The 2025 Business Meeting agenda is out, and gosh, it’s even bigger than last year, with 48 rule changes, resolutions and constitutional amendments to consider. I hold up my own hand here; I’m a named co-signatory on five of them, and was a member of committees proposing another eight. It’s too much, and we need to collectively start thinking, “Does this amendment really matter?”
My own four proposed clarifying amendments are now items F3-F6 on the agenda (pages 32-36), with the “Clarifying Best Series” proposal edited a bit to reflect Business Meeting style, but with no change to the content. I think I’ll try and comment on the rest of the business bit by bit, as there are some parts that I care more about than others.
One of the parts that I care about most is the report of the Hugo Administration Process Committee, which you’ll find on pages 72-82; you will deduce that it’s a pretty comprehensive piece of work. I agree with most of it and endorse the conclusions, but I have to start by pointing out some mistakes of fact in the text – small details, but important to me, and obviously I did not explain them clearly enough in my public statements or when I spoke to the committee.
The biggest issue is that the Hugo Subcommittee, which is a formal body which takes decisions and executes tasks on behalf of the Hugo administrator, can be different from the Research Team which checks the eligibility of nominees. The Report confuses the two (pp 73-74). I certainly found it much more convenient to have an arms’ length research team who presented the results of their findings to the Subcommittee, who then make the actual decision. I guess that not every Administrator does it that way, but I did, every year that I was involved. I should add that Locus always do a final pass of the ballot before it is published, which is very welcome.
More subjectively, and less important, I think that the existing rules in the Constitution are actually pretty clear about procedures which the Report describes as ambiguous or having serious gaps in public knowledge. What happened in 2023 was not the result of creative interpretation of the rules; it was systematic and conscious breach of the rules (and also of existing well-established practice, but mainly of the rules) by people who should have known better.
Edited to add: A smaller point – it is suggested in the footnote on page 76 that if the Administrators cannot contact potential finalists to notify them and get their acceptance, they are deemed to have declined. Actually the opposite is the case; I think Subsection 3.10.1 is fairly clear that the nomination stands unless Administrators are informed that it has been declined.
Having said all that, I largely agree with the Report’s conclusions.
Third-party administration or audit of the Hugos: This was a magic bullet invoked by a number of commentators when the 2023 scandal broke at the start of last year. But I have not seen any sensible proposal of how this could be done within the existing financial, time and legal constraints. The Report agrees.
Ethics: The Report acknowledges that the structure of WSFS makes it difficult to hardwire transparency into the process, but nonetheless recommends 1) the creation of a code of ethics (by another committee, natch) and 2) a constitutional obligation on the Hugo administrator to report on eligibility rulings, including disqualifications and categorization changes. These made it into the agenda as items D6 (page 22) and F11 (page 40) respectively, and I certainly endorse them both.
Continuation: The Committee asks for another year to address the following questions (D5, page 22):
To work with the 2026 Hugo Administrator to document their processes and best practices formally into one document.
To draft changes to the WSFS constitution that better enshrine the Administrator’s duties and relationships.
To work on developing a poll of WSFS membership regarding the relationship between the Hugo Awards and Worldcon.
I’m totally in favour of the first two points. On the third, I think that Worldcon is still learning how best to manage membership polls, and a more qualitative approach may be more appropriate in this case, but I’m certainly willing to trust the Committee for another year to think about it.
I confess that I had not heard of Liane Moriarty, but she clearly scores very well here, with Big Little Lies far ahead on Goodreads and fourth in a close race on LibraryThing. Sorry to those who were hoping to see Nevil Shute (On the Beach was 21st in my ranking and A Town Like Alice 23rd) or Peter Carey (True History of the Kelly Gang was 30th, Oscar and Lucinda 31st) on the list.
I disqualified only two books. I was puzzled to see The Book Thief (which won in Germany) topping the overall poll, but I had forgotten that Markus Zusak is actually Australian. And more than half of The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton is set in England.
Last weekend’s trip to see the hunebedden of Drenthe had a couple more stops which are worthy of note, though the Saturday and Sunday were both very wet.
Logistical details: We stayed at an AirBnB in Steendam, half an hour east of Groningen. This was not geographically very close to where we wanted to be, but the place looked charming and the price was good.
In fact, I can honestly say that in nine years of using AirBnB, this was the best experience I have had. The apartment was just as charming as it looked in the photos and very comfortable. For a modest extra charge the hosts provided a lavish breakfast, with enough leftovers to keep us going for the rest of the day. Recommended.
As with Best Fancast, I’m going to start at the top.
1) Tia Tashiro
Represented just by five short stories in the Hugo Voter Packet, but I found them all very refreshing and a bit subversive. Second paragraph of third story (“Every Hopeless Thing“):
Elodie carefully tucks the opera glasses into an inside pocket of her scavenging pack. She stands and dusts her gloves off on her thick, shielded pants. The gauge on the inside of her soft plastic helmet is reading at acceptable levels of ambient pollution, nothing that would breach her suit; it would alarm if she hit unsafe levels, and she’d hotfoot it back to Skip and let the medical system give her a once-over if it did.
2) Angela Liu
Also has five short stories in the Hugo Voter Packet, plus two poems. Again I enjoyed them all, I just enjoyed Tashiro’s work more. Second paragraph of third story (“You Will Be You Again“):
‘How do you feel?’ the doctor asks, three assistants hovering behind him like angels of death.
3) Moniquill Blackgoose
Wrote To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which won the Lodestar last year and is represented by an excerpt here. Second paragraph of third chapter:
But then Crow, who came flying to Masquapaug from the lands west of the sunset, taught the first people how to dance. Nampeshiwe’s Mother came to watch their dances. Nampeshiwe’s Mother said to the people, “Your dancing is beautiful. You must teach me your dancing. I would know how it is done.”
4) Jared Pechaček
Represented by a novel, The West Passage, which is a nicely worked out secondary world with some odd dynastic quirks. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Pell had always liked the refectory, with the quiet, half- conscious liking one feels for something one has known since childhood. A clerestory of tiny square windows ran along the eastern wall, letting in morning sunlight and evening breezes. Vast old tapestries covered the stone walls. Their rich colors had dimmed, many were moth- eaten, and some had fallen, but the stories and strange figures they held made her feel as if she were a creature of legend herself. Bats roosted in the south rafters, pigeons flew in and out, and ivy curled in at the windows, but even in its state of decay the refectory held some clear beauty quite separate from the ancient chaos of the rest of the palace.
5) Hannah Kaner
Represented in the Packet by two novels, Godkiller (submitted last year) and its sequel Sunbringer. Second paragraph of third chapter of Sunbringer:
Everything hurt. The cut on her shoulder, the burns on her right leg where her half-melted prosthesis had seared her skin. The nicks, scratches, and aches of long weeks of fitful nights and being hunted through the wild lands. Her body was keeping score of its battles.
Another secondary world, interesting enough but after reading the first hundred pages of Sunbringer I knew where I would rank it.
6) Bethany Jacobs
Represented in the packet by extracts from novels These Burning Stars and On Vicious Worlds. Second paragraphs of third chapters respectively:
Jun takes a grimacing drink of her coffee, cold and sickly sweet with condensed milk. Her appointment with the captain of The Swimming Fox is half an hour away, but she’s been nursing the same cup for two hours, and this is hardly a pleasant place to spend the afternoon. The Grum Bowl’s half-stocked shelves boast evaporated soups, snack packs, and candy bars, none of which are less than a standard year old. The floors are grimy, and the lights are eye-stabbingly fluorescent. Patrons glare at her when they see her gun, flashing their own sidearms like a dare she ignores. On one wall there’s a crude mural of Terotonteris, god of revelry and risks, his round body jutting with arms and legs, his mouth open to swallow from a pitcher while some of his hands play a game of tiles and others clasp at shiny things.
and
It’s tedious. They invited the Kindom here; their docks are open and their weapons are cold. There’s no need for histrionics.
Odd mix of fantasy and sf which didn’t quite draw me in enough to want to track down the full books.
All of these writers are good, I just happened to like some more than others; the future of the genre is safe.
Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut-tree that overhung the path, she would pick a leaf, crush it, and sniff the sweet scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer across the water. “She is a little near-sighted; you can’t imagine how sweet it makes her look,” Chris explained. (I did not say that I had seen her, for, indeed, this Margaret I had never seen.) A sudden serene gravity would show that she had seen one, and she would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly, with rather stiff movements of her long arms, to exactly the right place. When she had got the punt up on the gravel her serious brow would relax, and she would smile at one and shake hands and say something friendly, like, “Father thought you’d be over this afternoon, it being so fine; so he’s saved some duck’s eggs for tea.”
I am familiar with Rebecca West’s non-fiction, but this is the first of her novels that I have read, and it was also the first book she had published, in 1918. Shell-shocked Chris returns from the war in 1916, with amnesia wiping out the last fifteen years of his life; he is obsessed with the (now married) working class girl he had a fling with in 1901, and has totally forgotten his own wife and their recently dead young son. The story is narrated by Chris’ cousin who clearly has feelings for him herself. It’s a tightly written, intense story of mental illness and trauma, with a lot more going on under the surface, and I got a lot out of it. You can get it here.
Current The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster
Last books finished Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, eds. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton Fear Death By Water, by Emily Cook Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Next books Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
This is a book that is both weirdly out of date and weirdly timely. It is about an obscure incident of Middle Eastern history: the massacres of civilians in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces on the margins of the 1956 Suez war, 275 killed in Khan Yunus on 3 November and 111 in Rafah on 12 November. In these awful days, it’s probably healthy to cast our minds back almost seventy years to the brief months of the first Israeli occupation of Gaza, when most of its inhabitants had fresh memories of the Nakba and realistic expectations that they might be driven out of their homes again.
The other startling aspect of the book is that the research was carried out in 2002 and 2003, when the second Israeli occupation, started in 1967, was (as it turned out) on the last legs of its direct phase, and Fatah was still in political leadership among the Palestinians, though Hamas and other militants were clearly a rising faction through the Second Intifada, especially within Gaza. The death of Rachel Corrie happens just off screen.
Between the research on the book and its publication in 2009, the Israelis withdrew their military and settlers from Gaza (2004), Hamas won the Palestinian elections (2005) and seized control in Gaza (2006). I hardly need remind you of events since 2009, especially the last twenty months. But I’m writing here about Joe Sacco’s book, not about more recent history.
Sacco portrays the daily grind of life under the occupation vividly, and also the difficulty of getting eyewitness accounts of events from almost half a century before. Even for those who were there, 1956 was comparatively small beer compared with 1948 or 1967, unless you or your family happened to be directly involved with either of the massacres. Accounts differ on the details, but the broad account of brutality is the same, and the graphic medium brings home the human impact as words alone never can.
It’s an account from one side of two particular incidents, because the Israelis largely covered them up (apart from an interesting debate in the Knesset); Sacco interviews a senior Israeli securocrat to get their perspective, and he is also clear about the Fedayeen incursions into Israel in 1956, and indeed the suicide bombings and internal Palestinian violence five decades later.
It’s important that individual incidents in any conflict get the dignity of a permanent record, even if they cannot achieve closure for victims and perpetrators. (Needless to say, I think of an incident in 1972 which was more local to me.) At the time the book was published, these two massacres from fifty-three years before were the largest killings of Palestinians on Palestinian soil, a record that I suspect may no longer stand. I’m glad to say that Ha-Aretz posted a positive review of the book when it came out.
My one complaint, and it is a serious one, is that my copy of the book was wrongly bound, and instead of pages 245-276; there was an extra set of pages 117-148. Fortunately Martin Wisse was able to sort me out with the missing pieces, but it was almost a metaphor for the difficulty that Sacco faced in assembling the truth. If you are lucky, you can get a full copy here.
Truth is really important and also sometimes really difficult to get. As I was writing this, someone in my Facebook feed posted a summary of Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata (1714) by the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland / Hadrianus Relandis, claiming that Reland’s research on the ground in the early eighteenth century “proved” that there were almost no Arabs living in Palestine at that time. This meme is completely false; Reland never visited the Middle East in his life, and there is no attempt to calculate the contemporary population in his book, which is about Biblical and classical references to the place names of the region. As usual, if a propaganda claim from either side looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Footnotes from Gaza was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Final Cut, by Charles Burns.
I’m not a big podcast listener, and while I knew all of these by repute, I had heard very few episodes of any of them before. So I picked one of the episodes submitted for the Hugo Packet in each case, going for the one where I thought I knew most about the topic. My ranking was pretty clear, and for once I’m going to start with the positive.
1) Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, presented by Emily Tesh and Rebecca Fraimow. A favourite author talks about a favourite author – superb combination. I listened to all three of the submitted episodes here, on Eight Days of Luke, Wilkins’ Tooth/The Ogre Downstairs and Dogsbody. It must be decades since I read any of these, but I loved them as a young reader and loved returning vicariously to them now. Particularly interested in considering Eight Days of Luke as a gateway book to the rest of DWJ’s œuvre. Though am not totally convinced that Thor and Astrid get it on by the river. Gets my enthusiastic first preference.
2) Hugos There, presented by Seth Heasley; I listened to the episode where he and Damo Mac Choiligh talk about the early novels of Iain (M.) Banks with great knowledge and affection. A good moderator sits back and guides the discussion, and this was a good demonstration of that skill. As with all of these, I don’t know if I was just lucky or if the podcast is always like this, but I enjoyed it.
3) A Meal of Thorns, presented by Jake Casella Brookins; I listened to the episode where the guest is Dan Hartland talking about China Miéville’s The Scar. I must have read this shortly before I started bookblogging in November 2003, because it came out earlier that year, and I have vivid memories of the mosquito people. The episode is a well-structured deep dive into a long novel from more than twenty years ago, and it made me think that I should reread the book.
4) Hugo, Girl!, presented by Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson; I listened to the episode with Redfern Jon Barrett talking about The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Another favourite book of mine (one of my top five recommendations), and good discussion, but I am at the stage of life when I find too many voices with similar accents a bit confusing on my ears.
5) The Coode Street Podcast, presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe; I listened to the episode interviewing Julie Philips about her imminent (no published, I think) book on Ursula K. Le Guin. The book sounds great, but the podcast is very slow paced, to the point that I found myself frequently checking to make sure that my player had not dropped.
6) Worldbuilding for Masochists, presented by Marshall Ryan Maresca, Cass Morris and Natania Barron; I listened to the episode interviewing John Wiswell, whose recent Hugo-nominated fiction I have enjoyed, but I found the multi-presenter format confusing and diluting of the points that were being made (if they were being made). So it dropped to the end of my list.
No doubt I could have found better episodes of those that I marked down, but life is short.
I was glued to the screen for Logopolis‘s first showing in 1981, a month before my fourteenth birthday. The show I loved was being remade, with a total revamp of the TARDIS crew and last of all the leading man – just as Innes Lloyd had done in 1966. And here in 2025, we’ve just been through the same process again…
When I came back to Logopolis in 2008, I wrote at length:
I saw Logopolis (of course) back in 1981 and again when it was repeated later in the year. Its biggest problem is that the pacing doesn’t quite match the amount of Stuff that is Happening; the first episode in particular is alarmingly slow, episode two is incomprehensible in places, and it is not surprising that the ratings for the last two episodes were so low.
But the two million viewers who gave up on it between eps 2 and 3 were mistaken. Things I liked about it: the Watcher works really well, even though we never really find out the details of how he works. It generally looks fascinating – the nested Tardises, the streets of Logopolis. John Fraser as the Monitor is great. Nothing that the Master does actually makes sense, but it’s a great debut story for Ainley who does some high-class evil laughter. Nyssa may pop out of nowhere but it’s good to have her back (and out-acting Adric almost instantly). The music is super – the theme for the Watcher suggesting that he is not the Master (as Adric assumes) but something else, and that final chord sequence as it transforms into the Doctor Who theme.
The biggest problem I have with it now is that the Master’s grand plan simply doesn’t compute. How can he have known that the Doctor was headed for the Barnet by-pass? Or would then head for Logopolis? And how quickly will his message to the peoples of the universe reach them, indeed how will the radio telescope, sending messages at sluggish old light-speed, be able to affect the CVE in time? (And since Logopolis is out of commission, who will do this in future next time there is an entropy crisis?) We’ll leave out the fact that the Third Doctor survived a much longer fall in The Paradise of Death, since that story is of dubious canonicity.
The DVD is almost worth the cover price alone for the documentary on the transition between Doctors, “A New Body At Last”, featuring interviews with Davison, Baker (as hilarious as ever) and numerous other cast and crew.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
Taken on its own merits, Logopolis is a bit unsatisfactory. The first couple of episodes have way too much exposition and info-dumping, and the last two episodes are basically about establishing the Master and the new Tardis team, and getting rid of the Fourth Doctor.
But actually, watched in context, I can see why it gripped me at the time; the revival of the Master, the role of the Time Lords, and the CVE’s all link back rather satisfactorily to the earlier stories in the season, and the episode and a half actually set in Logopolis, and then the final battle between the Master and the Doctor, ending in his regeneration, are effective. And it does make sense to have the departing Doctor bid farewell to all of his companions, as the Fifth and Tenth were also able to do; this is a story about goodbyes and it’s appropriate.
And the music is particularly good.
Incidentally, when we reach the police box on Earth in the first episode, this is after a run of 23 episodes set elsewhere – the last time we saw Earth was at the very beginning of The Leisure Hive. It is the longest sequence of non-terrestrial episodes in the show’s history.
Watching again, I want to particularly salute Paddy Kingsland’s music. That sequence at the very end of the story remains spine-chilling, 44 years on.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Christopher H. Bidmead’s novelization of his own story is:
In any case, there was something much more interesting to think about. In the Doctor’s temporary absence, Adric’s curiosity had drawn him towards the police box.
Bidmead’s write-up of his own story is reassuringly dynamic and exciting, if just a little over-written in places. In particular, Logopolis itself feels more like a real place, and the minor characters more like real people; the whole thing makes slightly better sense than what we saw on screen.
Nothing to add to that; a confident novelisation which does what it needs to do. There is no explanation of the means and motivation of the Master, but there never is. You can get it here.
Jonathan Hay’s Black Archive on Logopolis pays appropriate tribute to a story that marked a turning point in the show. At 119 pages it’s fairly brief. A brief introduction gives the context for the story in terms of the production history.
The first chapter, “Resetting the Scene”, looks at the changes to the show brought in by John Nathan-Turner, the scientific basis for the story, the reintroduction of the Master and the backgrounds of the two new companions.
The second and longest chapter, “Regeneration”, looks at the way regeneration is handled for both the Doctor and the Master, especially in Season 18 but also in later Doctor Who history.
The third chapter, “Entropy” looks at the concept of entropy and the character of the Watcher. Its second paragraph is:
As the laws of physics assert, energy within a closed system can neither increase nor decrease on aggregate; it can only change between forms. Hence, as time passes, more and more energy within a closed system inevitably transforms into the form of heat energy. Heat energy is a disordered form which is essentially unable to then transform back into any other form of energy². This principle is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and applies not only on smaller scales, but also to our universe, the largest closed system we currently know of³. As time passes, the proportion of disordered (heat) energy within the universe increases. This tendency towards gradual disorder, which applies to any given physical system, is known as entropy. ² Maxwell, J Clerk, Theory of Heat, p93. ³ Maxwell, Theory of Heat, p153.
The fourth chapter, “Computers”, looks at the history of computers in reality, including the fact that the word used to mean a woman who does calculations, and the significance of Logopolis; it points out the importance of the computer-generated music. It’s not the longest chapter but I felt was intellectually the most substantial.
The fifth chapter, “The Singularity”, looks at the extent to which Logopolis anticipated Vernor Vinge.
The conclusion, “‘It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for'”, looks at the many ways in which the new Blu-ray edition of Logopolis improves on the original. It’s on my list…
Not the most ground-breaking of Black Archives, but as I said up top, a respectful and detailed analysis of an important story. You can get it here.
Last week, the Black Archives published their 77th and latest volume, on Castrovalva, and once I have read it, this reading project will have caught up to where I wanted it to get to when I started it in September 2021.
I am up North this weekend, in the Dutch province of Drenthe, feeding my interest in matters megalithic by inspecting the hunebedden, the huge 5000-year-old stone structures which are dotted around the province. In fact, Drenthe has no less than 52 of them, and there are another two in Groningen; in the whole of the rest of the Netherlands there is one (1) surviving megalithic structure, a tomb near Maastricht.
Herman Clerinx, in his book Een Palais voor de Doden, tallies twelve dolmens and menhirs in Belgium, and one in Luxembourg. (I have been to all of them.) This means that 76% of all the surviving megalithic monuments in the three Benelux countries are in Drenthe, otherwise one of the least remarkable Dutch provinces.
Even though the hunebedden are not that different from each other (which itself is interesting; compare the variations among the Belgian monoliths, and their contrast with Wéris), they are still pretty spectacular. We looked at six of them today, which is more than 10% of the total number, and unusually for this blog, I’m going to lead with my video reaction to each one, since photographs just don’t capture the majestic structure.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Niger.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Shadow Speaker
Nnedi Okorafor
2,696
448
In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger
Paul Stoller
278
76
Don’t Spill the Milk!
Stephen Davies
226
54
Harmattan
Gavin Weston
242
26
Nomads of Niger
Carol Beckwith and Marion van Offelen
31
83
This was a very difficult tabulation. There are a lot of books about West Africa, or just Africa in general. There’s a certain amount of confusion between Niger and Nigeria. There are books about travelling to Timbuktu (which is in Mali), or the Songhay Empire (which was also mainly in Mali), or following Mungo Park (who did the whole river Niger). I excluded 28 books before I got to the fifth one actually set in Niger, and for once I’m not going to list them all; some of them have very spurious Nigerien connections indeed.
The winner – for the second time, see also Sudan – is Nnedi Okorafor, who very clearly sets Shadow Speaker in a future Niger.
The top book set in Niger by a Nigerien author that I was able to identify is Sarraounia : Le drame de la reine magicienne, by Abdoulaye Mamani.
Incidentally, Niger has the second lowest median age of any country in the world, ahead of only the Central African Republic.
Next up: Australia, North Korea, Syria and indeed Mali.
Let us set the stage with a brief exploration of perhaps the most famous example of the intersection of honour imperatives and high politics in sixteenth-century Ireland: the fizzled duel of 1571 between James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald and Sir John Perrot. Fitzmaurice was the instigator and initial leader of the so-called Desmond Rebellions that raged in Munster in the 1570s and early 1580s; Perrot was the aging English knight and ex-soldier sent by the Crown to suppress them. Fitzmaurice proposed to settle matters through personal combat, a proposal to which Perrot gladly agreed, even allowing Fitzmaurice to set the conditions of combat. They arranged to meet outside of Killmallock to fight with the sword and target while clad in ‘Irish tresses’. But if Fitzmaurice’s challenge represents the high point of the politics of honour in Anglo-Irish affairs, his failure to show on the day suggests its rapid demise. He justified his absence by saying that were he to kill Perrot, the Queen would simply send a new president to crush him.¹ Whether this was sincere or not, it certainly showed a concern for the limits of honour politics: how could Fitzmaurice be sure that the Queen would abide by the extra-legal agreement made between himself and Perrot, two gentleman commanders? Following a period of self-exile on the continent, the would-be-duellist returned to Munster and with the aid of a small papal force attempted to raise a holy war against the forces of the Crown – marking the first time that a mature ideology of faith and fatherland appeared on the Anglo-Irish landscape, an ideology that would dominate that relationship, arguably, into the present.² In his abandonment of honour principles for the stronger stuff of faith and fatherland as a basis of resistance, Fitzmaurice may not have shown himself the bravest of rebels, but he certainly demonstrated political vision. ¹ For an extended discussion of the honour principles at stake, see Palmer, ‘The insolent liberty’. ² Anthony McCormack’s analysis of the Earls of Desmond’s intrigues with Francis I of France and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, however, demonstrate the longer lineage of ‘faith and fatherland’ ideology in Ireland and in Anglo-Irish relations. Nevertheless, Fitzmaurice’s landing in Munster accompanied by papal troops and carrying a banner bearing the cross marks the first appearance of this ideological position in the field. See McCormack, Earldom of Desmond, p. 68.
I met Brendan Kane back in 2009 when I attended a conference that he organised about Tudor Ireland in Connecticut; it’s still a topic I hope to write about at some future stage, and this book helped to remind me why. It’s a treatment of the concept of honour and how it affected relations between and withing Ireland and England in the century between the start of the process of declaring Henry VIII King of Ireland, and the outbreak of the Confederate Wars (with subsequent spillover into Scotland and England).
I’m instinctively (and anthropologically) attracted to historical explanations that rely on more than economic self-interest, and the concept of honour turns out to be rather a good lens for examining the history of conflict and co-operation between the various strands of Irish and their English overlords. The analysis of Irish language literature is beyond my competence to assess, but I’m glad it’s there. I found the chapters on the Nine Years’ War and on the mutual difficulties of Wentworth/Strafford and his Irish counterpart forty years later particularly interesting.
I was also completely unaware of the liminal figure of Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clanricarde (1572-1635), who was also created Earl of St Albans and married Frances, the daughter of Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (her first husband, the 2nd Earl of Essex, having come to a sticky end). One of their children married the very Irish Earl of Ormonde, and the other the very English Earl of Winchester. If I count correctly, his younger brother Ulick was my 7x great-grandfather. He was able to move between the two kingdoms and maintain his own set of identities at a troubled time, and I’d like to dig a bit more into his history.
Anyway, a good detailed book on a slightly obscure topic. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. On a related note, the next on that pile is Ireland in the Renaissance, c.1540-1660, eds. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton.
I always approach amendments to the WSFS Constitution with some trepidation. The Business Meeting does not always make things better, and it is not always sensitive to the lived experience of Hugo Administrators or con-running volunteers. But Tammy Coxen and I, as Hugo Administrators for 2017, 2019, 2020, 2024, 2025 (for a time) and 2026, hope to make things easier for our successors by clarifying the rules and bringing them fully into line with current practice, as proposed below. All new business is somewhat burdensome on the Business Meeting agenda, not to mention on the poor volunteers running it, but hopefully these four items should be uncontroversial and can be dealt with speedily.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Little Book of Fate”):
When he could get a word in, the Doctor thanked him and set off.
I wrote up the Black Archive on Warriors’ Gatetwo years ago, including the expanded and revised audio version of Stephen Gallagher’s novelisation which was released in 2019. A few months after my 2023 write-up, the BBC released a print version of the new audiobook, plus two more short stories by Stephen Gallagher set in the same continuity.
As I said before, the revised novelisation gives us a lot more background and characterisation of the slavers and the Tharils than did either the TV series or the 1982 text, and mixes up the plot quite substantially. Gallagher is probably the best known mainstream sf writer to have worked on 1980’s Doctor Who, and he clearly loves the story and can now shape it the way he wants.
The first of the two extra stories is quite a long one, “The Kairos Ring”, featuring Romana and the Tharils and aliens infesting an American Civil War battle. It was also originally released as an audiobook, as the first in a series of five of which the other four were all by Paul Magrs. I had not come across these before, and must look our for them.
The other new story is “The Little Book of Fate”, basically a vignette bringing the Eighth Doctor back into this particular continuity, but nicely done.
Sometimes the BBC tries to make money off us fans by putting old wine in new bottles, but this is very refreshing. You can get it here.
One thing that I should have mentioned in my post from yesterday – an important element of the WSFS consultative votes both last year and this year was that statements were published both for and against the proposed changes, written by people who already had skin in the game – the proposers and people who had spoken or written against each proposal.
I feel that this is a very important element of any future membership vote, and if that does become part of the process, something would need to be built into the rules about it. I wrote yesterday’s post before I had listened to Octothorpe’s discussion of the issue (starting at 40 mins in), and I was interested that one of the Octothorpe editors admits to having their opinion swayed by one of the published statements.
She didn’t lead with that. First there was some obfuscation.
Story set in a world like today’s America except that there are talking animals. A dog detective teams up with a crow to Solve Crime. Nice idea, though maybe more could have been done with it. You can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2020 (as part of Ellen Datlow’s submission to the Hugo Packet) and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on both of those piles is Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix.
So, the numbers are out from this year’s WSFS Consultative Votes. 343 Seattle Worldcon members voted in total.
In the vote to amend the constitution so as to eliminate the Retro Hugo Awards:
Yes: 164 No: 167 Total: 331
In the vote to amend the Hugo Award categories for Best Fan and Professional Artist:
Yes: 124 No: 160 Total: 284
This is less than the 1260 who participated last year, but still two or three times more participants than the peak attendance at the average Business Meeting session.
It’s not surprising that the participation was a bit lower this time. Most WSFS Constitutional amendments are not in themselves interesting and are in themselves technical. Films attract more Hugo voters than the art categories or the Retro Hugos, so turnout was inevitably higher for a proposal on the former than for proposals on the latter. These votes are consultative and were always intended as such.
Also, this year’s timing was experimental. Last year we held the vote for ten days immediately before the convention, the point at which interest in WSFS is perhaps most intense. Turnout was gratifyingly high. But we were aware that some proponents of the consultative vote favour a longer, earlier voting period. So we tried that this year, and got a lower turnout. I’m no longer on the team that made the vote happen, but I consider it to have been a successful effort, with lessons learned.
I doubt that I will be personally involved in future exercises, but my advice to organisers would be to go for a 10-day voting period, rather than a whole month, and link it to one of the Business Meeting sessions, probably the first, having the vote conclude a few days before so that the results can be announced there. I would also be very wary of making the constitutional specifications around the timing too rigid.
I think also that a different Worldcon could devote a few more resources to publicising the vote. I counted all of one social media post about it from Seattle, on the day it closed. (I did a post of my own the previous day, as did David Levine.) It was also the last of several items in a newsletter to all members on 23 May, where it was not mentioned in the opening paragraph. I feel that more publicity would have made a difference. I am sadly familiar with some of the reasons why it didn’t happen that way this time.
It comes down to this though. Is it more legitimate for important decisions to be made by the couple of dozen people for whom it is convenient to meet in a room at a given time? Or by several hundred people in an online up or down vote? I am impressed by those who are very confident that they already know the answer. In my view, it’s still a work in progress.
Current Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton
Last books finished The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson (did not finish) Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske
Next books Fear Death by Water, by Emily Cook The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
They stood in the courtyard of a family compound in the out-skirts of Dadang. A fat bottle palm squatted by a well, casting cross-hatched shade. Colorful tunics and shawls hung to dry on lines strung between semi separate houses. Aristide wondered who they belonged to. Surely no one lived here. Still, the illusion was admirable. And focusing on the tradecraft kept him from thinking about what he was about to do.
Third in a series (The Amberlough Dossier) of which I had not read the other two. I read the first hundred pages but couldn’t get into it on its own. Not anyone’s fault. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020, in the Hugo Voter Packet as part of Diana Pho’s generous submission. Next on that pile is A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock, from the same folder.
You have a game with pictures, trying to spot the differences, your eyes darting back and forth between them. It is harder with text. Don’t focus on individual words in each line, but look at the space between them. Know what both sides say. Hold it all in your head. Perhaps don’t even quite focus your vision.
This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.
I did understand this, but found it quite difficult to follow.
The last injection severs their voluntary motor pathways so nothing moves but their eyes. Before the final step, the prisoners feel young again, for a moment.
A very short, vicious, vivid portrayal of a prison planet.
“It was better before they put in the big road. The old road ran right by us, and we’d get people all the time. Now it’s just folks who already know we’re here. Or ones that get unlucky. It’s catch as catch can these days, I guess.”
So they (the first “they”) killed the kid again. They stormed the hole and broke the kid out and slit the kid’s throat on public television (as all television in Omelas was publicly funded), and they said, “Look at what sort of shit your beautiful city is built on!” and the kid bled out and it was extremely graphic to the point of being censored in later broadcasts. And one of the tracks of the free public transit system twisted loose, and a bunch of commuters were killed in a freak accident, and the stock market started shuddering downward, and a house collapsed on the south side of Omelas.
Update of the classic Ursula Le Guin story for today, including communications technology and general societal decay.
1) “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal. Second paragraph of third section:
Margery resettled the bag on her shoulder and the hammering of her heart got louder and harder against the walls of her ribs. Off to the side of the path, something gleamed in the sunlight. Too much sunlight, as if trees were missing.
Fairy tale involving giant homicidal snails. What’s not to love?
Straightening her eyeglasses, taking in the overall effect, she sighed.
I got this because I had been in contact with the author for a peculiar reason. Back in 2020, when The Canterville Ghost won the 1945 Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, we had the usual difficulties in tracking down the heirs of the creators to send them the trophy. Eventually I found out that the writer of the script, Edwin Harvey Blum, had a living daughter, and duly got in touch with her and sent her the rocket. (In retrospect, we should have also considered the heirs of director Jules Dassin as potential recipients. I think we did contact MGM, and they were not interested.)
I also discovered that Deborah Blum had written this book, and given my vague general interest in anthropology, I bought it; but it then lingered on my unread shelf for five years, to the point that it was the non-fiction book that had been there longest. (Next on that pile is The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane.)
Anyway, I finally got to it. It’s a reconstruction of the love life of Margaret Mead, between her young marriage to schooldays crush Luther Cressman, her affairs with Andre Sapir and Ruth Benedict, and her meeting with eventual second husband Reo Fortune, basically the first third of her life (she lived from 1901 to 1978).
Other people’s sex lives are always interesting, of course, but I felt this missed several beats. Blum has chosen to write a novelistic reconstruction of conversations and other events, rather than a historical treatment of the surviving correspondence (of which apparently there is a heck of a lot), and I always wonder how much has been made up in cases like this. (See also Persia.)
More importantly, the most interesting thing about Margaret Mead is not who she did or didn’t sleep with in her early twenties, but her contribution to anthropology, and this is only briefly covered in the book, which ends with her return from Samoa in 1926 and lightly skips over her subsequent work and fame. It would be nice to be able to draw a line connecting her emotional and intellectual progress, but that isn’t really attempted here and may not in the end be possible.
Not Blum’s fault at all, but I’d also like to read more some time about Alfred Cort Haddon, one of the founders of anthropology, who popped up in my PhD research thirty years ago as a zoology professor at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, before he became famous as Haddon the Head-Hunter. He crossed paths with Margaret Mead a couple of times, but was forty-five years older and lived on a different continent, so it is entirely fair that Blum does not write much about him here.
Mead’s feminism is particularly interesting (and insufficiently explored in this book). I would like to know how many young women in early 1920s America, marrying at 21, refused to change their names to their husband’s. It would certainly never have occurred to my grandmother, born two years before Margaret Mead in the same city (Philadelphia). Edited to add: I was completely unfair to my grandmother here. She did tell my grandfather before they married that she would not change her name; he said that would be fine; and then she changed her mind.
All social science, but especially anthropology, owes Margaret Mead a tremendous debt. At twenty-three years of age she did what no woman in anthropology had done. She went on a poverty-level fellowship compared to the generous stipends now given. She violated the canons of the Establishment by writing a report that was interesting, readable, and relevant to the lives of people in our society. She popularized anthropology. The departments in which some of her critics, both friendly and hostile, now teach owe their existence to Margaret’s popularization of the subject matter. If what she wrote in Coming of Age in Samoa tended to produce an outburst of demand for greater sexual freedom among our young people, it did that because it was a lance puncturing the old pustule of hypocrisy. She became a celebrity, and having been made that by the media she cleverly turned it to her own use to support her programs.
Over a half-century ago, this twenty-three-year-old girl who had never before been out of the country, went to an isolated island under financial conditions a contemporary graduate student would probably reject as demeaning, and there made her first field study. She had the firm conviction that she could establish and hold her place in the profession with men. Her record proves she was right and in the doing she became a pioneer in the women’s movement. We all are indebted to her in some degree. Colleagues as scholars will correct her errors, the perspective of time will establish her scientific work, and we, her professional associates, will gain stature both personally and professionally, if we rightly honor the remarkable young girl and the woman Margaret became.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Venezuela.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Dragons in the Waters
Madeleine L’Engle
4,810
1,393
Green Mansions
William Henry Hudson
3,251
1,811
Doña Bárbara
Rómulo Gallegos
5,804
517
It Would Be Night in Caracas
Karina Sainz Borgo
7,368
241
The Sun and the Void
Gabriela Romero Lacruz
3,699
408
In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon
Redmond O’Hanlon
1,558
638
Ya̦nomamö: The Fierce People
Napoleon A. Chagnon
1,327
705
The Caiman
Maria Eugenia Manrique
2,393
120
This table sees one of the biggest variations between LibraryThing and Goodreads that I have yet seen. The top-ranked book on LibraryThing is fifth on Goodreads; the top-ranked book on Goodreads is seventh on LibraryThing; the winner on aggregate is second on one system and third on the other. Even bigger divergences would have appeared if I had gone further down the table.
And of all my childhood favourites, I did not expect to see Madeleine L’Engle, of A Wrinkle in Time fame, winning this week’s prize. But indeed, Dragons in the Waters is about a kid going to Venezuela to take over his inheritance, both natural and supernatural.
Venezuelan writers pick up half of the spots this week. Surprisingly, only It Would Be Night in Caracas is directly about the current political situation.
Of the others, The Sun and the Void is set in a fantasy country that as far as I can tell the author wants us to read as Venezuela. The Ya̦nomamö live in both Venezuela and Brazil, but Venezuela has adopted Chagnon’s book, so I’m happy to go along with that.
I disqualified seven books. A Long Petal of the Sea, by Isabel Allende, is mainly set in Spain and Chile, and only in Venezuela at the end. The General in His Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is about the end of the life of Simon Bolivar, in what is now Colombia. Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano, is about the entire continent. Bruchko, by Bruce Olson, unpleasantly straddles the border with Colombia but seems to be more on the other side. When Time Stopped, by Ariana Neumann, is about a Venezuelan discovering her family’s experiences during the Holocaust. Bolívar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana, covers Simon Bolivar’s life and career all over the region. And Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln, by Margarita Engle, sounds very sweet but is set mainly in the USA.
Coming next: Niger, Australia, North Korea and Syria.
I’ve spent some time recently revisiting a teenage enthusiasm for the game of Diplomacy, in which (ideally) seven players with differently matched forces try to dominate the map of Europe circa the start of the twentieth century. The webDiplomacy site allows you to test your mettle not only against human players, but also against AIs. This can go quite fast, at a move every minute or so.
I am horrified and fascinated that the AIs continually defeat me, a mere human player. The couple of times I’ve tried “Gunboat Diplomacy” (where there is also no communication) with real humans, I found the going much easier, as opponents with brains made out of meat are more likely to make mistakes. Out of a couple of dozen battles with AIs, I have won only two; one where as Turkey I managed to break out of my corner before the rest of the countries had properly got started (which I think is the least difficult way to win against the software), and another as Italy where I combined good luck with a couple of good tactical shouts and a coherent overall strategy.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 31) Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson (did not finish)
Non-genre 2 (YTD 19) thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West
SF 13 (YTD 57) The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly (did not finish) These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only) Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only) The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner (did not finish) Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 13) Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Comics 4 (YTD 16) My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al
7,200 pages (YTD 35,300) 13/31 (YTD 52/138) by non-male writers (van der Lint, Blum, Ypi, West, Bradley, Cole, Donnelly, Jacobs x2, Kaner, Engle, Huang, Ferris) 3/31 (YTD 21/138) by non-white writers (Bradley, Cole, Huang) 2/31 rereads (Beyond the Sun, Doctor Who: Logopolis)
231 books currently tagged unread, down 20 from last month, down 78 from May 2024.
Reading now A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske
Coming soon (perhaps) Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone Fear Death by Water, by Emily Cook Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton
Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb “The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch ‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King Final Cut, by Charles Burns The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson
We sat on a bench and watched the East River behind the slow-moving bodies on the walkway. I tried to show her the dead book, and she thumbed the margins before giving up when it wouldn’t brighten. It was clear she had no interest in the thing.
Books and technology and perceptions and truth. Didn’t quite have the emotional punch that I wanted.
There was plenty of night left; she knew she too could go back to bed. Instead, she wrapped up in her biggest cloak and stomped outside to empty her mailbox. It was almost—almost funny the way it kept coming, like a magic cauldron in a fairytale following a poorly worded command to make porridge, swamping the town. Finally she hauled the bag back inside and spread it out in front of the fire. Outside, the storm grumbled, receded, returned, filled the entire cottage inside the cave with the echoing sound of rain.
Quite short; wizard and her apprentice awkwardly build a relationship and fight evil.
4) “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. Second paragraph of third section:
Antonis could not believe it. In fact, he had probably stopped listening to her rant right about when his werewolf neighbor had sent him a new wallpaper pattern. A thank you gift for watering the roses outside the werewolf’s castle. Antonis said that he’d prefer to be paid in teeth, the currency of TinyCastle™, but as he had explained to Nefeli, you have to roll with the game, that’s half the fun.
Splendidly creepy story of the protagonist (and eventually others) becoming gradually cut off from the rest of humanity, in parallel timetracks, with good sense of place.
3) “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie. (Title story of a collection which you can get here.) Second paragraph of third section:
“A dangerous time,” whispered one mother to the next. “Especially for the old.” And the whisper scurried through the village. And close behind it, a day or so later, another whisper, that Darter Spine’s molt was not going well, and that many had over the years wondered about Darter Spine’s soul, soul mark or no soul mark. That elder had always been peculiar, so the mothers and mothers’ mothers had said. “What if ?” the mothers whispered. A good person, who made beautiful gardens and was kind to all in the village, but peculiar. “What if ? What if Darter Spine’s soul has died. What if this elder dies and a soul does not emerge? This elder will be lost!”
This was the first of the novelettes that I read, and I was sure I was going to vote for it, so am slightly surprised to find myself putting it only third. Very well drawn story of a rather merciless alien society, whose first contact with humans brings change, but perhaps not enough.
2) “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker. Second paragraph of third section:
“Hot stuff!” Her truck drifted in my car’s direction as she eyeballed it, then overcorrected. “No wonder you had trouble.”
Tremendous tale which starts off looking like it’s just a matter of a dysfunctional relationship between two sisters finding some common landing point after decades of estrangement, and then turns into something completely different. Loses a quarter of a point for last four paras, which are an unnecessary epilogue.
I looked at the lease again and noticed something else: it was the simplest lease I’d signed since that sublet agreement in college that we’d made because everyone’s parents said we needed to “get things in writing.” Leases are usually full of rules and caveats—how to give notice at the end of term, how much you’ll owe if you damage something, whether you’re allowed to have a pet. This lease just said it ran from September through June, how much we were paying per month, and that we’d be paying utilities. The lead-based paint disclosure and the move-in checklist were paperclipped to the back.
Tremendous story of selkies, feminism, toxic relationships and the academic research treadmill. Charming and righteously enraging, with strong sense of the Massachusetts coast. Gets my vote.
I ran a finger down the side of his face and he shuddered and wrinkled his nose as if trying to discourage an insect. And then he turned on to his back and began to snore loudly.
When I first read this in 2009, I wrote:
I only realised after reading this that I had already heard the excellent audio adaptation which includes Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills. The original book is very good too, and I think would be reasonably penetrable for someone who hadn’t previously followed the Bernice Summerfield stories. Nicely observed emotional politics between and among Benny and her students, and the various aliens with whom Benny’s ex gets them involved. To a certain extent I felt it was the story that Colony In Space should have been. A good one (only the second Benny novel I have read, the first being the equally enjoyable Walking to Babylon).
I reread it in 2015, but in the midst of Clarke and other obligations didn’t write it up that time. My original plan was only to revisit the Bernice Summerfield novels that I have never written up at all, but then I thought, I actually enjoyed this and I wonder if a return visit will work? And it did; as well as the nicely judged emotional and physical perils of Benny and her students, there’s a particularly wacky alien reproduction process which often results in hot-looking humanoids, and a deceptive Ancient Weapon. One of the good ones. You can (probably) get it here.
I had written of the audio in 2007:
Beyond the Sun is another archaeological dig-goes-wrong story but introduces the character of Jason, Benny’s ex-husband, and lots of emotional angst as well as the actual plot. I was completely absorbed in it, and yet failed to spot the voices of Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills until I read the sleeve notes afterwards.
I spotted Anneke Wills this time, but failed to spot Sophie Aldred, who is actually a very versatile actor. But the star is Lisa Bowerman, really getting into her stride here as Bernice, with sarcasm and emotion, helping us through what’s actually a rather convoluted plot. The only one of the first season audios not adapted by Jac Rayner but by Matt Jones, the original author. You can get it here.
6) The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion, by Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford
What? I hear you exclaim. Given my own record on speaking out against the abuses of the Hugo process carried out by the organisers of Chengdu Worldcon, how can I possibly be ranking the Barkley and Sandford Report, which blew the bloody doors off the whole affair in February 2024, last on my Hugo ballot this year?
There are several reasons, which I will go into at greater length in due course. Most important, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures. But also, this Report misses a couple of vitally important issues revealed in its own detail and compensates with rhetoric. So I’m not voting for it, but it may well win the award anyway.
5) The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel, by Jenny Nicholson.
This is a four hour long video report on a bad investment decision by Disney, to create a Star Wars hotel in Walt Disney World in Florida. It looks nice, but I honestly think that the story is not worth four hours of vidding, let alone watching.
4) r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge
I think it’s brilliant that Reddit users got together to challenge each other to read more broadly, and the enthusiasm for this project is great. I just prefer my Best Related Works to be written commentary.
3) Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics, by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones
Now this is more like it, cold hard numbers demonstrating why the published statistics from the 2023 Hugos simply cannot be trusted. I was relieved but not surprised to see that the statistics from the years that I myself was involved generally do pass the mathematical smell test. Lots of beautiful numerical details here, which I’ve been chewing on occasionally ever since it was published.
As noted above, though, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures, so it’s not in my top two in this category.
2) Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll
Second paragraph of third chapter (actually Chapter 2, “Whitey on the Moon”, counting the introduction as the first chapter):
[Richard B.] Spencer expounded upon this idea at length in an early podcast that explicated Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) with alt-right essayist Roman Bernard. Interstellar caused a big stir among alt-right intellectuals because it expressed the widespread reactionary sentiment that the United States had undergone a serious social and technological decline. The country’s malaise, they suggested, could only be reversed by intrepid white explorers taking up where the Apollo missions left off. In the film, the United States has shifted all resources away from technological innovation and into food production after an environmental catastrophe reduces the planet to a dustbowl. Even as the government denies the possibility of spaceflight—they claim the moon landing was an expensive hoax—a secret NASA program strives to save humanity by sending settlers to colonize another planet.
A short, fascinating analysis of the extent to which the alt-right has drawn inspiration from science fiction, often from authors and works who would have been horrified that they were being used for these purposes. Alas, a very timely book given what has been happening in the USA of late. You can get it here.
1) Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum.
As its title suggests, 2312 is a novel driven less by story or characters, and more by the desire to capture a certain (fictional, futuristic) moment of human history. Robinson accomplishes this by trotting out all the best-known (and often-derided) tools of science-fictional worldbuilding, but also by referencing much of the work that has come before him. So 2312 often seems as much a commentary on visions of the future as one of its own.
Tremendous assembly of a body of work by the excellent Abigail Nussbaum, whose thoughtful dissection of form and substance is always a delight, and she is usually right about the books as well (ie often agrees with me). Gets my vote with enthusiasm. You can get it here.
Current The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans
Last books finished Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner (did not finish) Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
Next books Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
Langrice had shrugged. “Magister.” Speaking Pel easily because running the Anchorage meant you needed to be good with languages. “No Ilmari will work for me. It’s bad luck. Only the desperate will even come buy a drink from me. Or those who need to leave Ilmar the least convenient way.” She’d shaken her head ruefully, as though she’d give up the Anchorage and its trade in a moment if only there was someone else. “They won’t even take my money from my hands. I have to send my staff to market, or else pay some middleman. So why, exactly, would I not work with you Palleseen?”
I don’t think I voted in this category, and if I had a vote now I’d vote for The Coral Bones and The Red Scholar’s Wake ahead of City of Last Chances, but this is nonetheless a very good book, set in a fantasy city which has recently been occupied by invaders, where the various ancient civic institutions, including the magical ones, continue to function despite the change of rules, and further potential social ferment is brewing. There is a particularly effective twist in the middle, and a slightly discarded deity who attaches himself to one of the main protagonists. It is, er, a bit long at 496 pages. You can get it here.
I’ve run out of Tiptree and Clarke winners to read, so there are only two left in this sequence which I started with Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop back in 2012; a twelve and a half year reading project comes to an end. I think I’ll replace it with a project of reading a book by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who was not a white man; there are 29 of them by my count. It’s good to have a target.
