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January 2004 books

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The most crucial event of January 2004 was that little U took her first steps, at 13 months.

My first work outing of the year was to the Liberals' New Year reception in Brussels, after which I note that I had an awful lot of whisky with Graham Watson (then an MEP, now a work colleague, who by curious coincidence I was out drinking with last night as well). I was on a panel with the Bosnian and Croatian foreign ministers as well. (Fraser Cameron sitting between them. The Croatian minister was newly appointed after the election.) This was shortly after returning from a conference on Moldova in Munich.

We also did a report for the new Independent Monitoring Commission in Northern Ireland, comparing its mission with Balkan equivalents. This was also the month that I started to seriously strategise about getting a job with the new European Commission due to take office at the end of the year. (Spoiler: I didn't get a job there in the end.)

The books I read in January 2004 were:

Non-fiction 3
Home Rule: An Irish History 1800-2000, by Alvin Jackson
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin
The Procrastinator's Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now. by Rita Emmett

SF 5
1610: A Sundial in a Grave, by Mary Gentle
Looking Backward: from 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
From the Dust Returned, by Ray Bradbury
The Best of Lester Del Rey

Comics 1
Death: The High Cost of Living, by Neil Gaiman.

3,900 pages
3/9 by women; none by PoC.

Links above are to my reviews; links below are to Amazon.

The Lord of the Rings is of course one of my favourite books ever, but that was a re-read (you can get it here if you still need to). My best new book this month was Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys, which is superb and made me a real Pepys fanboy. You can get it here.

The one to skip: disappointed by 1610.


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“Catch That Zeppelin!”, by Fritz Leiber

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This won the 1976 Hugo and 1975 Nebula Awards for Best Short Story. Third paragraph of the main section of the story (there is also a short introduction):

And then my gaze clambered higher still, up the 222-foot sturdy tower, to the top of which was moored the nose of the vast, breathtakingly beautiful, streamlined, silvery shape which was making the shadow.

When I wrote this up in July 2001 – alas, much more innocent times to be writing about tall structures in New York – I said this:

The story is a real jeu d’esprit from Leiber. He warms us up in the first paragraph:

This year on a trip to New York City to visit my son, who is a social historian at a leading municipal university there, I had a very unsettling experience. At black moments, of which at my age I have quite a few, it still makes me distrust profoundly those absolute boundaries in Space and Time which are our sole protection against Chaos, and fear that my mind – no, my entire individual existence – may at any moment at all and without any warning whatsoever be blown by a sudden gust of Cosmic Wind to an entirely different spot in a Universe of Infinite Possibilities. Or, rather, into another Universe altogether. And that my mind and individuality will be changed to fit.

Any reader who knows Leiber’s classic “The Big Time”, published almost twenty years before, is already alerted to the fact that fun with alternate history lies ahead. As he walks along Broadway, he looks up and sees a Zeppelin moored to the top of the Empire State Building; and his first person narrative shifts to the persona of a patriotic German airship engineer, in a New York where the traffic is driven by electricity rather than the internal combustion engine, where the “blackamoors” are clearly emancipated, and he himself has a military bearing, a black moustache and a lock of hair that tends to fall across his forehead. His son is still a social historian, but now they are meeting for lunch in the Zeppelin departure lounge, and the date is no longer 1973 but 1937.

The narrator, whose name is no longer Fritz but Dolf or Dolfy, and his son discuss how their world could have developed differently. What if the great scientists Thomas Edison and Marie Sklodowska had not married? She was being courted also by a French physicist called Pierre Curie in the 1890s. If she had become Madame Curie, she and Edison would never have had a son whose invention of a new type of electric battery was used by Henry Ford for his automobiles. Also, if Germany and the United States had not been on such good terms, the Americans might not have been willing to sell helium – and the airship industry would then have used hydrogen, and might well have literally crashed and burned.

Also, what if the US’s post-Civil War reconstruction had failed under the threat of Ku Klux Klan violence? The consequences for the “American character” could have been very bad, and the freed slaves would effectively have been re-enslaved. Most sensitive of all, what if the Allies had not gone for an unconditional surrender of Germany in 1918, but instead settled for an armistice? Germany might not have accepted its defeat but instead have nursed a grievance which could have led to a militarist regime and a new war.

And our narrator’s time runs out, and as he runs to catch that Zeppelin, he finds the door is shut, the departure lounge disappears, and there is no Zeppelin. A sinister fellow diner, Jewish by appearance, tells him that the Hindenburg, filled with hydrogen, burned up completely earlier that day in New Jersey, and warns him that he looks a bit too much like Adolf Hitler – “If I were you, sir, I’d shave my moustache.” After another hiccup, he finds himself back in the world he knows best, “transiting from 1937 (where I had been born in 1889 and was forty-eight) to 1973 (where I had been born in 1910 and was sixty-three). My name changed back to my truly own (but what is that?)” He meets his son and goes for a coffee in Greenwich Village.

To turn oneself into Adolf Hitler takes a certain amount of chutzpah. To turn Adolf Hitler into an enlightened Zeppelin engineer and good guy takes even more. The holes in the story, taken as a reasoned cartography of how things might have been different, are huge – Hitler could hardly have had a son who was a cutting-edge social historian by 1937 no matter what timeline you use; the Edison electric battery sounds a bit unlikely; the historical reasons for the failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the Allies agreeing to the armistice in 1918 were pretty compelling.

But if you want a totally serious treatment of this theme, you should read Virtual History, a collection of essays by noted historians edited by Niall Ferguson. This story is meant to be fun. It’s not one of the classic, ground-breaking stories of the sub-genre, like L Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall or the author’s own The Big Time. It doesn’t take itself as seriously as the recent series of heavy volumes by Harry Turtledove and Harry Harrison, but is none the less far, far better. This story is classic Leiber. I like it.

It has to be said that this is not obvious Hugo or Nebula winning material though. The story of that year with most staying power appears to be “Child of All Ages” by P.J. Plauger, most recently republished in the Jack Dann collection Immortals in 1998, which was runner-up for the Nebula award and came third in both Hugo and Locus polls.

On rereading, I do not like this story anything like as much. The humour of the piece is not in particularly good taste. The lines about Jews particularly grate. It also grates that the world would have been saved if Marie Sklodowska had married an American instead of a Frenchman. Hitler is not funny (Doctor Who tried to make him funny by putting him in a cupboard, but it didn’t work). I know more about Reconstruction and the end of the first world war now than I did in 2001, and Leiber’s presentation of those topics is facile and misleading. The style is good, as ever with Leiber, but the ideas are not as interesting as he perhaps thought they were, and the fact that it won both Hugo and Nebula says something about the limited perceptions of voters as well.

For some reason there were 12 other stories on the Nebula shortlist, and six on the Hugo final ballot, so I am not going to list all of them (I can’t remember having read any of the others anyway). The other three on both final ballots were:

“Child of All Ages” by P.J. Plauger, which as noted above has had at least as much staying power
“Sail the Tide of Mourning” by Richard J. Lupoff
“Doing Lennon” by Gragory Benford

This was one of the rare years when there were three joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards across the written fiction categories. Next up is the joint winner of Best Novella that year, an old favourite of mine, “Home is the Hangman” by Roger Zelazny. I hope it wears a bit better.

The easiest place to get “Catch That Zeppelin!” is in the Leiber collection Ship of Shadows, available here.

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The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes. I must have lain long in the grass, for the shadow that was in front of me when I left the house had disappeared when I went back. I entered the house, as the house was bursting with an uneasy quiet. Then I heard my mother singing something about trains and Arkansas. She came in the back door with some folded yellow curtains which she piled on the kitchen table. I sat down on the floor to listen to the song’s story, and noticed how strangely she was behaving. She still had her hat on, and her shoes were dusty, as though she had been walking in deep dirt. She put on some water to boil and then swept the porch; then she hauled out the curtain stretcher, but instead of putting the damp curtains on it, she swept the porch again. All the time singing about trains and Arkansas.

This was Morrison’s first novel, a gritty tale of rape, incest and racism, told in an intense mosaic style, with life for black girls in her home town in the 1960s contrasted with Dick-and-Jane fantasies; and narrative layers and personal histories gradually being unpeeled so that you can pretty much understand everyone by the end. In her foreword to my edition, the author says:

One problem was centering the weight of the novel’s inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing. My solution—break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader—seemed to me a good idea, the execution of which does not satisfy me now. Besides, it didn’t work: many readers remain touched but not moved.

I was moved; so it worked for me. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer, my top unread book by a woman, and my top unread non-genre fiction. Next up on the first of those three piles is Bernardine Evaristo’s Man Booker Prize-winning Girl, Woman, OtherHild by Nicola Griffith.

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How the 2010s have been for me: the decade meme

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I see a lot of people writing blog posts etc about how the second decade of the century has changed their lives, so thought I would join in. (I saw a lot of people writing in similar vein about the first decade of the century ten years ago, but did not feel like it then.)

(And I am not interested in hearing that the second decade of the century is "really" 2011-2020. These things are social constructs. If lots of people say it's 2010-2019, then it's 2010-2019.)

This is the first picture I have found of me from the decade, from a January 2010 visit to what was then Southern Sudan (now South Sudan). I'm with the renowned Africa commentator Gérard Prunier, who is shaking hands with Riek Machar, then the Vice-President of the not-yet-independent Government of Southern Sudan, whose office in Juba we were visiting. Riek Machar's career subsequently took a downturn, to put it euphemistically. I look uncomfortable; I probably had an upset stomach, which happened most of the time when I was in Juba.

NW, GP and RM

This is the most recent picture of me that I have. I am with a friend from Cambridge days who I had not seen since graduation day in 1989. His name, amusingly and confusingly, is Nicholas White. He is a much better musician than I am, despite spelling his surname weirdly. We are in America's so-called Stonehenge, a rather baffling set of ruins which are possibly not as old as some people like to think. The picture was taken by my brother ten days ago. My hair is a bit thinner and greyer than it was in January 2010. But I look a lot more comfortable.

NW and NW

I guess there are four big things that have changed for me since January 2010.

Ten years ago, I had been to a few science fiction conventions, but had never been involved with organising any of them. In the last decade, I have been involved with three World Science Fiction Conventions: I was a member of the Committee for Loncon 3 in 2014; I was the administrator of the Hugo Awards for Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in 2017; and I was both a Committee member and the Hugo administrator for Dublin 2019: An Irish Worldcon. It's been an extraordinary new thing in my life, which has given pleasure to a lot of people and given me a strong sense of ethical validation.

Hugo 2017 ceremony

Early in 2010, the BBC invited me to be part of the TV commentary team in Belfast for the General Election on 6 May, a frenetic experience of live broadcast which I wrote up here. I've since helped cover the 2011 Assembly election, the 2014 local and European elections, the 2015 Westminster election, the 2016 Assembly election, the 2017 Assembly election, the 2017 Westminster election, the 2019 local elections and the 2019 European parliament election. And I will do it again, for the tenth time in ten years (and the third time this year) for the British general election on 12 December. It gives me a certain visibility which I confess I enjoy, including my present status as a Visiting Professor at Ulster University. In this picture from the most recent election count in Magherafelt, you can see me and co-presenter Mark Devenport being beamed to a screen at the lower left, while at the top right you can see our backs as we are filmed on the upstairs level.

Professionally, I took a new step in September 2014 when after 18 years of work in the non-profit sector, I joined APCO Worldwide as head of the geopolitical team in their Brussels office. I have enjoyed the transition to the private sector. I find the KPIs are clearer – nobody makes me feel guilty for not having saved the world today, not even me – and I also find it easier to leave the work in the office. The team is large, diverse and fun to work with, and we do cool stuff, not all of which I can talk about. One thing I can say, today of all days, is that I've been very proud to work with Rotary on the global eradication of polio. They also let me throw axes sometimes.

On 1 January 2010, my children were 12, 10 and 7. Now they are 22, 20 and almost 17 – so two out of three have passed completely through teenagerhood. Our family is a bit different, of course, but with F's independence and U spending more time in the same residential centre as B, there is more time now for Anne and me to be with each other (though ironically as I write this she is spending a week away from the family for the first time ever). While I was on one of my trips last month, the others all got together for a ride on a wagon pulled by a tractor. I was sorry to miss it.

So that's how the decade has been for me. Many new friendships and experiences, but this is what I choose to write about.

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Tuesday reading

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Current
Two Brothers, by Ben Elton
Halo: The Thursday War, by Karen Traviss
One of the 28th: A tale of Waterloo, by G. A. Henty

Last books finished
A Close Run Thing, by Allan Mallinson
Red Alert, by Peter George

Next books
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikowsky
My Century, by Günther Grass

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Northern Ireland local election votes from May 2019 projected onto #GE2019 boundaries

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I've been going belatedly through the May 2019 local government election results for Northern Ireland, and projecting them onto the Westminster / Assembly constituency boundaries.

Westminster projection

In three cases, the party with most votes in May does not hold the Westminster seat.

The first, obviously, is North Down where Independent MP Sylvia Hermon is retiring. DUP are ahead here on May local govt figures – but Alliance can surely expect tactical boost from Greens not standing. (Other candidates are UUP and Conservatives.)

DUP UUP Cons Oth U Alliance Green Oth SDLP SF
2019lg 29.5% 19.8% 2.1% 0.9% 25.6% 14.4% 7.3% 0.1% 0.3%
2017w 38.1% 2.4% 41.2% 9.3% 6.5% 0.1% 1.0% 1.4%
2017a 37.5%** 21.5%* 1.7% 18.6%* 13.7%* 3.6% 1.8% 1.6%
2016a 41.7%*** 15.5%* 2.1% 4.0% 16.8%* 12.7%* 4.9% 1.3% 1.0%
2015w 23.6% 4.4% 55.2% 8.6% 5.4% 0.9% 1.0% 0.8%
2014lg 31.9% 17.3% 3.4% 7.5% 15.1% 7.9% 14.6% 2.3% 0.0%

In Foyle, Sinn Féin, who gained the Westminster seat in 2017, slipped back behind the SDLP in May local govt votes. Independent candidates got a lot of voters who had drifted away from SF – will they drift back? (Also standing: DUP, UUP, Alliance, PBPA, Aontú)

DUP UUP Oth U Alliance PBPA Oth SDLP SF
2019lg 11.4% 5.3% 5.2% 9.0% 12.3% 30.8% 26.0%
2017w 16.1% 1.8% 3.0% 39.3% 39.7%
2017a 13.4%* 3.7% 0.2% 2.5% 10.7% 1.1% 31.8%** 36.6%**
2016a 11.9%* 3.6% 3.0% 0.6% 10.5%* 10.9% 30.0%** 28.5%**
2015w 12.4% 3.3% 2.6% 2.3% 47.9% 31.6%
2014lg 11.9% 5.7% 2.7% 1.5% 11.4% 32.3% 34.4%
In South Belfast, the Alliance Party got the most votes in the May local govt elections, just ahead of the DUP. Sinn Féin not standing will help the SDLP; who will Green votes help more, SDLP or Alliance? How many votes will divert to Aontú? How many to the UUP?
DUP UUP Oth U Alliance Green Oth SDLP SF
2019lg 22.9% 6.1% 2.7% 24.5% 9.5% 5.2% 15.3% 13.2%
2017w 30.4% 3.5% 0.6% 18.2% 5.1% 25.9% 16.3%
2017a 20.8%* 9.0% 2.1% 17.8%* 9.9%* 3.4% 19.4%* 17.7%*
2016a 22.0%** 6.7% 7.4% 16.4%* 9.6%* 3.4% 20.0%* 14.2%*
2015w 22.2% 9.1% 6.4% 17.2% 5.7% 0.9% 24.5% 13.9%
2014lg 20.4% 10.1% 8.0% 19.4% 4.0% 6.1% 18.9% 13.5%

In two other Belfast seats held by DUP MPs, the party was just ahead on May local govt votes. In East Belfast, the lead over Alliance was less than 150 votes. Both Alliance and the DUP have tactical reserves, but the DUP will aim to squeeze the UUP candidate's vote.

DUP UUP PUP Oth U Alliance Oth SDLP SF
2019lg 33.4% 13.4% 4.8% 3.3% 33.0% 8.6% 0.4% 3.3%
2017w 55.8% 3.3% 1.0% 36.0% 1.4% 0.4% 2.1%
2017a 37.6%** 13.1%* 6.6% 3.0% 31.4%** 4.9% 0.6% 2.9%
2016a 36.7%*** 11.1%* 4.8% 4.1% 28.7%** 11.7% 0.4% 2.5%
2015w 49.3% 2.8% 42.8% 2.7% 0.3% 2.1%
2014lg 32.7% 16.4% 7.8% 8.5% 20.9% 9.3% 0.9% 3.4%

In North Belfast, the DUP numbers from May local govt votes are better, but my gut says it's a tougher defence. No SDLP candidate boosts SF considerably; absence of other Unionists boosts the DUP a bit less; Alliance are standing here as well.

DUP UUP Oth U Alliance Oth SDLP SF
2019lg 29.3% 8.0% 3.8% 11.2% 9.2% 13.4% 25.2%
2017w 46.2% 5.4% 2.2% 4.5% 41.7%
2017a 32.1%** 5.8% 5.1% 8.4% 6.1% 13.1%* 29.4%**
2016a 35.0%*** 5.4% 7.3% 7.0% 7.7% 10.6%* 26.5%**
2015w 47.0% 7.2% 3.6% 8.2% 33.9%
2014lg 29.4% 8.4% 12.3% 8.9% 6.4% 9.3% 25.4%

One other seat to note is Fermanagh and South Tyrone. On May local govt figures, the total Unionist vote is more than the SDLP and SF combined. But what about those independents? The DUP are not standing, UUP, SF, SDLP, Alliance and Ind Lab are.

DUP UUP Oth U Alliance Oth SDLP SF
2019lg 22.8% 18.6% 2.1% 2.5% 11.6% 11.9% 30.8%
2017w 45.5% 1.7% 0.8% 4.8% 47.2%
2017a 29.8%* 11.6%* 1.6% 2.7% 2.3% 9.8% 42.1%***
2016a 32.6%** 12.8%* 2.5% 1.1% 2.5% 8.5%* 39.9%**
2015w 46.4% 1.3% 1.5% 5.4% 45.4%
2014lg 18.1% 24.4% 4.6% 0.6% 8.1% 12.4% 31.8%
The other seven DUP seats look safe enough on May 2019 local govt figures. The UUP are in second place in North Antrim, South Antrim and Lagan ValleyEast Antrim and StrangfordEast Londonderry and Upper Bann.

Apart from Foyle and FST, Sinn Féin's other five seats also look safe on May 2019 local govt figures: West Belfast, South Down, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh and West Tyrone.

Assembly projection

This is not a cheerful set of Westminster projections for the UUP, but at Assembly level it's a different story – on May 2019 local govt figures they have prospects in South Down, Lagan Valley, East Londonderry, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh, and West Tyrone, though they are vulnerable in East Antrim.

Also on May local govt figures:

  • Alliance have Assembly prospects in North Belfast, South Belfast and East Antrim.
  • The SDLP are vulnerable in North Belfast and Lagan Valley, but have prospects in FST.
  • The DUP are vulnerable in South Down and Newry and Armagh, but have prospects in South Belfast.
  • The Greens are vulnerable S Belfast.
  • So is Claire Sugden in East Londonderry (though it's not a fair comparison as she was not represented in the local elections).
  • And SF are vulnerable in North Belfast, South Belfast, FST, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh and West Tyrone.

Of course, all elections are different; but best predictor of future voting behaviour remains past voting behaviour!

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December 2003 books

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In December 2003 we celebrated little U's first birthday, and at work I was dealing with the fallout from the previous month's events, rushing out a report on Georgia on the first of the month (actually most of it had been writen before the revolution on 25 November, but obviously needed updating) followed by one on the Preševo Valley in Southern Serbia. At the end of the month Serbia had an election.

The books I read in December 2003 were:

Non-fiction 3
The Myth of Greater Albania, by Paulin Kola
The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics, by Marcus du Sautoy
Eats Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss

SF 4
Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold
After London, by Richard Jeffries
Carolan's Concerto, by Caiseal Mór
Gateway, by Frederik Pohl

Comics 6
Sandman V: A Game Of You, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman VI: Fables & Reflections, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman VII: Brief Lives, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman VIII: World's End, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman IX: The Kindly Ones, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman X: The Wake, by Neil Gaiman

3,500 pages
2/13 by women, none by PoC.

I think Brief Lives is the best of the Sandman volumes, and probably ahead of Paladin of Souls as my favourite book of the month. You can get it here. I will get back to Paladin of Souls in due course as I do my Hugo/Nebula joint winners reread.

The one I would not recommend: Carolan's Concerto.


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Normal People, by Sally Rooney

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Second to fourth paragraphs of third chapter:

You should study English, says Marianne.
Do you think I should, or are you joking?
I think you should. It’s the only subject you really enjoy in school. And you spend all your free time reading.

I had missed all the hype around this book, which won the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, the Costa Award for Best Novel and was the Waterstone's Book of the year 2018 as well as being on the Mann Booker Prize longlist. The two protagonists grow up in the same County Sligo town and end up both attending Trinity College Dublin, and develop a deep friendship which is also an on-again, off-again love affair. Connell, the working-class popular kid at school, finds that at university he cannot fit in, while Marianne, posher but a loner at school, blossoms in Dublin (and elsewhere in Europe). Both are children of single mothers (Connell's father was never on the scene, Marianne's has died) who are also well portrayed (Connell's mother is basically sound, Marianne's isn't).

What I found particularly refreshing is that Rooney shows both protagonists as entirely mature and adult, making conscious choices if sometimes bad choices. They both have other relationships and friendships which are all convincingly and economically depicted. There is plenty of sex here, but it is again economically portrayed rather than going into titillating detail (though Marianne does get a bit kinky). What happens before and after the physical part is more important, and the journey that both of them take makes sense. Apparently there is a TV series coming.

My student days are long ago, but I found a lot to empathise with here. My siblings both studied at Trinity, and so did some of my friends from school, so although I was a Cambridge undergraduate and went on to do my PhD in Belfast, I hung out often enough in the same places as Rooney's fictional characters twenty-five years later, and had one or two winces of recognition. And of course my own memories of student romance and relationship building, whether in Ireland or in England, are still pretty vivid. I liked it a lot. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that list is Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson.

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Tuesday reading

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Current
Two Brothers, by Ben Elton
A Close Run Thing, by Allan Mallinson
Halo: The Thursday War, by Karen Traviss

Last books finished
The Highgate Horror, by Mark Wright, David A. Roach, Mike Collins, Jacqueline Rayner and Martin Geraghty
"Catch That Zeppelin!", by Fritz Leiber
In Black and White, and Other Stories, by Jan Mark
Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding

Next books
One of the 28th: A tale of Waterloo, by G. A. Henty
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikowsky

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November 2003 books

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I’ve been bookblogging since November 2003, and will reach the twenty-year mark about four years from now. So I’m going to try and do some retrospective posts, every six or seven days, starting today, looking at the books I read each month a while back with also some reflections on what was going on for me in each month.

November 2003 was politically momentous – there were elections in Northern Ireland and Croatia, a major political crisis in Moldova, and an election followed by a revolution in Georgia, all of which affected my work, though we were able to publish a report on Mostar. I also attended a conference in Vienna with my American intern B, who is now a computer game designer in Arizona. He left halfway through the month and was replaced by a Croatian journalist, S, who is now back in Zagreb working as a press officer for an international organisation.

At home, we took the kids to a snoezelruimte, which the older two both enjoyed.

C2C568A9-A4DB-4EA6-9EA8-969C8298DBA1.jpeg
EB864F57-6F1E-4757-8019-3CD1BD7F8791.jpeg

For me and U it was a bit overwhelming.

EB864F57-6F1E-4757-8019-3CD1BD7F8791.jpeg

The books I read in November 2003 were:

Non-fiction 1
Why is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond

SF 6
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer
Floater, by Lucius Shepard
Double Star, by Robert Heinlein
The Separation, by Christopher Priest
Ersatz Nation, by Tim Kenyon

Comics 1
Sandman IV: Season of Mists, by Neil Gaiman

2,300 pages
8/8 by white men.

Links above are to my reviews; links below to Amazon(.co.uk).

The one I wrote least about at the time, but that on reflection I think is definitely the best of them, is The Separation, Christopher Priest’s story of dual identites, overlapping histories and alternate timelines for the second world war. I’ll return to it reasonably soon, as it won both the Clarke and BSFA Awards. You can get it here. (I think American Gods, which is certainly by far the best known of these eight books and would have been even before the recent TV series, is interesting but flawed; you can get it here.)

The book I would not recommend is Ersatz Nation, a poorly written and jumbled narrative.

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The Calcutta Chromosome, by Amitav Ghosh

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He slumped back in his chair, yawning. His eyes began to glaze over at the thought of the steaming cup of sweet, dark tea that was waiting for him at the neon-lit doughnut shop in Penn Station; of the other regulars who occasionally dropped by to sit around the plastic-topped table—the Sudanese bankteller, the well-dressed Guyanese woman who worked in a Chelsea used-clothes store, the young Bangladeshi man from the subway newsstand. Often they just sat in companionable silence around a circular plastic-topped table at the back of the shop, sipping tea or coffee out of paper cups while watching tapes of Arabic and Hindi films on a small portable monitor. But every once in a while, there would be a discussion, or they would exchange tips–about a gadget that was on sale somewhere, or some new scam for saving on subway tokens.

The Calcutta Chromosome is a fascinating book in which the research of Ronald Ross into malaria in 1898 turns out to have been something of a sham, in fact the outcome of manipulation by shadowy forces whose nature is only hinted at. The story is told in roughly three timelines: a near-future New York (probably roughly 2019), where an unassuming Egyptian with a friendly Siri-like AI is sucked into research on how and why a former colleague who was obsessed with Ross disappeared in 1995; the story from the former colleague’s point of view, as he goes to Calcutta to get first-hand evidence on what Ross actually did; and the story from Ross’s own point of view, which does not really explain all that much. The western versions of science and history are in conflict with Indian traditions, and subverted by the mysterious immortal character Behind It All; there is a memorable ghost train moment as well.

It’s a really fun read – Murugan’s obsession with Ross could have been weritten as tedious info-dumping, but Ghosh turns it into some very strong characterisation, and the other Indian characters of 1995, the poet Phulboni, the journalists Sonali and Urmila, and indeed Calcutta itself are vividly visualised. The ending is a bit of a let-down, in that the various plot strands are not really brought together and none of them is really resolved, though hints are left for the reader to draw their own conclusions. Still, I’m glad that the Clarke judges stepped outside the usual circles of genre fiction to recognise this. You can get it here.

The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997, the year that The Sparrow won the Tiptree Award and Excession the BSFA Award. The other shortlisted books were Blue Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson; Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, by Sheri S. Tepper; Looking for the Mahdi, by N. Lee Wood; The Engines of God, by Jack McDevitt; and Voyage, by Stephen Baxter. (Odd note: the losing five all had the same publisher.) I have not read the Wood, and think I have read the McDevitt but cannot remember anything about it. I have certainly read the other three. I don’t think Blue Mars stands well on its own considered separately from the two previous volumes of the Mars trilogy, and would question whether it is really even a novel, though admittedly it won the Hugo; and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is not Tepper’s best.

But it’s interesting that the judges decided to go for The Calcutta Chromosome rather than Voyage, which is much more firmly in the Arthur C. Clarke tradition and which I think would have got my vote if I’d been a judge in 1997 (it has a much more satisfactory ending). Poor Stephen Baxter has had seven novels shortlisted for the Clarke, but has never won it. Voyage did win the Sidewise Award for Alternate History that year.

Next up in this sequence will be that year’s BSFA-winner, Excession, by Iain M. Banks (a reread).

Arthur C. Clarke Award winners:
The Handmaid’s Tale | The Sea and Summer | Unquenchable Fire | The Child Garden | Take Back Plenty | Synners | Body of Glass | Vurt | Fools | Fairyland | The Calcutta Chromosome | The Sparrow | Dreaming in Smoke | Distraction | Perdido Street Station | Bold as Love | The Separation | Quicksilver | Iron Council | Air | Nova Swing | Black Man | Song of Time | The City & the City | Zoo City | The Testament of Jessie Lamb | Dark Eden | Ancillary Justice | Station Eleven | Children of Time | The Underground Railroad | Dreams Before the Start of Time | Rosewater | The Old Drift | The Animals in that Country | Deep Wheel Orcadia | Venomous Lumpsucker | In Ascension | Annie Bot

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Tom Jones: film (1963) and book (1749)

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Tom Jones won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1963, and picked up another three: Best Director (Tony Richardson), Best Substantially Original Score (John Addison) and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (John Osborne). Five of the actors got nominations, which I think may be a record (I haven’t been counting) – Albert Finney in the title role for Best Actor, Hugh Griffith as Squire Western for Best Supporting Actor, and three (which is definitely a record) for Best Supporting Actress – Edith Evans as Miss Western, Diane Cilento as Molly Seagrim, and Joyce Redman as Mrs. Waters/Jenny Jones.

The other Best Picture nominees were America America, Cleopatra, How the West Was Won and Lilies of the Field, none of which I have seen. On the two IMDB rankings of 1963 films, Tom Jones does not rank highly, 32nd on one list and 22nd on the other. The only Oscar-winning film so far that does worse on these metrics is Cavalcade (25th and 40th). Seventeen films are ranked ahead of Tom Jones on both systems; I have seen four of them, From Russia With Love, The Sword in the Stone, The Pink Panther and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. The other 1963 film I am sure that I have seen is Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, which is (rightly) ranked lower. The Hugo was not awarded that year.

Here’s a trailer.

It’s a Bildungsroman of Merrie England, based on a famous 18th-century novel, and starring good-looking up-and-coming English actors. I liked some aspects of it, but I was ultimately a bit dissatisfied – perhaps it fitted the 1960s Zeitgeist, by fitting that into an older boisterous tradition – and for the first time in ten years I’m adding this to my bottom ten films, just ahead of The Greatest Show on Earth (the plot is less boring and cinematography more interesting) and below Gone With The Wind.

We have just one actor here who has already been in an Oscar-winning film, Hugh Griffith as Squire Western. He blacked up as Sheikh Ilderim for an Oscar-winning performance in Ben-Hur four years ago; here he has perhaps rouged up as the alcoholic squire (he was apparently not acting the alcoholic bit).

This was the film debut for two actors who both went on to become significant in Doctor Who and (in one case) Game of Thrones. Both play bad guys here. Julian Glover is the nasty Lieutenant Northerton; two years later he was in Doctor Who as Richard the Lionheart, again in 1979 as Count Scarlioni in City of Death, and finally in GoT as Grand Maester Pycelle.

And David Warner, here the unpleasantly priggish young Blifil who almost gets Tom killed, has done several Doctor Who voice roles and appeared on screen as Professor Grisenko in the Matt Smith episode Cold War.

A bit more obscurely, James Cairncross is Parson Supple here, and also appeared twice in black-and-white Doctor Who, as Lemaitre in the William Hartnell story now known as The Massacre (which is lost from the archives) and also with Patrick Troughton as Beta, one of the Gonds in The Krotons (which survives).

There is a lot to like about this film, and I’m trying to identify why it didn’t really work for me. As with All The King’s Men, I watched it on Eurostar after a long day in London, which possibly didn’t help. In the end it comes down to two things, I think. First, there are lots of brilliant scenes and little bits and pieces, but it somehow doesn’t come together. The director, Tony Richardson, himself described it as “incomplete and botched in much of its execution”. Second, a lot of the characters simply are not very nice – Tom Jones himself is a completely irresponsible casual user of women, and we cheer his rescue from hanging at the end not because he is good but because he is innocent of that particular offence. Grotesques can be funny to watch but are usually difficult to relate to. Somehow the characters in the original book came over as more three-dimensional.

An awful lot of Oscar-winning film adaptations have erased or minimalised non-white characters from the original books that they are based on. This is the first one that I have noticed actually adding a non-white character, though it is a very small non-speaking and uncredited role – a boy servant in Lord Fellamar’s house in London.

Although three of the cast received Best Supporting Actress nominations, the film is not especially enlightened on the battle of the sexes – we are invited to admire Tom’s behaviour and the damage that he does is treated humorously. Having said that, the actresses all deserved their nominations. Here’s the famous erotic dining scene with Albert Finney in the title role and Joyce Redman as Jenny:

Diane Cilento absolutely smoulders as Molly:

And Edith Evans hits the mark as Miss Western:

But I actually think Susanna York was robbed of a nomination – even though she is the Good Girl, I think she carries it off awfully well and has very convincing chemistry with Albert Finney.

The cinematography is tremendously quirky. There are a lot of innovative cuts between scenes, stop-motion interludes, the opening sequence done as a silent movie (though in colour), occasional breaking the fourth wall. Micheal MacLiammoir’s voice provides a lovely warm narration. It’s a shame that it doesn’t really come together. The classic scene is the hunt, expanded from about three lines in the book to six minutes on screen – a tremendous bit of filming.

Finally, a couple of historical trivia: this was the last film that President Kennedy saw before he was assassinated; and the singer Tom Jones took his stage name from the title. You can get it here.

Next up is My Fair Lady, a film I know well.

I went back to reread the book as well (am slightly regretting this policy decision after both this and Lawrence of Arabia turn out to be very long). Second paragraph of third chapter:

And true it is that he did many of these things; but had he done nothing more I should have left him to have recorded his own merit on some fair freestone over the door of that hospital. Matters of a much more extraordinary kind are to be the subject of this history, or I should grossly mis-spend my time in writing so voluminous a work; and you, my sagacious friend, might with equal profit and pleasure travel through some pages which certain droll authors have been facetiously pleased to call The History of England.

When I read the book back in 2012, I wrote:

The classic novel of 1749, whose prose style is in places a bit tedious but also in places very funny. The plot is a basic romantic comedy, but it is enlivened by the authorial asides which open each of the individual books within the novel, and by the author’s grasp of character which must have inspired Dickens. There are also a couple of passages which pastiche Homer, Vergil and I think the King James Bible, and there must have been others that I missed.

Some social points of the 1740s that I found interesting: women had few enough rights, but in Fielding’s account retained an absolute right to accept or refuse an offer of marriage. Presumably coercion was a ground for divorce or annulment, and there must have been enough cases for it to be a real issue. I was also interested that Sophia’s father is depicted as having much the thickest West Country accent of any of the characters, despite being the local squire. A hundred years later, I guess all gentlemen of his class would have been assimilated into poshness by public school; but in the 1740s you only needed to communicate with the locals in your rural fastness. Mr Western of course has no time for education or politics (his sister, who serves as comic relief, is also the most politically aware character in the book). I was also struck by the relative lack of animus to the Irish (cf Shakespeare, who scores rather badly there):

Sophia heaved a deep sigh, and answered, “Indeed, Harriet, I pity you from my soul!—-But what could you expect? Why, why, would you marry an Irishman?”

“Upon my word,” replied her cousin, “your censure is unjust. There are, among the Irish, men of as much worth and honour as any among the English: nay, to speak the truth, generosity of spirit is rather more common among them. I have known some examples there, too, of good husbands; and I believe these are not very plenty in England. Ask me, rather, what I could expect when I married a fool.”

It was a bit of a slog in places but I am glad to have read it.

Slightly cheating here, as I haven’t finished rereading it yet, but I stand by what I previously wrote – Fielding’s characters are much more solid and three-dimensional than the grotesques of the film.

One bit of context worth noting is that the book is set firmly during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and its characters (including the soldiers) are widely dispersed along the spectrum of allegiance to King George or Bonnie Prince Charlie – and remember that this isn’t ancient history for Fielding and his readers, it was only four years before publication. Fascinating that a writer could depict loyalty to a treasonous (if defeated) cause in such a sympathetic light, and get away with it.

You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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The Computer Connection, by Alfred Bester

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

We pulled him off the poor old Shortie and were met at the gate by Fee, who seemed rather impressed by Nemo’s performance. Muggings she knew all about, but this was the first time she’d ever seen one used as an excuse for a lecture. Fee conducted us to the landing site and it was my turn to be impressed.

Very much in the shadow of Bester's better-known The Demolished Man (winner of the first Hugo for Best Novel) and The Stars My Destination, this was his first novel for almost 20 years when it came out in 1974. Critical reaction then was disappointed; Bester had perhaps laid the path for the New Wave writers of the intervening period but was now behind the curve. Forty years on, I must say I enjoyed it a lot; the plot concerns a group of immortals in the very near future, who are dealing with a supercomputer that has acquired human intelligence, and the style remains pyrotechnical – and yet I never lost track of what was going on, or why we should care about these characters. Bester's reading of Native American traditions would not really pass muster today, but in fact he uses the perspective of his Cherokee characters to make some statements about American society in general and to an extent also about gender politics. I came away feeling that this has been underrated and might be due a reappraisal. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that list is Dragonworld, by Byron Preiss.

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Be My Enemy, by Ian McDonald

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The centre of the ring suddenly blazed with light, whiter than white, painfully bright. Two men in dark suits stepped out of the light. The first was a sharp-faced white man with fair, curly hair. Everett recognised the second as the Prime Minister. Their steps, begun on another world, carried them a long way in the moon's low gravity. The Prime Minister lost his footing for a moment but recovered with dignity. Madam Moon stepped forward to meet them. A nod from her indicated that he should do the same. He had worked out a way of walking here that didn't send him bounding into the air looking stupid. It was a kind of low shuffling. It was not very elegant, but it kept him on the floor. The fair-haired man had the trick of it but the Prime Minister did not. Every stride took him up into the air and down again.

Sequel to Planesrunner, which I read last year. Our protagonist continues to try and tie things together between his/our own reality, a steampunk alternate timeline, and some much nastier worlds. I got a bit lost with the evil robot doubles but generally enjoyed it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2013. Next on that pile is Halo: The Thursday War, by Karen Traviss.

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