Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson / Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter of Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson:

For some time after I came to Dublin, my body was weak, my health very precarious, and my spirits heavily oppressed. Pleasures seemed to have lost their exhilarating effect, and I experienced a kind of lethargy of the mind. In short, I fell into a state, the most destructive to virtue that possibly can be. It is when the heart is replete with sorrow and languor, that is most susceptible of love. In the midst of a round of amusements, each equally engaging, and a train of admirers the giddy female gives neither a preference, and has not leisure to attach herself to either. But when softened, and inactive, the tender passions find easy admission, and the comforter, and consoler soon becomes the favoured lover—such was my case.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore:

While Dardis continued to visit Peg when he could, she was lonely and missed her family. She confessed, ‘I was oppressed with anxiety, and could neither look back with remorse, nor forward without apprehension of what might follow.’ Her biggest concern was what her sisters and father might be making of her disappearance. She had fled he sister’s house telling no one where she was going and had left behind all her clothes. Anxious about the distress she was causing her family, she pleaded with Dardis to try and find out what they knew of her situation.

I picked up Julie Peakman’s book about Peg Plunkett, 18th century Dublin courtesan, off a remainder pile a few years ago, and thought I should prepare myself for it by reading the original memoirs, published in 1795-97 and available for free here, among other places.

Peg’s memoir is a tremendously interesting account of what it was like to make your living from sex in the Dublin of 250 years ago. She pulled herself up from a series of failed relationships and set up a brothel on what is now O’Connell Street with her friend Sally Hayes in about 1775; she would have been in her thirties (if we accept the 1742 birthdate proposed by Peakman) and Hayes a bit younger.

She faced a lot of violence from men who felt they should take it into their own hands to punish sex workers just for being sex workers, but interestingly (by her account at least) she managed to get the forces of law and order on her side, and usually won her day in subsequent court cases. She tells these stories with great humour, but it must have been very traumatic.

She does a lot of name-dropping of names that mean nothing to us now, but clearly she was accepted in the highest social circles. She had affairs with at least two of the English governors of Ireland, Charles Manners, the Duke of Rutland, and John Fane, the Earl of Westmorland. She has a hilarious story about being challenged while at the theatre about her affair with the Duke; when hecklers yelled, “Peg, who lay you with last?”,

I with the greatest nonchalance, replied, “MANNERS you black-guards;” this repartee was received with universal plaudits, as the bon mot was astonishingly great, the Duke himself being in the royal box with his divine Duchess, who was observed to laugh immoderately at the whimsical occurrence, for ’tis a known fact, that this most beautiful of woman kind that ever I beheld, never troubled herself about her husband’s intrigues.

Still, it must have been pretty uncomfortable to have her sex life dissected in public like that, and it is impressive that she turns it into a joke. (The unfortunate duke died of alcoholism while still governing Ireland, aged only 33; his ‘divine duchess’ outlived him by more than forty years.)

I picked up Julie Peakman’s book hoping that it would fill in some of the gaps in Peg’s first person account. To what extent can her stories be independently verified by other records? Who is behind the various pseudonyms, such as “Mr. B——r, of Kilkenny [who] shortly after came to be Lord T——s, by his father’s obtaining a very ancient earldom”? How does her narrative fit into the overall analysis public discussions of sexuality and sex work in the English-speaking world in the 18th century?

I’m afraid that I was disappointed. Peakman’s book does resolve some of the pseudonyms, but otherwise doesn’t do much more than reheat and repeat Peg’s narrative for a modern audience; and frankly, Peg’s style is much more entertaining and engaging. I guess that for readers who don’t have access to the original documents, Peakman will do; but as I have found with that other great self-describer of a century later, Fanny Kemble, the original text is far more interesting than any modern re-hashing.

What I’d like to see is an edition of Peg’s memoirs where the blanks are filled in and where we get a decent best-guess timeline and maps showing the geography of the places where she was active. I think that it would sell rather well. Meanwhile you can get Julie Peakman’s book here.

Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis.

The best known books set in each country: Türkiye

Posted on by

See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the territory of today’s Türkiye. (And I follow the convention that you call people and countries by the name that they wish to be known by.)

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
The IliadHomer464,04928,539
My Name Is RedOrhan Pamuk57,3757,088
SnowOrhan Pamuk47,0517,086
The Bastard of IstanbulElif Shafak 55,9911,894
The Museum of InnocenceOrhan Pamuk33,5232,269
Istanbul: Memories and the CityOrhan Pamuk20,5443,654
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange WorldElif Shafak 65,748999
Birds Without WingsLouis de Bernières15,2912,672

The Iliad is very firmly set in and around the siege of Troy, today’s Hisarlık on the Ionian Sea coast. So I’m giving it this week’s prize. But it’s very encouraging that six of the other seven are by actual Turkish authors, even if there are only two different writers.

I disqualified the following books because less than half of them (much less, in a couple of cases) is set in Türkiye: Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides; The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova; Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr; The Forty Rules of Love, by Elif Shafak; The Idiot, by Elif Batuman; and The Island of Missing Trees, again by Elif Shafak. (I’m pretty sure that more than half of The Bastard of Istanbul is set in the city, but not 100%.)

When I did this exercise back in 2015, the same three books came out on top for Turkey (as it was then called).

Next up: Germany.

The Administrator’s Tale, third time around: part one

Posted on by

So, this year was my third time as Hugo Award Administrator, and my sixth year of being involved with the Hugos in general. And it was by far the weirdest.

I was the Hugo Award Administrator in 2017 and 2019; Deputy Hugo Administrator in 2020 and 2022; and WSFS Division Head for a few months in 2021. This involved Worldcons on three different continents – Helsinki (2017), Dublin (2019), New Zealand (2020, though conducted virtually in the end), Washington DC (2021), Chicago (2022) and Glasgow (2024). Each presented their own problems. I’ve written up the 2017 experience here and here, and 2019 here and here, and more briefly 2022 here; 2020 and 2021 were too painful to write up in full, for somewhat different reasons.

I see from my records that my discussions with Esther MacCallum-Stewart, the Glasgow 2024 Chair, about taking on the role of WSFS Division Head began as early as February 2020, though not confirmed until November 2021. I got my team lined up fairly early – Kat Jones as Hugo Administrator from the beginning, with Cassidy as her deputy and Kathryn Duval as my deputy from October 2022, and Laura Martins joining the team also at an early stage. For the other parts of the WSFS Division, Jesi Lipp came on board as Chair of the Business Meeting in September 2022 and Naveed Khan and Thomas Westerberg for Site Selection in April 2023. Bridget Chee also volunteered to wrangle Hugos on the ground in Glasgow. So far, so good.

Some of the team in May 2024 – Laura, me, Naveed and Bridget

But several things went very awry in the process. The first of these was software for administering the Hugo voting and counting. This has been the subject of Monday morning quarter-backing from people who are unaware of the constraints under which a Worldcon operates. The first thing to understand is that for the convention, the registration software is critical to the functioning of the entire organisation. The Hugo and Site Selection stuff is a secondary issue, and no matter how hard you may try and push, the fact is that the convention will be embarrassed if the Hugo stuff doesn’t work properly, but will go bust if the registration stuff doesn’t work properly.

For various very good reasons, which I don’t intend to go into here, the Registration software often tends to get largely or completely rewritten for each convention. WSFS’ aim under my watch has generally been to get the Hugo software talking to the registration system and up and running at an early stage in January for nominations and in April for the final ballot. This does not always work. 2020 was the worst case in point, but it’s a bit of a bare knuckle ride every time.

This year, we had an external service provider who did indeed produce a good registration solution. But their Hugo work fell short of expectations, and we had to resort much more hastily than I would have liked to volunteer efforts – a combination of Kansa, the venerable but creaking back-end for tallying nominations written by Eemeli Aro in 2017 and subsequently updated by David Matthewman, and NomNom, a bespoke solution for the front end of nominations and for both ends of the final ballot written specially this year by Chris Rose. This was precious and valuable volunteer time, and I cannot thank them enough.

Even so, the launch of Hugo nominations voting glitched very badly when it turned out that there was a serious software problem linked to the registration system interface that needed to be resolved, and we had to stop the voting a day after it had started and restart several days later. Henry Balen was also crucial to managing the relationship with the software provider at this point.

In the meantime, we faced much bigger reputational problems affecting the Hugos as a whole. I attended Chengdu Worldcon in 2023 and enjoyed a lot of it. But the data from the final ballot vote, released at the start of December, looked distinctly odd. And when the data from the nominations count was released in January, I was dismayed to see that it was clearly very flawed. The numbers simply did not add up, and were clearly not the output of a genuine ballot count.

The other immediate flaw that caught public attention was the disqualification of several finalists without explanation. It has been generally surmised that this was because of overt or implicit censorship from government authorities. I do not know if this is true, but it seems unlikely to me to be the full story. Babel, by R.F. Kuang, which was disqualified from the ballot, actually won a Chinese-organised prize in Chengdu a few months later. On the other hand, John Chu’s story “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You”, which is about a gay relationship in Taiwan, was allowed to stand as a Hugo finalist.

Personally, I am very disappointed with the behaviour of those who led the Hugo administration in 2023. There is no excuse for the breach of trust with voters and nominees, or for the damage that was done to the Hugos as an institution. The lack of transparency around the decisions is an additional reason for frustration, but the basic point is that the vote very deliberately failed to reflect the wishes of voters.

I have reflected on what I might have done if I were in the position of being instructed that certain Hugo nominees were not allowed on the ballot by local law. (NB that it is still not clear that this was what actually happened in 2023.) The Hugos and Worldcon must of course obey local legislation. But I would have wanted very clear professional advice before taking any such steps, preferably advice that could be published. And if put in an ethically difficult position, I like to think that rather than proceed, I would have resigned – as I did under milder circumstances in 2021.

A silly proposal went to this year’s Business Meeting suggesting that there should be a committee performing broad surveillance of how Worldcons choose WSFS software solutions. This is a bad idea. It adds bureaucracy to a fraught process, blurs lines of responsibility, and ignores the big issue for the convention itself (the registration software). If you think that the biggest problem with the 2023 Hugos was quality control of the software, I have a panda sanctuary that I’d like to sell you. But I will co-operate in good faith with the committee that has been set up to look into these things.

Unfortunately as more details came out about what had happened at Chengdu, it became clear that Kat Jones could not continue as 2024 Hugo Administrator and she resigned. After some reflection, I took on the role of Hugo Administrator myself, doubling up on my existing job as WSFS Division Head. I would not in general recommend this; there are good reasons why these two jobs are generally done by two people.

Translation was a big issue. The many WSFS members of Chengdu were all entitled to vote in 2024 Hugo nominations, and we commissioned Sophia Xue (Xue Yongle) from Shanghai to translate all the relevant materials. I had met her, ironically, because of the 2023 Hugo disqualifications, as a result of which she had qualified for the final ballot, and we had had a long chat at the Hugo ceremony in Chengdu. She caught a number of flaws in the Chinese translation of the WSFS Constitution that had been done the previous year.

With Sophia Xue in Chengdu

I have described the work of the Research Team in the Administrators’ Report and elsewhere. It was essential to the exercise. We had to disqualify three potential finalists, all Chinese (though one also qualified in another category) and another five declined nomination, a couple of them rather late in the process. There were some other tricky calls – Astounding finalists with self-published early work, tallying votes for two of the three volumes of a non-fiction nominee. Northanger Abbey was not a tricky call, but I included it in the final report for amusement.

The Chinese arm of our research team, Regina Kanyu Wang and Arthur Liu

I had had high hopes of producing a video announcing the final ballot with a professional production company and a well-known Scottish actor. The costs, however, were simply unfeasible, so we ended up with a video of self-recorded announcements by various speakers, prefaced with an introduction filmed by my son of me at the Atomium, north of Brussels, which is as science fictional a backdrop as you can get in our part of the world.

I was particularly pleased that we managed to get Geoffrey Gernsback, the oldest great-grandson of Hugo Gernsback, after whom the Hugos are named, as one of the announcers. He supplied us with a photograph of himself as a baby with his great-grandfather. Assembling the whole thing was a mammoth task accomplished without visible seams by Meg McDonald and James Turner.

Looking at the categories, ten out of twenty included Chinese finalists writing in Chinese and ten did not, so we decided to ask Sophia Xue to read the names of the former while I did the latter. (We then used the same audio for the ceremony, which startled me when I heard my own voice booming into the auditorium.)

We also held a town hall meeting for the Hugo finalists a couple of days before the announcement was made, partly for transparency but also to help finalists to make the most of their nomination status in local media.

People sometimes ask why we do not open voting on the Hugo final ballot as soon as it is announced. The simple fact is that there is not enough time. As noted above, we had a couple of very late withdrawals. Better to do the last coding twiddles when we know that the candidates are settled. We did the announcement at Eastercon on the Friday evening, including also details of those who had declined or were disqualified, and posed with those finalists who were present.

At Eastercon we also unveiled Sara Felix’ tartan rocket:

I should mention also the Hugo Helpdesk team, led by Terry Neill backed up by Rosemary Parks, and the Hugo Packet team consisting of Dave Gallaher, Jed Hartman and Scott Bobo, who ensured important elements of the user experience. The Packet in particular needs perhaps a bit more attention from WSFS as a whole; it is an important element of voter expectations, but is nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

I am out of chronological order here, because an early and easy decision in the entire process was to commission Iain Clark to design the trophy base. In general I prefer to go to known creators; running a competition absorbs time both from artists and administrators. Iain’s design is simple and pleasing, and leaves no doubt about the geography of the convention.

Hugo voting ended on 20 July, 55 years to the minute after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on the Moon. I was on a plane from Munich to Brussels at the time: my flight from Los Angeles the previous day had got delayed landing and I had to argue my case for Lufthansa to get me home that night. I landed knowing that we had more issues to deal with.

In about two thirds of the categories, an early lead was established by the eventual winner. We watched the inflow of votes for the rest with interest. In early June we became aware of something unusual – a particular finalist, who we will call Finalist A, was picking up something like ten nominations each day, at a time when most others were picking up just a couple. On closer examination it became clear that almost all of Finalist A’s votes were coming from newly purchased memberships, which were behaving quite unlike memberships controlled by real people. We took no immediate action – as Napoleon said, never interrupt the other side when they are making a mistake – but as history records, we disqualified 377 of those votes, and Finalist A therefore did not win in their category.

My hypothesis, based on the data that I have, is that a well-resourced fan of Finalist A hired a ‘vote farm’ to get a Hugo for their favourite creator. A notice was published in some public or semi-public online or meatspace forum, inviting people to make a quick buck by buying a Glasgow 2024 membership and sending the sponsor proof that they had voted for Finalist A. The sponsor then paid their money back plus a bonus. The greedier ones put in multiple memberships in alphabetical sequence, or in one case giving names which were translations of the numbers from 13 to 17.

For reasons which should be obvious, I am being circumspect about the precise details. I don’t want to make it easier for the next person who decides to do this. I do want to emphasise that the evidence points against Finalist A being involved or knowing about this in any way. I should also add that I have briefed and will brief future Hugo administration teams at greater length.

No other outcome was changed by the disqualification of the 377 votes – actually a couple of close finishes in other categories were widened. We found that disqualifying votes in NomNom is a rather tedious activity, which is just as well – it forces you to be absolutely certain that you are getting it right.

Out of time for today; coming soon, my experience of the convention itself.

Continued here.

Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Hakon shook his head. ‘This is a piece of personal initiative on my part.’ He glared at the guards. ‘Now, shoot them. That’s a direct order.’

This is a really surprising Doctor Who novel from Terrance Dicks, a writer who one doesn’t normally associate with the word “surprising”. It’s a prequel to The Brain of Morbius, but set later in the Doctor’s timeline – Peri is injured one a random planet that they happen to be visiting, so the Fifth Doctor takes her to Mehendri Solon earlier in his career to get fixed up. The two get separated, of course, and the Doctor finds himself the military commander of a grand alliance of improbable partners against Morbius, while Peri leads guerilla resistance planetside. There is a lot about war and military strategy and tactics, and one feels Dicks perhaps working through themes that he was never quite able to explore in his other work – though of course he was the co-author of The War Games. This is a very different Fifth Doctor and Peri to those we are used to, and diehard fans may want to read it as an alternate timeline. But I must say I enjoyed it, and you can get it here (for a price).

I was sufficiently intrigued by all of this to check out Dicks’ own military career. According to his obituaries, he studied English at Downing College, Cambridge and then did two years of National Service with the Royal Fusiliers. He was born in 1935, and National Service was abolished from 1957 to 1960, so he must have been in one of the last cohorts to do it, probably in 1956-58. My own father, born in 1928, told me that he had thought he could have been exempted by being from Northern Ireland, but then discovered that to get a job in England he needed to have done it (indeed he reminisced about how someone told him this at a party, ruining the evening).

Two years in the forces don’t make you an expert on military history, but 1956-58 saw the Suez crisis, the intensification of the EOKA campaign in Cyprus, the climax of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the IRA’s underwhelming border campaign, and the independence of Ghana and Malaysia. From the law of averages, Dicks must have been involved with at least one of these, even if only peripherally, and I guess it gave him some thoughts that he worked out 45 year later in this book.

Next in this series of reading: Grave Matter, by Justin Richards.

Dangerous Waters and Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna

Posted on by

(By the way, I am completely offline today, which will probably do me good.)

Second paragraph of third chapter of Dangerous Waters:

His casual gesture indicated the smirking man at his side.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Darkening Skies:

Jilseth had always been awe-struck by the Archmage’s talents. A stone mage by birth, hs instinctive affinity was with the soil and rock. Yet he had such effortless control over all the magics of fire, water and even of the air, the element most opposed to his own. There couldn’t be more than a handful of other wizards in this whole city so dedicated to the study and perfecting of magic who could work a scrying spell combined with a clairaudience.

These are the first two of the Hadrumal Crisis series, which I got from the author back in 2018. As usual, intensely detailed secondary world, where a rogue magician troubles the mages and corsairs trouble respectable coastal folks, with it gradually becoming clear how the two plot lines intertwine. Both are very long (well over 500 pages) but I found myself carried along by the narrative. The central characters, Jilseth the young woman mage and battle-hardened warrior Corrain, are especially well drawn. You can get Dangerous Waters here and Darkening Skies here.

These were the sf books that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (sorry Jools). Next on that pile is Redeemer, by C.E. Murphy (sorry Catie).

Companion Piece, by Ali Smith

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third section:

It’s comparatively quite a recent word. But like everything in language it has deep roots.

Another of Smith’s brilliant short novels, set very firmly during the latter days of COVID (it’s funny how few novels there are that use that setting), with a protagonist who finds an acquaintance from student days coming back into her life, along with complex family; and various low-stakes mysteries that need to be solved. I loved it – I think it catches a slice of our lives very well. You can get it here.

Tuesday reading

Posted on by

Well, Worldcon has taken its toll on my reading this week. However, a 24-hour boat journey with no internet looms in my immediate future, so there will be a longer list next week.

Current
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
Why Politicians Lie About Trade, by Dmitry Grozoubinski 
Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait

Last book finished
Doctor Who: Kerblam!, by Pete McTighe

Next books
Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson
Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato

The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al

Posted on by

Second frame of third part:

Next in the sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics, this keeps Alice, the Doctor’s librarian companion from the previous two sequences, and introduces the mysterious Sapling, a young sapient tree which is at the centre of a mystery that needs to be solved. Some very good story concepts, the first half involving a weirdly stereotypically British planet and a Silent that even other Silents cannot see, and the second half involving one of Alice’s neighbours who has unaccountably become multiply duplicated. A good start. You can get it here.

The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It’s the classic Monty Python question; I mean what has it done for us? We all have a vague notion that it gives us the tides, but how else can a ball of rock in space help us here on Earth?

The astronomer Maggie Aderin-Pocock has been one of the presenters of the BBC astronomy TV programme The Sky at Night for ten years, following in the footsteps of Patrick Moore. I’m afraid it’s generally on too late for me to watch, but I read this book with much interest, having read Patrick Moore’s classic Guide to the Moon forty years ago.

Moving with the times, it’s a very approachable combination of autobiography, science and culture, with the second quarter of the book looking at the history of lunar observation and at literature inspired by the moon. There’s not much about the Apollo landings – you can find plenty of information about them elsewhere – but there’s a lot about the research findings of what is on and inside the Moon.

But the guts of the book are to explore the effect that the moon has on us – both culturally and scientifically. Aderin-Pocock’s approach is that curiosity about the moon is a gateway drug that may lead readers into more research on science. It’s tightly and breezily written, and recommended. You can get it here.

2024 Hugos in a bit more detail

Posted on by

Headlines:

3813 final ballots were received (3808 electronic, 5 paper). As we announced on 23 July 2024, we had to disqualify 377 of these which were not cast by natural persons. We did count the remaining 3436, which is the third highest final ballot vote ever.

1720 nominating ballots were received (1715 electronic, 5 paper), the eighth highest nominations vote ever.

The winner of Best Semiprozine was decided by a margin of 6 votes, and the winners of Best Professional Artis and Best Fancast by margins of 7. These were the closest results among winners.

At lower placings, there were ties for 3rd place in the Astounding Award, and for 5th place in the Best Graphic Story or Comic category, and 4th place in the Best Graphic Story or Comic category was decided by a margin of one vote.

The most decisive contest was for Best Game or Interactive Experience, where the winner got 42.7% of the first preferences and won on the fourth count, with three other finalists still in the race.

In five categories, the finalist with the second highest number of first preferences won after transfers. In two categories, the finalist with the third highest number of first preferences won after transfers.

In ten out of twenty categories, the winner had also topped the poll at nominations stage. In four categories, the winner placed second at the nominations stage; in three the winner had placed third at nominations, in two the winner was fourth and in one case the winner was the second last to qualify.

The last place on the ballot in the following categories was decided by a single vote: Best Related Work, Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, Best Fanzine, Best Fan Artist.

The last place on the ballot in the following categories was decided by a margin of two votes: Best Short Story, Best Professional Artist, Best Semiprozine.

Full details linked from here.

In detail:

Best Novel

  1. Some Desperate Glory by 71 votes ahead of Translation State.
  2. Translation State ahead of The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
  3. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi ahead of Witch King
  4. Witch King ahead of The Saint of Bright Doors
  5. The Saint of Bright Doors ahead of Starter Villain
  6. Starter Villain by John Scalzi (Tor, Tor UK)

Some Desperate Glory also topped nominations by EPH points, though in fact Translation State had the most votes. Martha Wells declined for System Collapse, and its replacement Cosmo Wings was not eligible. The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz missed the ballot by only 3 votes.

This category had the most nominating votes, and the joint fewest first preference votes for No Award on the final ballot.

Best Novella

  1. Thornhedge by 112 votes ahead of Seeds of Mercury
  2. Mammoths at the Gates by 3 votes ahead of Seeds of Mercury
  3. Seeds of Mercury by 12 votes ahead of The Mimicking of Known Successes
  4. The Mimicking of Known Successes ahead of Rose/House
  5. Rose/House ahead of Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet
  6. Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet

Seeds of Mercury had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

The Mimicking of Known Successes was narrowly ahead of Thornhedge for nomination votes. Untethered Sky, by Fonda Lee, missed the ballot by twelve votes.

This category had the most final ballot votes, and the joint fewest first preference votes for No Award on the final ballot.

Best Novelette

  1. The Year Without Sunshine by 312 votes ahead of Ivy, Angelica, Bay
  2. One Man’s Treasure by 2 votes ahead of Ivy, Angelica, Bay
  3. Ivy, Angelica, Bay ahead of On the Fox Roads
  4. On the Fox Roads by Nghi Vo way ahead of the other two
  5. I AM AI by Ai Jiang ahead of Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition
  6. Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition

The Far North was way ahead on nominations, but the author, Hai Ja, declined. The Year Without Sunshine was way ahead of the rest. Science Facts, by Sarah Pinsker, needed 8 more votes, or in excess of 4.00 more points, to get on the ballot.

Best Short Story

  1. Better Living Through Algorithms won on the fifth count, with How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub and The Mausoleum’s Children still in the race
  2. How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub ahead of The Mausoleum’s Children
  3. The Mausoleum’s Children ahead of The Sound of Children Screaming
  4. The Sound of Children Screaming ahead of Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times
  5. Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times ahead of Answerless Journey
  6. Answerless Journey

Answerless Journey, which came sixth on the final ballot, topped the nominations ballot. The winner, Better Living Through Algorithms, came third. Day Ten Thousand, by Isabel J. Kim, needed 2 more votes to get on the ballot.

This category had the most nominees; the lowest percentage of nominating votes for the top qualifying finalist; the joint fewest first preference votes for No Award on the final ballot; and the lowest percentage for No Award in the runoff.

Best Series

  1. Imperial Radch by 516 votes ahead of October Daye
  2. The Final Architecture ahead of October Daye
  3. The Laundry Files ahead of October Daye
  4. October Daye ahead of The Universe of Xuya
  5. The Universe of Xuya ahead of The Last Binding
  6. The Last Binding

Imperial Radch topped nominations as well, just ahead of The Universe of Xuya. The Craft Sequence, by Max Gladstone, needed 18 more votes to get on the ballot.

Best Graphic Story or Comic

  1. Saga, Vol. 11, by 88 votes ahead of The Three Body Problem
  2. Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons ahead of The Three Body Problem
  3. Bea Wolf ahead of The Three Body Problem
  4. The Three Body Problem by 1 vote ahead of Shubeik Lubeik
  5. tie between Shubeik Lubeik and The Witches of World War II

The Three Body Problem had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

The Three Body Problem was way in front at the nomination stage, with Saga, Vol. 11 second on EPH points but only fourth in actual votes. Why Don’t You Love Me?, by Paul B. Rainey, needed 9 more votes to get on the ballot.

This category saw the winner with the fewest first preference votes.

Best Related Work

  1. A City on Mars by 39 votes ahead of The Culture: The Drawings
  2. The Culture: The Drawings ahead of A Traveller in Time
  3. A Traveller in Time ahead of Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History v2-3
  4. All These Worlds ahead of the rest
  5. Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, vols 2 and 3 ahead of Discover X
  6. Discover X

Discover X was far ahead at nominations, with the most votes in any category, and rather unusually got fewer votes in the final ballot. A City on Mars was fifth on nominations, after Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood withdrew. Making It So, by Patrick Stewart, needed 1 more vote to get on the ballot.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

  1. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves by 49 votes ahead of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  2. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ahead of Barbie
  3. Barbie ahead of Nimona
  4. Nimona ahead of Poor Things
  5. Poor Things ahead of The Wandering Earth II
  6. The Wandering Earth II

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was also well in the lead at nominations stage. Godzilla Minus One needed 1 more vote to qualify for the ballot.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

  1. The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time” by 18 votes ahead of Those Old Scientists
  2. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Those Old Scientists”, ahead of Glorious Purpose
  3. Loki: “Glorious Purpose”, ahead of Subspace Rhapsody
  4. Doctor Who: “The Giggle”, ahead of Subspace Rhapsody
  5. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Subspace Rhapsody”, ahead of Wild Blue Yonder
  6. Doctor Who: “Wild Blue Yonder”

Long, Long Time was also far ahead at nominations. Doctor Who: “The Church on Ruby Road” needed 8.8 more points to get on the ballot.

Best Game or Interactive Work

  1. Baldur’s Gate 3, far ahead of the field
  2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom ahead of Chants of Sennaar
  3. Chants of Sennaar ahead of DREDGE
  4. DREDGE ahead of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
  5. Alan Wake 2 ahead of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
  6. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Baldur’s Gate 3 was also far ahead of the field at nominations stage. Stray Gods needed 6 more bullet votes to qualify for the ballot. No Award got the highest number of first preference in this category.

Best Editor Short Form

  1. Neil Clarke by 100 votes ahead of Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas
  2. Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas ahead of Jonathan Strahan 
  3. Jonathan Strahan ahead of Yang Feng
  4. Scott H. Andrews by 9 votes ahead of Yang Feng
  5. Yang Feng ahead of Liu Weijia
  6. Liu Weijia

Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

Yang Feng was way ahead in nominations, and Liu Weijia well ahead of the rest. Nisi Shawl needed 8 more votes worth 3.34 points to get on the ballot.

This was the category in which No Award got the fewest votes in the runoff.

Best Editor Long Form

  1. Ruoxi Chen by 38 votes ahead of Lee Harris
  2. Lee Harris ahead of Yao Haijun
  3. Lindsey Hall ahead of Yao Haijun
  4. Yao Haijun ahead of Kelly Lonesome
  5. Kelly Lonesome by 14 votes ahead of David Thomas Moore
  6. David Thomas Moore

Lee Harris topped nominations, with Ruoxi Chen second. Natasha Bardon declined nomination. Gillian Redfearn needed 5 more votes worth 2.86 points to get on the ballot.

This was the category where No Award got its highest vote share in the runoff.

Best Professional Artist

  1. Rovina Cai by 7 votes ahead of Alyssa Winans
  2. Alyssa Winans ahead of Micaela Alcaino
  3. Galen Dara by 3 votes ahead of Micaela Alcaino
  4. Micaela Alcaino ahead of Dan Dos Santos
  5. Tristan Elwell by 7 votes ahead of Dan Dos Santos
  6. Dan Dos Santos

Alyssa Winans had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

Alyssa Winans was far ahead on nominations here, with Rovina Cai third in votes and fourth in EPH points. Feifei Ruan needed 2 more votes worth 1.08 points to get on the ballot.

Best Semiprozine

  1. Strange Horizons by 6 votes ahead of Uncanny Magazine, the closest result of the night.
  2. Uncanny Magazine ahead of FIYAH Literary Magazine
  3. FIYAH Literary Magazine ahead of Escape Pod
  4. Escape Pod ahead of the field
  5. khōréō ahead of GigaNotoSaurus
  6. GigaNotoSaurus

Uncanny Magazine had the most first preferences, but lost on transfers.

Strange Horizons was far ahead at nominations. Interzone needed 2 more votes to qualify for the ballot.

Best Fanzine

  1. Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together by 17 votes ahead of Journey Planet
  2. Black Nerd Problems ahead of Journey Planet
  3. Journey Planet ahead of Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog
  4. Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog ahead of Idea
  5. Idea by 8 votes ahead of The Full Lid
  6. The Full Lid

Black Nerd Problems had the most first preferences here, and Journey Planet the second most, with Nerds of a Feather coming from third place to win.

Nerds of a Feather had the most votes at nominations stage, but Journey Planet had the most EPH points. Zero Gravity News needed 0.5 more points to get on the ballot.

This was the category whose winner had the fewest first preference votes.

Best Fancast

  1. Octothorpe by 7 votes ahead of Worldbuilding for Masochists
  2. Worldbuilding for Masochists by 6 votes ahead of The Coode Street Podcast
  3. The Coode Street Podcast ahead of Publishing Rodeo
  4. Hugos There by 18 votes ahead of Publishing Rodeo
  5. Publishing Rodeo ahead of Science Fiction Fans Buma
  6. Science Fiction Fans Buma

Discover X and Diu Diu Sci Fi Radio both got far more nominating votes than anyone else, but both are professional productions so were not eligible. Octothorpe got far more than any of the rest. Hugo, Girl! needed 8.33 more points to get on the ballot.

This was the category with fewest nominees, and the category where fewest final ballot votes were cast.

Best Fan Writer

  1. Paul Weimer by 114 votes ahead of Jason Sanford
  2. Jason Sanford ahead of Bitter Karella
  3. Bitter Karella ahead of Alasdair Stuart
  4. Alasdair Stuart ahead of James Davis Nicoll
  5. James Davis Nicoll ahead of Örjan Westin
  6. Örjan Westin

Paul Weimer was far ahead at nominations. Camestros Felapton withdrew. Alex Brown needed 3 more votes worth 1.75 points to qualify for the ballot.

This was the category where No Award had its best percentage share of first preference votes.

Best Fan Artist

  1. Laya Rose by 57 votes ahead of Sara Felix
  2. Iain J. Clark ahead of Sara Felix
  3. Sara Felix ahead of Dante Luiz
  4. Dante Luiz ahead of the rest
  5. Alison Scott ahead of España Sheriff
  6. España Sheriff

Iain J. Clarke and Sara Felix led nominations, with Laya Rose third on EPH points and fourth on votes. Yuumei needed 0.8 more points to qualify for the ballot.

This was the category with the fewest nominating votes, and therefore also the category where the top nominee got fewest votes.

Lodestar Award for Best YA Book

  1. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by 42 votes ahead of Liberty’s Daughter
  2. Liberty’s Daughter ahead of The Sinister Booksellers of Bath
  3. The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by 11 votes ahead of Abeni’s Song
  4. Unraveller by 3 votes ahead of Abeni’s Song
  5. Abeni’s Song ahead of Promises Stronger than Darkness
  6. Promises Stronger than Darkness

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath and Promises Stronger than Darkness led nominations. Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle, needed 10 more votes worth 6.05 points to qualify for the ballot.

Astounding Award for Best New Writer (sponsored by Dell Magazines)

  1. Xiran Jay Zhao by 159 votes ahead of Moniquill Blackgoose
  2. Moniquill Blackgoose ahead of Ai Jiang
  3. tie between Sunyi Dean and Ai Jiang
  5. Hannah Kaner ahead of Em X. Liu
  6. Em X. Liu

It was very close at the top here in nominations, with Sunyi Dean getting the most votes, just ahead of Moniquill Blackgoose and Ai Jiang, who were just ahead of Xiran Jay Zhao. On EPH points, Blackgoose was top, Jiang second and Dean third, with Zhao fourth again. Bethany Jacobs needed in excess of 3.33 more EPH points, or 12 more votes, to qualify for the ballot.

This was the category where No Award got most votes in the runoff.

And now for next year…

The best known books set in each country: Iran

Posted on by

I’m posting this on Saturday this week because my Hugos post will go up tomorrow (though not until after the official announcements). See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in Iran.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (vol 1 of 2)Marjane Satrapi212,2888,651
Reading Lolita in TehranAzar Nafisi 135,27613,103
The Complete PersepolisMarjane Satrapi186,2466,989
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (vol 2 of 2)Marjane Satrapi75,9914,214
Ruba’iyatOmar Khayyám21,6725,246
Not Without My DaughterBetty Mahmoody35,4191,827
EmbroideriesMarjane Satrapi28,1131,960
Persepolis, Volume 1 (of the original four)Marjane Satrapi90,763554

Well, I’ve had cases where a single author dominates literary perception of a country, but this is the first time that I’ve had four slightly different versions of the same work in the top eight. And I must say I agree; Persepolis is an outstanding artistic achievement, and probably the first half of it is the crown. Also it’s nice that seven out of eight of these books are by actual Iranians.

I disqualified House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, because it is set in the USA. But I let Persepolis 2 through because just under half of the book (the original part 3) is set in Austria and just over half (the original part 4) back in Iran.

I also allowed the Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam as being mainly set in Iran. Omar Khayyam may not have written all of the poems that are now attributed to him, but he was a very real Persian statesman, scientist and writer, and there are plenty of Iranian cultural references in the poems, which are told from a first-person perspective.

So we end up with five graphic novels (OK, two graphic novels, one of them in four different versions), two first-person factual accounts and one work of poetry. Not bad.

Next up: Türkiye.

L’Affaire Tournesol / The Calculus Affair, by Hergé

Posted on by

Second frame of third page:

Tintin: We’re home again, and none too soon, either!
Captain Haddock: The telephone, Nestor.
(translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner)

This is one of the great Tintin albums: a simple story in which our hero and Captain Haddock go to the rescue of their friend Professor Calculus (Tournesol in the original French) who has been kidnapped by the agents of an Eastern European dictatorship. There’s lots of exciting action through the streets of Geneva and the Swiss and Balkan countrysides, with a climax in the opera house with the great Bianca Castafiore; there’s also comic relief in the form of Thompson and Thomson, the professor’s complete deafness, and the insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg (Séraphin Lampion in French) who invites himself to become Captain Haddock’s friend and house guest while he is away.

Most of the art is close up framing of our heroes, but Hergé throws in a couple of big picture panels. Here is a crown of rubberneckers gathering outside Marlinspike, to Captain Haddock’s annoyance.

Hergé has actually put himself in there at the bottom right, as the man in the crowd with a drawing pad drawing the crowd. He didn’t do that very often.

It was great fun to revisit this, and you can get it here in English and here in French.

This was my top unread comic in a language other than English. Next up is the first volume of Bellatrix, Leo’s latest series.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith (and Stephen Wyatt)

Posted on by

I caught the last episode of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on first broadcast in 1988; when I watched the whole story for the first time in 2008, the last story of Old Who that I watched first time round, I wrote:

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is not a bad end to the season (and indeed to my watching all of Old Who). It looks generally good, and performances are all pretty convincing. I did once again find myself wondering about the means and motivation of the villains, in this case the Gods of Ragnarok; and I was left a bit confused by how the Psychic Circus fitted into the planetary society (and also a bit confused by the ending). But it was all fairly watchable. Now I can go back and do it all again.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:

And finally for this run, once again I enjoyed The Greatest Show In The Galaxy more than I was expecting to. The storyline is awfully simple – the Psychic Circus as a deathtrap set by ancient powerful beings, the Doctor and Ace trying to escape from it and destroy it – and there is therefore an awful lot of circular plotting before the dénouement, but somehow the extra bits tacked on to the plot all add to it. A particular cheer for T.P. McKenna’s fraudulent Captain Cook as a parody of the show’s central character, and the earnest fan played by Adrian Mole Gian Sammarco who finds that the object of his fascination is a fatal obsession; but Jessica Martin and Chris Drury are excellent too, and the whole thing just looks so much better than we were getting two years ago (or even one year ago). Let’s hope they can keep up the standards for a few more years.

What struck me this time round was how symbolic it all is. The story seems somehow not very concerned with creating a convincing secondary world, but instead with managing the characters in a particular plot and emotional space. And yet it gets away with it.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Stephen Wyatt’s novelisation of his own script is:

‘There’s something not quite right about all this,’ the Doctor mused.

When I read it in 2008, I wrote:

Wyatt’s book is not really an improvement on the TV original. Shorn of (for once) decent production values and the compelling performances of the actors, the holes in the plot and clunky scene-setting are more apparent, and Wyatt, having written a TV script, is reduced to reporting what we saw on screen without being able to add much to it. Fails the Bechdel test – each female character is rigidly paired off with a male, and on the rare occasions that they converse it is always about one of the men (usually the Doctor).

Nothing to add too that, sixteen years later. You can get it here.

Dale Smith wrote the punchy Black Archive on The Talons of Weng Chiang which I reviewed a few months ago; he has also written a Tenth Doctor novel that I liked and a Seventh Doctor novel that I didn’t. Here he has done what some of the best Black Archives have done, by taking a story that I had not really thought about very much and making me think about it a lot more, the thoughts going in some unexpected directions. He has also blogged about the process of writing it.

The opening chapter, “What Did You Say Your Name Was?” looks at the over production situation on Doctor who at the time the story was made and draws many parallels about what we see on screen and what was happening behind the cameras.

The second chapter, “Tears of a Clown”, looks at clowns in general and why Ace is right to be scared of them.

The third chapter, “Let There Be Rock”, looks at quarries, and then slides into an argument that the comics artist Alan Moore is a formative and pervasive influence on Andrew Cartmel’s era of Doctor Who. Its second chapter is:

This view of quarries is certainly reflected in Cartmel’s era on the show: outside of season 24 – where one story featured three separate quarries but Cartmel had limited ability to course-correct – only three stories featured quarries, and only two used them as alien planets3. Of those two stories – The Greatest Show and Survival – both used Warmwell Quarry in Dorset. Part of this was the simple reason that only these two stories featured any significant time spent on alien worlds, as Cartmel’s realisation that the BBC could do period drama very well led him to move the show to more Earthly settings. But that shift didn’t result in Doctor Who becoming completely studio-based: the production team settled into alternating between studio-based and location-based stories for the rest of their run, with The Greatest Show being intended to be studio-based until circumstances forced a rethink.

3 Doctor Who Locations Guide, ‘Season Twenty-Four’, ‘Season Twenty-Five’, ‘Season Twenty-Six’. The third was Battlefield (1989), which used the Castle Cement Quarry in Kettleton for pyrotechnics work when Ancelyn crashes into a hill on arrival, presumably on the grounds that quarries are less concerned about things blowing up than Rutland Water.

The fourth chapter, “Fingerprints of the Gods”, looks at the role of magic in Doctor Who, particularly in the Cartmel era.

The fifth chapter, “Forward”, is sheer but entertaining self-indulgence on Smith’s part; it takes the history of Doctor Who, the history of hip-hop, and finds parallels between them despite the rather imperfect rapping delivered by Ross Ricco as the Ringmaster. It is unusual subject matter for a book on Doctor Who, but Smith succeeds in making the case.

A Black Archive that I like more than the story it is about. You can get it here.

Incidentally the Seventh Doctor is the first Doctor to have more than half his stories and episodes covered by Black Archives. (Apart from the special cases of the Eighth Doctor and the Shalka!Doctor.)

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Flux (63)

Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

That’s not a word I often hear.

This won the Tiptree Award (now the Otherwise Award) in 2018. It’s a short book about a post-apocalypse future England, in a world where most human men have died of a gender-specific virus and the survivors live in secret reservations, while women get on with running civilisation. Our protagonist is a teenager who has no idea that men are still around; she meets a teenage boy who has fled his reservation, and finds out more about her society than she expected to. I see a lot of very unenthusiastic reviews of this book online, but I rather liked it; I think I can see what the author was trying to do. You can get it here.

The Tiptree Award shortlist included a short story, five novels and one duology. The only one I have read is An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen.

The BSFA Award that year was won by The Rift, by Nina Allan; the Clarke Award was won by Dreams Before the Start of Time, by Anne Charnock, which was also on the BSFA ballot. (I wrote both up here.) The Hugo and Nebula both went to The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin.

The following year the Tiptree Award (as it still was) went to a short story, “They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete, so that will be next in this sequence.

Tuesday reading

Posted on by

Current
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
Why Politicians Lie About Trade, by Dmitry Grozoubinski
Doctor Who: Kerblam!, by Pete McTighe
Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait

Last books finished
Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson
The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Maggie Aderin-Pocock
The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al
Companion Piece, by Ali Smith
Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna
Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks
Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman (did not finish)

Next books
Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson
Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato

Since I am spending most of the next week at Worldcon, I doubt that next Tuesday’s list will be as long!

“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick; “The Martian Child”, by David Gerrold

Posted on by

These two stories both won the Hugo and the Nebula in their respective categories in 1996 for work published in 1994. They are very different works, one trying to put a new gloss on an old theme and the other barely sfnal.

The second paragraph of the third section of “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” is:

But the more he concentrated on those memories, the more vague and imprecise they became, and he knew they must have occurred a very long time ago. Sometimes he tried to remember the name of his tribe, but it was lost in the mists of time, as were the names of his parents and siblings.

This is an old-fashioned tale about the decline of humanity, as detected by alien anthropologists investigating a depopulated Earth; the narrator is able to sense the story of the owner of an artefact through its aura (or whatever). It turns out that the humans are not so extinct after all. Seven short stories add up to a grim big picture. I found it a somewhat moralising tale, with an original concept reaching a rather obvious conclusion. The best of the internal stories is the middle one, about a safari in the year 2103, which is also the only one explicitly about white folks from outside swooping in to look at Africa; better when you write what you know. People loved this at the time, but I feel it slightly muffs the landing, though not as badly as Resnick’s later humorous squibs.

“Forgiveness Day”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, was also on both Hugo and Nebula ballots for Best Novella.

Cover by George Barr for the 1994 chapbook

The second paragraph of the third section of “The Martian Child” is:

I was in Arizona, at a party at Jeff Duntemann’s sprawling house. Jeff is a two-time Hugo nominee who gave up science fiction to write books about computer programming. Apparently, it was far more profitable than science fiction; now he was publishing his own magazine, PC-Techniques. I write a regular column for the magazine, an off-the-wall mix of code and mutated zen. It was the standing joke that my contribution to the magazine was the “Martian perspective.”

This on the other hand is a story I love, even though it may not even be sfnal depending on how you read it. The author, who is not named but clearly shares many characteristics with David Gerrold, adopts a boy who has certain behavioural quirks, one of which is that he believes that he is a Martian and may have a limited ability to grant wishes. Any of us who have experienced or closely observed parenthood will sympathise with the experience of having a tiny and new personality developing right in front of you. Any child that you raise includes bits of you, but also has characteristics that seem to come from somewhere else entirely. From Mars? Why not?

Cover from Gerrold’s website, no artist given.

I was fortunate to meet with David Gerrold at SMOFCon in Santa Rosa, California, in December 2018, and we discussed this story among other topics. Here we are at the Charles M. Schulz Museum. I admit that I was a little starstruck.

“The Singular Habits of Wasps”, by Geoffrey A. Landis. and “The Matter of Seggri”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, were also on both Best Novelette ballots.

That year the Hugo for Best Novel went to Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold, and the Nebula to Moving Mars, by Greg Gear; the Hugo for Best Short Story went to “None So Blind”, by Joe Haldeman, and the Nebula to “A Defense of the Social Contracts”, by Martha Soukup.

This marks the start of a rather odd period when there was very little crossover between the Hugos and Nebulas. Normally there are a couple of joint winners every year, but between 1995 and 2001 there was only one, Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman, which will be the next in this series.

Meanwhile my own copy of both stories is in the Nebula Awards 30 anthology, which you can get here.

Caged, by Una McCormack

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She’d been trekking for days across the grassy plains that lay beyond the valley and the river and the settlements, but at last the ground was beginning to climb. She was sure she would find answers here.

A rather lovely Fifteenth Doctor novel, with two different sets of cute aliens in potential conflict with each other, and the Doctor and Ruby sorting out the conflict. You won’t get the same level of characterisation here as in Ruby Red, but it’s a good sfnal concept, executed in a very Whovian way. You can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Vietnam

Posted on by

See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the Vietnam.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
The Things They CarriedTim O’Brien319,91114549
On Earth We’re Briefly GorgeousOcean Vuong316,9003996
The Quiet AmericanGraham Greene64,4998127
The LoverMarguerite Duras58,9995234
MatterhornKarl Marlantes44,3432823
We Were Soldiers Once… and YoungHarold G. Moore31,3052550
DispatchesMichael Herr20,1663242
The Best We Could DoThi Bui36,5111231

I excluded the following because less than half of the book (as far as I can tell) is set in Vietnam: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving; The Women, by Kristin Hannah; The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen; Inside Out & Back Again, by Thanhhà Lại; and In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O’Brien.

That still leaves a better list than I had expected. I feared that it would be dominated by American experiences of the war, and indeed four of the top eight books are in that category. But two of them are actually about the West’s encounter with Vietnam before the war with the USA (and it’s interesting to see Graham Greene make my list for the second week running).

I’m not 100% confident that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous passes my 50% test, but The Best We Could Do certainly does, and it’s also the first graphic novel to feature here.

However, the US perspective remains dominant, even if not quite as dominant as I had feared, and the top book for Vietnam is Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried – not the first short story collection to feature in these posts, but the first to win.

Next up: Iran.

Antiquities of Luxembourg: necropolis, dolmen, menhir, rock art and qanat

Posted on by

As my regular reader knows, I have done a few road trips over the last few years to visit all the surviving menhirs of Belgium. (I grew up calling them “standing stones”, which is the usual UK / Ireland terminology, but local practice is to use the French term “menhir” which originates from the Breton for “long stone”, though apparently in modern Breton the completely different word “peulvan” is used.)

I’ve exhausted Belgian resources in this regard – the excellent Megalithic Portal lists several that I have not visited, but expresses serious doubt about whether any of them are real megaliths. But there is still plenty to look at in the neighbourhood. I had been tipped off by Herman Clerinx’s Roman book to the joys of Luxembourg, and a bit of research indicated that there was enough there to tick many of my antiquarian boxes.

So on Tuesday, the hottest day of the year so far, I set off down south for a long afternoon.

Diekirch: the necropolis and the museum

My first stop was the northern Luxembourgish town of Diekirch. It has a local beer, an obsession with donkeys, a museum of military history, a museum of historic motor vehicles, and a museum of the history of brewing. But I was not there for any of those. In the 1960s, excavations under the Church of St Lawrence revealed that it had been built on top of a Gallo-Roman necropolis, an indoor cemetery; and a block away a nearly intact large Roman mosaic was found in 1950.

The necropolis, with one of the deceased residents
The mosaic

The church is free, but to access the necropolis and mosaic you have to pay a very modest entrance fee to the Diekirch History Museum, which I warmly recommend. The museum is very accessible and friendly. Unfortunately all the displays are in German; there are leaflets available in other languages but they really don’t cover much of the content.

Deiwelselter

On a rock outcrop overlooking the town of Diekirch is the site of what used to be a megalithic dolmen, the Devil’s Altar or Deiwelselter in Luxembourgish. From the number of stones, it must have been about half the size of the big Wéris dolmens, far bigger than the Irish ones that I grew up with. Unfortunately, in 1892 the city fathers of Diekirch decided to rearrange the stones into a large arch shape, completely destroying the existing structure. God save us from the arrogance of the nineteenth-century antiquarian.

It’s quite a hike to get to as well. I am afraid that I ignored the ‘No Entry’ sign at the bottom of the lane, and parked at the edge of a field. Today’s city fathers of Diekirch could profitably think about improving access.

Beisenerbierg

The only genuine menhir surviving in the whole Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is near the town of Mersch. It was buried until 1978 and then erected on its present location, 30 metres from where it was found. It’s unusual among menhirs in that it’s on top of a hill – usually they are on the flank of a slope. Some commentators claim to see an anthropomorphic shaping of its profile; I am not convinced myself, but see what you think.

Of the four monuments I tracked down in the field, this was by far the easiest to find – you park in a layby by a 17th century chapel, and then the path from the chapel is pretty obvious. (And it’s interesting that although the stone itself was buried for centuries, Christianity built a shrine nearby.)

Häerdcheslee / La Roche des Payens

I have never seen anything quite like this before.

Here are two figures carved into a sandstone boulder on a hillside. In the rock above them is a rectangular pit (which I am not athletic enough to access). Are they gods? A funeral memorial? Who knows? Nearby rock show signs of stone-age grooves, but the Häerdcheslee figures are dated firmly to the first century AD (…ish).

In his novel L’homme qui rit, Victor Hugo makes a passing reference to:

…la clairière dite la Mauvaise Femme, près Diekirch, où il y a deux bas-reliefs énigmatiques représentant une femme qui a une tête et un homme qui n’en a pas……the clearing called “The Wicked Woman” near Diekirch, where there are two mysterious sculpted figures representing a woman with a head and a man without one…

It’s not all that close to Diekirch, and I think I’d say the headless figure is more likely to be female, but he’s clearly talking about the same place.

It’s not well signposted at all, but as long as you have the coordinates you will find it.

Raschpëtzer Qanat

The Raschpëtzer Qanat is a 600 metre long tunnel, built around 130 AD, which brought water from a spring on one side of the Petschend hill to a large Roman villa in the Alzette valley on the other side. It is an extraordinary feat of engineering. At least eighteen shafts were dug from the hillside down to the channel below. The mysterious pits on the hill were known about for centuries, but the water channel was only rediscovered in 1986.

One of them has been lit so that you can see all the way down to the water flowing at the bottom.

My cousin J lives in Luxembourg, close to the Qanat, and joined me for the trip. “I’ve lived in this country for ten years, we are less than ten minutes’ drive away, and I’d never been here before!”

There is a visitors’ gallery to the tunnels which is supposedly open only on Sunday afternoons; but we were lucky and found it open on a Tuesday.

From the top of the hill there is a lovely view of the towns of Heisdorf and Steinsel.

This is impressive engineering, and the best example of this sort of water management system north of the Alps, but in fact the emperor Claudius (remember him?) had set up a similar and much bigger structure to drain the waters of Lake Fucino in Italy about 80 years earlier (including what was the longest tunnel in the world, until 1871), and it is on record that this was repaired at almost exactly the same time that the Raschpëtzer Qanat was built, so the technology was available within the Roman Empire.

The Raschpëtzer Qanat is not very well signposted (a familiar refrain) from the car park, but if you use online resources you can find your way fairly quickly. A fellow rambler told us that there used to be more and better signs, so perhaps by the time you get there the situation will have improved again. And on such a warm day it was nice to spend so much time in the woods with their natural air conditioning.

Food and language

Always worth noting where I ate – you may want to follow suit. In Diekirch I had lunch at Niklos Eck, an unpretentious Luxembourgish eatery at 3 rue Nicolas Wathelet – actually on the square around the corner from St Laurence’s Church and the museum. The lentil and sausage salad was yummy and kept me going all afternoon. It doesn’t have a website, you’ll just have to show up and hope for the best.

For dinner, J. took me to Um Eck in Hostert, which apparently has upgraded significantly in the most recent period and did a rather good seafood platter – the calamari were a bit chewy but that’s tricky to get right for the first customers of the evening, and the rest was very yummy.

Everyone speaks French and German in Luxembourg, and most people speak English; and if your German is good enough you can catch most of what is written or spoken in Luxembourgish as well. It’s one of those situations where making all the languages official and legal has taken the sting out of the cultural issue.

So, I don’t think I need to go back to Luxembourg for the sake of the antiquities, but I am glad I went. (And it’s always nice to spend time with J.)

Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective, eds. Lawrence Leduc, Richard G. Niemi, Pippa Norris

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter (“Party Systems and Structures of Competition”, by Peter Mair):

The most conventional and frequently adopted criterion for classifying party systems is also the most simple: the number of parties in competition. Moreover, the conventional distinction involved here has also proved appealingly straightforward: that between a two-party system, on the one hand, and a multiparty (i.e., more than two) system, on the other (see Duverger 1954). Nor was this just a casual categorization; on the contrary, it was believed to tap into a more fundamental distinction between more or less stable and consensual democracies, which were those normally associated with the two-party type, as opposed to more or less unstable and conflictual democracies, which were those associated with the multiparty type. Thus, two-party systems, which were typically characteristic of the United Kingdom and the United States and invariably involved single-party government, were assumed to enhance accountability, alternation in government, and moderate, center-seeking competition. Multiparty systems, on the other hand, which usually required coalition administrations and were typically characteristic of countries such as France or Italy, prevented voters from gaining a direct voice in the formation of governments, did not necessarily facilitate alternation in government, and sometimes favored extremist, ideological confrontations between narrowly based political parties. And although this simple association of party system types and political stability and efficacy was later challenged by research into the experiences of some of the smaller European democracies, which boasted both a multiplicity of parties and a strong commitment to consensual government (e.g., Daalder 1983) and thus led some early observers to attempt to elaborate a distinction between “working” multiparty systems (e.g., the Netherlands or Sweden) and “nonworking” or “immobilist” multiparty systems (e.g., Italy), the core categorization of two-party versus multiparty has nevertheless continued to command a great deal of support within the literature on comparative politics.2
2 See, for example, Almond, Powell, and Mundt (1993, 117-20), where this traditional distinction is recast as one of “majoritarian” versus multiparty systems; see also the influential study by Lijphart (1984) where one of the key distinctions between majoritarian and consensus democracies is defined as that between a two-party system and a multiparty system.

This was another of the books that I got at the end of 2016, lost and then found again, to prepare a talk that I gave in Belfast that December. It was published in 1996, but it seems a bit dated even for 28 years ago; most of Eastern Europe was already two cycles into the new democratic system by then, and more could have been made of the test bed for democracy. In addition, there’s almost nothing about the actual subject of my talk, which was electoral boundaries. Still, I only paid £3.88 for it, so I can’t really complain.

What it does have is quite a wide range of essays picking out different aspects of the democratic process – not just the legal framework of the vote and the political party system, but also the roles of what we would now call civil society, opinion polls, media, the economy, and the impact of leadership, recruitment of candidates, and campaigning – the chapter on actual campaigning by David Farrell is probably the best in the book.

A useful snapshot of where research stood in the mid-1990s, but with massive gaps even then in the Global South. I hope that there is a more up to date volume out there. Meantime, you can get it here.

Version 1.0.0

The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney

Posted on by

My usual system of quoting the second paragraph of the third section is always challenged by theatre scripts, and in this case there are no sections to the play at all, though there is a point where an optional interval is indicated. So I’ll just quote the most famous lines.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

These lines come at the conclusion of a grim story: the young Neoptolemus is sent by Odysseus to retrieve the bow of Philoctetes, who has been abandoned by the Greeks on the island of Lemnos. Philoctetes’ bow shoots invincible arrows, and the Greeks know that they cannot conquer Troy without it. But the only way to get it from Philoctetes is for Neoptolemus to pretend that he too has fallen out with the Greeks. Eventually a divine intervention helps to resolve the plot into a more cheerful place than seemed likely for most of the duration. (This is not a spoiler; the chorus tells us that it’s going to happen in the first speech of the play.)

It’s often difficult to appreciate a play from the script (well, difficult for me at least), but I really enjoyed this, in particular Heaney’s use of Ulster turns of phrase to give a clear voice to the characters. It’s a psychological story which can be told with minimal scenery. I’d certainly pay to see it.

You can get it here.

The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Paulius has draped a robe over Kenna’s shoulders as he leads Kenna across the orchard, headed for a small frosted-glass door set into a polished aluminum wall. Kenna clutches at the white linen lapels, reveling in the feeling of clean cloth; he’s worn his filthy Inevitable Robe for so long he can no longer distinguish between the stained cloth and his squalid skin.

I used to occasionally dip into Ferrett Steinmetz’s livejournal back in the day – I remember a particularly vivid account he wrote about of having sex during a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. This was one of the books in the 2020 Hugo packet which I have only just now got around to. It is a space opera with a somewhat wacky setting. It didn’t really grab me and I gave up after a hundred pages. But you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Desdemona and the Deep, by C.S.E. Cooney.

July 2024 Books

Posted on by

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 41)
The Combined 2001 Election, by NISRA
Frontiers of the Roman Empire: The Lower German Limes, by David J. Breeze, Sonja Jill, Erik P. Graafstal, Willem J.H. Willems and Steve Bödecker
Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece to Life, by Jonathan Bardon
Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective, eds. Lawrence Leduc, Richard G. Niemi, Pippa Norris
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith

Poetry 2 (YTD 3)
How to be Invisible: Lyrics, by Kate Bush
The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney

SF 7 (YTD 54)
Godkiller, by Hannah Kaner
Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse (did not finish)
The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean
“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick
The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz (did not finish)
“The Martian Child”, by David Gerrold
Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 20)
The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis
The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford
Caged, by Una McCormack
Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Stephen Wyatt

Comics 2 (YTD 20)
The Malignant Truth, by Si Spurrier et al
L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé

3,700 pages (YTD 38,100) 
8/20 (YTD 71/157) by non-male writers (Jill, Norris, Bush, Kaner, Roanhorse, Dean, Bergin)
2/20 (YTD 23/157) by a non-white writer (Roanhorse, Dean)
4/20 rereads (“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, “The Martian Child”, Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, L’Affaire Tournesol)
299 books currently tagged unread, down 8 from last month, down 61 from July 2023.

Reading now
Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna
Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Coming soon (perhaps)
The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al
Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who: Kerblam!, by Pete McTighe
Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson
The Edge of Destruction, by Simon Guerrier
Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman
Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait
Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis
Comparing Electoral Systems, by David M. Farrell
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato
The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless
The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells
Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo
Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Desdemona and the Deep, by C. S. E. Cooney
“They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete
The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch
South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton
Monica, by Daniel Clowes
Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman
Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

The Emperor Claudius and the eclipse on his 54th birthday

Posted on by

Thursday this week marks the 2033rd birthday of the Roman Emperor Claudius, who reigned from AD 41 to AD 54. (The calculation is a bit unfamiliar – there is no Year 0; he was born in 10 BC, so his ninth birthday was in 1 BC, his tenth birthday in AD 1, and his 2033rd birthday is 2023 years after his tenth birthday.)

My good friend Professor G has serious doubts that Claudius was actually born on 1 August, 10 BC, but she also makes a good argument as to why he would have wanted to celebrate his birthday on that day. Anyway once he had become Emperor, six months before his 50th birthday, it was too late to change the official narrative.

The historian Cassius Dio records that in the run-up to Claudius’ 54th birthday on 1 August 45 AD, he took the following preventative action:

Since there was to be an eclipse of the sun on his birthday, he feared that there might be some disturbance in consequence, inasmuch as some other portents had already occurred; he therefore issued a proclamation in which he stated not only the fact that there was to be an eclipse, and when, and for how long, but also the reasons for which this was bound to happen.

So, it’s fascinating that a) Claudius thought his birthday was a big deal for his loyal subjects (he may or may not have been correct), and that b) he was completely certain that there would be a solar eclipse on his birthday. The stakes were pretty high – if he had issued a proclamation about an eclipse that didn’t happen, he would have looked really stupid.

What’s really interesting is that Cassius Dio then gives the reason for a solar eclipse, saying that he is quoting Claudius’ decree:

These reasons I will now give. The moon, which revolves in its orbit below the sun (or so it is believed), either directly below it or perhaps with Mercury and Venus intervening, has a longitudinal motion, just as the sun has, and a vertical motion, as the other perhaps likewise has, but it has also a latitudinal motion such as the sun never shows under any conditions.

”Longitudinal motion” means the progress of the Sun and Moon around the ecliptic as their daily and monthly regular apparent movements. “Vertical motion” means varying distance from the earth, and it’s interesting that it’s taken for granted that the Moon’s distance varies but Claudius/Cassius Dio is not as sure about the Sun. And “latitudinal motion” means the Moon’s divergence from the ecliptic due to the inclination of its orbit; since the ecliptic is by definition the Sun’s path, the Sun doesn’t do this.

When, therefore, the moon gets in a direct line with the sun over our heads and passes under its blazing orb, it obscures the rays from that body that extend toward the earth. To some of the earth’s inhabitants this obscuration lasts for a longer and to others for a shorter time, whereas to still others it does not occur for even the briefest moment. For since the sun always has a light of its own. it is never deprived of it; and consequently to all those between whom and the sun the moon does not pass, so as to throw a shadow over it, it always appears entire. This, then, is what happens to the sun, and it was made public by Claudius at that time.

It’s not a bad summary of the mechanisms, and I am inclined to think that Cassius Dio is directly quoting from the imperial proclamation. Claudius, who was a polymath, was au fait with astronomy. Cassius Dio then goes on to explain lunar eclipses, and I find his vocabulary just a bit different, as if he was writing it himself rather than quoting a century-old document. It too is not a bad summary.

But now that I have once touched upon this subject, it may not be out of place to give the explanation of a lunar eclipse also. Whenever, then, the moon is directly opposite the sun (for it is eclipsed only at full moon, just as the sun is eclipsed at the time of new moon) and runs into the cone-shaped shadow of the earth, a thing that happens whenever it passes through the mean point in its latitudinal motion, it is then deprived of the son’s light and appears by itself just as it really is. Such is the explanation of these phenomena.

We tend to forget that the ancient Romans and Greeks had a very good understanding of the movements of the Sun and Moon relative to the earth, but is is well expressed here. and of course people had been predicting eclipses for thousands of years at this stage.

Solar eclipses are more difficult to calculate than lunar eclipses. They do repeat fairly reliably after 18 years, 10 or 11 days (depending on how many leap years are involved) and 7 hours. From a fixed point on the Earth’s surface, such as, for instance, Rome, this means that if you hang around long enough after one eclipse, you’ll see another 54 years and 32 or 33 days later (again depending on the number of leap years in the interim).

As it happens, just a month before Claudius was born, on 30 June, 10 BC, there was a solar eclipse which was nearly total from Rome and most of Europe. If he ever looked up the details of past eclipses (and I’m sure he did) and knew about the 54 years and 32-33 days cycle (and again, I’m sure he did), he’d have been very aware that his 54th birthday was certain to see a repeat eclipse.

Of course, I think it’s also significant that we only know about this from Cassius Dio, who was working from archive documents a century later. My suspicion is that Claudius and Cassius Dio were both much more interested in eclipses than the average inhabitant of the Roman Empire, and that the average provincial governor probably filed Claudius’ proclamation with the latest imperial directive about corn tariffs, so that the mass of the population never heard about it.

But it’s interesting all the same.

Path of the 1 August, AD 45 eclipse from EclipseWise. It is a bit incongruous to see modern (well, pre-2005) political boundaries on the map!
Path of the 28 June, 10 BC eclipse from EclipseWise. (Computers cannot cope with the fact that there is no Year Zero in our calendar, so 10 BC is shown as the year -9.)

Tuesday reading

Posted on by

Current
Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna
Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Dr.Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Last books finished
Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith
L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé

Next books
The Sapling: Growth, by Rob Williams et al
Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Pearlman
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato

The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford

Posted on by

When The Waters of Mars was first shown, I wrote:

I enjoyed it. I think RTD is rather good at the base-under-siege stories, and Lindsay Duncan, who I don’t think I had seen before, was superb as Adelaide. (Has anyone remarked on the fact that this story was headed by two Scottish actors putting on English accents?)

Many electrons have been distorted in discussion of whether the ending worked in terms of Adelaide, the Doctor, and Time. I was satisfied with Adelaide. She took agency back from the Doctor, even though it meant her own destruction; of course, she did this because she knew what her death would mean, and valued that ahead of her life.

The Doctor has now been without a regular companion since Donna left. (We also have a whole bunch of companionless Tenth Doctor books and audios released this year, for those who are prepared to take their Who outside the TV canon.) Donna told him at their first meeting that he needs someone to tell him when to stop, and that latent part of his character was made manifest in the climax of The Waters of Mars. It’s a dramatic twist to show us a flawed hero – still recognisably the same person, but seen by us (and himself) in a different way.

It topped the nominations for the 2010 Hugo in the BDPSF category by a very wide margin, and went on to win the award though in a tighter vote.

I enjoyed rewatching it as well. There aren’t all that many Doctor Who stories about space exploration, which is odd when you think about it. And I’m not always keen on the stories which show the Doctor as a flawed hero, but sometimes it works better than others, and I think this is one of those times.

Phil Ford has now written a novelisation of his own script – he had previously done the same for one of his Sarah Jane Adventures stories, and I complained then that it was not comfortably done, but I liked his Torchwood stuff (see here and here). That SJA novelisation was seventeen years ago, and he’s clearly got a lot more writing experience under his belt since then. The Waters of Mars is one of the better recent novelisations. The second paragraph of third chapter is:

He said he had been eight years old, and it was a tomato, small but perfectly round and deeply red, that he had plucked from a spindly but leafy tomato plant grown in a pot at the back of his father’s greenhouse. One side of the greenhouse was filled with tall, flourishing plants, their limbs already bowing with the weight of ripening tomatoes. The opposite side was a jungle of cucumber plants, aubergines and potted bushes of red and green chillies.

There’s a lot of juicy extra stuff here that didn’t appear in the TV story, whether because there wasn’t room for it in the original script or whether the author has imagined it more deeply when coming back to the novelisation. The characters on the Mars base are all more fully realised on the page than on the screen, and we get more into the secrets that the astronauts have discovered on planet; while the fundamental plot arc is not reinforced particularly, it isn’t weakened either. So, definitely one to look out for. You can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Democratic Republic of Congo

Posted on by

See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
The Poisonwood BibleBarbara Kingsolver752,10926,582
Heart of DarknessJoseph Conrad519,31623,867
CongoMichael Crichton172,4488,107
King Leopold’s GhostAdam Hochschild60,8584841
A Bend in the RiverV.S. Naipaul17,8453218
Tintin in the Congo Hergé10,9641333
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken HeartTim Butcher 11,489952
A Burnt-Out CaseGraham Greene5,0491,904

I was surprised by the fact that I had read half of these, though much less surprised that six of the top eight are by white men. Disqualified due to not being sufficiently set in the DR Congo are The Leopard, by Jo Nesbo; The Mission Song, by John le Carré; and The Dream of the Celt, by Mario Vargas Llosa. I was interested that books by two former colleagues, Gerard Prunier and Jason Stearns, were both bubbling under. The top book by an author who is actually from Congo is How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child, by Sandra Uwiringiyimana.

Next up: Vietnam.

Pepys Pilgrimage (and a couple of museums, and the Clarke Award)

Posted on by

I spent the last couple of days in London, mainly with a view to attending the Clarke Award ceremony, but also just to do some tourism in the city. In particular, I wanted to do the self-guided tour of Samuel Pepys’ London, a different way of looking at the city; and this turned out to be a great way to spend the middle of the day on Thursday.

It starts at Samuel Pepys’ birthplace on Salisbury Court, just off Fleet Street – I walked over there after a meeting at Parliament, which took me through the courts area which I don’t think I have previously had reason to explore. Of course, the house where he was born was destroyed in the Great Fire and would not have survived the centuries anyway, but there is a plaque.

It’s very close to the church of St Bride’s, which I had been to once before (I went to see the film Bohemian Rhapsody with the vicar back in 2018). This is where Pepys was baptised, and where his brother was buried; it was also destroyed in the Great Fire and badly damaged in the Blitz, but the German bombing revealed its medieval and Roman foundations which you can see in the crypt.

There are also plenty of memorials to other parishioners apart from Pepys. I found this one particularly moving, because of the eloquence with which it doesn’t say the thing that we all know.

I was intrigued by the use of the word “lobbyist” in this memorial, but in fact is seems to mean that Sir Alfred Robbins was a parliamentary correspondent.

I wandered slowly along the Pepys walking route. I didn’t go into St Paul’s Cathedral, as I had a good look around it in 2014 – but around the corner from St Paul’s, I looked at the mysterious plaque of the Panyer Boy, who frankly looks to me like he is doing a poo on the top of Ludgate Hill, reputedly the highest point in the City.

When ye have sought
the Citty Round
Yet still this is
the highest ground
August the 27
1688

The walk doubles back a bit to Christchurch Greyfriars, which I don’t think I had seen before; badly damaged in the Blitz and not rebuilt, and with a monument to Christ’s Hospital school, where Samuel Pepys helped set up what is now the mathematics department.

There isn’t a particular Pepys connection to the church of St Mary-le-Bow, but the Norman crypt does a really excellent lunch. The Norman arches were an innovation for 11th-century England, and gave their name not only to the church (arch = bow) but also to the Church of England’s judicial arm, the Court of Arches, which still meets there.

It’s a bit of a walk from there to the Monument, which I photographed from both east and west.

The depiction of King Charles II distributing relief to the citizens of London is very silly.

Across the road is a plaque marking the site of the bakery on Pudding Lane where the Fire broke out; though I felt that the Worshipful Company of Bakers could have added some comment like, “Er… sorry!”

Having got there from Westminster on foot, I must say I had a new appreciation of the extent of the Great Fire which devastated London from more or less the Monument to the Temple, a half hour’s brisk walk (I had taken a lot longer over it). I also have a new appreciation of the extent to which Christopher Wren shaped and continues to shape the urban landscape of London. It’s one thing to know the fact that he built over 50 churches in the City, about half of which are still standing; it’s another to wander around the streets and find that there’s another Wren church around almost every corner.

One that Wren didn’t need to touch was All Hallows by the Tower, known to Pepys as Barking Church, protected during the Fire by Sir William Penn who blew up neighbouring buildings to create a firebreak. This was the tower that Pepys climbed on the fourth day of the Great Fire, 5 September 1666, “and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw”. (Though again, the tower was badly damaged in the Blitz and has been reconstructed.) Incidentally this is where John Quincy Adams married Louisa Johnson 131 years later, in 1797.

All Hallows is at the bottom of Seething Lane where Pepys lived and worked; half way up the street there is a lovely memorial garden to him with a bust by Karin Jonzen, which a kind passer-by captured for me.

And at the top of the lane is St Olave’s church, where he worshipped and was buried. I was utterly delighted that I happened to wander in just as the Belarusian pianist Olga Stezhko was starting a performance of Debussy’s Estampes. Not Pepys’ type of music, and yet I think he would have approved.

On the right hand wall is a memorial to Pepys erected in 1883 by his Victorian fans.

But actually the point where you feel closest to Pepys isn’t either of the memorials to him inside or outside St Olave’s; it’s the monument to his wife Elizabeth. They married two weeks before her fifteenth birthday in 1655; their marriage was not always happy, and he had another long relationship after Elizabeth died, but this is how he wanted their love to be remembered. She died of an unspecified fever in 1669, just after they had returned from a holiday in France, where she had grown up. She leans out of the wall, turning her head to look at the gallery (now demolished) where he continued to worship for another third of a century without her, until he in turn died in 1703.

My attempt to translate the Latin epitaph which Samuel wrote for Elizabeth:

Wife of Samuel Pepys (Secretary of the Royal Fleet)
Educated in France, first in a convent, then in a school
She shone in the virtues of both:
Beautiful, accomplished, multilingual
She bore no children, because she could not be equalled
In the end she said farewell peacefully
(Just after a voyage to lovely places in Europe)
She returned, and now she is discovering a better world.

She died on 10 November
in the 29th year of her age
the 15th year of her marriage
the 1669th year of Our Lord.

She was also appreciated by none other than the Third Doctor.

One other thing struck me about the beginning and end of the journey through Pepys’ life. The church where Pepys was baptised is St Bride’s, named for the semi-mythical Irish Saint Brigid of Kildare, one of the patron saints of Ireland; the church where he is buried is St Olave’s, named for the Norwegian king who helped the Saxon dynasty regain London from the Danes in 1014 and is the patron saint of Norway. These are two cults which originated not in England but in neighbouring countries. London has always been defined by its links with the outside world.

This is quite a long enough entry as it is, but I just want to call out two museums that I went to on Wednesday before the Clarke ceremony. Believe it or not, I had never before been to the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (I went to the Pink Floyd retrospective there in 2017). I had no expectations at all, but was blown away by the two Cast Courts, which assemble replicas of great sculptures.

I was particularly delighted to find a copy of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s funeral monument from Fontevrault – I don’t know if I will ever see the real thing.

The other museum I went to was one flagged up to me by the Discovering Tudor London guide, the Museum of the Order of St John at St John’s Gate in Clerkenwell. This tracks the story of the Knights of Malta in their various guises since the 11th century. The Knights are strong on branding.

I also liked the model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which apparently you can take apart to look inside.

Unfortunately I didn’t get organised to join one of the guided tours of the old priory; but there will be a next time.

How to be Invisible, by Kate Bush

Posted on by

Second verse of third song (“Love and Anger”) as given here:

Take away the love and the anger,
And a little piece of hope holding us together.
Looking for a moment that’ll never happen,
Living in the gap between past and future.
Take away the stone and the timber,
And a little piece of rope won’t hold it together.

I’m not a super-fan of Kate Bush, but I like her music well enough, and what’s interesting about this collection of her lyrics is that it’s very much curated by her – this is not a chronological order from early to modern, it’s a compilation of all of her songs to date (2018) grouped by theme. I enjoyed revisiting some old favourites, but also realised how little I know Bush’s complete œuvre, and there is clearly some good stuff that I have missed out on so far. There’s also a very nice and helpful foreword from David Mitchell (the novelist not the comedian, from context). You can get it here.

This was both the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2018, and the shortest of the unread books acquired in 2018. Next on those piles respectively are Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis, and Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, by Clodagh Tait.

Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece to Life, by Jonathan Bardon

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Wealth and comfort were assured from the moment Jennens was born in 1700 at Gopsall in Leicestershire. At that stage his father was overseeing the production of over 2,000 tons of cast iron a year. The Darbys of Coalbrookdale had discovered the art of smelting ore with coke, but they kept this knowledge to themselves: until the middle of the eighteenth century charcoal was the only fuel that could then produce metal of a quality acceptable to all other ironmasters. Prodigious quantities of wood for charcoal burning were needed to feed the industry now burgeoning in the English west midlands. For a time timber felled in the broadleaved forests of Ireland, shipped across the Irish Sea, had met the requirements of a great many English smelters. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, these forests were no more – heedless exploitation had left Ireland, apart from Iceland, the most treeless country in Europe. Jennens’s father, also called Charles, had been assiduously buying up suitably wooded land still remaining in England and Wales to ensure a steady supply for his business: when he died in 1747, his son inherited 736 acres at Gopsall and no fewer than 33 other properties in 6 different counties.1
1 McCracken, 1971, pp29 and 83-84; Smith, 2012, p.3

Jonathan Bardon (who died of COVID in 2020) was one of the great Irish historians, and this was his last monograph, published in 2015. It is a lovely micro-study of the before, during and after of the evening of 13 April 1742, when Handel’s Messiah was first performed in Dublin at the long-vanished music hall on Fishamble Street

He carefully unpicks the cultural background to the performance, with Dublin, feeling that it was not punching its cultural weight as a city, eager to find openings where it could score over London. He also looks at the stories of the other people involved with the show – librettist Charles Jennens (who submitted it to Handel unsolicited); leading soprano Susannah Cibber, sister of Thomas “Rule Britannia” Arne; and Jonathan Swift, whose grumpy authority over the choristers of St Patrick’s Cathedral almost derailed the entire performance at the last minute.

And he goes into the subsequent history of Messiah, which was actually rather slow to catch on in the English-speaking world. Interestingly it was the Methodists who first picked up on it, and then it became a staple for large-scale musical spectacle starting with a performance in Westminster Abbey in 1784 to commemorate the centenary of Handel’s birth. (He was actually born in 1685, but never mind.)

So, it’s a nice study of a particular cultural event which will tell people who know about Irish history some interesting things about music, and will tell people who know about music history some interesting things about Ireland. Recommended. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next is Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman.

Version 1.0.0