as the sixth story of the 1982 series), with which Priest attempted to comply. One of Root’s requirements was that Adric, one of the Doctor’s companions, should be written out. Nathan-Turner felt that three regular companions was one character too many; the character of Adric was considered to have become rather ‘cocky’ in some serials, and as actor Matthew Waterhouse was finding the role frustrating, it was decided that he should be dropped from the regular line-up. The Enemy Within, therefore, had a problematic development, and after Priest refused to perform rewrites, it was formally rejected on Friday 17 July 1981, having not been what the production team had in mind.

Richard Bignell has put all the pieces together with evidence from the archives, and concludes:

Ultimately, the problem with The Enemy Within came down to rewrites. Priest had already done one set of rewrites and JNTs insistence that more work needed to be done and that he should come into the BBC for four days and work through them with Saward was met with a refusal as it appeared that the BBC didn’t want to pay him extra for these.

Priest’s agent tried to argue that Chris should be given the chance to put the scripts right later on, but as the story centred around the pivotal death of Adric, they wouldn’t be able to wait and the scripts were cancelled. Both the BBC and Priest’s agent agreed that there had been misunderstandings and breakdowns in communication.

Just to clarify, he’d certainly been paid for the work done to date (the original commission and the rewrite). What was under dispute was whether or not he was told by JNT that he wasn’t going to get paid for the further work that was required on the scripts after the initial 56 days had elapsed.

There is a lot more detail here, and I’m not very surprised that Priest had forgotten some of it by 2007.

Putting the pieces together, just as the decision to introduce Adric had led to the abandonment of Sealed Orders, so the decision to kill him off led to the abandonment of The Enemy Within, when Priest refused to do further rewrites without payment. (Deleting this sentence as both parts of it seem to be disproved by newer evidence.) The rapid changeover of script editors cannot have done the process any favours – Antony Root took over for the first three months of 1981 and was then replaced by Eric Saward, who lasted until 1986. One assumes that the vituperative conversation between JNT and Priest took place on 16 or 17 July; probably shortly after one of JNT’s well-lubricated lunches.

The aftermath

Well known writers write stuff all the time which may or may not get produced, and this would have been a minor blip in both Doctor Who and Christopher Priest’s histories if it had not been for what happened next. Again, Chris takes up the story.

        A few months passed. Then someone sent me a cutting from a film/TV magazine, in which Turner was being interviewed about Dr Who. One of the questions was: “Why don’t you commission stories from established SF writers like Brian Aldiss, Chris Priest (and a couple of other names)?” Turner said in reply: “We prefer experienced TV writers. We did commission one script from Priest, but it was hopelessly amateurish and unsuitable, so we won’t be wasting any more time on that sort of experiment.”

I considered this a damaging thing to say, as well as untrue, but not being particularly litigious I found out the name of Turner’s boss at the BBC and wrote him a letter. I told him what had happened, I enclosed some of the letters I’d had from Turner about the episodes (which were, to be as euphemistic as possible, badly typed), also a copy of the WG [Writers Guild] guidelines on rewrites, and a copy of the interview. I said that what Turner had published was clearly a professional libel, one which I treated with complete seriousness, but as I was not particularly litigious I would accept a full retraction and apology from Turner.

Time passed, and I began to wonder if I’d taken the wrong tack. Then a few weeks later I received a letter from the BBC Head of Series & Serials, giving me an official apology on behalf of the BBC, an assurance that any future submissions from me would be treated with the utmost professionalism, and a statement of gratefulness that I had not dragged the BBC through the courts. Best of all was a handwritten PS under the signature: “I hope you will appreciate the enclosed.”

The enclosed turned out to be two handwritten letters, one from Turner, one from his script editor, abjectly apologizing. From the visible pressure of the ballpoints on the paper I assumed these letters had been written at gunpoint. I wrote back to Douglas Read (the BBC man who had written to me) [actually David Reid] and told him that as far as I was concerned the matter was closed. A couple of weeks later I heard that Turner had been canned. [In fact he survived several more years, as did Eric Saward, the script editor.]

        If that’s a controversy, so be it. I remember it as an unnecessarily unpleasant professional dispute. The scripts are still in my drawer somewhere, and maybe one day when I’m dead and gone my kids will be able to flog them to someone. The Who fans are endlessly interested in them, but for the time being they remain in my drawer.

        Although I’m always happy to talk about this sort of thing in private, it is not, of course, to go any further.

Richard Bignell has put me right on the sequence of events from closer to the time.

[Priest’s] ire about being named by JNT as a novelist who couldn’t write for television didn’t actually happen. It was a fan (who I shan’t name here) who wrote to Saward asking why they didn’t use “real” science-fiction writers. It was Eric writing back to the fan who said that “the names of the writers you quoat are all novalists” and that when they had tried to get a script from one of them, it had been with “disasterous results.” It was the fan who subsequently wrote to Priest and asked if Saward has been talking about him. So, not an interview, not JNT and Priest was never actually named.

(I will also not name the fan, who appears to have dropped out of sight completely and need not be disturbed.)

About Time vol. 4 by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles (pages 315 and 317) quotes Saward’s letter verbatim (and I’ve also had it from Jonathan Morris):

“The names of writers you quoat are novalists. Infact one of them has attempted to write a Doctor Who script with disasterous results. That is why we don’t use novalists.”

But actually it was public knowledge that Priest had been commissioned to write an unproduced script – his authorship of Sealed Orders was discussed at the time in Doctor Who Monthly, as it then was – so for Saward to say that “one of them has attempted to write a Doctor Who script with disasterous results” could only be read as referring to Priest.

Richard Marson gives a fair account of this in his biography of John Nathan-Turner (pp. 159-160), including an interview with David Reid, the then Head of Series and Serials, who comments ruefully, “This wasn’t a one-off – very much not so.” Reid’s own pedigree includes being Executive Producer on the entire run of Sapphire and Steel.

I was aware that Saward was supposedly the author of the offending letter, and challenged Chris on his statement to me that it had been JNT.

Who fandom lore suggests that the particularly rude treatment you got was at the hands of Eric Saward the script editor (who was sacked in 1986) rather than Turner (who lasted until 1989). I seem to recall the account I read included verbatim a comment by Saward (or possibly Turner) about you along the lines you mention, but of truly staggering illiteracy. (I appreciate your euphemism.) Other than those fairly minor details, yes, you’re quite right, no particular controversy about the sequence of events or their outcome.

Chris replied,

I hardly knew Saward, although I met him a couple of times at the Beeb. He seemed pretty young and ineffectual to me, very much in Turner’s ghastly shadow. However, he was implicated in some way with the libellous comments about me, and certainly of the two handwritten apologies I received, one was from him and the other was from Turner. Perhaps it was he who said these things, but my memory is it was Turner himself. Certainly, the last conversation I had with Turner was one of the most profoundly unpleasant of my life, with a flood of petulant complaints, obscenities and spiteful personal remarks thrown at me.

It is clear that the abusive phone call from JNT lingered much more in Priest’s mind than the later letter which sparked his written complaint to the BBC, and that his dislike for JNT was far greater than his dislike for Saward – he told the story several times (including to Richard Marson), and the climax is always the phone call rather than the subsequent mopping up and apology, so he may have been a little vague as to who said what when we corresponded a quarter of a century later. In any case, Saward would have been speaking with JNT’s authority, so it comes to much the same thing. Priest wrote to Richard Bignell, much closer to the time:

If the phonecall from Turner in 1981 was (and remains) the single most unpleasant conversation of my life, then his grovelling letter of apology is probably the one that caused the loudest cries of you [presumably typo for ‘joy’] and triumph.

But I am still very intrigued by one point; can the spelling really have been as bad as is reported, with “quoat” and “novalists”? So far the only sources I’ve seen go back to Priest himself… Though if Saward is genuinely dyslexic, that’s not a crime.

I finished by asking Chris about the fate of the actual scripts – each of the stories had been developed into four full episodes. He replied:

        No, I know the value of them. It increases year by year. My only worry is that one of Turner’s pals might find the BBC copies at some point, and try to flog them. I can do nothing to stop that, but the added value to my copies is that I can sign them … and throw in the letters as a bonus.

Nina Allan tells me that in fact the scripts and associated papers have been lodged with the British Library, where no doubt they will be eventually made available to the public. Perhaps Big Finish will pick up the option to dramatise them.

Around the same time, Chris wrote an episode of the children’s telefantasy Into the Labyrinth, in which three kids chase parts of the magical Nidus throughout history, in the shadow of duelling time wizards played by Ron Moody and Pamela Salem. His episode is the second of the second series, Treason, and you can watch it here and also here, here and here. It is set around the Gunpowder Plot, with Patrick Malahide guesting as King James I and VI, and I watched it (admittedly with only with half an eye) while writing this; there is a fair bit of murky double identity stuff going on, which again is in line with Priest’s other work. It was broadcast on 10 August 1981, so it must have been written between Sealed Orders and The Enemy Within, and it demonstrates that Chris was perfectly well able to produce a 25-minute story for the screen.

Many thanks to Nina Allan for allowing me, indeed encouraging me, to quote Chris’s correspondence with me; and many thanks also to Tim Roll-Pickering, Jonathan Morris and in particular Richard Bignell for chipping in with more details.

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: Changes to Standing Rules

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

Having vented about the stuff I feel most strongly about on the 2025 WSFS Business Meeting agenda, here are my thoughts on the five proposed changes to Standing Orders.

My first thought is that there are too many. There are a total of 48 issues for voting on this year’s agenda, which I understand is a record, and none of these five changes is of such overwhelming urgency that they needed to be on the agenda this year. I hope that they can all be addressed expeditiously without absorbing too much time or energy. It’s unfortunate that they go first in the agenda, and need to be got out of the way before we get to the interesting stuff.

C1 gives the Business Meeting staff ten days rather than seven to prepare the agenda for publication. This is obviously sensible. If WSFS members continue to generate material at the current rate, even ten days may not be enough. Support.

C2 tightens up the rules on reports from committees, a clear example of something that is basically a good idea but didn’t really need to be raised right now. Support in order to get it out of the way.

C3 amends the rules on the Motion to Reconsider, which currently can only be raised by someone who was in the room and voted on the winning side of the vote whose reconsideration is being proposed. I think the wording of C3 is poor. It says:

5.13. Reconsideration. For the purpose of the motion to Reconsider, all those not present for the original vote are considered to have voted on the prevailing side.

It would be better to say that the Motion to Reconsider cannot be proposed by someone who was on the losing side first time round. Counting those who were not present as having voted in favour, even theoretically and for limited purposes, is a falsification and a rewriting of history. I’ve been a victim of this arcane bit of the rules myself in the past, and would like to see them changed, but I don’t like this solution as currently written.

C4 requires committees to include the proposers of the relevant material. It’s a huge flaw that Roberts does not already require this. Support in order to get it out of the way.

C5, as previously discussed, requires a two-thirds vote to set up an investigation committee, and I am among the proposers. Support.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock

Second paragraph of third chapter:

He commandeered a  horse that had been left in the Lowmarket when its owner had  either died or fled, then rode as fast as traffic would allow to Screaming Hall. Meanwhile, the sky closed in, stealing away any sense of the horizon, and it started to snow.

I happened to be reading this alongside The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang, and they are both fantasy novels with similar themes and about the same length. The Water Outlaws is better, but this is OK – well developed politics of a secondary world with magical elements; I had expected to be put off because it is the second in a series, but in fact it worked perfectly well as a standalone. I wasn’t quite sure that the magic system held together, and the use of French and German to stand for exotic fantasy languages was a little irritating, but if you are in a forgiving mood you’ll probably enjoy it too. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020 (in that year’s Hugo Packet). Next on that pile, from the same source, is The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster.

WSFS Business Meeting 2025: The Mark Protection Committee

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

The Mark Protection Committee is the most public-facing of the WSFS standing committees. It was also the only body so far to officially censure Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow and Raistlin Chen for their involvement with the 2023 Hugos debacle. It has a responsibility to protect the marks of the Hugos, Worldcon, etc. In normal times this should be pleasantly technical and unexciting, but unfortunately times have not been normal of late. You will find its report on pages 56-61 of the 2025 Business Meeting agenda.

I have been a member of the Mark Protection Committee for the last three years, elected by the Business Meeting in Chicago in 2022. The election system is peculiar, but nonetheless I would like to put myself forward again this year, and I hope that people will vote for me.

The MPC has collectively got three resolutions on the Agenda this year, all of them carried over from last year as they are constitutional amendments passed by Glasgow and requiring ratification in Seattle.

The first, E3 (on page 26), requires Worldcon bids to agree to the most recent WSFS Mark Licensing Agreement (which itself is still being drafted). I obviously supported this when it was first proposed by the committee, of which I was a member, and I support it now; it will give clarity about the extent to which a Worldcon can and cannot play around with WSFS intellectual property.

The second, E4 (on page 27), brings the rules about the running of the MPC into alignment with actual practice. It also allows the MPC to remove its own members by a two-thirds vote – to our surprise when the 2023 controversy broke, we discovered that we did not have the power to do more than censure members other than going through the lengthy trial procedure in Roberts’ Rules of Order. I support this one too.

I am less sure about the third, E5 (on pages 27 and 28) on including representatives of the Business Meeting on Hugo and site selection committees, who would then report back to the Business Meeting on the propriety of the conduct of the Hugo and site selection votes. I supported it last year before the Hugo Administration Process Committee was set up, but it now seems to me that that committee is providing a more holistic view and set of solutions. On Site Selection, I am no longer convinced that this problem (if it is a problem) is the one that most urgently needs to be solved.

I do like the first paragraph of E5, which ends the fiction that a Worldcon Committee could theoretically decide to administer the Hugos themselves rather than appoint a subcommittee to do it, and at present my feeling is that I’d like to split E5 and pass the first paragraph but not the rest. However if it cannot be split, I’d vote against it as a whole.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Some of Lin Chong’s techniques would have served her very well in doing so.

I’m only vaguely familiar with the Chinese classic The Water Margin, but S.L. Huang is clearly a fan, and has updated it with the best traditions of wuxia combined with gender-flipping many of the characters and some pretty clear references to Hong Kong kung fu films. There’s some rather gory violence, but also a real affection for the story and a political sensitivity to what is really going on in the magical empire. Slightly to my surprise, I loved it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer (from last year’s Hugo Packet). Next on that pile is The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman.

2025 WSFS Business Meeting: the meeting itself

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

Two very quick points here.

First, it is a very good thing that the Business Meeting is being held online this year. It is about time that it moved into the twenty-first century rather than pretend to be a nineteenth-century style deliberative assembly. People who know more about the rules than I do have looked at them, and deemed that it can be done this way, and I am glad. Please let’s have a good turnout at the first session of the virtual meeting on 4 July.

Second, the agenda for this year’s meeting includes a 25-page report from the Business Meeting Study Group (pages 83-107 of the agenda) which is clearly a serious piece of work, and which I won’t summarise here. It provides ample justification for passing resolution D4 (on pages 21 and 22 of the agenda) to find better alternatives for Worldcon procedures. I’ll vote in favour.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Wednesday reading

Current
The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore

Last books finished
The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster (did not finish)
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw 
Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton
1913: The Year Before the Storm, by Florian Illies
The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb (did not finish)
“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link
Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo

Next books
The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna 
Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al

The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans

Second paragraph of third chapter (“Fortified Settlement in Northern Pictland”, by Gordon Noble):

The 5th and 6th centuries in northern Britain are a key period when historical sources increase in frequency for the societies that had lived north of the Roman frontier (Chapter 2 of this volume; Evans 2008, 2014; Fraser 2009a; Woolf 2007b). The literary sources suggest that this was a transformative period with the emergence of more developed systems of rulership and social structure. Important changes can also be identified in the archaeological record in this same chronological horizon: for example, after more than 1,000 years of very limited burial evidence, the dead become a more prominent part of the archaeological record (Chapter 5 of this volume; Maldonado 2013; Mitchell and Noble 2017). As well as cemeteries, memorials to the dead and traditions of monumental carved stone monuments emerged and played notable roles in creating and maintaining new forms of personal and group affiliation (e.g. Forsyth 1997a, b; Goldberg 2012, 155-9; Henderson and Henderson 2004; Samson 1992).

A short book of essays about the Picts, more specifically the archaeological remains that exist in the land to the south of the Moray Firth as far as Aberdeenshire, the ancient realms of Fortriu and Ce. I must say it is surprising just how little is known about this culture; there’s a little bit of “No one knows who they were or what they were doing“. They seem to have left no written records of their own at all. One of the few contemporaries to write about their attitude to Christianity was very negative:

…ecclesia plorat et plangit filios et filias suas quas adhuc gladius nondum interfecit, sed prolongati et exportati in longa terrarum, ubi peccatum manifeste grauiter impudenter abundat, ibi uenundati ingenui homines, Christiani in seruitute redacti sunt, praesertim indignissimorum pessimorum apostatarumque Pictorum.…the church mourns and weeps for its sons and daughters whom the sword has not yet slain, but who were taken away and exported to far distant lands, where grave sin openly flourishes without shame, where freeborn people have been sold off, Christians reduced to slavery: slaves particularly of the lowest and worst of the apostate Picts.

That’s St Patrick, in his Letter to Coroticus, from the fifth century; though it’s clear that the Picts ended up Christian like everyone else.

The single most fascinating artifact for me is the Rhynie Man, found at what seems to have been a major political/cult centre along with other decorated stones, a life-sized figure carved onto a megalith, now casually sitting in the headquarters of Aberdeen Council. All ancient art is interesting, but human figures are particularly compelling; was the Rhynie Man a portrait? a memorial? a deity? all three? Fourteen centuries on, he is ignoring us and ready to use his axe – on what?

Though the Gaulcross Hoard is fascinating as well, a hundred or so worked silver pieces from the end of the Roman Empire; and the Rhynie Man is but the most striking of many Pictish symbols stones. But it makes you think of the Silurian hypothesis; the Picts had a thriving material culture and presumably everything else that goes with that – yet we do not even know their name for themselves with certainty.

Anyway, well worth a read. You can get it here.

2025 WSFS Business Meeting: Retro Hugos

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

A proposal to abolish the Retro Hugos was passed by the 2024 Business Meeting and has landed on this year’s agenda as item E7 (page 29), requiring ratification. It was put to a consultative vote of WSFS members last month and was narrowly rejected, by 167 votes to 164.

Another proposal is on the agenda for this year’s Business Meeting as item F21 (pages 53-54), in case that E7 fails ratification, to allow Worldcons to present Retro Hugos in a multiple of ten years after a gap in the Hugo sequence. The “missing years” are 1940, 1942, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952 and (it is argued, though not convincingly) 1957. So we could polish them all off between 2027 and 2032.

I think that has helped to clarify my own thinking. The absorption of volunteer time and bandwidth, and of money, by the Retro Hugos is not a good use of resources, at a moment when the demands on Worldcon volunteers in general and Hugo administrators in particular are increasing. So if I’m in the room when it happens, I’ll vote in favour of E7, and if that is rejected, against F21 which would leave the cycle at a 25-year pace.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Although both my parents were officially ‘intellectuals’ because they went to university, neither studied what they wanted to study. My father’s story was the more confusing of the two. He was gifted in the sciences and while still in secondary school had won Olympiads in maths, physics, chemistry and biology. He wanted to continue studying maths but was told by the Party that he had to join the real working class because of his ‘biography’. My family often mentioned that word, but I never understood it. It had such wide applications that you could not make out its significance in any particular context. If you asked my parents how they met and why they married, they would answer: ‘Biography.’ If my mother was preparing a file for work, she would be reminded: ‘Don’t forget to add a few lines about your biography.’ If I made a new friend in school, my parents would ask each other: ‘Do we know anything about their biography?’

Autobiography of an Albanian academic, writing about her childhood in totalitarian Albania and the eventual transition to democracy. I have been to Albania a few times, starting in 2004, and the Hoxha regime is now marketed as somewhat kitschy; this first person account reminds us of how all-enveloping the ideologically-driven police state was. I remember some very lefty acquaintances in the 1980s singing the praises of the motivation of the Albanian volunteers building railways for the workers’ paradise; now that we know the truth, it’s all pretty revolting.

Childhood is childhood wherever you are, of course, but the cycle of school and family, indoctrination and mild subversion, was specific to Eastern Europe and particularly odd in Albania. Lea Ypi grew up knowing that her great-grandfather had had the same name as a pre-Communist Prime Minister, but was taught to insist that it was just a coincidence; only after the end of the old regime did she learn that in fact Xhafer Ypi was her great-grandfather, and that this element of ‘biography’ had followed her father throughout his career.

Then change came at breakneck speed, and her parents became political activists, her father even serving a term as a somewhat detached MP for the Democratic Party. Her cosmopolitan grandmother, however, had always encouraged her to keep an eye on the rest of the world, and after the economic collapse of 1997, she left to study philosophy abroad.

This isn’t a travelogue around the physical geography of Albania, but it’s a great guide to the psychology of an entire country forced to survive on lies for forty years, and the aftermath, told through an intensely personal lens. Strongly recommended (and thanks to Michael Clarke for recommending it to me). You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2023 which is not by Ben Aaronovitch. Next on that pile is The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright.

2025 WSFS Business Meeting: Art categories

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

One of the constitutional amendments passed last year was a proposal to clarify the Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist categories in the Hugo Awards. I believe that I actually wrote most of it, but I no longer agree with it. I have come to realise that I mistakenly accepted the logic proposed by some of the louder voices on the unmissed Hugo Awards Study Committee, arguing that we should define all genre-related activity as either Fan or Pro, and then define the awards accordingly. In fact Pro Art and Fan Art have been historically very different things, and what we should be talking about is how to change the definitions of both to reflect how the production and consumption of art has changed over the years.

This proposal was put to a consultative vote of WSFS members last month, and rejected by 160 votes to 124 – three or four times the numbers that one would historically expect to be in the room for an in-person business meeting.

It is now on the Business Meeting agenda for ratification as item E9 (page 30). It should be rejected. Unfortunately the discussion will be on 25 July, when I will be unable to attend.

There is a new proposal to clarify the art categories on the Business Meeting agenda as item F22. I find it an improvement on the status quo, but I would like to hear the views of the artist community. I don’t like the fact that it proposes renaming the ‘Best Professional Artist’ award to ‘Best Artist in the Field of Professional Illustration’, which is simply too verbose, and I regret that it has missed the opportunity to require Best Fan Artist finalists to supply the same proof of eligibility as Best Professional Artist finalists, which is the one bit of E9 that I still stand behind.

(Presumably the ratification of E9 could be split, to allow the last paragraph through and kill the rest.)

F22 is capable of amendment to improve it in the debate, but that will presumably be on the day that I cannot attend the meeting. It would be no great tragedy if E9 and F22 are rejected and we have another go in another year.

Update: one of the proposers of F22 was subsequently so rude and offensive in an online discussion of the topic that I no longer feel inclined to offer their proposal the benefit of the doubt, and would vote against if I were present (which I probably won’t be).

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Yes,” Cindy agreed as she eyed the milling mob. “But I almost wish they’d let me slip out of here quietly so I wouldn’t be conscious of what I was getting into.” She caught sight of blue uniforms, gold braid, and glistening brass instruments. “Golly, they’ve even got the Aerospace Force Band!”

I picked this up at Eastercon. It’s a curiosity. I have identified the author as Eloise Katherine Engle nee Hopper (1923-1993), who was born in Seattle and died in Alexandria, across the river from DC; in the introduction she identifies her husband as Captain Paul R. Engle (MC) USN. The intro concludes:

I could not have dreamed of writing a space book for girls without the help of Major James F. Sunderman and the Air Force Book program.

She also wrote several books on military history, and a couple of other novels, some of them with her second husband Lauri Paananen, who was Finnish.

Anyway, the story itself was originally published in American Girl, the magazine of the Girl Scouts of the USA, in 1961, and expanded for book publication in 1962. It has a brief but gushing preface from Dolores O’Hara, the Lieutenant Nurse for the Mercury astronauts. It’s set at an unspecified date in the near-ish future, where no women have yet flown into space (though in our own timeline, that particular barrier was broken as early as 1963) and yet there are several dozen male astronauts living on a base on the Moon.

Our protagonist, gallant Cindy McGee, is a nurse for the astronaut corps, and is sent to the Moon to deal with several astronauts injured in an accident because she weighs only 95 pounds, much to the annoyance of her female colleagues who are better pilots. She shows that she is good at nursing in space despite occasional moments of feminine panic. They celebrate Christmas on the Moon, and some of the chaps are mean to her. In the second last chapter there is a bizarre incident where aliens appear on the lunar base, look around and then erase everyone’s memories of their visit before going home. And she realises that she is in love with the astronaut who flew her to the moon and back, manly Turk Hunter [sic].

There are numerous fallacies of detail (mercilessly catalogued by Ian Sales here), but for me the striking thing about the book is its lack of ambition for Cindy and for women. Nursing is the only profession that can get you into space; being a good pilot is not enough. The hierarchy is thoroughly male and likely to stay that way. For a book published in the 1960s, the attitudes are very 1950s. (Cindy’s weight is specified as early as half way down the first page.)

I couldn’t honestly recommend it, but you may be able to get it here.

WSFS Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report and recommendations

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

The public-facing report of the WSFS Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards can be found on pages 65-68 of the 2025 Business Meeting Agenda. I was a member of the Committee and therefore I endorse the report and also the way in which it has been handled. I want to flag up a few points arising from it.

The most important point is that hundreds of votes for dozens of nominees, mostly Chinese, were discounted without explanation at an early stage of the 2023 Hugo process. The “Validation Spreadsheet”, one of the documents provided to Chris Barkley and Jason Sanford by Diane Lacey, is clearly the output of a run of the EPH algorithm (which is used to determine the finalists from the nomination votes) using a very different set of votes to those which are the basis of the officially reported statistics.

This is not news. Abigail Nussbaum spotted it almost as soon as the Sanford / Barkley report was published in February 2023 (even though Sanford and Barkley themselves largely missed it), and Chinese blogger Zionius went into the numbers in detail. But most attention in Western discourse centred on the later exclusions which had become public knowledge when the statistics were published in January, because they included some individuals who are well-known names in the West. The 22-29 nominees excluded at an earlier stage have largely been ignored.

It has been suggested that the initial exclusion of many votes was conducted by the 2023 Administrators to counter the effects of a slate. Slates, however, are not against the rules, and in any case my analysis of the works on the alleged slate and the works that were excluded by the disqualification of votes after the original EPH count of the “Validation Spreadsheet” is that there is not a huge amount of overlap between that list and the “first 29”. (I am in disagreement with Zionius on this point.)

Of the six potential finalists in 2023 whose exclusion without explanation became public in January 2024, one appears in fact to have been correctly excluded under the rules – “Color the World” by Mu Ming (Congyun Gu). It’s my personal belief that “Fongong Temple Pagoda” (尽化塔) by Hai Ya was then excluded by mistake; its English language publication date would have made it eligible, but administrators may not have been aware of that. It’s pretty clear that the other four were wrongly excluded from the ballot for other reasons.

There’s a lot more to write about this, but I think I’ll save that analysis for another occasion. Operationally, it means that the resolution passed last year to declare the “January Six” retrospectively as Hugo finalists is fundamentally flawed. One of the six, as it turns out, was correctly excluded from the 2023 ballot, though without adequate explanation. As matters stand, we’re about to declare that “Color the World” was “really” a finalist even though it should not have qualified.

But there are also another 29 nominees whose exclusion from the ballot appears to have been arbitrary and against the rules. They all deserve apologies, and they all deserve the same consideration as the “January Six”. Even if you believe that retrospectively declaring anyone to have been a Hugo finalist is desirable or possible, we just don’t have enough information to know whether all of the “first 29” would have made the ballot absent the irregular disqualification of their votes.

So the Investigation Committee has proposed in resolution D9 (page 24 of the agenda) that the following note should be attached to the official Hugo record maintained by the Formulation of Long Lists Committee: “Approximately 30 nominees were excluded from the final ballot of the 2023 Hugo Awards for reasons other than the nominating procedures prescribed in the WSFS Constitution.” It’s not clear if the number is 34 (a maximum) or 27 (a minimum), but “approximately 30” is enough to demonstrate the severity of the problem.

Speaking for myself: the proposed constitutional change E8 (page 28 of the agenda), passed in Glasgow last year and awaiting ratification in the virtual Seattle meeting this year, to allow the Business Meeting to declare unsuccessful finalists to have the status of finalists retrospectively, is a bad idea, and purports to give the Business Meeting the power to rewrite history. The 2023 Hugo process was bad and hurt many people. We have to accept that mistakes were made and that the damage can’t be undone by passing counterfactual resolutions. The ratification of E8 should be rejected.

Edited to add: I myself spoke at last year’s Business Meeting (see page 35 of the Minutes) in favour of apologising to the “January Six”. In fact, had I (and others) done the research, we would have quickly found that Chinese fans had already established that “Color the World” was correctly excluded, though without the explanation that it was due.

The Investigation Committee also proposes the following resolutions:

  • C5 (page 19), that in future such committees should require a two-thirds vote to set up, and I agree with this (obviously since I signed off on it as a member of the Committee). It was a tough process and should not be entered into lightly.
  • D10 (page 24), that a new committee should be set up to write a Whistleblower’s Charter, which I agree with and I hope can be merged with D6, which would create an committee to write a code of ethics.
  • D11 (page 25), recommending that Worldcon Chairs should not be members of their respective Hugo administration subcommittees, which I thoroughly agree with.
  • D12 (also page 25), which will be discussed when we reach the relevant part of the Business Meeting.

I hope that they all pass.

I’m not promising to do one of these posts every day, but it’s not all that long until the Preliminary Business Meeting on 4 July, so there will be more soon.

Edited to add: actually I did do a post on this every day for the next two weeks.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22