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The Last Days of New Paris, by China Miéville

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He did not see or hear her arrive at the door to the cellar where he was working, until she called him by name, gently enough not to alert his comrades above. He reached for his gun at the sight of her but she tutted and shook her head with collegial imperiousness. “I’m Main à plume,” she said, and he believed her. That it was by some technique from the canon, some re-uttered poem in a novel context, that she had gained unseen entrance. He put his rifle down.

This was one of the near misses for the Hugos in 2017, but I was interested to read it anyway as Miéville is always provocative. Here we have an alternate timeline where Paris is still resisting the Nazis in 1950, and the Surrealist artists are united with the Partisans in resistance. I'm afraid it would have meant more to me if I knew more about the artistic connections, which were somewhat above my head. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next up is The Moomins and the Great Flood, by Tove Jansson.

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Wednesday reading

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Current
Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

Last books finished
Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, by Ian Marter
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow
Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment, by Ian Marter
The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen
Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks
A Killing Winter, by Tom Callaghan
Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen, by Terrance Dicks
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn

Next books
The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant
Arc of the Dream, by A. A. Attanasio

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The First Season 12: The Ark in Space

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I definitely remember watching The Ark in Space first time around – again, not sure that I caught every episode, but the setting of the space station far in humanity's future was immediately entrancing. When the show returned, this was one of the first DVDs I bought. I wrote then:

Harry is a bit annoying, but it's every bit as good as I thought I remembered from when I was seven (I admit I watched the updated CGI version rather than the one with the original model shots, so the only really wobbly bit was the march of the Wirrn over the hull in the last episode). Of course, Ian Marter's novelisation was even more fun, but there's lots to like here – particularly pleasing are the characterisation of Tom Baker's Doctor (only his second story broadcast, though of course the third to be filmed), the first episode with nobody other than the Doctor and companions, and the banter between minor characters Rogin and Lycett. DVD extras are OK, including an interview with Tom Baker in Wookey Hole filmed while making Revenge of the Cybermen.

When I came back to it in my 2009-11 rewatch, I wrote:

I've often remarked in the course of this rewatch that I've revised my view of a story from mediocre to decent (or more rarely vice versa) when watching it in sequence. For the first time, with The Ark in Space, I'm revising my rating from "excellent" to "really superb". In particular, the first episode, establishing the new Team Tardis (particularly the Harry-Doctor relationship, Sarah already being a known quantity) with no other characters seen, is a great stroke – I think the last time we had a new companion treated in anything like this much introductory detail was Zoe.

The rest of the story is good too, with a great deal made of very little physical material – green bubble-wrap and about three sets in total. And Kenton Moore's agonised performance of Noah is excellent. (I had missed on previous watchings, but 'Noah' is his nickname, his real name being 'Lazar', i.e. Lazarus, so in fact a character with two Biblical references.) Slightly let down by the adult Wirrn but they are far from the worst monsters ever (or even this season).

This time around I watched it with the visiting in-laws,and they in their late seventies were as captivated by it as I was aged seven in the mid-seventies. I had forgotten just how claustrophobic the set is made to feel, psychologically reinforced by the rapid spate of deaths in the second episode, and the body horror of the Wirrn (Noah vs his arm being another shout-out to Dr Strangelove). Also, the different parts of the Nerva beacon are distinct enough from each other that we don't get lost – there is a clear correlation between the external model shot and what we see inside. We don't always get that in 1970s TV science fiction.

Doctor Who and the Ark in Space was the first of ten novelisations by Ian Marter, who actually played Harry Sullivan on screen (and still has the second highest tally of novelisations after Terrance Dicks, despite having died in 1986). I did a big article about Marter for Strange Horizons a while ago; here are the relevant bits:

Marter's first two Doctor Who books, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space (1977) and Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment (1978), were both based on stories broadcast in 1975 in which Marter himself had appeared as Harry, and there's a corresponding emphasis on the character. It is weaker in the former, a story of alien insects infiltrating a far-future space station where humanity lies dormant, waiting for the earth to become inhabitable again, although Harry very much provides the viewpoint in the first chapter as we are introduced to the Doctor, Sarah, and the futuristic setting.

Marter both added and subtracted from the story as broadcast. He removed, somewhat surprisingly, most of the humorous lines of dialog, such as the Doctor's line from The Ark in Space: "Well, my doctorate is purely honorary, and Harry here is only qualified to work on sailors." It is, of course, a joke on Harry's character, but perhaps Marter just felt the line didn't work as well on the page as it does on the screen. It's also a bit surprising that the unusual link between the two television stories—the Doctor and his companions travel to Earth via transmat beam—was dropped in favour of the more standard journey in the Doctor's TARDIS.

He added, however, some simply superb descriptive passages which one really regrets were not realised on-screen. Sometimes it's just little things, like the Doctor opening a door on the space station by thinking at it. At his best, there are some much longer sections: [eg] Sarah's journey through the ventilation duct, through the mass of Wirrrn—another thing added by Marter is an extra "r" in the name of the monster insects. He also adds graphical nastiness and violence. One character's head explodes, revealing the Wirrrn within. Another's body is "burnt to a colourless crystal."

Basically, if your attention is suddenly held by the prose in one of Marter's novelizations, it's a fair bet that it's something he added. Doctor Who and the Ark in Space is a really good read, to the point where Andrew Wrixon at the Doctor Who Ratings Guide blames Marter for making him unable to enjoy the original television version as much as he does the novel.

Coming back to it now, Marter's shift in tone from Dicks is even more remarkable; this is a gruesome gritty story, where future humanity has impoverished itself spiritually through unimaginative specialisation, failing to question the flawed political leadership of Noah until the disruptive Tardis crew stimulates them to do so. But the book somewhat deprecates the considerable agency of the women characters in the original – it's very interesting that the High Minister of Earth is a woman (as Harry says, in the year that Margaret Thatcher was elected Leader of the Opposition, "Fancy a member of the fair sex being top of the totem pole?")  played by Gladys Spencer, who at the age of 80 must have been one of the oldest actors to appear in Doctor Who to that date (even if we only hear her voice).

This is a good story, but only the second best of this season. You can get the DVD here and the book here (a new edition with a foreword by Steven Moffat).

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January 2005 books

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The year began with a big push at work on the future status of Kosovo, with a full-scale report and also an op-ed by me. We also did a report on the EU's crisis response capacities which I'm still rather proud of, and got me a quote in the Washington Times. My new intern, A, from Kazakhstan, started working with me. I went to Rome to speak to the NATO Defence College, spoke at the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, and also to Ljubljana to brief the Slovenian foreign minister as he took up the OSCE Chairmanship-in-Office. Here's me waiting to speak at the European Parliament.

January 2005 books:

Non-Fiction 3
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey
The Twelve Caesars, by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus
The Star Factory, by Ciaran Carson

Non-Genre 1
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

SF 5
England Swings SF, ed. Judith Merril
Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan
Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison
Nebula Award Stories Number Three, ed. Roger Zelazny
The Chick is in the Mail, ed. Esther M Friesner

3,400 pages
2/9 by women
none by PoC

Best book of the month was Dostoevsky's classic Crime and Punishment, which you can get here, closely followed by The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which is not as awful as the title may suggest, and which you can get here. I rather bounced off The Chick is in the Mail, but you can get it here.


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Roots and Wings: Ten Lessons of Motherhood that Helped Me Create and Run a Company, by Margery Kraus

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

It isn’t easy to achieve your dreams; it takes commitment and hard work, along with the courage to take risks.

You may not have heard of Margery Kraus, but she is very important in my own life, in that she founded my employer, APCO Worldwide, in 1984 and remains our Executive Chairman. (Incidentally, the commemoration of the 1984 date explains why I dressed up as a Ghostbuster for last year's Christmas party.) This is quite a short book in which she explains her personal philosophy, and how she links her family life to running the company (which does have rather a family atmosphere about it). There are lots of illustrations, and I learned a lot about the author's early life – like many Americans, her family fled Nazi Europe; unlike many, they stopped off in Cuba for a number of years en route; she also had early business experience assisting her father in running a football team. It's a personal account of her career, including one or two incidents that I recognised from my own five years with the company. An interesting snapshot of the life (or lives) of a woman who has been successful in business while also managing her family. You can get it here.

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The First Season 12: Robot

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It struck me as the year turned that this year’s Doctor Who series, being the twelfth of New Who, occupies in a sense the same space as the first series of Old Who featuring Tom Baker, which is also the first series of Doctor Who that I remember really making an effort to watch as it was broadcast (I was seven). So, time to go back, and also revisit my own previous takes.

I think I only caught the last episode of Robot first time around, in 1975, and was puzzled as to why the Doctor was not the grey-haired smartly dressed chap I had seen before. So when I watched in 2007, it was the first time for the first three episodes, though I had of course read the novelisation and the bits from The Making of Doctor Who that looked at the scriptwriting process. I wrote:

Robot was the first of Tom Baker's stories as the Fourth Doctor, its first episode shown at the end of December 1974. I should really have watched it before getting the first set of Sarah Jane Smith audios, as they turn out to be a sort of sequel. It is particularly remarkable (even now, when Pertwee's Doctor is a distant memory) for Baker's jarring, eccentric performance in the title role. In the very first episode, after the hilarious costume change scene, he mimes the sinking of the Titanic while standing in a jeep. This is why Baker was and remains my favourite Doctor – the sense that he is not only a hero, but an alien hero, which only Hartnell and Ecclestone really have come close to. He turns what is basically a standard Pertwee/UNIT story into a real feast of entertainment. Everyone else is good, including the fascist scientists. (Shame about the tank and the final dodgy CSO of the growing and shrinking robot, but you can't have everything.)

A few years later, in 2010, I reached it in my rewatch of Old Who from the beginning, and wrote:

By a fortunate coincidence, I was watching Robot at the same time as reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, where the gifted technical folks, feeling that the world does not value them enough, withdraw from it until everyone else has starved to death. The story clearly has roots in Mrs Thatcher and fascism as well as King Kong and Frankenstein; there is a brilliant scene with Timothy Craven playing a character called Short (his only lines in the entire story) who is a real nerds-will-rule-the-world type.

The main delight of course is watching Tom Baker, fresh and new, but walking into the part as if it was what he was meant to do all his life (which perhaps it was); his line about the Titanic, his experiments with costume, his tricks with the scarf, his combination of gritty moral determination with bonkers humour, all make me wish I had seen all of this first time round rather than just the fourth episode.

Watching again now, especially with The Woman Who Fell To Earth still fairly fresh in my memory, I see a bit more of what the production team is trying to do – a debut story for a new Doctor in the comfortable environment of a UNIT adventure, simultaneously reassuring the audience that this is still they show they know and love but also tickling them to keep watching for new excitement with a new lead. Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier were the only two well-established companions to survive a change of Doctor in Old Who (in New Who, there's Rose, Clara and to an extent Captain Jack and River Song). Both of them get some decent exchanges with the new Doctor, the best line being surely "Naturally, I mean, the rest were all foreigners", though Sarah's "Brigadier, you're a swinger" is a close competitor.

It does have its flaws. Baker mugs for the camera rather a lot in the first episode before settling into it (there's a bit of that in The Sontaran Experiment as well). The not-so-special effects have been mentioned. I also found Professor Kettlewell's arc rather unconvincing (Dicks tries harder to explain it in the book, but does not really succeed; the same is true to a lesser extent of Jellicoe). However I think you could safely recommend it as a jumping-off point for newbies wanting to watch Old Who, just as it was for me 35 years ago.

I revisited the novelisation in 2008, and wrote:

Oddly enough, Dicks is not especially good at making his own stories transition happily to the printed page. There are some good bits added/changed here, especially the characterisation of the new Doctor, but in general it is competent rather than exciting.

One point that struck me on reading this (rather than on watching the TV original) was the similarity between the Robot and the Hangman in Roger Zelazny's Hugo/Nebula winning novella, "Home is the Hangman". The Who story came first, but I would be surprised to learn that Zelazny had had a chance to see it; both he and Dicks were, of course, drawing from many other sources going back at least as far as Mary Shelley.

Quite by coincidence, I reread “Home is the Hangman” very recently. The similarities with Robot are striking, but I think must be pure chance; Zelazny’s story was published only a few months after Robot was broadcast, and he is unlikely to have seen it in America. The other partial inspiration which I also recently revisited is, of course, Dr Strangelove. And of course there’s King Kong.

This was the first novelisation of a Fourth Doctor story, and came out only a couple of months after the original broadcast. It is rather clearly written for younger readers than most novelisations; Terrance Dicks perhaps still finding his range. The second paragraph of the third chapter of the book is:

The Thinktank had started life as a manor house, built by a wealthy merchant in the spacious days of the nineteenth century. Now, in the twentieth, it was far too expensive for any private owner to keep up. Like many other big houses, it had been taken over by the Government. Its size and relative isolation made it an ideal choice for the newly-founded Thinktank. Now the sprawling wings of the main building, and the many stables, barns, outhouses, potting sheds, and greenhouses, had all been converted into ultra-modern laboratories. Mercifully, the conversion had been carried out unobtrusively, and, except for the addition of a guarded perimeter fence, the outside of the fine old building was unchanged. The Director’s office, once the Squire’s study, was also very much the same, except for the addition of a few filing cabinets.

I remember, when first reading the book aged nine or so, being rather excited by the concept of a thinktank; now that I have actually worked for a couple of them and deal with them every day, the glamour has worn off just a little!

But actually, having watched the whole of Season 12, it strikes me just how political the stories are. Some are more obviously so than others; here we have the question of accountability for state-funded research which has potentially lethal consequences, and also the dangers of a fanatical group of scientists setting up a state-within-a-state, plus a shout out to the dangers of nuclear war. Put like that, Robot is in part a dress rehearsal for the greatest of this season’s stories.

You can get the DVD here and the book here.

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2001: A Space Odyssey

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Along with my trek through the series of Oscar-winning films, I'm also revisiting the Hugo and Nebula/Bradbury winners of the same year. Although Worldcons had been presenting a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation since 1958, 2001: A Space Odyssey was only the third film to win, in 1968 (after The Incredible Shrinking Man won the inagural 1958 Hugo and Dr Strangelove won in 1965) – five of the first ten ballots were won by TV series (The Twilight Zone three times and Star Trek twice), two were No-Awarded and two years were simply skipped. There was some serious competition in 1968; I have not seen Charly or Rosemary's Baby, but I have seen both Yellow Submarine and "Fall Out", the last episode of The Prisoner.

For all that, I'm with the IMDB users who rank 2001 as the best movie of the year on both IMDB systems (here and here). It has particular nostalgia for my own early engagement with science fiction. I think this was the first film I ever went to see in the cinema without an adult (my younger brother probably came with me). The book must have been one of the first books I bought for myself. So I was slightly concerned re-watching it with young F who was keeping half an eye on the screen. Would the magic have lasted?

And well, yes, it has. Taking the four sequences in turn, each has its particularly glorious moments. The Dawn of Man sequence is particularly good for the performance of Daniel Richter, who as well as playing lead ape-man Moon-Watcher also choreographed the other actors.


Added to this impressive technical performance from Richter and team, the use of lighting and especially the background music make the whole sequence a rather incredible experience, telling a short story without words (indeed, basically telling this Clarke story from 1953).

Then we cut from bone to spaceship, one of the most memorable transitions in cinema.


And now we are in the world of 2001 – or possibly 1999; I'm not sure if it is stated which of the future segments takes place in which year. Today, with 2001 19 years in the past rather than 33 years in the future, we can smirk a bit about some of the things that didn't work out the way the film portrayed them. From 1968, it seemed reasonable to extrapolate that the moon landings, less than a year away, would be the beginning of a new age of human exploration, rather than a technical dead end. Pan Am and Bell are no more, and what's with the choice of languages in the space station?

In the book, the languages are "English, Russian, and [sic] Chinese, French, German and Spanish" which at least is closer to international reality in 1968, 2001 and 2020. (But where's Arabic?)

Another less-than-briliant point about the film is the fact that there is not a single non-white character to be seen (in the book, one of the stewardesses is Indonesian) and that women barely get a look-in, at least among the Americans; among the Soviet scientists, the women appear to be at least of equal status with the men (an imporvement from the book, in which the encounter is not with a group of Soviet scientists but with a single male Russian). Speaking of the Soviets, there's a familiar face there:

Yep, it's Leonard Rossiter, later famous as Reginald Perrin, but here playing Dr. Andrei Smyslov. We'll be coming back to him in a future post. And speaking of familiar faces, here are two actors who had both been in William Hartnell's final Doctor Who story, The Tenth Planet, two years earlier: Robert Beattie, the head of security here who was the crazed General Cutler at the South pole contending with Cybermen (and had had a previous encounter with Hartnell in a Belfast pub in Odd Man Out).


And Glenn Beck – not that Glenn Beck, the other one – an astronaut on the moon here and a TV announcer in Doctor Who, having been a pilot in Dr Strangelove the year before.


So, this whole sequence is the only part of the film that shows us a bigger picture of human society in the future, and while it's a snapshot of life for the scientific and political elite dealing with a crisis, it's still very successful at humanising a more technological world – despite the goofs mentioned above. The story of an unspeakable alien intrusion disrupting this carefully ordered society is well told. And gosh, it looks beautiful.

Then we shift to the Discovery heading for Jupiter (in 2001? Or 2003?), where all efforts have been made for the comfort of the hibernating astronauts.


I'm going to give a couple more shout-outs to minor cast members. Kenneth Kendall was the first ever BBC newsreader to appear in from of a TV camera, in 1955 (previously the BBC had newsreel style bulletins). Here he interviews the Discovery crew; he had been in another Hartnell-era Doctor Who story, The War Machines, also as a newsreader.


And referring back to my Oscars project, Frank Poole's mother is played by Ann Gillis, who thirty-two years earlier appeared in The Great Ziegfeld as a young friend of the protagonist. She was only ten years older than Gary Lockwood who plays Poole (she died almost exactly two years ago). I currently rank The Great Ziegfeld 40th out of the 40 Oscar-winning films I have seen.

This section of the film is actually a very basic SF pulp story – two astronauts and their AI helper, which goes mad and kills one of them, and is then killed by the other. It's actually marginal to the main thrust of the narrative, except that we are supposd to believe (as is made clearer in the book) that HAL's breakdown is caused by the secrecy around the mission. But with superb filmography, even the most cliched story can be made great, and that indeed is what happens here. I remember being shocked, as a teenager, by the casual and brutal death of Frank. As Dave Bowman desperately blew the doors open and risked vacuum to regain entry to his ship, F sat up straight and said, "Dad, this is really good!" He is right.

And the scene where Dave then destroys HAL's brain is gripping and gut-wrenching.

I don't think Keir Dullea has been in anything else that I have seen, apart from the sequel to this film. His on-screen persona is very reminiscent of the public image of Neil Armstrong, and that's probably not accidental. It's a great case of impressive performance with very few words. (It can be fairly commented that of the three main characters in this segment, HAL is the most emotional, more so than the human crew members.)

And then the end. Well. This somewhat baffled and disappointed me as a teenager in Belfast around 1983. I find myself much more tolerant now (also of course it has the benefit of being familiar). I had forgotten about the rather fascinating landscapes that Dave Bowman traverses once through the Star Gate.

I had not forgotten about his successive encounters with his aging selves.

And the ending remains vivid, striking and intriguing.

You can get it here.

On to A Clockwork Orange next, another Kubrick film.

I missed a trick when I wrote up Doctor Strangelove – it was actually the tenth Hugo-winning film for Best Dramatic Presentation (counting the Retro Hugo winners). So here is my ranking of them all so far:

11) Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Retro Short, 1944)
10) Heaven Can Wait (Retro Long, 1944)
9) The Incredible Shrinking Man (Outstanding Movie, 1958)
8) Pinocchio (Retro Short Form, 1941)
7) Destination Moon (Retro, 1951)
6) The War of the Worlds (Retro, 1954)
5) Fantasia (Retro Long Form, 1941)
4) Bambi (Retro, 1943)
3) The Picture of Dorian Gray (Retro, 1946)
2) Dr Strangelove (1965)
1) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Coming back to 2001, there are not one but two books-of-the-film. The first one, an alternative treatment of the plot where more is explained and the Discovery finished up at Saturn instead of Jupiter (more specifically Iapetus) was, as noted above, one of the first books I remember buying for myself. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Down at the river the Others made their usual ineffectual threats. Their leader, a one-eared man-ape of Moon-Watcher's size and age, but in poorer condition, even made a brief foray towards the tribe's territory, screaming loudly and waving his arms in an attempt to scare the opposition and to bolster his own courage. The water of the stream was nowhere more than a foot deep, but the further One-Ear moved out, into it, the more uncertain and unhappy he became. Very soon he slowed to a halt, and then moved back, with exaggerated dignity, to join his companions.

What I noticed re-reading it this time is that in contrast to the film a) there is in fact a (single) non-white character, but b) its treatment of women is even less impressive than the film's – there are no visible women scientists on the Moon; the Balinese stewardess shows off her dance moves in zero-G; the space pods are "christened with female names, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their personalities were sometimes unpredictable". Note also the first noun in the memorable first sentence of the introduction:

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.

It's one of Clarke's most passionately written books, and of course 2001, film and book, made his reputation to the point where he was able to sign science fiction's biggest ever book deal. It does explain a little more of what is going on, in particular the memorable descriptions of Bowman's state of mind:

He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart.

And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

It's good stuff, but I think Clarke wrote better (Rendezvous with Rama, Imperial Earth, A Fall of Moondust, The Fountains of Paradise, many of the earlier short stories) and although it's by far his most popular book, I wouldn't actually recommend it to someone who did not know much about science fiction. You can get it here.

The Lost Worlds of 2001, originally published in 1972, is an interesting exploration of alternate storylines for the novel and the film. The thord chapter is a reprinting of the original 1951 story "The Sentinel" which inspired the whole thing, and this is its second paragraph:

Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our surface vehicles couldn’t cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisium is very flat. There are none of the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking us wherever we wished to go.

"The Sentinel" is the very short story of an all-male expedition which finds an alien artifact on the Moon, set in 1996 (44 years after publication). You can read it here. It's powerfully written and gives you a damn good bit of sensawunda.

Earlier versions of the film had more personalised aliens coming to educate the apemen, and a much longer segment of politicking in Washington DC (where incidentally there are quite a lot of women, even of most of them are defined by their male partners). Clarke frames the out-takes with some explanation of the painful process of film-making. He was 48, Kubrick was 40, and there's a slight sense of generational clash (the Englishman old enough to have fought in the war, the American who wasn't). It's interesting to see which paths were not taken, and in the end I have to agree with the judgements made by Kubrick and Clarke to move the narrative as they did; making the aliens too visible would have risked looking silly, and monoliths and music are much more impactful.I like it for the same reason I like the Book of Lost Tales, etc; they throw further light on something I already love. It's long out of print, but if you are lucky you can get it here.

Incidentally, as I log my book-reading on Librarything, I tag each book with a note of the year and month that I read them. That means that these two books, which I read last month, are appropriately tagged "2001".

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January Books

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Non-fiction: 6
Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins
Roots and Wings: Ten Lessons of Motherhood that Helped Me Create and Run a Company, by Margery Kraus
Backstop Land, by Glenn Patterson
About Writing, by Gareth L. Powell
The Lost Worlds of 2001, by Arthur C. Clarke (in fact this is mostly SF but the non-fiction framing is key)
In Praise of Disobedience: The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other Writings, by Oscar Wilde (mostly non-fiction but includes several fantasy stories)

Fiction (non-sf): 3
In the Heat of the Night, by Jon Ball
Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver
Selangor, by Gerry Barton

sf (non-Who): 17
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman
Land of Terror, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Demon in Leuven, by Guido Eekhaut
“Home is the Hangman”, by Roger Zelazny
The Last Days of New Paris, by China Mieville
Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, by James Hadley Chase
Distaff: A Science Fiction Anthology by Female Authors, eds. Rosie Oliver & Sam Primeau
Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
Once Upon a Parsec: The Book of Alien Fairy Tales, ed. David Gullen
The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood
This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
The True Queen, by Zen Cho
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow

Comics: 4
Auguria, Tome 1: Ecce signum, by Peter Nuyten
Auguria, Tome 2: Gaeso dux, by Peter Nuyten
Auguria, Tome 3: Fatum, by Peter Nuyten
As Time Goes By, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Matthew Dow Smith

Doctor Who: 2
Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, by Ian Marter

7,500 pages
10/32 by women (Higgins, Kraus, Kingsolver, Hartman, Oliver/Primeau, Leckie, Atwood, El-Mohtar, Cho, Chambers)
2/32 by PoC (El-Mohtar, Cho)
5 rereads (the two 2001 books, "Home is the Hangman", Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space).

Reading now
The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen
A Killing Winter, by Tom Callaghan

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn

Coming soon (perhaps)
The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant
Arc of the Dream, by A. A. Attanasio
A Popular History of Ireland, by Thomas D'Arcy McGee
Hex, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Small Island, by Andrea Levy
Babayaga, by Toby Barlow
Red Notice, by Bill Browder
Excession, by Iain M. Banks
Prophet of Bones, by Ted Kosmatka
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson
The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells
The Moomins and the Great Flood, by Tove Jansson
Wiske, by Willy Vandersteen
Strategic Europe, by Jan Techau
Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
The Ghost of Lily Painter, by Caitlin Davies

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Reflections on Brexit day

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It is one thousand, three hundred and seventeen days since the Brexit referendum. And I am still angry.

There is no economic bonus to weakening links with your strongest trading partners. There is no benefit to sowing dismay and fear about their right to live in their own homes among EU citizens who have been in Britain for years. There is no upside to opting out of the largest conflict resolution project in history, which has reconciled France and Germany after centuries of war, and then provided a foundation for the reintegration of Central and Eastern Europe. It is a historic mistake.

It was always going to happen, of course. The drumbeat of lazy, mendacious journalism pioneered by Boris Johnson had critically undermined the EU’s credibility in Britain. To quote Alastair Campbell’s pithy presentation to the Leveson enquiry,

“Several of our national daily titles – The Sun, The Express, The Star, The Mail, The Telegraph in particular – are broadly anti-European. At various times, readers of these and other newspapers may have read that ’Europe’ or ’Brussels” or ’the EU superstate’ has banned, or is intending to ban kilts, curries, mushy peas, paper rounds, Caerphilly cheese, charity shops, bulldogs, bent sausages and cucumbers, the British Army, lollipop ladies, British loaves, British made lavatories, the passport crest, lorry drivers who wear glasses, and many more. In addition, if the Eurosceptic press is to be believed, Britain is going to be forced to unite as a single country with France, Church schools are being forced to hire atheist teachers, Scotch whisky is being classified as an inflammable liquid, British soldiers must take orders in French, the price of chips is being raised by Brussels, Europe is insisting on one size fits all condoms, new laws are being proposed on how to climb a ladder, it will be a criminal offence to criticise Europe, Number 10 must fly the European flag, and finally, Europe is brainwashing our children with pro-European propaganda!”

I knew in my bones that it was coming when Nigel Farage thrashed Nick Clegg in a televised debate in 2014. We can debate where the crucial moment was. 1992, when John Major negotiated the Maastricht Treaty and opened the internal Conservative warfare? 1997, when Michael Heseltine decided not to run for the Conservative Party leadership and William Hague defeated Kenneth Clarke on an openly anti-EU platform? 2002, when Tony Blair decided not to spend his political capital on fighting and winning the referendum he had once promised on the UK’s membership of the Euro, but instead opted to invade Iraq? 2005, when David Cameron withdrew the Conservatives from the European People’s Party? 2011, when he spectacularly botched a summit? It all points the same way anyway; there was no point at which it looked like the momentum could be reversed.

I want to be clear that I accepted the referendum result, though I disagreed with it. It seems to me that having made the stupid decision to put such a complex issue to a popular vote, you have to accept what the people say. Yes, there were lies (told by both sides, though many more by Leavers), some very dodgy funding and very dubious decisions about the franchise. But the UK needs to face the facts of its own broken political system. The result was as legitimate as most British electoral outcomes are; it was still wrong.

The most shocking revelation of the last three years has been the British government’s utter failure to negotiate smartly with the EU, with the House of Commons, and with itself. (See my thread here.) I had expected a sensible UK government approach, rooted in legal reality rather than chest-beating, which would fairly rapidly assert the need for a jazzed-up EEA-style arrangement (or at least some coherent vision) and sell that both to the EU and to its own people, with a negotiating team that at the very least reported regularly to a cross-party body of some kind and which might have even included opposition politicians. Instead we got negotiation by soundbites, delivered by megaphone, while the EU quietly decided what it wanted and then offered it to the UK on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

A lot of that is of course down to Theresa May personally, whose extraordinary decision to launch the Article 50 process a year before deciding her own government’s position was the single biggest driver of uncertainty. But a lot of blame attaches also to the Brexit hardliners, whose erotic fascination with a No Deal outcome drove the devastating instability of the final twelve months of negotiation (and did not strengthen the UK’s position in the slightest; rather the opposite). I should note also that the government’s secretive approach to the negotiations led to Northern Irish and Scottish officials commenting to me that they were getting better information about the state of play from Dublin than from Whitehall.

The Remainers must also accept blame. There was a moment in September 2019, after the Supreme Court judgement, when a new referendum could have been called by the formation of a government of national unity. But the leadership flaws of Corbyn and Swinson (holding my hand up; I voted for her) meant that this was never tested in the House of Commons. (I attach less blame to the SNP, who are playing a different game and playing it rather well for now.) The Remain side had their chance – had several chances, though this was the best – and blew it. (And I suspect that they would probably have blown a second referendum if they’d managed to call one, so perhaps it’s just as well.)

Johnson loyalists may bluster that now that he is in power, everything will be all right. Bear in mind that after three months of doing the square root of nothing in terms of negotiations, he then generously conceded to Ireland and the EU pretty much the deal that the EU had put on the table in the first place before allowing Theresa May her backstop. The policy outcome was probably the best on offer, given the red lines that the British had drawn for themselves, but the process does not reflect well on Johnson’s character (note particularly, but not only, his treatment of the DUP). His approach was as amateurish as May’s, but both nastier and, in the short term at least, more effective. He was, of course, able to hypnotise most of his party into believing that a substantial retreat was in fact a triumph of negotiation, which is good tradecraft; but that is not the same as statesmanship. We will see how he progresses now that Brexit is moving to the next stage, which will be truculent and difficult (and that’s just the UK deciding its own position).

Has there been an upside? Well, Brexit has been good for business in my line of work (contra those who muttered that I was only opposed to it to protect my supposedly lavish Brussels lifestyle). I’ve been looking back on what I have written about it. A lot of it’s on Twitter. Some of it’s on an APCO microsite. Some of it’s on Facebook. My three most important pieces are probably the open letter to British friends that I wrote shortly before the referendum; the piece I wrote the day after with a colleague; and my op-ed in the Irish Times last July. I stand by most of what I wrote. (I was wrong to suggest that British MEPs would be deliberately marginalised in the European Parliament; though of course, a large number of them marginalised themselves anyway.) My employers’ clients – and potential clients – have been very interested to hear my analysis of what is coming next. I may be a sore loser (OK, I am a sore loser) but I’ve been invited to give talks on Brexit in Brussels, Birmingham, Belfast, Rome, Istanbul, Nashville (Tennessee) and Portland (Oregon). My Belfast lecture from 1 May last year is probably the best summary of what I thought about the whole thing.

I’ve discussed it on various media, including Chinese television (6:45-8:15, 13:34-14:46, 16:45-19:10 and briefly 25:40-25:55).

The extra elections caused by the Brexit debacle gave me more exposure to BBC Northern Ireland viewers.

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1115687488687886338

But that doesn’t really make it all worthwhile.

And it has sharpened my own feeling about the United Kingdom as well. On referendum day I held three passports, one for each of my citizenships – the British and Irish that are my birthright, and the Belgian that I acquired by naturalisation in 2008 (none of the three countries has a problem with multiple citizenships). But my British passport expired in 2017, and I have not renewed it. The Brexiteers have made it clear that my values are not theirs. I am not wanted by the UK, and I am lucky enough to have alternatives. I am sorry for my British friends who do not have the option. I offer you love and sympathy, but it is as a foreigner rather than a fellow-citizen. I choose not to stand up and be counted with your country any more.

Brexiteers, you won. You have made your country a smaller-minded and less important place. For the sake of your mythical sovereignty, you have managed to re-create the old border in Ireland and also produce a new border between Northern Ireland and Britain. You have sniggered at the problems of EU citizens, resident in the UK for years, who struggle to retain the rights that you promised would be untouched by your project. I will be polite and professional with you; I hope to work positively on projects of common interest in the future. But I do not forgive you.

“Home is the Hangman”, by Roger Zelazny

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Second paragraph of third section:

“Yes?”

This is the next in sequence of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula Award as I re-read them. It was the cover story for the November 1975 issue of Analog, and won the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novella.

I have to be honest: I love this story with a deep love that is not entirely rational. Zelazny was one of the first authors I discovered when I first started reading sf systematically as a teenager. He won five Hugos and three Nebulas in his abbreviated career; this was the one story that won both.

It's set some decades in the future, though not all that many, vis-a-vis 1975 (so Zelazny quite possibly had roughly 2020 in mind when he wrote it). The protagonist appears in two other Zelazny stories (all three are collected in My Name Is Legion): in a world where everyone has become integrated into the surveillance state, our nameless narrator has managed to stay outside it and also retained the power to invent false identities when needed, which turns out to be occasionally useful for the security service when unusual problems need to be solved. Before I get into the story itself, it's interesting to note that while we today remain worried about state surveillance of our daily lives (and Zelazny here is on a straight line from Nineteen Eighty Four, with the difference that the sheeple have allowed it all to happen democratically), in real life we now worry at least as much about the extent to which corporations have power over our personal data. Several other aspects of the story point to its mid-70s view of technology – most notably that there are video phones but no mobile phones.

One interesting call is that one of the major characters is a US Senator who used to work for the space program – in 1975, John Glenn had just been elected for the first time and it must have seemed like a bit of a novelty; now of course Wikipedia has a whole category for American astronaut-politicians (and let’s not forget early cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Gherman Titov, who both later served in the Russian State Duma).

I have said many times that I hate stories about cute anthromorphic robots. The Hangman of the title is an anthropomorphic robot, but it is very far from cute. Programmed *mumble* years ago to be an autonomous intelligence exploring the outer planets of the Solar System, it went rogue and disappeared. Now it has returned, and its former operators are being murdered one by one. Our hero is brought in to stop it.

There are a lot of good ideas in here, of which the best is the notion of the robot's psychological make-up being heavily influenced, but in the end not completely determined, by the four people who were in charge of its development. (Compare the two-dimensional Susan Calvin of Asimov's robot stories.) Another is that of the three storieas Zelazny wrote about his nameless protagonists, this is the only one where his cover comes close to being blown, and it humanises a character who would otherwise appear a little too superhuman.

It's interesting also to read about a future America that is not New York or California; although the story starts in Baltimore (apart from a couple of framing paragraphs), the main action is the length of the Mississippi – New Orleans, Memphis, St Louis, rural Wisconsin. And of course, as usual, Zelazny's prose conveys the images economically but vividly. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Big fat flakes down the night, silent night, windless night. And I never count them as storms unless there is wind. Not a sigh or whimper, though. Just a cold, steady whiteness, drifting down outside the window, and a silence confirmed by gunfire, driven deeper now that it had ceased. In the main room of the lodge the only sounds were the occasional hiss and sputter of the logs turning to ashes on the grate.

I sat in a chair turned sidewise from the table to face the door. A tool kit rested on the floor to my left. The helmet stood on the table, a lopsided basket of metal, quartz, porcelain, and glass. If I heard the click of a microswitch followed by a humming sound from within it, then a faint light would come on beneath the meshing near to its forward edge and begin to blink rapidly. If these things occurred, there was a very strong possibility that I was going to die.

I must admit now that I am 52 rather than 14 that the story is not without flaws. It depends very much on two coincidences of timing – the availability of our protagonist, who reports in for work only four times a year, just happening to match the return of the Hangman; and also certain other events that appear to be connected with the Hangman’s return but turn out to be independently generated. Zelazny did not always write women well or sympathetically, but there is an interesting woman psychiatrist here (not the only one in his works).

Anyway, re-reading it, I still love this story. Not entirely rationally.

“Home is the Hangman” won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella presented in 1976 (so the 1976 Hugo but 1975 Nebula). The other novella on both final ballots was “The Storms of Windhaven”, by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle, which was incorporated into their novel Windhaven, but I don't think I have read it. The other Hugo finalists were “ARM”, by Larry Niven, one of the “Long ARM of Gil Hamilton” stories; “The Custodians”, by Richard Cowper, also the title story of a collectionTerry Carr collection. The other losing Nebula finalists were “A Momentary Taste of Being”, by James Tiptree, Jr. which I enjoyed in 2006 in the Star Songs of an Old Primate collection, and “Sunrise West”, by William K. Carlson, which has never been reprinted.

This was a year when three of the historic four fiction categories were won by the same story for both Hugos and Nebulas. Short Story, as already reported, went to “Catch That Zeppelin!”, by Fritz LeiberThe Forever War, which will be the next in this series of write-ups.

“Home is the Hangman” is in print in numerous places. To my delight I managed years ago to get my own copy of the November 1975 Analog, but it's probably easier to get in the following:
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Wednesday reading

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Current
The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow

Last books finished
This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Lost Worlds of 2001, by Arthur C. Clarke
The True Queen, by Zen Cho
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers
In Praise of Disobedience: The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other Writings, by Oscar Wilde

Next books
The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant
Arc of the Dream, by A. A. Attanasio

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December 2004 books and 2004 reading roundup

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December 2004 was a quieter month, celebrating little U's second birthday and then Christmas at home with just the five of us; I cooked boar as usual, and we watched the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings DVDs during the holiday. No Crisis Group publications, though I was working hard on the big Kosovo report for early 2005, and I did have the thrill of being quoted by the prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan Milošević (at end here and then again here). I don't even seem to have travelled – cancelled a planned trip to Albania at the last moment owing to pressure of work. (My non-systematic tally, before I started doing the overnights meme properly, was that I had been to twenty different countries in 2004.) My Slovenian intern K left; by peculiar coincidence, within a few months she was working for my present employers, and now works for one of our biggest corporate clients, so we are still in touch. This was also the year of the Boxing Day tsunami.

Books read December 2004

Non-fiction 2 (2004 total 42)
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
The Uncyclopedia, by Gideon Haigh

SF 5 (2004 total 76)
Cyteen, by CJ Cherryh
The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
The Radiant Seas, by Catherine Asaro

Comics 2 (2004 total 8)
A Contract With God, by Will Eisner
Berlin: City of Stones, by Jason Lutes

3,600 pages (2004 total 46,800)
2/8 by women (2004 total 33/149, 22%)
None by PoC (2004 total 2/149, 1%)

I hugely enjoyed both The Time Traveler's Wife, which you can get here, and Berlin: City of Stones, which you can get here. However, The Radiant Seas failed to convert me to Catherine Asaro. You can get it here.


So looking at the 149 books that I read in 2004 as a whole (the first full calendar year that I systematically tracked my reading):

SF 76 (51% – higher percentage than in any recent years, though if you count Doctor Who and SF together it works out about average)
Best of 2004: Sacrifice of Fools, by Ian McDonald, The Time Traveller's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, Changing Planes, by Ursula Le Guin
The one you haven't heard of: Bad Timing, by Rebecca Levene
Worst of 2004: Humans, by Robert J. Sawyer

Non-fiction 42 (28% – also higher than any recent years, though not by as much)
Best of 2004: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire TomalinJ.R.R. Tolkien: author of the century, by Tom Shippey
The one you haven't heard of: Home Rule: an Irish History, 1800-2000, by Alvin Jackson
Worst of 2004: Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings, by Lin Carter

Non-genre 19 (13% – lower than most recent years, same as 2016, more than 2017)
Best of 2004: The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson, Beasts and Super-Beasts, by Saki
The one you haven't heard of: The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, by Emma Donoghue
Worst of 2004: To the Nines, by Janet Evanovich

Comics 8 (5% – lower than any recent year)
Berlin, Maus, Persepolis are all great.

Book of the year 2004: Claire Tomalin's bio of Samuel Pepys. You can get it here.

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As Time Goes By, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Matthew Dow Smith

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Second frame of third installment:


(The speaker is Rory.)

This is one of the IDW Eleventh Doctor comics, and actually appears to be the only one I have. The Doctor, Amy and Rory wind up in Casablanca during the second world war, and as well as wandering Zelig-like in and out of the background of the famous film, they become caught up in a Silurian plot to take over the world. It's a neat trick to combine both Who lore and a well-known story from outside the Whoniverse, and I felt that Fialkov's narrative worked well. I wasn't always so happy with Smith's art, which inclines a bit to the abstract; I was really tempted to buy this by Mark Buckingham's lovely cover, with its homage to the film's famous poster. You can get it here.

This was my top unread comic. Next on that pile is Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz, acquired in Santa Rosa just over a year ago.

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Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Londinium lies between six and eight metres below London. In Naples, you can take tours to ‘Napoli Sotterranea’, underground Naples. You can climb down steps under a church, and be in the Roman streets. Or wander through the Greek city, older still, which was once the new city, the ‘nea polis’. You cannot ‘be’ in Londinium, though you can, if you are persistent, seek it out and glimpse it in the crypt of a church, in the cellar of a shop, in an underground car park, behind a locked door in an office basement. If Londinium is the city’s dark ancestral place, its unconscious, then it is, for the most part, occluded. It is in the City’s nature to prefer the bright, sunlit, angular surface of things, the hard edges of its supermodern architecture with its false promise of prosperity. Why would you want to go down there, to the dank, dark places of the imagination? To the past? The katabasis — the Greeks’ ‘going-down’, the descent to the Underworld, is a dangerous journey. You might not return with what you set out to find.

I am Irish, and was reflecting the other day with a friend born in Iran that the Romans had basically conquered everywhere between our two countries at one time or another. (Roman Armenia of course actually did overlap with present day Iran.) Now of course I live in a former Roman province, with a Gallo-Roman tumulus less than a mile from my home and ten more in the immediate vicinity. I have a big book on Roman remains in Belgium on the unread shelf. But I got seduced by this lovely book by Guardian journalist Charlotte Higgins, going around Britain and looking for the Roman stuff, exploring some places that I know (London, Bath, Silchester where I spent a summer afternoon long ago, Wroxeter) and others that I don't know at all (Roman Scotland, Kent, Essex). She has a good eye for character, both among the past figures who she writes about and the personalities of the present day (the patient boyfriend a little-seen but much-felt presence); and also for landscape – like her, I read Hunter Davis' A Walk Along the Wall many years ago, but she has updated it with reflections on the role of tourism in the survival of the otherwise failing rural economy. I came out of this book with a much longer list of things to see in future.

I did wish that the many photographs had had adjacent descriptions, rather than marooning them all on a separate page.

There are some very moving sections. The affair of Arthur's O'on, a Roman temple which gave its name to Stenhousemuir, almost equidistant between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and destroyed in 1743, is a sad commentary on the different valuation of heritage in the past. The story of Tessa Verney, and her better known husband Mortimer Wheeler, is also not a happy one. but I'll leave you with her lovely note on one of the Vindolanda tablets:

You can see some of the Vindolanda tablets in the Roman Britain gallery of the British Museum, and they look deeply unimpressive. They are thin, small, brownish rectangles covered with thin, small, brownish writing. And yet, craning my neck at an uncomfortable angle to try to read the indistinct strokes, I found myself with a catch in my throat when I came face to face, for the first time, with a tablet whose text I knew already:

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings.
    I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.

Sulpicia Lepidina was the wife of Flavius Cerialis, the camp commandant. Claudia Severa was the wife of Brocchus, he of the hunting nets. The letter is written in two hands. The body of the note is in a clear, competent script that has been identified on other tablets – perhaps that of a scribe. The sign-off – warm, personal, urgent – in another hand. It is probably, according to the papyrologists, Severa's own. If it is, it means these are the first words to have survived, from anywhere in the empire, in a Roman woman's own handwriting. 'Sperabo te soror, vale soror, anima mea, ita valeam karissima et have,' reads the Latin. The words 'anima mea karissima', my dearest soul, may have been a bland formula ('lots of love'?), but I none the less felt ambushed by the affection and sweetness in them. The fragment contained atavistic magic that scepticism could not entirely blot out. The years seemed to collapse as I read it, picking out the faint, spidery Latin on the dull wood. I read the words over and over again, and thought of the lost life of the woman who wrote them.

You can get it here.

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Demon in Leuven, by Guido Eekhaut

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Lisa had al eerder lijken gezien. Een paar keer in het labo van een patholoog, een paar keer bij een verkeersongeval waar ze als aspirant naartoe was gestuurd. Om de smaak en de geur te pakken te krijgen, zeiden de instructeurs. Je eerste dode is het ergst, omdat je een instantverrijzenis verwacht. Daarna ben je genezen van dat soort onzin. Lisa had seen corpses before. A few times in the pathologist’s lab, a few times in a traffic accident to which she had been sent as a trainee. To get the taste and the smell, the instructors said. Your first dead body is the worst because you expect an instant resurrection. Then you are cured of that kind of nonsense.

Guido Eekhaut is a well-known figure in the Belgian sf scene, who has also written a couple of dozen books, most of them speculative fiction but also some thrillers. This particular book was commissioned a few years back by Belgian railways as part of a set of six novels for commuters. (What a good idea!!!) It's set inand around Leuven, the city where we both live (well, I'm a bit outside it), and concerns an occult police detective (named Solomon) with a newly acquired sidekick (Lisa Noman, who is a woman) investigating the demonic deaths of a couple of senior university officials on top of the university library. There's lots of fun exploration of the city, both parts I know and parts I don't, and some interesting speculation on how magic actually works. I did feel the ending was a little rushed, and wondered if it might have been more satisfactory without the rather severe length restriction imposed by the sponsor. You can get it here.

This was the shortest of the unread books acquired in 2013 on my pile. Next up is Strategic Europe, by Jan Techau. (If I can find it.)

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Auguria, by Peter Nuyten

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Second frame of third page of Auguria, Tome 1: Ecce signum:


Sound the retreat! We are withdrawing! NOW!

Second frame of third page of Auguria, Tome 2: Gaeso dux:


Ehiwaz…

Second frame of third page of Auguria, Tome 3: Fatum:


I know that voice…

I bought this series of three albums on spec at the Brussels comics festival in September, and started kicking myself as soon as I opened to the title page and realised that I had the French translation of a Dutch original – if I'm going to read in another language, I prefer the original if I can read it at all!!! It is also available in German and Spanish, but not (yet?) in English.

So. It's a three part story published in 2017 and 2018, of which the first volume is revised from a version originally published in 2010. The first volume is set in 69, the Year of the Four Emperors, mainly covering the Batavian Revolt, and the other two in 71, mopping up after the conflict – the second volume mainly in Britannia, the third back in Germania. The art is gorgeous, the historical research is thorough, and the situation of the Batavians as Romanised Germans with ambiguous loyalties is well depicted. I have to say that I got rather lost plot-wise; there are a number of different strands which seemed to me to more or less peter out, and when I turned the last page I was a bit puzzled as to what it all meant. I felt that Nuyten could do with a writing collaborator to complement his artistic and research talents. If you want to give it a try, you can get the French versions here, here and herehere, here and herehere and here (third volume not out yet); and the Spanish (in one volume) here.

This was my top unread non-English language comic. Next on that pile are the two last volumes of the Amoras series.

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