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  • Thu, 20:48: Makes very effective parallel with John Major’s handling of the IRA ceasefire in 1994-96. https://t.co/8THbpSoG3h
  • Thu, 22:57: Many thanks (I think!) to @AndrewTeale for delving into my own electoral past (see entry for today’s local council… https://t.co/uFP92z46FB
  • Fri, 10:10: RT @mwfamhist: Now I feel confused. Raab says the EU should take responsibility for the consequences of a no deal Brexit. But, according t…
  • Fri, 10:16: RT @combeferal: my (60M) daughter (17F) has fallen in love with a guy she saw in the park (21M). he’s at a barricade with 9 of his homosoci…
  • Fri, 10:16: RT @ClaireRousseau: @combeferal Hey maybe just like, move out of the one town where the cop that’s hunted you across the years is the chief…
  • Fri, 10:31: RT @aScottyMr: I’m fucking furious to only find out today that the Dayton shooter murdered his trans brother, NOT his sister
  • Fri, 10:31: RT @transscribe: The sibling of the Dayton shooter was a trans man who went by the name Jordan Cofer, according to friends and social media…
  • Fri, 10:45: RT @tconnellyRTE: To add to the numerous threads out there on Brexit, Dublin’s reading of the UK positioning is as follows:
  • Fri, 10:49: RT @britainelects: Newnham (Cambridge) result: LDEM: 59.5% (+16.3) LAB: 18.1% (-18.1) GRN: 11.5% (+1.5) CON: 11.0% (+0.2) Liberal Democra…
  • Fri, 11:28: RT @joncstone: Seems like: – UK rail firms wanted to stay in Interrail but leave EUrail, so they could sell more profitable BritRail pass…

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Het Amusement (The City of Belgium), by Brecht Evens

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Third page:

"I'll call you and wake you in the morning.
And I can't wait to see you, darling."
"Me neither, sweetie!"*
"Till tomorrow. Sleep well!"
"See you tomorrow, sweetie!"
(ring tone)
Impossible to translate the "Ik zie je graag"/"Ik zie je graager" exchange accurately. And the pet names are much more bokeworthy than my translation.

I was blown away by Evens’ previous book, Ergens waar je niet wil zijn (The Wrong Place), and grabbed this as well; it won the Fauve d’Angoulême: Prix Spécial du Jury at the Angoulême International Comic Book Festival. Here’s a (wordless) trailer for it:

Before I get into substance, I’m really intrigued by the three different titles in three languages of publication. The Dutch original can be translated as “The Entertainment” though the connotation is of a particular event rather than an ongoing activity. In French, the book’s title is “Les Rigoles”, which literally means “The Gutters” but more slangily could be “The Laughs” or perhaps “The Larfs”, close to the sense of the Dutch (if plural rather than singular); but “Les Rigoles” is also the name of the author’s favourite cafe in Paris. The English title, “The City of Belgium”, weirdly contradicts the spirit of the story which is that the events (and the gutters) could be set in any western European large city that isn’t Berlin, and the setting nods to Paris, Antwerp and Brussels (as well as being closer to the beach than any of those three cities actually is). So there’s a strange ambiguity about what story is really being told here.

Anyway. As with Ergens waar je niet wil zijn, we have a story with three main characters, Jona, Victoria and Rodolphe, who meander across their unnamed city finding (or avoiding) deeper truths about their lives, with again the vortex of carnality and enjoyment that is Disco Harem providing a geographical anchor for the narrative strands. Robbie from Ergens waar je niet wil zijn puts in a guest appearance at one point. Evens’ watercolour style is arresting and intriguing, and his gimmick of giving each of his protagonists a primary colour (Jona blue, Victoria yellow and Rodolphe red) works well to convey their very different perspectives. He gives his minor characters more of a voice here too, each of the three protagonists acquiring a strange sidekick, and also each getting rides with the same mysterious taxi driver, who tells each of them different stories. I enjoyed most of it; I felt that the three stories did not all end equally satisfactorily – in particular the last 40 pages (of 300) follow just one of the three protagonists on his personal path to enlightenment, which felt unbalanced. But in general it’s pretty good. You can get the Dutch original here and the English translation here.

This was my top unread non-English comic. Next on that list is Oyasumi, by Renee Rienties.

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The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent, by Tim Crook

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

There was also a Professor of English Literature on board with the address, The Bungalow, Colbury, Southampton. His name was Alexander Wilson. He had just turned 32. The single-funnelled City of Nagpur with its red and black livery had a passenger list of 34 men and 55 women who in the quaint language of the time were ‘not accompanied by husband or wife.’

Last year we were hugely entertained by the TV series Mrs Wilson, based on the same history as this book. Here’s the trailer for it.

The story is one of fundamental deceit; Alexander Wilson had four wives at the same time, and children with each of them, but managed to keep this more or less secret from all concerned. He was a British spy, and published author of a score of spy novels, but got sacked from the secret service in murky circumstances. He died suddenly in his third wife’s home in 1963; it was not until 2007 that his various families found out about each other, largely thanks to the writer of this book, who is a professor of media studies at Goldsmiths in London.

The story is a fascinating one. Wilson managed to lead parallel lives for decades. His first two wives did at least realise that their relationships were over (divorce, however, was not an option); but the third and fourth wives were living not far apart, and Wilson managed to flit between households without being found out. He was in love with all of the women he married, and loved his children by their account, though he ran out of money pretty fast due to not having a job and indeed served prison time for small-scale financial fiddling. His habitual fantasising in real life clearly also fed into his writing, which was reasonably successful in the 1930s – he published 24 books between 1928 and 1940. I was rather reminded of Patrick Troughton, also a man of simultaneous relationships, who was a professional pretender by trade (also felled by a heart attack in his 60s). Troughton at least seems to have been more honest with his wives and girlfriends about his emotional commitments.

This extraordinary sequence of events is not served well by Crook. Rather than take us through Wilson’s life chronologically, he has instead taken each of the women’s stories and recounted them in separate chapters, in reminiscence style, followed by two chapters each on his secret service career and his literary career. This means that we are jerked about the timeline mercilessly. It would have been very interesting to match the chronology of Wilson’s books directly with the documentary evidence about his second marriage, and essential to match the records of his petty crime convictions against the memories of his third wife. But the sources are treated as separate boxes telling separate stories, rather as Wilson in life kept his families from knowing about each other. The style is breathless and unreflective.

There are some annoying formatting issues as well – the entire book is in plain text with, for instance, extended extracts from Wilson’s novels formatted exactly the same as the rest of the book; there are a decent number of photographs, all shoved at the end in apparently random order. It is a rare case where the fictionalised screen version, which stars Wilson’s granddaughter as her own grandmother, does the facts more justice than this non-fiction version. I found the book surprisingly poor for an author who holds a professorship in journalism. It reads more like a sequence of newspaper feature articles stitched together. Maybe that’s what it originally was. Anyway, you can get it here.

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Current
De Bourgondiërs, by Bart Van Loo
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter
Doctor Who: Scratchman, by Tom Baker with James Goss

Last books finished
Ben-Hur, by Lee Wallace
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, by Graeme Thompson

Next books
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster, by Annie Yellowe Palma

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Second paragraph of third chapter (apologies for the scatological content):

“Get me the soap,” mum would squeal if we dared mention constipation. We would then be made to squat over the toilet whilst she softened the soap in warm water and rubbed it on your arse. To much relief, the old bowels would immediately open up and let loose the last ten days of gunge. My mother would look on triumphantly as if she had waved a magic wand or plunger. There wasn’t much time to contemplate dignity, the remedial soap was just accepted as was the fact that your brothers watched on huddled together and in stitches at the sight of your arse up in the air with bubbles floating out of it.

A few years back I read the autobiography of Jayne Olorunda, child of a Nigerian father and a Strabane woman, which was a tough read. Annie Yellowe also grew up in difficult circumstances, but in Portadown; her mother went to Liverpool as a young woman, and came back with no husband and no money, but three mixed-race children. Her Protestant relatives provided a certain amount of support, but her mother was an alcoholic who abused her children and also allowed her rotating succession of boyfriends to exploit her. Reading through, it is frankly astonishing that social services, even at the limited extent that they were operating in the 1970s, did not step in and move the children into foster care (also something that one notices by its absence from Jayne Olorunda’s story); there seems to have been a certain amount of collusion between extended family and authorities to prevent state meddling. In the end, Annie did OK at school, and finally went to London to start her new life (where she is now a social worker and published poet). Her elder brother, who gets a good write-up here, is a well-known Northern Irish footballer.

I have to say that this is not a particularly well-written book – the author’s style is rather breathless and stream-of-consciousness. But it comes from the heart. You can get it here.

This was my top book by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Cat Country, by Lao She.

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A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

During my weeks there I had only two bad nights. Once when I dreamed that the tower was crumpling and, once, sliding forward into machine-gun fire and no pit to creep into, slithering on through mud to mutilating death. And then my screams too joined with the night creatures. Well, there was a third sleepless night but that came much later and for a different reason.

I saw the film with Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth when it came out in 1987, and greatly enjoyed it; the original book is very short, but very intense. It’s the story of two shell-shocked veterans in an isolated English village in the early 1920s, one restoring a medieval wall painting of the Last Judgement, the other on a single-handed archæological dig, both confronting and to an extent exorcising their demons. The place and time are very convincingly invoked; there’s a lovely contrast between the unwelcoming established church (apart from the vicar’s wife who is a bit more welcoming) and the warm communality of the local Methodists; the climactic moment (spoilers, sorry) is when the narrator finds himself giving an impromptu sermon. The final twist, which I didn’t think the film handled very well, is much better in the original. You can get it here.

This was one of the 34 winners of the Guardian Book Prize, which ran from 1965 to 1998. Looking at the list, I think the only other three that I have read are The Condition of Muzak, by Michael Moorcock, Kepler, by John Banville, and Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard.

This was the top unread non-genre fiction book on my shelves. Next on that list is Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver.

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The Showstoppers, by Jonathan Cooper

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Perhaps he’d have time this afternoon to devote some thought to it, though it was already approaching 11am and the stacks of paperwork Corporal Wright had sent over, accompanied by a sweet yet scathing note detailing the dangers of not returning them promptly, had not even been depleted by a fraction. Lethbridge-Stewart sighed. He didn’t expect the duties of a colonel to be wholly blood and thunder, but he hadn’t expected the rot of bureaucracy to set in quite so quickly either.

Sixth book in the Candy Jar Lethbridge-Stewart sequence, second of the second series, this sees the future Brigadier, Ann Travers and journalist Harold Chorley investigating a mysterious TV spy show in which almost all the characters are played by the same actor, who is also the show-runner – the concept of Dr Strangelove, but taken to a new extreme. I had not come across the author before, though he’s written a couple of Space: 1889 books. It’s very nicely done – a novel that is a spinoff from a TV series whose hero changes faces from time to time, about a TV series which features an actor of many faces; Cooper balances the absurdity of the set-up nicely with the tension of how-the-heck-will-they-get-out-of-this. There are a couple of lovely moments of fan-service, but nothing too intrusive. A new (and black) regular character is introduced to the Lethbridge-Stewart universe. Basically, I am enjoying this series. You can get this one here.

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1913, by Charles Emmerson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Visitors to Berlin, over a million of them in 1913, found a city full of nervous, unchannelled energy; a city that wrapped itself in the mantle of the German Reich but which was, inside, still the provincial capital of Prussia; a city which was reckoned the most modern in Europe, an industrial powerhouse and a capital of science; a city on parade. Their reactions were mixed. Some saw a metropolis more suggestive of the future than any other, more urban and more modern, the very expression of the global economic force which the German Empire had become. But other visitors found a parvenu, blaring its new-found prosperity but with no finer sensibilities, an ugly and uncouth city. Many found both.

The author worked alongside me in the International Crisis Group back in the early years of this century, and went on to greater thinktanky things; in this book, he looks at 1913, the last year before the first world war, from the perspective of twenty-three great cities, starting and ending with London, but visiting the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia and the rest of Europe en route. It’s a masterly synthesis of what was going on in global politics, pulling together loads of primary sources – newspapers, diaries, etc – to build a clear picture of human politics as it was experienced by the people of the day. It was particularly interesting to get the perspective of cities from outside the European cultural space, such as Bombay, Peking, Shanghai, Tokyo, Tehran. It’s quite a long book but a refreshingly quick read.

The concentration on individual cities does mean that two aspects of the world in 1913 are underplayed. First, most obviously, the countryside is seen only in relation to the city. Sure, the cities were where change was taking pace most quickly, but the politics of land ownership and agricultural technology are also fairly crucial drivers and are largely not included. Second, of course you can only pick so many cities; Brussels is not listed in the index, though there are a couple of paragraphs on the World’s Fair in Ghent; Ireland’s impact on England is described, but not from Ireland’s point of view; we hear from Algiers and Durban, but little from the continent between. And third, there is little space for transnational phenomena – for instance, there is a throwaway remark about the meeting of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Budapest, which the Persian delegation was unable to attend; Lenin and Stalin pop up very briefly in the chapter on Vienna, as does Adolf Hitler. 

But I guess you have to take your framing devices where you can find them, and I must admit I liked this a lot more than the last such book I read (1688, not counting 1434). It’s fluent and engaging. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2014. Next on that pile is Two Brothers, by Ben Elton.

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Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

On some days you wonder what it all means. And on some days you find out. It’s like suddenly seeing a huge black pig in your headlights when you’re running 80 miles an hour on ice. Boom. Total clarity. No more gray area.

One of the classic accounts of American politics, not quite as remarkable as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 because the election of 1992 was much less remarkable, and also frankly because Thompson’s own style was becoming much more self-indulgent. Thompson’s drug-fuelled raging stream of consciousness writing comes over now as rather white and male. He picks up on the importance of Hillary Clinton, but fails to really interview her. The one African-American who is mentioned in passing is Roosevelt Grier, who he utterly unfairly blames for the death of Robert F. Kennedy. He fumes about the fundamental evil of George H.W. Bush without really proving the case.

And yet there are moments of sheer genius. It starts with a flashback to the failed McGovern campaign which is basically the set-up for a punchline:

Another thing I still remember from that horrible day in November of ’72 was that some dingbat named Clinton was said to be almost single-handedly responsible for losing 222 counties in Texas—including Waco, where he was McGovern’s regional coordinator—and was “terminated without pay, with prejudice,” and sent back home to Arkansas “with his tail between his legs,” as an aide put it.

“We’ll never see that stupid bastard again,” one McGovern aide muttered. “Clinton—Bill Clinton. Yeah. Let’s remember that name. He’ll never work again, not in Washington.”

A passing reference brought me to H.L. Mencken’s obituary of William Jennings Bryan, which makes it clear how much Thompson’s style owed to Mencken’s writing:

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

There is a hilarious passage describing Bill Clinton’s supposedly odd behaviour at his first interview with Thompson, later explained by a mutual friend as the effect of Thompson’s eerie resemblance to Clinton’s childhood nemesis (way too good to be true, alas). I had also completely forgotten that Ross Perot’s excuse for dropping out of the 1992 presidential election was that the Republicans were planning to spoil his daughter’s wedding by distributing fake compromising photographs of her. Yes, really.

The book ends with a postscript written after the death of Richard Nixon, Thompson’s old nemesis, in 1994. For all that Thompson says he hated him, there is evidence of some respect between the two:

Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”

Anyway, I should get hold of the better, earlier books of the Gonzo Papers. It’s a little sad to get the sense from reading that Thompson’s powers were waning, and that he knew it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016 (cheating slightly because I had in fact read it years ago). Next in that list is The Computer Connection, by Alfred Bester.

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July Books

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Non-fiction: 10 (YTD 29)
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
Becoming, by Michelle Obama
First Generation, by Mary Tamm
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew
Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson
1913: The World Before the Great War, by Charles Emmerson
For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster, by Annie Yellowe Palma
The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent, by Tim Crook
Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story, by John Bossy
Small Wonder, by Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 19)
Gigi, by Colette
The Cat, by Colette
A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 56)
The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang
Gateways, ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull
The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty
The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

Doctor Who, etc: 4 (YTD 17)
Night of the Kraken, by Jonathan Green
Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell
Terror Moon, by Trevor Baxendale
The Showstoppers, by Jonathan Cooper

Comics 3 (YTD 15)
Plastic Man #1, by Jack Cole
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens
The Story of Garth the Strong, by Stephen Dowling

6,900 pages (YTD 38,400)
9/25 (YTD 60/137) by non-male writers (Obama, Tamm, Yellowe Palma, Kingsolver, Colette x2, Kuang, Hull, Chakraborty)
4/25 (YTD 22/137) by PoC (Obama, Yellowe Palma, Kuang, Chakraborty)
2/25 (YTD 14/137) rereads (Better Than Sex, The Time Machine)

Reading now
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, by Graeme Thompson
De Bourgondiërs, by Bart Van Loo
Ben-Hur, by Lew Wallace
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, by Deborah M. Withers
Berlin Book Three: City of Light, by Jason Lutes
Smallworld, by Dominic Green
Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver
Alina, by Jason Johnson
Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text, by Brian Morris
Cat Country, by Lao She
Oyasumi, by Renee Rienties
The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
Be My Enemy, by Ian McDonald
The Bastard of Istanbul, by Eilif Shafak
The Computer Connection, by Alfred Bester
Two Brothers, by Ben Elton
A Close Run Thing, by Allan Mallinson
How To Be Both, by Ali Smith
A Local Habitation, by Seanan McGuire
The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
True Stories, ed. Xanna Eve Chown

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Current
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, by Graeme Thompson
De Bourgondiërs, by Bart Van Loo
Ben-Hur, by Lee Wallace
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter

Last books finished
The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent, by Tim Crook
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens
The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick
Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story, by John Bossy
Small Wonder, by Barbara Kingsolver
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

Next books
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘What’s what?’

The last (so far) Bernice Summerfield novel, published in 2014, this is apparently tied into an audio box set that I haven’t yet heard. I didn’t mind. It’s set on a spaceship called the Adorable Illusion, with Benny disguised as a disgraced fellow-archaeologist for Reasons and a motley assortment of crew and other passengers regarding her with more or less justified suspicion. Then about two thirds of the way through the book, there is a massive plot twist, and it turns out that we do actually care about everyone on board – very nicely done, as you would hope for from Russell who is one of the best Who writers when on form. I think you’d need basic familiarity with the Bernice universe to really appreciate it, though. You can get it here.

Next (and penultimate) in the set of Bernice Summerfield books is True Stories, edited by Xanna Eve Chown.

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The making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew

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Second paragraph of third essay (“Modest Realities Lurk behind All-Embracing Rhetoric of Document”, published in The Times on 23 February 1995):

The Framework Document meets none of Sinn Fein’s demands for a timetable for withdrawal. Yet, most unionists were angry yesterday, and the impression persists that the government may have miscalculated. How has this happened? The core belief of Ulster unionism is clear: “It is better to be separated from the rest of Ireland than from Great Britain”. There is a definite implication: unionist politicians are unlikely to make major sacrifices to bring about a local assembly if the price is to give Dublin an unacceptably large role in the north. Hence yesterday’s proposal for a northern assembly will not, in itself, calm unionist fears about the content of the document.

I’ve known Paul Bew since I was 13; he was a colleague of my father’s at the Queen’s University of Belfast and succeeded him as Professor of Irish Politics. This is a collection of his newspaper and magazine articles (as opposed to academic publications) from 1994 to 2007, the year in which he became a member of the House of Lords. (He is now the Chairman of the House of Lords Appointments Commission, having previously chaired the Committee on Standards in Public Life.)

These pieces very much reflect the times in which they were written, and also noticeably shift to reflect the perspective of Ulster Unionist leader and First Minister David Trimble at the point where the author was closest to him in the early 2000’s (and then back away again after Trimble’s defeat). But what really interested me was to be reminded of how far Northern Ireland has come, an important perspective given the gloomy current situation; 25 years ago, when the first of these pieces was written, the terrorist campaigns of both sides remained in full swing, and there was no perspective of a DUP/Sinn Fein-led power-sharing government (and even though that arrangement collapsed in early 2017, both parties stipulate that they want it restored).

It’s also a salutary reflection that in those days, it was the Dublin government which was still getting to grips with the reality of Northern Ireland, and Westminster which had an in-depth knowledge, as opposed to today when the British establishment has retreated to absurd superficiality and it is Dublin that is keeping its finger on the pulse. (Officials from both Northern Ireland and Scotland tell me that they are getting more and better information about Brexit from the Irish government than from London.)

All of these essays have dated, in that they were very specific descriptions of the latest political developments, written for a literate but not well-informed audience. But they are well-written and clear, and useful for anyone wanting to track how we got from the chaos of 1994 to the settlement of 2007. You can get it here.

This was the shortest book left on my shelves of those acquired in 2011. Next on that list is Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, by Deborah M. Withers.

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Choose Your Future: Night of the Kraken, by Jonathan Green; Terror Moon, by Trevor Baxendale

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I’ve previous written up the Find Your Fate, FASA and Decide Your Destiny Doctor Who game books. These are two Twelfth Doctor choose-your-own-adventure books, both published in 2016. I’m not aware of any more of this type of book being produced since.

Night of the Kraken, by Jonathan Green

Second paragraph of Chapter 3:

Warily, the Doctor approaches the rider and, when the man still doesn’t react, grabs hold of his hat and throws it aside. What he sees makes him leap backwards again.

As with Green’s previous game book, The Horror of Howling Hill, this is set in southern England – 18th century Cornwall, to be precise – and is rather well written, capturing the Capaldi Doctor very well. It has several different storylines, most of which revolve around the Kraa’Kn (an aquatic alien monster, of course) with a galactic smuggler and a barmaid playing walk-on roles, but other variants include the Terileptils and a brief appearance of a clockwork robot. There are numerous endings, including one in which the Doctor is killed by zombies and another in which he is stuck in a perpetual time loop.

A structural gimmick which was new to me – at several points your choice is constrained by what has happened before, eg chapter 78:

If the Doctor has already visited the Hispaniola Inn, go to 142.
If not, go to 103.

This is a very interesting way of creating new lines through the structure. Unfortunately it’s a bit too clever – there is a set of five chapters, starting with Chapter 12, which are orphaned (and I couldn’t see where they were meant to fit – Chapter 12 starts with the Doctor heading toward the village with the smuggler, but no other chapter offers that as an option).

Anyway, more interesting than I expected.

Terror Moon, by Trevor Baxendale

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Voice-activated photonic projectors raise the light level. The Doctor is standing in the middle of an extensive laboratory littered with advanced scientific equipment.

A somewhat more diffuse book, with lots of different and quite independent timelines for adventures of the Twelfth Doctor on an unnamed moon. (Though in one variant he goes back to contemporary earth for an adventure with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart.) This also has the feature I noted from some of the Decide Your Destiny books, where the player makes choices that I would have expected to be made by the writer, eg Chaper 78:

If you think the sonic will open the airlock, tap here to go to Entry 118.
If you think the airlock will stay shut, tap here to go to Entry 83.

Some rather good lines, but I prefer when the multiple storylines in these books are all set in more or less the same universe as each other. Baxendale also wrote three of the Decide Your Destiny books, which I likewise found average rather than compelling.

You can get Night of the Kraken here and Terror Moon here.

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My tweets

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  • Sat, 10:54: RT @tconnellyRTE: Guessing Johnson’s intentions, and the risk of No Deal. Here’s my take on a tumultuous week… via @RTENewsNow https://t.…

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My Worldcon schedule

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See you in Dublin!

Is it about a bicycle? The influences of a comedic genius and their funniest book
15 Aug 2019, Thursday 11:00 – 11:50, Wicklow Room-2 (CCD)

Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is a significant and well-loved novel, especially in Ireland. (One of its central characters, de Selby, has become a cult hero. Cited as Alan Moore’s favourite book, its prodigious footnoting was a major influence on Robert Rankin.) Yet it was initially rejected by publishers and finally issued only after the author’s death. See what our panel make of this!

Jenna Maguire, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Nicholas Whyte, Nigel Quinlan (M)

Using SFF as sandboxes for ideas on politics and society
Format: Panel
16 Aug 2019, Friday 16:00 – 16:50, Wicklow Room-3 (CCD)

Speculative fiction can offer readers and writers a space, removed from ‘real’ life, to explore and criticise society and politics and offer possible solutions. From the economy of your galactic empire to the status of dwarves in your epic fantasy, it is impossible to separate the political from the fantastical, and SFF is a great place to imagine other ways of existing.

Nicholas Whyte (M), Sam Hawke, Eyal Kless, Taiyo Fujii
The 2019 Hugo Awards Ceremony
Format: Event
18 Aug 2019, Sunday 20:00 – 22:00, Auditorium (CCD)

The premiere event of the Worldcon will take place on Sunday evening, as we celebrate the best science fiction and fantasy of 2018. Hosted by Afua Richardson and Michael Scott, we invite you to join us in congratulating this year’s finalists and winners of the prestigious Hugo Awards.

Afua Richardson (M), Michael Scott (M)

Irish science and scientific discoveries
Format: Talk
19 Aug 2019, Monday 10:30 – 11:20, Odeon 3 (Point Square Dublin)

From Boyle’s Law to the later speculations of Schrödinger, Ireland and its scientists can claim many world-changing scientific discoveries. How did this happen? What linked Irish science with the island’s political situation?

Nicholas Whyte

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Gateways, ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull

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Second paragraph of third story ("Sleeping Dogs", by Joe Haldeman:

Low gravity and low oxygen. My heart was going too fast. I stood for a moment, concentrating, and brought it down to a hundred, then ninety. The air had more sulfur sting than I remembered. It seemed a lot warmer than I remembered that summer, too, but then if I could remember it all I wouldn't have to be here. My missing finger throbbed.

This is a collection of stories, poems and essays celebrating the 90th birthday of Frederik Pohl, which was in 2009 (though the book was not published until 2010). Only a couple of them are really good, Haldeman's "Sleeping Dogs" which takes a veteran back to the site of conflict with a memorable twist, and Cory Doctorow's "Chicken Little" which links to both The Space Merchants and Gulliver's Travels. There's also the last Stainless Steel Rat story by Harry Harrison, and late stories by Brian Aldiss and Sherri S Tepper.

Worth also noting Neil Gaiman's poem:

The [Backspace] Merchants

The [backspace] merchants sell deletions and removals,
masters of the world (or so they claim)
they go by many hundred different names
and live inside a giant block of Spam.

It quivers, as if alive, is fed
by tubes and tendrils, and is inhabited.
Portions are cut from it continually to feed the people.
Insidious, invidious,
(occasionally in videos),
the [backspace] merchants seek to sell you:
V1agRa and all its magical cousins
(If you had a larger thing in your pants your life would have been better!!)
(MAGIC PENIS ENLARGEMENT PILLS)
(She'll love the new growth!)
(Make nights turbulent.)
Also, designer watches, diplomas,
diplomats who will entrust you with their missing millions.
There are girls in your town who want to
meet you.

The [backspace] merchants want so to delete you.

The [backspace] merchants click and they erase
our faces, so we keep on losing face.
The [backspace] merchants
offer relief from their own excesses:
The products will not work as advertised
The Spam is vast and must be satisfied.

In the old days of the future
our freedom fighters lived deep inside the chicken meat
Their coffee was the coffiest, their dreams the dreamiest.
The rest of us craved and grazed our lives away
and wondered if we should emigrate to Venus.

These are the poles we navigate between:
Yesterday's futures now reshape our days
into futures past, somewhere between last week and day million
as ancient as a black and white TV show, watched so late
and all the names we conjured with appeared to us in monochrome
with their faces, such young faces,
to those of us who would learn to be plugged in at all times,
they told us of the future, that it was what they saw
a Game of If when they opened wide their eyes.

So we avoided all their awful warnings,
ignored the minefields as the klaxons sounded
played “Cheat the Prophet” just as Gilbert said,
we sidestepped cacotopias unbounded
and built ourselves this gorgeous mess instead

I wish we could still emigrate to Venus.

Sometimes I wonder what the Spam makes of us:
does it define us by our base desires,
or hope we can transcend them? Like small gods,
the [backspace] merchants offer us all choices
and each day
we can be tempted
or delete.
They lay their traps ineptly at our feet.

The present moves so quick we can't describe it,
so Science Fiction limns the recent past.
We future folk are just another tribe who
hyperlinked our colours to the mast,
When now is always then and never soon
Our freak flags will not fly upon the moon.

Our prophets opened gateways, showed us pitfalls
gave us worlds of if and galaxies uncountable.
They made us think then take the other road.
But future yesterdays are growing cold.
The [backspace] merchants huddle in their meat
while we demand a finer, nobler future:
It waits for us beyond the blue horizon.
Our future will be glorious and gold.

If it lasts more than four hours
consult your physician.

It's not quite as mind-blowing a collection as I would have liked, given Pohl's significance and the rank of the authors involved, but it's still pretty good and you can get it here.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Smallworld, by my old friend Dominic Green.

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