Best Not gonna make any excuses; The Hobbit is my favorite of all of the above. Not perhaps substantial enough for three epic films though… (Review; get it here)
Honorable mentions Brave New World is justifiably a classic of science fiction. (Review; get it here) The Vanishing of Esme Lennox is a brilliant short book about hidden Scottish family history. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of The History of Sir Richard Calmady is a great novel about a privileged man, born with only vestigial legs. Published in 1901, it is frank about sex, disability and religion. An overlooked and neglected classic. (Review; get it here)
The one to avoid Rogue Queen was hailed as breaking taboos on sexual themes in sf when it was published in 1951, but to today’s ready it is dull and off-target. (Review; get it here)
A brother and a sister shared to some extent the day nursery with me, but they were my seniors by several years, and hardly counted in my scheme of things. Of far more immediate interest was the personality of a sagacious old tabby, who would stroll into the nursery and lie on the floor in the sun, and was good-natured enough to purr when I used her as a pillow. I was aware that she timed these visits, and that if she did not find me alone (by which I mean alone with Emma) she would not stay. Not that she was, so far as I recall, a particularly affectionate animal. Cats are never sentimental; they treat you exactly as you treat them; and it was simply that she had marked me down, with unerring instinct, as ” safe “—a person who could be trusted to amuse the kittens while one dozed and dreamed.
I was vaguely aware of the Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid. This is the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1926, covering his boyhood up to the point of his first real love affair. He was born in 1875, and his father died when he was six (and his beloved nurse Emma returned to England around the same time, which seems to have left a larger gap in his life), with Forrest as the youngest of half a dozen surviving children. His education was very patchy, starting with a late stint at Miss Hardy’s preparatory school and then a few years at Inst, which was not exactly an intellectual powerhouse at that stage. Meanwhile he played with the neighbourhood kids, who seem to have been generally pretty nasty.
As with H.G. Wells, who was born nine years earlier, a slow recovery from serious childhood illness got Reid into reading serious (and also frivolous) literature. Then a friendship with John Park, the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen’s University, brought him into contact with the deeper currents of philosophy. This meant that he was completely unsuited to the office job in a tea merchant that his family eventually found for him. He was also quietly opposed to a lot of the norms of the conservative Belfast Protestant society of his roots. Clergymen (including his uncle) are figures of fun in the book, and as soon as Reid had been confirmed he announced that he was not attending church any more, and didn’t – hence his embrace of apostasy in the book’s title.
What I particularly loved about this book was the intimate and detailed account of the geography of Mount Charles, the Belfast street where he grew up, and the surrounding bits of University Street, Botanic Avenue, etc, in the 1880s when these were all relatively new buildings and all inhabited by families (or unmarried professors), as opposed to the mix of student accommodation and university-related offices on Mount Charles now and for most of my lifetime. I always find it appealing when a book has a strong sense of place, and even more so when it’s a place I have known since my own childhood, but roughly a century earlier. (There are also excursions to an uncle’s vicarage at Ballinderry, which is less well known to me.)
Modern map from the PRONI Historical Maps viewer.
Chapter VI is a detailed description of 1880s Belfast which I reproduce here (apart from the references to popular literature of the day):
My waking world, also, was gradually expanding, though it still remained the very small world of a provincial town—a rather hard, unromantic town too—devoted exclusively to money-making; yet a town, for all that, somehow likeable, and surrounded by as beautiful a country as one could desire. The Belfast of my childhood [the 1880s] differed considerably from the Belfast of today [1926]. It was, I think, spiritually closer to that surrounding country. Then, as now, perhaps, it was not particularly well educated, it possessed no cultured and no leisured class (the sons of even the wealthiest families leaving school at fifteen or sixteen to enter their fathers’ offices); but it did not, as I remember it at any rate, bear nearly so marked a resemblance to the larger English manufacturing towns.
The change I seem to see has, of course, brought it closer to its own ideal. For some not very intelligible reason, a hankering after things English—even what is believed to be an English accent—and a distrust of things Irish, have always characterised the more well-to-do citizens of Belfast. But in the days of my childhood this was not so apparent, while the whole town was more homely, more unpretentious. A breath of rusticity still sweetened its air; the few horse trams, their destinations indicated by the colour of their curtains, did little to disturb the quiet of the streets; the Malone Road was still an almost rural walk; Molly Ward’s cottage, not a vulcanite factory, guarded the approach to the river; and there were no brick works, no mill chimneys, no King’s Bridge to make ugly blots on the green landscape of the Lagan Valley. The town itself, as I have said, was more attractive, with plenty of open spaces, to which the names of certain districts—the Plains, the Bog Meadows—bear witness. Queen’s University was not a mere mass of unrelated, shapeless buildings; the Technical Institute did not sprawl in unsightly fashion across half the grounds of my old school. Gone is the Linen Hall, that was once the very heart of the town in its hours of ease. A brand new City Hall, all marble staircases and inlaid floors, garnished with statues and portraits of Lord Mayors and town councillors, and fronted with wooden benches on which rows of our less successful citizens doze and scratch the languid hours away, flaunts its expensive dullness where that old mellow ivy-creepered building once stood, with its low, arched entrance, its line of trees that shut out the town bustle and dust. The Linen Hall Library, transported to another building, still exists, but, as with the city, expansion has robbed it of its individuality. The old Linen Hall Library, with the sparrows flying in and out of the ivy all day long, fluttering and squabbling, was a charming place. It was very like a club. Its membership was comparatively small; its tone was old-fashioned; it belonged to the era of the two-and three-volume novel; it had about it an atmosphere of quiet and leisure. […]
In the Linen Hall Library, curled up in a low deep window seat, I would sit gazing out between the trees and right up Donegall Place, which on summer afternoons was a fashionable promenade, where one was almost sure to meet everybody one knew. […] And here, one summer afternoon, just outside the tall iron gates, I beheld my first celebrity. Not that I knew him to be celebrated, but I could see for myself his appearance was remarkable. I had been taught that it was rude to stare, but on this occasion, though I was with my mother, I could not help staring, and even feeling I was intended to do so. He was, my mother told me, a Mr. Oscar Wilde; and she added, by way of explanation I suppose, that he was aesthetic, like Bunthorne, in Patience.
The City Hall feels so solid and iconic to us today that one easily forgets that it is less than 120 years old, and my great-grandmother, who was born in 1887 and lived until I was 18, would have seen it being built when she was a teenager visiting from her Lower Bann home, and would have known the White Linen Hall which preceded it. And I had not realised (though I should have) that the Linen Hall Library was based in the old Linen Hall before being forced to move across the road; I was one of its governors in the mid 1990s.
I’d love to find a few weeks somehow to produce an annotated version of this book, chasing down the literary and personal references. Reid died in 1947, so his works are out of copyright now. If anyone would like to join forces on such a project, let me know. In the meantime, you can get Apostate here.
The best I’m going to give a one-off joint win here, to two 2021 Lodestar finalists (reviewed here), A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (get it here) and A Deadly Education (get it here).
Honorable mentions I have a lot of four-star ratings for the above. the two I’m going to pick out are: Kushiel’s Mercy, by Jacqueline Carey, is one of the superb erotic fantasy series, and probably the only one I’ll cover in this series of write-ups. (Review, get it here) Dead of Winter, by James Goss, is a splendidly creepy Eleventh Doctor / Amy / Rory story. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement is a collection of Paul Bew’s writings on Northern Ireland in the early 2000s. Lucid and informative. (Review; get it here)
The one to avoid Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn, seemed to me to be trying to say important things about race and class by importing Welsh and British legends to North Carolina, and I could not get over the cognitive dissonance. (Review; get it here.)
When I spoke to Sam Bompas and Harry Parr ten years ago they had been creating their remarkable experiments with food and drink for a couple of years. Those early days were marked by fun and innovative projects that often required Sam and Harry to think on their feet.
I occasionally like to read self-help books, and this was recommended by an entrepreneurial friend; if you are of an entrepreneurial mindset, it’s probably the sort of book that will help you hone your thoughts and take the next steps. I’m not sure that it was really written for my sort of approach to life and work, but it’s closer than the last such book I read (The 4-Hour Work Week). You can get F**k Work, Let’s Play here.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Taiwan. I did reflect on whether or not Taiwan counts as a country, but I plan to include a few other contested cases as I get down the list, so here we go.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Astonishing Color of After
Emily X.R. Pan
33,411
1,306
Loveboat, Taipei
Abigail Hing Wen
20,283
415
Notes of a Crocodile
Qiu Miaojin
8,397
487
Taipei
Tao Lin
7,857
420
Bestiary
K-Ming Chang
3,973
342
The Membranes
Chi Ta-wei
7,086
188
Dumpling Days
Grace Lin
2,687
305
The Man with the Compound Eyes
Wu Ming-Yi
3,180
236
There were a couple of these that I was not certain about, but it’s clear that The Astonishing Color of After is mostly set in Taiwan, and that it’s ahead on Goodreads and way ahead on LibraryThing.
Despite its title, I wasn’t completely sure if more than 50% of Tao Lin’s Taipei is set on the island, and likewise Bestiary which seems to be the reminiscences of Taiwanese-American women, but mainly about Taiwan. I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt.
I did exclude half a dozen. Stay True by Hua Hsu, The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin, Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang and Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho all seem to be entirely about the Taiwanese-American emigrant experience. Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung is mainly set on the mainland. Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu is set both on the mainland and in the USA.
The best I was really blown away by Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a great novel of repressed Victorian London, and also Surrey. (Review; get it here)
Honorable mentions The Spring of the Ram, by Dorothy Dunnett, is the second of her superb Niccolò sequence, taking him from Flanders to distant Trebizond, in the shadow of the fall of Constantinople and the imminent threat of a repeat. I loved all of these, but this was one of my favourites. (Review; get it here) Empire of Mud is a great micro-history of the city Washington and the District of Columbia. Did you know that before the Pentagon, there was the Octagon? Which is still standing, and actually has only six sides. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of Presidents I’ve Known and Two Near Presidents, by Charles Willis Thompson, is by the Washington correspondent of the New York Times and the New York World, and wrote this book in 1929, about the presidents of the previous thirty years – McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding and Coolidge and Mark Hanna, the power behind the throne of McKinley’s presidency, and three-times Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan. A brilliant personal insight into a rather neglected part of US history. (Review; get it here)
The one to avoid The Prisoner, by Dave Rogers, is one of these annual-style books, published in 1989, about the 1960s series, which adds very little to its recapitulation of the plots of the 17 episodes. (Review; get it here)
I wrote in 2022 that the election system used by WSFS should be changed. At present, the rules for electing the Mark Protection Committee, the body charged with ensuring that the intellectual property of WSFS is protected, are set out in Standing Rule 6.2:
Voting shall be by written preferential ballot with write-in votes allowed. Votes for write-in candidates who do not submit written consent to nomination to the Presiding Officer before the close of balloting shall be ignored. The ballot shall list each nominee’s name. The first seat filled shall be by normal preferential ballot procedures as defined in Section 6.4 of the WSFS Constitution. There shall be no run-off candidate. After a seat is filled, votes for the elected member shall be eliminated before conducting the next ballot. This procedure shall continue until all seats are filled. In the event of a first-place tie for any seat, the tie shall be broken unless all tied candidates can be elected simultaneously. Should there be any partial-term vacancies on the committee, the partial-term seat(s) shall be filled after the full-term seats have been filled.
I warned that this carries the risk that a single faction with roughly half of the total votes could win every single seat and squeeze out other viewpoints.
My warning has come dramatically true. One of the candidates for this year’s MPC elections endorsed two other candidates and asked his supporters to transfer their votes to them. That candidate got almost half of the votes for the first seat and was easily elected; the two candidates who he endorse then took the second and third of the three seats up for grabs, thanks to votes transferred from the first candidate. This vividly demonstrates the potential for the current system to be gamed by slates.
What happened this year
The counts were as follows – with the winning candidate labelled C1 and the two who he supported labelled as C2 and C3; the other candidates are labelled D4 to D9 and DX for the tenth one. I’m removing names here because I don’t want to get into personalities.
DX
D8, D9
D7
D6
C1
67
+1
68
68
68
+1
69
D4
23
23
+2
25
+3
28
+2
30
D5
19
19
19
19
19
C2
9
9
+1
10
10
+3
13
C3
6
6
6
6
6
D6
5
5
5
+1
6
-6
–
D7
4
4
+1
5
-5
–
–
D8
2
2
-2
–
–
–
D9
2
2
-2
–
–
–
DX
1
-1
–
–
–
–
138
138
138
137
137
As you can see, C1 did very well on first preferences, but picked up only two transfers from the 14 votes that came from eliminated candidates. C2 and C3 were quite a long way behind in fourth and fifth place.
For the second round, C1’s votes were distributed to the next preference, and the results were very different. The first two columns here show the first preference votes from the first count, and then the number of votes gained from C1’s transfers.
1st
C1
D9, DX
D8
D7
D6
D5
C3
C2
9
22
31
+1
32
+3
35
+2
37
+5
42
+3
45
+24
69
D4
23
5
28
+2
30
+1
31
+4
35
+4
39
+10
49
+8
57
C3
6
19
29
+1
30
30
30
30
+5
35
-35
–
D5
19
1
20
+1
21
21
21
21
-21
–
–
D6
5
4
9
9
+1
10
+1
11
-11
–
–
–
D7
4
3
7
7
+1
8
-8
–
–
–
–
D8
2
3
5
+1
6
-6
–
–
–
–
–
D9
2
1
3
-3
–
–
–
–
–
–
DX
1
2
3
-3
–
–
–
–
–
–
135
135
135
134
132
129
126
Of C1’s 67 original votes, 41 followed C1’s advice to transfer to C2 and C3, putting them now first and second rather than fourth and fifth. Transfers from the other candidates coalesced around D4 – by the second last round, D4 had picked up 21 new votes, C2 had picked up 14 and C3 only 6. But C3’s votes were then transferred and broke to C2 by a ration of 3 to 1, electing C2 easily to the second seat. It should perhaps be added that as well as C1 having endorsed C2 and C3, they happen to live in the same city, so a strong rate of transfers could have been expected anyway.
For the third seat, I have broken out how many votes each candidate got in first preferences, then transfers from C1, then transfers from C2.
1st
C1
C2
D9
DX
D7
D6, D8
D5
C3
6
19
29
50
50
+2
52
52
+2
54
+6
60
D4
23
5
28
+1
29
+1
30
+6
36
+9
45
+13
58
D5
19
1
2
22
22
+1
23
23
+2
25
-25
–
D8
2
3
4
9
+1
10
10
10
-10
–
–
D6
5
4
9
9
9
+1
10
-10
–
–
D7
4
3
7
7
+1
8
-8
–
–
–
DX
1
2
1
4
+1
5
-5
–
–
–
–
D9
2
1
3
-3
–
–
–
–
–
132
132
132
131
124
118
You’ll see that C3, who got only 6 votes in the first round, got a total of 48 transfers from C1 and C2 – which was just enough to get C3 elected ahead of D4. In the rounds of transfers up to the second last round, D4 picked up 17, C3 only 4. In the last round, D5 was eliminated and his votes were transferred; D5 and C3 (and C2) happen to live in the same city, so some of D5’s votes went to C3 as well.
But all in all, my 2022 prediction that a large enough minority would be able to take all of the seats in this electoral system has been proved by C1’s success in electing C2 and C3.
I note also that in the other election for a WSFS committee this year, where five seats were up for grabs, the same candidate came out as the loser in the first three rounds, and placed third in the last two rounds, with their support peaking at 49 votes out of 138. It’s quite likely that none of those 49 people voted for any of the five successful candidates. Of course, you can debate whether a particular committee is meant to have members who collectively represent the centre of gravity of the meeting’s views, or who represent the diversity of opinion present; but we should be clear that that choice is being made by the system we choose to use.
How this came about
We now reach the point where I should reveal a relevant point of information.
Candidate C1, who quite possibly brought C2 and C3 in on his coat-tails, was actually me.
I did not consult with Alan Bond (C2) and Chris Rose (C3) before suggesting that voters who supported me should transfer to them. I genuinely felt that their insights would be useful to have or to retain on the committee and, in an election where candidates may not be well known to voters, I thought it would be helpful to indicate who was closest to my own views. Neither Alan nor Chris endorsed me, or each other, and in fact I was the only candidate to express support for any of my competitors in that way. And of course lots of people voted for both of them, or for all three of us, without paying any attention to my recommendation
I think my own vote was helpfully inflated by a couple of factors. I made several successful interventions in the Business Meeting session the previous day. (Video here; I spoke nine times, the first time at 1:04:10 and the last at 3:33:45.) On the day that votes closed in the election, File 770 led its news roundup with a piece about that, and then linked to one of my blog posts a bit further down the same post; again, I did not communicate with Mike Glyer about that in any way. So there were no sneaky tricks here; it was entirely organic.
Obviously I’m very glad that Alan and Chris got elected, and I look forward to working with them and the rest of the committee. But I feel sorry for Bruce Farr (D4), who was only two votes short in the end. And the 58 people who voted for him are 42% of the total number of voters; it rather sucks that such a large chunk of the voter body ends up with zero seats out of three.
The solution
I was astonished when I first discovered how the MPC is elected. The runoff ballot in a succession of single-seat contests is appropriate enough for determine the winners and lower places of the Hugo Awards. It’s utterly inappropriate if you want to elect a diverse spread of people. (Maybe you don’t.)
In the real world, which is to say for all elections in both parts of Ireland and in Malta, and for the Australian Senate, and for municipal elections in Scotland, in New Zealand, in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and in Portland (Oregon), the single transferable vote is used and a candidate is elected if their vote exceeds the electoral quota, which is set to be a smidgeon above the number of valid votes cast, divided by one more than the number of seats.
If a candidate is elected, then their votes are transferred to other candidates at a smaller value, calculated as the ratio of transferable votes to the surplus over the quota, usually rounded to two or three decimal places. In the 2025 MPC election, with 138 votes in total for three seats, the quota would be just over 34.5 – let’s take it to three decimal places and say 34.501. We can actually get a pretty good sense of how such an election would have worked out, using the votes actually cast this year. (The voter experience of the current system would not have changed; you still rank as many candidates, in order, as you want to.)
I got 67 first preferences, which is 32.499 votes over the quota. 64 of my votes had second preferences (see the first column of my breakdown of the second seat count, above). They would all be given a new value of 64 ÷ 32.499 = 0.507. So the first two counts would have looked like this:
Count 1
C1 surplus
Count 2
C1 Whyte
67
-32.499
34.501
D4 Farr
23
+2.535 (5 votes)
25.535
C2 Bond
9
+11.154 (22 votes)
20.154
D5 Dunn
19
+0.507 (1 vote)
19.507
C3 Rose
6
+11.661 (23 votes)
17.661
D6 Hertel
5
+2.028 (4 votes)
7.028
D7 Ross-Mansfield
4
+1.521 (3 votes)
5.521
D8 Black
2
+1.521 (3 votes)
3.521
D9 Rudolph
2
+0.507 (1 vote)
2.507
DX Oakes
1
+1.014 (2 votes)
2.014
Non-transferable
+0.051
138
137.949
The number of non-transferable votes recorded is an accounting artifact – it represents the value that gets lost in rounding to three decimal places. If we had gone for two decimal places, the quota would have been 34.51 and the value of the transferred votes would have been 0.50, which I don’t think would have changed the projected outcome much.
We can actually go a bit further in our alternate timeline. The data is incomplete, and I am assuming that the one vote that transferred to me went on to transfer to Alan Bond, but we can be fairly sure that after the bottom three candidates had been eliminated (which would have been done one by one in real life), the numbers would have looked something like this:
Count 1
C1 surplus
Count 2
D8, D9, DX
Count 5
C1 Whyte
67
-32.499
34.501
34.501
D4 Farr
23
+2.535
25.535
+2.507
28.042
C2 Bond
9
+11.154
20.154
+2.521
23,166
D5 Dunn
19
+0.507
19.507
+0.507
20.014
C3 Rose
6
+11.661
17.661
+0.507
18.168
D6 Hertel
5
+2.028
7.028
+0.507
7.535
D7 Ross-Mansfield
4
+1.521
5.521
+1.000
6.521
D8 Black
2
+1.521
3.521
-3.521
–
D9 Rudolph
2
+0.507
2.507
-2.507
–
DX Oakes
1
+1.014
2.014
-2.014
–
N/t
+0.051
0.051
0.051
138
137.949
137.949
Again we can’t break them down individually, but from the numbers we have, we can be fairly sure that the votes from candidates D6 and D7 would have transferred something like this:
Count 1
C1 surplus
Count 2
D8, D9, DX
Count 5
D6, D7
Count 7
C1 Whyte
67
-32.499
34.501
34.501
34.501
D4 Farr
23
+2.535
25.535
+2.507
28.042
+6.521
34.563
C2 Bond
9
+11.154
20.154
+2.521
23,166
+5.028
28.196
D5 Dunn
19
+0.507
19.507
+0.507
20.014
20.014
C3 Rose
6
+11.661
17.661
+0.507
18.168
18.168
D6 Hertel
5
+2.028
7.028
+0.507
7.535
-7.535
D7 Ross-Mansfield
4
+1.521
5.521
+1.000
6.521
-6.521
D8 Black
2
+1.521
3.521
-3.521
–
D9 Rudolph
2
+0.507
2.507
-2.507
–
DX Oakes
1
+1.014
2.014
-2.014
–
N/t
+0.051
0.051
0.051
+2.507
2.556
138
137.949
137.949
135.442
So, in a big turnaround from the real life situation, candidate D4 secures the second of the three seats, just creeping over the quota by 0.062 of a vote, with the last seat to be decided between C2 and D5 by C3’s transfers. In the real life election for the second seat, C3’s transfers broke in favor of C2 by a ratio of three to one; we don’t know how many of those were C3’s 6 first preferences and how many were the 23 transferred votes from C1, but it’s clear that C2, who was already 8 votes ahead of D5, would have been the greater beneficiary and would have won the final seat.
Obviously this outcome would have suited my personal agenda less, but I think it would have been a more representative result than the one we had in real life. It also would take a shorter time, because most of the votes would only be counted once.
How to get there
If we went to a multi-member transferable vote system, there are a few technical decisions we’d need to make. One of them is that we shouldn’t transfer surpluses, the operation that has the most work attached, unless the total of the surplus could potentially affect the outcome. In the worked example above, D4 has a surplus of only 0.062 of a vote, which is not enough to save C3 from elimination. WSFS already differs from standard practice by eliminating losing candidates one at a time, even if the lowest-placed candidate’s votes couldn’t possibly make up the difference between the second and third lowest, but I don’t think we have to do that for surpluses too. (If we had taken the value at two rather than three decimal places, D4 would not have reached the quota before the final round.)
The other technical point is, which surplus votes do you actually transfer in later rounds? In Ireland the practice is to just transfer the last votes that came in, which in the worked example above would mean only looking at the votes that D4 got from D6 (probably 2 full value votes and 2 worth 0.507; in total, D4 has 30 full-value votes and 9 at a value of 0.507). There are two reasons for this: in theory, the people who voted for D4 at an earlier stage have already got full value for their votes, and it’s the ones whose votes arrived last who create the surplus; and in practice, it makes the count much easier and more efficient. I understand, however, that the Australians do it differently and redistribute all of the votes that a winning candidate has ever received.
I have seen it argued that since the election method for the Mark Protection Committee is set out in the Standing Rules, it requires only a majority vote at a single Business Meeting to change it. I suspect that rather than go for a change immediately, a suitable intermediate step would be to create a working group next year to report in 2027, which could look at other alternatives too (though I think they’ll end up here once they have looked at the alternatives). This isn’t something that you should try and suspend standing orders for, in order to sneak it through at the last moment. (Very few things are.)
Also worth noting: less than 10% of the votes were cast for women, and all the candidates (as far as I know) identify as white. (The other committee had less than 16% of first preferences cast for men, though a man won the fifth seat.) I don’t know what we can do about that, but I do identify it as a problem. Probably for another day, though.
The best To my surprise, I was blown away by The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s sparse and lucid account of young things in Paris and Spain. (Review; get it here)
Honorable mentions Christopher Priest’s The Separation is one of the great alternate-WW2 novels – and there are some bad ones too. (Review; get it here) Sally Heathcote, Suffragette, is a great mixture of historical feminism and the lived experience of a late twentieth-century professional woman. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of My distant cousin Amy Dillwyn’s best novel is Jill, about a young woman finding herself (and love with other women) by travelling around Europe in the 1890s. (Review; get it here)
The one to avoid I do not like Light, by M. John Harrison. I thought the sex was sordid, the characters unpleasant, and the plot barely comprehensible. (Review; get it here)
In 1513, Luther decided that his main lectures in the coming year would deal with the Psalms. There was nothing untoward in this. The book of Psalms was generally considered by Christian theologians the most obviously “Christological” book in the Old Testament, and was therefore a favored subject for commentary throughout the Middle Ages. Notwithstanding Luther’s insinuation that the Bible was unknown to professional theologians, lecturing on a part of the Bible (especially this part) was not at all unusual. The academic pursuit of theology from the thirteenth century onwards had been based on one particular textbook, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, on which dozens, if not hundreds, of medieval commentaries and lecture series survive. But this textbook was the starting point for the study of theology, not its be-all and end-all. Scholars lectured on the Sentences, as Luther had done, by way of apprenticeship, to prove themselves as theologians, and theology students started by attending lectures on the Sentences, but the Bible was by no means ignored.
I got this for Anne a few years back, as it’s closer to her interests than mine; but I also vaguely knew Richard Rex and his wife Bettina from Fisher House, the Catholic Chaplaincy in Cambridge University, at the very start of his career, so I was interested to see what has become of him.
And it’s quite a good book. The intellectual context needs a lot of unpacking for the reader unfamiliar with sixteenth-century Christian theology, but Rex takes us through Luther’s thought processes about what Luther was thinking, saying and teaching, as well as guessing at his (much-explored) psychological impulse to resist authority. I’d have liked maybe a little more on the micropolitics of the German statelets which created a context where (some) governments were more receptive to religious innovation than might have been the case in earlier centuries.
Rex does enlarge at length on the technological revolution of printing, which made the spread of new ideas possible, and which left the ecclesiastical authorities reeling. I must say I found strong similarities to the rise of social media today, and the ability of new political forces to seize the momentum and disrupt existing authority. There is a vivid description of Worms during the Reichstag meeting, festooned with posters of Luther and with the Elector Frederick ready to print off the pro-Luther side of the story for mass consumption as soon as it happened. Meanwhile the Pope had no idea what was happening.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is A Tall Man In A Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson.
The best Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly has flaws – every woman character is referred to by the size of her breasts – but the central theme of loss of self is utterly compelling. And the prediction of a 1977 book, that 1994 would see the war on drugs still being waged and lost, only with superior technology and occasional state collusion, turns out to have been entirely true; thirty years on from 1994, almost fifty since the book was written, we haven’t learned much. (Review; get it here.)
Honorable mention, also the one you haven’t heard of Jonathan Bardon’s history of Handel’s Messiah is great on how he came to be in England, then in Ireland, and the social situation of 18th-century Dublin that almost guaranteed success. (Review; get it here)
The one to avoid I got only fifty pages into The Transfer Problem, by Adam Saint. (Review; get it here.)
So, the WSFS Business Meeting makes some decisions that I disagree with, and some that are stupid; and there is a mechanism to reverse a decision taken at an earlier session at a later stage called a Motion to Reconsider. This was used last year, for instance, when it turned out that one of the supposedly obscure films that had been granted an eligibility extension by the Business Meeting had actually only missed being on the 2025 ballot by a single vote, so had therefore lost fair and square.
We have another situation this year. The background is that a couple of years ago, the previous terminology of “supporting membership” and “attending membership” for Worldcons was changed to “WSFS membership” and “attending supplement”, to make it clear that you are buying two things, the right to participate in the Hugos and other WSFS business, and the right to attend.
A lot of people grumbled that this made things less clear rather than more, and that things should be put back as they were. A constitutional amendment was passed in Glasgow and ratified at the first of this year’s sessions, as item E.2 of the agenda, to do exactly that:
Replace WSFS Membership with Supporting Membership wherever it appears in the Constitution, and to replace Attending Supplement with Attending Membership, including all similar variations of the words (e.g., WSFS Memberships, WSFS members, attending supplement) to their grammatically correct replacements.
That looks simple enough. I confess that I voted for E.2 on the evening because the proposers put their case better than the opponents.
There has been a bit of a backlash in the circles that care about this sort of thing, arguing that the new change doesn’t make things better. (And the one guy who thinks he has the perfect solution and we should just wiggle the rules to allow it to be implemented.) I was frankly confused and not very excited by these discussions. But then Andrew January pointed out that Section 3.11.1 of the Constitution, which already referred to WSFS members before the first change, will now be affected by E.2. And that will be disastrous, because Section 3.11.1 says:
Final Award voting shall be by balloting in advance of the Worldcon. Postal mail shall always be acceptable. Only WSFS members may vote. Final Award ballots shall include name, signature, address, and membership-number spaces to be filled in by the voter.
Under E.2, that phrase “WSFS members” will become “Supporting Members”, and the third sentence of 3.11.1 will read:
Only Supporting Members may vote.
The Business Meeting has accidentally disenfranchised WSFS members attending WorldCon, whether physically or virtually, of the right to vote in the Hugos!!!!!
This is obviously unacceptable, and it’s equally obviously the effect of the plain words of E.2.
People have been fiddling around with various alternatives, but I think that there is only one option – tomorrow’s session of the Business Meeting must vote to reconsider E.2 and then repeal it.
Unfortunately I can’t attend myself, as I will be on the road at the relevant time tomorrow. But I do hope that others will be able to put this right.
Edited to add: The motion to reconsider was passed 99-29, and the ratification of E.2 was then reversed 31-108.
Many weeks later, after endless fuss and expensive phone calls, they drove to the mortuary chapel at Dublin airport to load up the coffin and follow it down to Tullamore. The hearse went slowly for a while and then, at some secret moment, started belting along the road. It took the bends so fast, Carmel became a little fixated on the square end of the box disappearing up ahead. This chase went on for three hours, then the hearse slammed on the brakes and they were right on top of it again. People turned to stare. A man took off his hat and nodded right at her, through the glass. A woman stood at a garden wall with her children lined up in a row, and they each made the sign of the cross as the cars crawled past. In the centre of Tullamore, shopkeepers stood in front of half-shuttered windows, pedestrians blessed themselves and, when she looked behind, Carmel saw these people step down off the kerb to follow the cortège, like zombies. That is what she said later to Aedemar Grant, it was Night of the Living Dead Culchie. These people, in their anoraks and tweed caps, were the residents of a place that Phil McDaragh had scorned in verse – excoriated – a town he refused to visit after his mother died. And still the local people came, as the priest later intoned, to welcome their poet home.
A really great novel, with the main characters Nell and her mother Carmel; and frequent appearances from Phil, Carmel’s long-dead father, a well-known poet who was horrible to his family, but who still dominates their lives long after his death. There’s a lot of intricate exploration of family, played out against the background of Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It seems to be my first Anne Enright novel (also her most recent), but it won’t be my last. You can get The Wren, The Wren here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2023 which is not by Ben Aaronovitch. Next on that pile is The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings.
The best Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m going to go with the critical consensus and nominate The Way by Swann’s, also known as Swann’s Way, originally Du Côté de chez Swann, by Marcel Proust. I find that in general I enjoy the great modernist writers, and I found the descriptions of children’s perceptions of the world of grownups, and of what it is like to be a man in love, simply superb. Also, more girl-on-girl action than I had expected. (Review; get it here.)
Honorable mentions I’m giving you three quirky extras today. Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon, won the 2003 Nebula for Best Novel. It’s about a high-functioning autistic chap in a near-future world; I don’t think it hits all the notes perfectly, but I’m glad it was done. (Review; get it here) The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by the late great Diana Wynne Jones, is a hilarious dissection of the tropes of fantasy novels; she knew a thing or two about that subject. (Review; get it here) The Dorling Kindersley Visual Dictionary for Doctor Who is rather glorious. (The more recent BBC publication of the same title equally so.) (Review; get it here)
The ones you haven’t heard of My distant cousin Amy Dillwyn wrote a number of novels in the 1890s, the first of which was The Rebecca Rioter, a story of industrial unrest in South Wales a few decades before. There is also a nice recent biography of her by the late David Painting. (Review of both; get The Rebecca Rioter here; get David Painting’s biography here.)
The one to avoid Actually I’m leaving this blank today; none of the above is awful. I guess I was least impressed with The Ultimate Treasure, a below-par Sixth Doctor story. (Review; get it here)
Current Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by John Higgs The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson House of Odysseus, by Claire North
Last books finished Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan The Blacksmith, by Barbara Howe (did not finish) Apostate, by Forrest Reid Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho From a Shadow Grave, by Andi C. Buchanan Private Road, by Forrest Reid We All Fall, by Helen Vivienne Fletcher
Next books Tyrelia, by S R Manssen The Master, by Louise Cooper Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
Edith was “sent away” in 1903 at the age of fourteen by Mrs. Jane Bratt, her grandmother, to be a boarder at Dresden House in Evesham, Warwickshire (TFA 27). While the Tolkien children do not say why Edith was “sent away” by her grandmother, the most likely reasons were she and the rest of the Bratt family did not want the responsibility of raising Edith (Simpson 148) nor any contact with an illegitimate child, who might raise questions in other people’s minds about the family’s respectability. Edith’s being an heiress did not remove these compelling considerations. By sending Edith to a boarding school, Mrs. Jane Bratt would both further Edith’s education and remove her from the Birmingham area, sparing the family any further shame. The thirty-mile trip from Birmingham to Evesham would have required approximately two hours on an Edwardian train, given train speed and the time needed to stop at other local stations.²
²”At the beginning of the twentieth-century railroads had an average speed of 40 mph.” “The development of the railway network in Britain 1825-1911.” Dan Bogart, Lee Shaw-Taylor and Xuesheng You, last viewed on 6/4/2020. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/beca/ ae2e1cf76dca3ecc5a252d529e583806ecec.pdf.
Back in 2020, I read an earlier version of this, and I wrote:
This fascinating 185-page article about Edith Bratt, wife of J.R.R. Tolkien, was published online by the Journal of Tolkien Studies a couple of weeks ago, almost immediately withdrawn, I guess because the presentation was marred by some editing and formatting errors, and then republished with one of the original authors removed. There’s probably a story there, but it’s none of my business. I read it over an insomniac night, and it did not help me to go back to sleep. It’s a scholarly article rather than a monograph, but I am counting it as a book anyway.
Most Tolkien fans will be familiar with the received version of the history of the writer and his wife (as depicted in the recent film starring Lily Collins as Edith, which incidentally I loved). They met as teenage orphaned lodgers in Birmingham; she was a couple of years older, and a Protestant; Tolkien’s guardian, a Catholic priest, forbade him to have any further contact with her until he reached the age of 21 in 1913; when he got back in touch she was engaged to someone else, but broke it off to be with him and they married in 1916, just before he was posted to France for war duty. You may have seen the recent biopic, which I watched on my last transatlantic flight (and enjoyed).
When I reviewed John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War, I commented that “I would like to know more about the effect of Tolkien’s relationship with his wife Edith, who he was courting and marrying at this time [the war years], on his writing. Perhaps there is little to say, or to be discovered.” Well, it turns out that there was plenty to be discovered and to say.
Bunting looks in intense geographical and genealogical detail at Edith’s Midlands background. She was the daughter of a businessman and his wife’s maid; much of her childhood and early adult life revolved around evading the stigma of illegitimacy (she did not even tell Tolkien until after they were married) but she also inherited her father’s fortune and so was able to support Tolkien during their early married life, until his academic career took off.
The authors make a compelling argument that previous writers (notably Carpenter and Garth) have neglected the importance for Tolkien’s life and writing of Edith and their relationship, concentrating instead on his male friends. Indeed, my father, commenting on Carpenter’s biography, wrote in 1980:
…the relationship between Tolkien & his wife begins romantically, in their waiting 3 years for each other. Yet she wasn’t really suited to be a don’s wife. She disliked his friendship w CS Lewis, & he evidently told her to lump it. She was happy only at the v. end, when they lived in Bournemouth. Yet through it all he was fond of her – & presumably she of him, tho’ the author doesn’t offer evidence on this.
Thanks to their research, it becomes clear just how important the early separation from Edith, and their reunion, were for Tolkien’s creativity, and how his emotional state translates into his early work (seeing Warwick – of all places! – as a mythical city). There are some other fascinating insights as well – his mother’s mental lapses in the final stages of her illness perhaps informing some of the depictions of dissociation in Tolkien’s work; also a reference to someone else’s research on the inspiration for the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith. Also this led me to the research of Seamus Hamill-Keays on the Welsh inspiration for Buckland.
The whole thing is forensically researched and illustrated. Utterly absorbing if you are interested in Tolkien, and I think probably even if you are not you’ll find it a nice piece of biographical research on the life of a young woman born at the end of the nineteenth century.
Edited to add: The revised version of the article has also been withdrawn from the Journal of Tolkien Studies website. I hope it will reappear in some form someday.
I’m glad to say that the following year, 2021, it was properly published in the Cormarë series of Tolkieniana, with I think a bit more circumstantial detail and a delightful reconstruction of the episode where Edith danced for her husband in the woods at Dent’s Garth in 1917. It’s well worth getting if you want to see the most important feminine influences on Tolkien, whose story tends to get told in male terms.
It’s not perfect – the writing style is a tad clunky and in places repetitive, and it ends with an odd fixation on Tolkien’s knowledge of Sanskrit – of course he knew some, he was a philologist; but that doesn’t mean it was quite at the forefront of his mind all the time. But for Tolkienists, whether dilettantes like me or more serious folks, it’s a great read. You can get The Gallant Edith Bratt here.
A rather short list today, so let’s keep this short too.
The best Middlemarch is one of my favourite books ever. It is about fifty times better than the other four above, combined. Sometimes the conventional wisdom has a point. (Review; get it here)
Honorable mention Somehow it’s been rare for Doctor Who books to reach the top spot in my recommendations here, but The Algebra of Ice is a great multi-stranded Seventh Doctor novel which starts with the death of Edgar Allan Poe and then just gets weirder. (Review; get it here, at a price)
Caption: But Alison’s feeling of doom persists. Alison (reading Capital, by Karl Marx): Wow. 1,042 pages to go.
This jumped off the shelf at me when I saw it in a London bookshop last month. Alison Bechdel, who we have met in threepreviousbooks, is now running a sanctuary for abandoned goats in rural Vermont, while her partner Holly is becoming an internet influencer thanks to her use of power tools for carpentry. Meanwhile Alison’s successful first memoir, Death and Taxidermy, has become a hit TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch as her father, but veering further and further from Alison’s own lived experience. Her old friends live down the road and are going through their own emotional transformations – there’s a fair bit of over-sixties sex in this book – and incidentally the world is going to hell, with Trumpists threatening civil war, climate catastrophe looming, and incidentally Alison’s MAGA sister writing her own autobiography to set the story straight.
I loved this, and laughed out loud several times on the London Underground and the train while reading it, much to the dismay of fellow passengers. The funniest scene perhaps is when the goats… no, I won’t spoil it for you. There are some serious points as well, both about the state of the world and the limited effect that one individual can have (which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try), and also about Life as Art and Art as Life. Recommended. You can get Spent here.
The best I became a Hamilton fan in January 2016, and delightedly grabbed the Hamiltome, as we cognoscenti called it, as soon as I could. It is a brilliant look behind the writing and the making of the musical, including the songs that were taken out (the third cabinet battle, the one about John Adams, etc). I know that not everyone is a fan, but heck, this is my blog and I get to recommend the things that I like. (Review; get it here)
Honorable mentions Two books by authors with confusingly similar names (though one was born in 1963 and the other died in 1965, so they are probably different people): The best known book by Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) is The Haunting of Hill House, and I loved it too; edgy, brilliant ghost story. (Review; get it here) The best known book by Shelley Jackson (1963-) is Half Life, an amazing phantasmagoria of a damaged society seen through the eyes of conjoined twins. (Review; get it here.)
The one you haven’t heard of For once I’m leaving this blank; Half Life is the most obscure of the books I liked from the above list, and it’s not all that obscure.
The ones to avoid Two classics that I really didn’t get on with: The Sorrows of an American is a dismal New York tangle of love affairs, Norwegian ancestors and 9/11. (Review; get it here.) Nova Swing simply repelled me, like most of Harrison’s writing does. (Review; get it here.)
I took the M6 north. The satnav reckoned cutting across country to Derby and the M1 would be marginally quicker, or taking the M62 later on, but either way meant navigating a tangle of busy motorways with every chance of traffic jams. I stayed on the motorway until Tebay, where I stopped for a late lunch. The farming business that owns this service station offers freshly sourced local food which you can eat while you enjoy the view of the northern Lakes’ fells. I resisted the temptation to sit down for a meal in the restaurant and got a snack from the quick kitchen counter instead. Still, I’d go home the same way, I decided, and stock up with a few treats from the farm shop.
Sixth in Juliet McKenna’s series of novels about Daniel Mackmain, sent on supernatural missions around contemporary England (and in this case Scotland) by the Green Man and other supernatural entities; his girlfriend is a swan-maiden, and the villain this time is a chap who is a part-time giant cat and is wreaking personal havoc in various places.
As well as the complex politics of mythic figures from British folklore, there’s a very good sense of place here, with a particularly well realised Scottish castle in a vivid landscape. The British weather is also a memorable character. I enjoyed it and you can get The Green Man’s Quarry here.
This won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 2024, beating Airside, by Christopher Priest, and Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi, which I have read, and also Descendant Machine, by Gareth L. Powell, and HIM, by Geoff Ryman, which I haven’t. It’s Juliet McKenna’s first major award win in a 25-year career, and not before time.
Just to remind you of last year’s other winning novels: the Clarke Award went to In Ascension, the Hugo to Some Desperate Glory and the Nebula to The Saint of Bright Doors.
I have only one more BSFA winner to go, Three Eight One by Aliya Whitely; and I’ll wind up this reading project with Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer, which won the Clarke Award last month.
The best, also the one you haven’t heard of A hidden jewel from the Clarke submissions list: Appliance is a great collection of themed short stories about the invention of a teleporter and its consequences. I felt that it was not a novel, and therefore not eligible for the award, but it was great all the same. (Review; get it here)
Honorable mentions Reading The Old Man and the Sea, somehow you are out there in the Gulf of Mexico, struggling against the forces of nature. Brilliant stuff. (Review; get it here) I met Seamus Heaney only once, a chance encounter in a pub (the Foggy Dew in Temple Bar in Dublin, some time around 1989); he offered to buy me a drink on the basis of having known my parents in their mutual QUB days, but I was too shy to accept. I wish I had. I learned a lot from Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, and I would have learned something from even ten minutes’ conversation with him. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of Alliance, by J.O. Morgan; see above.
The one to avoid Even worse than The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Bou Bounoider’s childrens’ book about Napoleon is rambling and poorly written. Readers will be startled to learn that “Wellington was an Englishman, a bit like Paddington Bear.” None of those things is quite like the other. Wellington was born in Ireland, and Paddington Bear was a) from Peru and b) a bear. The book is aimed at the 6-12 age group, and they will like the illustrations but may not learn much from the text. (Review; get it here)
A reminder that the deadline for Hugo voting is coming up fast. Sending best wishes to this year’s Hugo team, but also personally relieved that I have stepped away from it myself.
I didn’t finish all of these, but I watched enough of them to decide my votes.
Short Form
6) Fallout: “The Beginning” – I watched half of this but really had no idea what was going on. Voters who enjoyed the entire season naturally nominated the season finale, but on its own it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think there is a strong case for diving the Dramatic Presentation categories differently, for Best Episodic Drama and Best One-Shot Drama or something like that, which would better reflect the way we actually consume sf media.
5) Agatha All Along: “Death’s Hand in Mine” – I really enjoyed the series as a whole, which looked gorgeous and is acted with conviction; I just wasn’t sure that the plot of this one made sense.
4) Star Trek: Lower Decks: “Fissure Quest” – and here we have not only the season finale but the second last episode of the season getting on the ballot. I watched the first few seasons of Lower Decks, really enjoyed them, but haven’t seen any of the fifth series apart from the two finalist episodes. Even so, it all makes sense. Bumpingthis one a little below the other on grounds of plot complexity.
3) Star Trek: Lower Decks: “The New Next Generation” – and it makes a difference in your appreciation of a season (and indeed a series) finale if you are familiar with the characters; I loved the closure but I also loved the humour.
2) Doctor Who: “Bubble and Dot” – tremendous effects, impactful plot, an evil society, apparently Ncuti Gatwa’s first filmed scenes, and he started as well as he continued.
1) Doctor Who: “73 Yards” – in my original ranking of Season One I put this third and “Bubble and Dot” top, but I’ve rewatched this and reassessed it, and now I definitely like it more. Apparently Millie Gibson’s first filmed scenes. Gets my top vote this year.
Long Form
6) The Wild Robot – I hate cute anthropomorphic robots, and the animation is actually rather poor. Didn’t last past the first 20 minutes.
5) I Saw the TV Glow – writing this post, I realised that I couldn’t remember anything about it although I watched it only a couple of weeks ago, which is never a good sign. Checking other sources than my memory, it’s a commentary on cult TV that doesn’t quite hit the mark.
4) Furiosa – looks fantastic, but really, such awful people doing such horrible things to each other; ick.
3) Dune II – sat down to watch this on streaming and it weas fifteen minutes before I realised that I’d actually seen it in the cinema. Looks great and well acted, but a little lacking in soul.
2) Wicked, Part 1 – I did not have time to watch more than just the start of this, and probably won’t have time to before the voting deadline, but it’s clearly the kind of thing that I will enjoy a lot when I see the full thing.
1) Flow – an incredible achievement of animation and mystery. You could watch it over and over. I only watched it once, but it gets my vote.
I may do a note on my Best Series vote if I have time.
You may quibble that The Fountains of Paradise is mostly set on a fictional island called Taprobane; but Taprobane is in almost exactly the same place as Sri Lanka in our world, and it’s pretty clear where the writer had in mind when he was writing the book. Also I love it.
It’s surprising for the top book on my metric to be only in second place on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. Indeed there is an unusual divide between the two systems here: Michael Ondaatje is relatively way more popular than usual on LT, while the women writers on the list are relatively way more popular than usual on GR.
I must say that the book I most want to read off this list is probably Wave, which sounds interesting but tough, as Huck Finn said about Pilgrim’s Progress. I am not completely sure if it passes my 50% test, but it seems more likely than not.
I disqualified only two books this time (see also China, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Cameroon and Australia). They were both by Michael Ondaatje, who attracts “sri lanka” tags for obvious reasons. One was The English Patient, which actually outranked everything else by miles, but has no internal reference to Sri Lanka at all, and the other was The Cat’s Table, which would otherwise have been just below Anil’s Ghost and just above The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
The best Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century is a great analysis of why it is that Tolkien’s works have struck such a deep chord with so many readers. (Review; get it here.)
Honorable mentions Kosovo: A Short History is magisterial, but only goes to 1997 unfortunately. (Review; get it here) Dawn is a typically unsparing Butler examination of slavery and symbiosis. (Review; get it here) Desert goes from the Western Sahara to Marseilles, and finds that the human desert may be in the latter rather than the former . (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of Maybe it’s slightly cheating to count thinktank papers as books for these purposes, but I found the June 2023 Chatham House report on “How to end the War in Ukraine” very rigorous and coherent, in particular debunking the various justifications that have been given for the war. Though my good friend Ian did this rather more pithily a year earlier. (Review; get it for free here)
The one to avoid I do not understand the reverence for the works of E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith in the history of science fiction. They are all rubbish, and Galactic Patrol is as bad as any of them. (Review; get it here)
It’s not too early to start my reviews of sf set in 2026. Though actually there is not very much of it for this particular year. I have found two films (one of which is very famous and the other very obscure), a very famous short story, two well-known novels which are partly set in 2026 and which I have covered before, four games (none of which I have heard of, but that’s on me), a six-part anime series and one radio play, all written before my cutoff date of 2006, twenty years earlier.
(I have decided not to include The Pushcart War, a 1964 novel by Jean Merrill, which I enjoyed when it was told by Al Mancini on Jackanory in 1974, and then when I read the book for myself shortly afterward aged roughly eight. Wikipedia explains that the 1964 original edition was set in 1976; the 1985 reprint was set in 1996; and the 2014 edition is set in 2026. Authorial intent counts for a lot in my view, and anyway the 2014 edition misses my 2006 cutoff date.)
Journey into Space was a classic BBC radio series broadcast in 1953-58 and set in 1965-71, by which time the writer, Charles Chilton, expected that humanity would be exploring the Moon and Mars and meeting Martians. Chilton wrote a special 90-minute episode in 1981, called Return from Mars, in which Jet Morgan and the original crew are found trying to land on Earth in 2026, decades after they disappeared after the events of the last story. You can find it online in various places; I found the Internet Archive recording (in two parts) the most audible.
I’m afraid that you won’t find out much about Chilton’s imagined 2026 here, because most of the story is a flashback to Jet Morgan and his team exploring what appears to be a very different solar system (or is it ours, somehow at a different time?) where they have arrived via time warp, and then explaining it to bewildered 2026 space traffic controllers at the very beginning and the very end.
It’s pretty old fashioned stuff, and would I think have seemed old fashioned in the 1950s, never mind in the immediate aftermath of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The social structure of the planet Talia where our heroes meet the beautiful Cassia is, frankly, fascist, with no real interrogation of that. Cassia falls in love with Jet Morgan because they have to have something to do. It’s three stars out of five, maybe two and a half.
Out in the real world in 1981, Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, John Crowley’s Little, Big, Philip K. Dick’s Valis, Julian May’s The Many Colored Land and C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station were taking the genre to new places. Return from Mars is a case of “building yesterday’s future”, to coin a phrase.
Therr are two later one-off plays following the adventures of Jet Morgan and his crew, both of which are set in alternate continuities where the events of Return from Mars never happened and with the crew played by different actors again. I’m not rushing to hunt them down.
The best It’s a bit of a cliche, but I really do like (most of) Ulysses, and it does reward return visits. (Review; get it here)
Honorable mentions The Immortality Thief is a story of a race against time with unlikely allies in an abandoned space structure inhabited by horrible creatures. I didn’t think it put a foot wrong.(Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of I picked up a short trilingual book on the Frontiers of the Roman Empire: The Lower German Limes at a reception last year, and found it unexpectedly absorbing and fascinating, comparing the Rhine frontier with Hadrian’s Wall and other Roman boundaries. (Review; get it for free here)
The ones to avoid I’m going to be mean today, because three of these books got two stars or less out of five in my personal ratings. TOR: Assassin Hunter – historically illiterate, clunky writing.(Review; get it here) The Plotters – really historically illiterate; I expect better from Doctor Who novels. (Review; get it here, at a price) Guy Erma and the Son of Empire – leaden, unreadable prose. (Review; get it here)
If the buried won’t help us, perhaps the invisible can prove the way. Where the road has lost all substance we must call upon the boundaries of the land it travels through, because ‘a genuine ancient long-distance road is nearly always a parish boundary at least in places,’ claimed Margary.
Having greatly enjoyed Hadley’s Hollow Places, I was eager to catch up with this story of a single Roman road in Hertfordshire and Essex, running 22 km between the small towns of Braughing and Great Chesterford, and coded RR21b by the great Ivan Margary.
The book has roughly one page for each 70 metres of the actual road (depending whether or not you count the notes). For most of its length, the road has simply disappeared to the unaided eye, though cropmarks do show its presence as a straight line between two points. It appears to have cut directly across hills and valleys.
Hadley meditates on the effect of the road, and on its meaning, and speculates about how long it would have taken to construct – and also to destroy; he reckons that locals simply removed most of the stones from which it was made for building. This is a fairly quiet bit of English countryside, and possibly was at its busiest in Roman times.
The emphasis is on the Roman Empire, and how it affected Britain; and on tracing the records of RR21b in maps and elsewhere; and also on the fauna and flora that currently inhabit the fields through which it runs. It’s a great meditation on history and the countryside. With 340 pages (including notes and acknowledgements) that’s about one page for every 65 metres of the road. The illustrations are lovely, though I wish they had been labelled on each page rather than referenced in the endnotes. You can get The Road here.
The best Unusually I have not given any of the above five stars out of five on LibraryThing. I have given three of them 4.5 out of five, and of those three I think marginally ahead is City of Stairs, the first in the fantasy Divine Cities trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett. It was famously crowded off the Hugo ballot by the Sad Puppies; I found the worldbuilding and plotting excellent. (Review; get it here.)
Honorable mentions In the Serpent’s Wake is the second of Rachel Hartman’s equally excellent Tess of the Road novels, about a polar expedition in a fantasy world. (Review; get it here.) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a heart-warming story of wartime occupation int he Channel Islands. (Review; get it here.)
The one you haven’t heard of The Dalek Book, dating from 1964, is possibly the very first Doctor Who spinoff publication, and reflects a very creditable creative effort from the creatures’ creators. (Review; get it here if you are lucky.)
The one to avoid The Twin Dilemma, Colin Baker’s debut, is by far my least favourite Doctor Who story of the 1963-89 TV era, and its novelisation is equally my least favourite Doctor Who book of all time. (Review; get it here.)
She sat in the window of her room, legs tucked to her chest and hand dangling. Beyond, the sky was a cloudless blue, any mugginess lingering from the storms too thin to be felt, the air quickly returning to its usual stink of hot stones and sand. The gnats had all but disappeared with the rain, but a few still insisted on buzzing by her ear. She swatted at them in vain.
Sequel to The Perfect Assassin, and also acquired as part of the 2020 Hugo packet; I had forgotten reading the first book, but enjoyed this a lot all the same – woman assassin, in love with a healer, both get tangled up in magical skullduggery at the hands of the ruler, vividly realised trek across the desert (the whole thing is set in an Arabian style fantasy world), lots of exciting combat and magical action. These secondary worlds do not always grab me, but this one was fun. You can get The Impossible Contract here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next up is The Revenant Express, by George Mann.
The best My favourite of these is Ian McDonald’s great Indian novel River of Gods, which in these days of AI seems more and more relevant. (Review; get it here.)
Honourable mention Antoine de Saint-Exupéry explores the challenges of flying in North Africa in Terre des Hommes, whose lyric description of the desert almost makes up for the colonialism. (Review; get it here.)
The one you haven’t heard of I’m fascinated by the nineteenth-century actor, writer and campaigner Fanny Kemble; Constance Wright’s book looks at her relationships with America, with her American husband; and with abolitionism. (Review; get it here.)
The one to avoid The Chosen Twelve is an awkward rehash of The Hunger Games. (Review; get it here)
Current The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho
Last books finished Little Wars and Floor Games, by H.G. Wells Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed Marie Hodgkinson Down, by Laurence Miles Around the World in 80 Games, by Marcus du Sautoy Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer Spectral Scream, by Hannah Fergesen
Next books Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by by John Higgs Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan The Master, by Louise Cooper
