Here’s Why The General Election Will Actually Be Really Fascinating

Buzzfeed’s tour d’horizon.
(tags: ukpolitics )

An Open Letter On The Subject Of Tim Farron’s ‘Homophobia’

Telling it like it is.
(tags: ukpolitics libdems sexandgenderandsexuality )

Hugo award winner Folding Beijing to be made into a movie

Hooray!
(tags: China sf )

Please Read This Before You Post Another RIP On Social Media.

Wise words.
(tags: Socialmedia Death )

2014 JO25 is a kilometer-wide asteroid that flew just 1.8 million km past Earth yesterday | SyfyWire

Close!
(tags: asteroids Astronomy )

You’re too busy. You need a ‘Shultz hour’.

Sometimes easier said than done…
(tags: psychology work )

President Marine Le Pen’s first 100 days

Gaming out the unthinkable.
(tags: france eu )

30 Most Extreme Places in Britain – Part 1

Fascinating.
(tags: ukpolitics demography )

I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong

A confession.
(tags: uspolitics )

How Liberals Fell in Love with The West Wing

and the problems that causes.
(tags: uspolitics )

Chrome and Firefox Phishing Attack Uses Domains Identical to Known Safe Sites

Well worth reading.
(tags: security internet )

Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth
The Habit of Loving by Doris Lessing
Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
Words are My Matter, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Last books finished
Europe in Winter, by Dave Hutchinson
The Gods of the Underworld, by Stephen Cole
The View from the Cheap Seats, by Neil Gaiman
Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee

Next books
The Parrot’s Theorem, by Denis Guedj
Lavondyss, by Robert Holdstock
Argonautica, by Valerius Flaccus

This UKIP Guy Is Selling “Bleach” As A Health Supplement

Political poison.
(tags: ukpolitics wankers )

Doctor Who: series 36, episode one – The Pilot

@guardian review.
(tags: doctorwho )

Boris Johnson makes pig’s ear of Syria response

Lord Hannay on the state of UK diplomacy.
(tags: ukpolitics brexit eu syria )

Coercion, cash and culture: how to resolve conflicts

My own views on peacebuilding.
(tags: mymedia peace war )

UK denies residency to London-born children of Dutch-Spanish couple

Shameful.
(tags: ukpolitics brexit eu migration )

Conflict and Famine

The last time the UN declared a famine was in 2011. Today we are on the brink of four.
(tags: war southsudan Somalia nigeria yemen )

Democracy Is Not Dying

Thomas Carothers & @YoungsRichard at @CarnegieEndow are not pessimistic.
(tags: democracy poliics )

“@United Airlines made me ABANDON my mobility device at the gate before my honeymoon”

Boggle.
(tags: unitedairlines disability )

United Passenger “Removal”: A Reporting and Management Fail

Really good analysis.
(tags: unitedairlines )

China Elevates `Good Cop’ on Trade to Counter Trump Barbs

The most important Chinese trad official you’ve never heard of.
(tags: China )

Brexit Between The Rock and a Hard Place

Rhetoric and negotiation.
(tags: gibraltar brexit ukpolitics eu )

Kirk Drift

Brilliant by @ehorakova on sex in Star Trek.
(tags: trek sexandgenderandsexuality sf )

Pepsi Ad How and Why It Was Made

A PR disaster, partially explained.
(tags: publicrelations )

‘Disastrous response that made things worse’: UK PR experts lay into United Airlines and its precarious CEO

Rightly so.
(tags: publicrelations unitedairlines )

Will London Fall?

New York Times reflects.
(tags: ukpolitics london eu brexit )

Power brokers in the Kremlin jostle to succeed Putin

Who’s next? (Apologies, FT paywall)
(tags: russia )

Not disclosing my ranking: A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was too much. Too much, and yet, the restrictions that were in place made processing the Port all the harder. Things were happening behind the kit, she knew. She could hear them, smell them. The visual cone of perception that had rattled her upon installation was maddening now. She found herself jerking the kit sharply around at loud noises and bright colours, trying desperately to take it all in. That was her job. To look. To notice. She couldn’t do that here, not with fragmented views of crowds without edges. Not in a city that covered a continent.

A Hugo finalist, so no comment from me until after Worldcon.

4-5) Azanian Bridges, by Nick Wood

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She’s a short skinny woman, an Indian, a bright green headscarf hiding her hair, so I assume she’s a Muslim. My mother may not have approved of her then – but that matters little now, for she herself is long gone.

I liked all of these a lot, but one has to start pruning somewhere, and though I really loved the concept of a parallel track of history where apartheid and the Soviet union never fell (yet Obama got elected) I felt there were some glitches in the execution and characterisation. It's the shortest of the shortlisted books, though, and still well worth a read.

3-4) Occupy Me, by Tricia Sullivan

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘His hands and feet are cold,’ Maja says. ‘Mucus is building up in his throat. But he’s responsive. I can call the family if you think it’s appropriate.’

A tight and yet occasionally spectacular narrative of transhumans getting into trouble. Good fun, didn't quite grab me as much as some of the others.

2-3) Europe in Winter, by Dave Hutchinson

Second paragraph of third chapter:

He was on his way into town, changing trains at Euston Underground station, riding the escalator up from the Victoria Line platforms, and as he neared the top everything was suddenly unfamiliar. It was as if he had not only never been in this place before, but in this situation. What was this moving staircase? What were these tunnels? What did all these signs mean? Which language were they in? He felt a sense of fear so profound that he stopped at the top of the escalator and several people coming up behind him bumped into him and almost knocked him over.

Ties the two previous volumes of the trilogy together, fractured future and fractured past; I wasn't quite sure where we got to in the end but I very much enjoyed the journey.

1-2) Daughter of Eden, by Chris Beckett

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Michael’s Place didn’t look so different, I guess, from where I used to live on Knee Tree Grounds, with its bark shelters arranged round a circle of open space where we lit our fires and sang our songs. I guess that’s how low people live all over Eden. But the ground it stood on was black dirt instead of pale sand, and the trees shining round it were Wide Forest trees – whitelanterns with their pure white shining globes, redlanterns with their long tubes of glowing pink, and spiketrees with their little bright blue flowers – and not the knee trees with their drooping branches and yellow-green flowers that grew out on the Grounds. And another another thing that was different was that, right there in middle of the circle of open space the shelters stood round, there was another circle, a little circle of small round stones gathered from poolside, which no one ever stepped inside. Every Davidfolk cluster had one of these, even if it was only tiny. It was a copy of the original Circle of Stones, over there across the Dark, in Circle Valley, which marked the place where people from Earth had first come down to Eden, and to which, so the Davidfolk believed, Earth people would one waking return. About thirty of us lived there round that little ring of stones, including grownups, newhairs, oldies and little kids, and it was my home now. It was the new family I’d found, after I’d lost the one I had before, and after a lonely time with no one to be with at all. I’d become one of them, one of the Davidfolk, who believe that nothing is more important than family, and nothing matters more than keeping family together.

I've been a big fan of the Eden books, but I think this caps the trilogy very nicely indeed – and I think it's also sufficiently distinct from the previous two (though with some reference to previous events) that someone new to the trilogy could enjoy it. Eden, if you don't know, is a world on the edge of the galaxy where the planet's inner heat supplies enough energy to give it a viable atmosphere; its human inhabitants are the descendants of two survivors of a lost spaceship centuries ago. Their mythology centres around Earth. But what happens when Earth comes to visit? Really good.

Novel | Art | Non-Fiction | Short Fiction

You’re Not Mad at United Airlines; You’re Mad at America

Probably.
(tags: uspolitics unitedairlines )

Since none of the artists whose work is up for the BSFA for Best Art is also on the Hugo ballot, I think I can list my preferences here in the usual way.

6) Suzanne Dean and Kai & Sunny – Cover of The Sunlight Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan (William Heinemann).

Geometrically pleasing but not super-exciting.

5) David A Hardy – Cover of Disturbed Universes by David L Clements (NewCon Press).

Hardy is one of the great sf artists, but this didn't appeal to me as much as some of his other work.

4) Chris Moore – Cover of The Iron Tactician by Alastair Reynolds (NewCon Press).

A more interesting composition, but again didn't quite grab me.

3) Tara Bush – Transition (Cover of Black Static #53).

This is more like it, an interesting and somewhat haunting playing with images.

2) Juan Miguel Aguilera – Cover of The 1000 Year Reich by Ian Watson (NewCon Press).

Much more going on here; you feel that this is an important moment in the history of an interesting world/worlds.

1) Sarah Anne Langton – Cover for Central Station by Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon Publications).

Fascinating, weird, does amazing things with only one colour and just a few lines at angles to each other. Makes me want to read the book, more than any of the others do.

Novel | Art | Non-Fiction | Short Fiction

Many things slipped my mind over the final few days of preparing the Hugo final ballot for publication, and one of them was my usual report on the number of owners and average rating of the Best Novel finalists by users of Goodreads and LibraryThing. This may well measure nothing more than the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, of course. For what it's worth, here are the figures:

As I noted with the Nebulas, All the Birds in the Sky is way ahead in terms of number of owners, but the ratings for some of the others are pretty strong.

This is the second year that the BSFA has had its two-stage vote system in effect, and for the second year in succession I think it’s had a positive impact particularly in this category, where some very odd stuff was showing up in the early part of this decade (like, a novel in this non-fiction category back in 2010, and a poorly written essay in 2013).

It’s good to see academic treatments of sf getting extra prominence via the shortlist as well, even though it does mean that there is some variation of format among the entries, with blog posts and series of blog posts jostling monographs and essays. But I don’t think that is avoidable; there’s not really enough interest in the category to allow splitting into sub-categories.

So, all that being said, here is my ranking, in reverse order, with the second paragraph of the third chapter or section of each shortlisted work. (None of the BSFA shortlist is on the Hugo final ballot, so I am unrestrained.)

Not Ranked: “New Model Authors? Authority, Authordom, Anarchism and the Atomized Text in a Networked World”, Paul Graham Raven (Adam Roberts: Critical Essays)

Second paragraph of third section:

So the framings of Crowe’s with which I am here concerned are those of ephemerality and utopianism, and I shall deal with the latter first. Writing on the history of the utopian form in science fiction, Edward James (2003: 219) contends that the SF utopia has ‘mutated [ … ] into something very different from the classic utopia’, due to ‘the profound way in which utopianism has permeated SF’; this resulted in the subgenre of ‘technological utopianism’, in which the formation of the utopian society is achieved partly or totally through technological or scientific means, as opposed to the predominantly political; these utopias are defined less by a static, perfected society than a ‘continued struggle and progress’ ( James, 2003: 222). Meanwhile Ken MacLeod (2003: 238), in a survey of political forms in science fiction taken from the same volume, observes that ‘the closest analogy for a functioning anarchy is the internet’, a model whose attractiveness is rooted in the way in which it ‘vastly extends both private initiative and public space’ (MacLeod, 2003: 239). While the basic analogy still holds, however, technological progress has (perhaps counterintuitively) undermined the latter of the two extensional powers MacLeod ascribes to it.

This is a very well done and well executed piece of work, and I really enjoyed reading it and can understand why people nominated it. However it is clearly a work of fiction, so I won’t vote for it at all in the Best Non-Fiction category. I won’t say more to avoid spoiling the joke.

5) “Breaking the Cycle of the Golden Age: Jack Glass and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy”, Anna McFarlane (Adam Roberts: Critical Essays)

Second paragraph of third section:

In Jack Glass, this plurality is shown as silence, just as the Occupy movement’s lack of a cohesive political programme was experienced as silence by the political and financial elites. However, this silence is a powerful resistance due to the interplay between silence and servility in the text and its intertexts. Part 3 of the novel, ‘The Impossible Gun’, sees Jack Glass, Diana Argent, and her once-servant Sapho arrive at the Sump where they seek someone who can access information from a droid that they have in their possession. The droid has witnessed a murder which the group believe to be recorded in its memory, if only they can access it. Since Karl Čapek’s 1920 play R. U. R. first coined the word ‘robot’ (from ‘robota’, the Czech word for ‘forced labour’),18 robots have been used in science fiction to represent the working classes, the ‘trillions’ of the Jack Glass galaxy on whose labour the capitalist system relies. Texts featuring robots have revealed a bourgeois fear of revolution in that the earliest pulp stories about robots and mechanical men often portrayed robots running amok and destroying bourgeois society. Asimov wrote that,

By the time I was in my late teens and already a hardened science fiction reader, I had read many robot stories and found that they fell into two classes. In the first class there was the Robot-As-Menace… In the second class (a much smaller one) there was Robot-As-Pathos. In such stories the robots were lovable and were usually put upon by cruel human beings. These charmed me. (Asimov, 1995: 9)

One of two essays about Adam Roberts’ work on the list. I enjoyed Jack Glass when it was up for the BSFA Award four years ago; I was less convinced that it will have the staying power of the Foundation trilogy and didn’t feel I learned much from the comparison.

This was the only thing on the shortlist that I really bounced off.

4) “Introduction to The Big Book of Science Fiction“, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (The Big Book of Science Fiction)
Second paragraph of third section:

Conte philosophique translates as “philosophical story” or “fable of reason.” The contes philosophiques were used for centuries in the West by the likes of Voltaire, Johannes Kepler, and Francis Bacon as one legitimate way for scientists or philosophers to present their findings. The conte philosophique employs the fictional frame of an imaginary or dream journey to impart scientific or philosophical content. In a sense, the fantastical or science-fictional adventure became a mental laboratory in which to discuss findings or make an argument.

An ambitious attempt to summarise the history of science fiction in 18 pages, which pointed me in some new directions. Very interesting.

3) “100 African Writers of SFF“, Geoff Ryman (Tor.com blog posts, part 1, part 2)

Second paragraph of third section of Part 1 [Nairobi]:

Binyavanga [Wanaina] was a key figure in the selection of writers for Africa 39, credited with researching the writers, with Ellah Wakatama Allfrey editing and a panel of three judging the final list of the 39 best African writers under 40. Binyavanga is a mainstream figure but he has always defended science fiction and its role in African literature. He did a reading a couple of years ago at the London School of Economics and it got inside his father’s head in a mix of biography and stream of consciousness fiction—it also drew heavily on science for its metaphors: Higgs Boson for unknowabilty, neutrinos (I seem to remember) for people who don’t interact with others.

Second paragraph of third section of Part 2 [Writers in the UK]:

Her mother wore the latest cloth in the market and held her head high, for her daughter was young – had just finished university, in fact – and was doing strong things. Her father bought himself an ozo title; one could hear him laughing kwa-kwa-kwa as he sat with his friends on the veranda of his new house, drinking palm wine and eating bush meat, flicking flies with his horsetail whisk. Yes-men and boy-boys would sing his praise names from the compound below and he would get up to spray naira notes on them like manna. Life was good.

—From “Story, Story: A Tale Of Mothers And Daughters”

Ryman has been evangelising the increasing strength of Africa as a source of new and great sff for some time, and in these two posts he looks very specifically at writers in Kenya and in the U.K. It’s a convincing survey which again gave me some new things to look out for once I have time to start looking out for new things again.

2) “THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK 1930-1980”, Rob Hansen

Second paragraph of third chapter:

In the summer of 1947 the Willises discovered, in a second-hand bookshop on Austin Street, something whose existence they had not previously suspected: a US edition of Astounding. This led to a frantic scouring of Belfast and surrounding districts that didn’t produce any other issues but which did turn up a copy of Walter Gillings’s prozine Fantasy. In the letter section was a missive from a Belfast fan, one James White. Walt Willis wrote to him and White replied on 26th August, a day thereafter known as Irish Fandom day, and arranged to meet. The group had been born, but for the first few months they were content to do little more than read through each other’s books and magazines and to combine their collecting efforts. In December 1947, Willis came across an ad for the British Fantasy Library in one of the prozines and wrote off for details. The reply came in the form of a scribbled note from Ron Holmes and a mess of duplicated BFL material, including Operation Fantast. Since OF offered magazines that Willis wanted he got in touch with editor Ken Slater about them and also asked if Slater could put him in touch with any other fans in Belfast. He couldn’t. In March 1948 the third OF appeared, and among its enclosures was a copy of the first issue of Norman Ashfield’s fanzine, Alembic. As Willis recalls:

“It was this that started me off as a fanzine publisher, for Madeleine held it up and said, ‘Surely you could do better than that!’, and I thought maybe I could. It wasn’t that we had such contempt for Alembic, it was rather that it was more our sort of thing than OF had been. OF had news items and all sorts of proper magazine stuff, whereas Alembic was just comments and general talk by Norman. Besides, this was only the second fanzine I’d seen, and it made me realise that there was no closed shop.”

This was an absolutely fascinating read, covering the history of sf fandom in the U.K. from its earliest beginnings in great detail. I’ll hope to get my act together sufficiently to write a proper review of it; I was particularly interested in the important role played by fans in Belfast both before and after the Second World War, and of course it is interesting to read of the origins of people who we now know as venerable beings (including of course the late Peter Weston). I’m sure this will win the award, and deservedly so.

But my own top preference will go to:

1) “Boucher, Backbone and Blake: The Legacy of Blakes Seven“, Erin Horáková

Second paragraph of third section:

That aside, a remake can’t happen (or it really shouldn’t) because this is a show about terrorism—not like, incidentally. It’s a huge structuring element of the plot, because the central characters (whether or not they signed up to be) are political terrorists. They attack military facilities, sometimes threaten civilians, hijack a ship, and do other things that would be read by an anxious modern US audience as terrorism. If I say “terrorism” three times, an American network executive will appear in the mirror and pull funding (try it at home!). Get “Netflix?” out of your mouth—even your beloved “edgy”, “independent” networks would balk. They produce content with fucking and gore that pretends at sedition while reinforcing conservative thinking about the normalcy of sexual assault, the acceptability of military violence, etc. I’m not prudish about this, I’m just bored. Because it’s not fucking seditious, is it? All that is less risky than producing content with a fairly simple, coherent political through-line.

I am of the generation for whom Blake’s 7 was a crucial part of growing up, and a chill still goes down my back at the opening music. Horáková makes a passionate and convincing argument for the importance of the show in shaping science fiction television ever since, and for its wider political importance then and now. She pushes all my buttons, and she gets my vote.

Novel | Art | Non-Fiction | Short Fiction

Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth
The View from the Cheap Seats, by Neil Gaiman
The Gods of the Underworld, by Stephen Cole
Europe in Winter, by Dave Hutchinson

Last books finished (since 1 April)
The Cabinet of Light, by Daniel O’Mahoney
A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers
Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
Pounded In The Butt By My Second Hugo Award Nomination, by Chuck Tingle
The Arrival of Missives, by Aliya Whiteley
Daughter of Eden, by Chris Beckett

Next books
The Habit of Loving, by Doris Lessing
The Parrot’s Theorem, by Denis Guedj
Lavondyss, by Robert Holdstock

Brexit: Economists Will Have The Last Word

Vince Cable’s analysis.
(tags: ukpolitics brexit )

There’s no overlap at all between the BSFA shortlisted Short Fiction and the Hugo finalists. It’s also striking, I think, that all of the BSFA shortlist first appeared in print, whereas none of the Hugo finalists did (several appeared simultaneously in print and electronic publication). I found my final ranking easy enough to make.

6) “Taking Flight”, Una McCormack

Second paragraph of third section:

For a whole day the shuttle followed the coastline south along ragged shores and pristine sands. Shortly after dawn of the second day, we reached the silver-streaked triangle of a river delta and struck south-west into the interior.

Only four pages; read like a short extract from a longer story, didn’t really work for me.

5) “Presence”, by Helen Oyeyemi

Third section has only one paragraph, so here it is:

For most of their lives she and Jacob had both been afraid of the same thing: not being deemed worthy to share a home with a family. They were both foster kids. Nobody ever said you were unworthy, not to your face, but there was talk of adults and children not being ‘the right fit’ for each other. The adults were the ones who decided that, so when ‘fit’ was brought up they were really talking about the child. This left Jacob, and Jill, and Lena (Jill’s one-time foster sister during an idyllic but brief lull) ever ready to have to leave a home, or to be left. Jacob became extremely capable, a facilitator, someone you wanted around because he smoothed your path – whether through his skill as a polyglot or his general aura of ‘can do’. Lena was pretty much lawless; she used to wear a pair of sunglasses on the back of her head and a badge that said HELL, which she tapped whenever anyone asked her where she was ‘originally from’ and she was so clearly somebody you could trust with your life that reform always seemed possible for her. Jill advanced an entirely false impression of herself as biddable and in need of protection. Ah, I’m just a little chickadee who won’t survive the winter and this I nestle under your life sustaining wing. Far from original, but it worked.

I didn’t really work out what was going on here – the narrative seemed to be about differing time perceptions and the effect on your family life but the point eluded me.

4) “Liberty Bird”, by Jaine Fenn

Second paragraph of third section:

He rotates Liberty Bird and peels away from the Reuthani Clan liner; the huge blunt needle is strung with spoked rings, their sizes and positions determining their place in this microcosm of clan life: engineering, living suites, gardens, entertainments and accommodation for the few thousand citizens permitted to accompany their betters off world for this annual jamboree. In a touching if tacky gesture, a block of portholes in the central midtown ring have been selectively lit to spell out the words Good Luck Kheo.

Short piece which at first appears to be about an aristocratic space racer but then turns out to be about queer identity in a repressive society.

3) “The End of Hope Street”, by Malcolm Devlin

Second paragraph of third section:

This house was owned by Marlon Swick, and he lived there with his partner of eight years, Julia Prinn. It was another Saturday and they had spent the afternoon at his mother’s house in Barnstaple. She spent the whole time they were there talking about children. She’d always wanted grandchildren she’d said, and she said it with one of those pointed expressions which was probably supposed to be subtle, but really wasn’t.

Much better. More horror than fantasy, creepy unexplainable catastrophe happens to middle-class suburban English people.

2) “The Apologists”, Tade Thompson

Second paragraph of third section:

I deliberately interrupt Katrina’s morning routine. She goes to the gym at six oh five every day, and she likes to start with the cross trainer. I do not let her on this day. I stand on the pedals back to front and I sing The Boys are Back in Town’ at the top of my voice. Katrina sees me and freezers.

Rather good and bleak post-apocalyptic story, with a very unpleasant narrator who gets his come-uppance.

1) The Arrival of Missives, Aliya Whiteley

Second paragraph of third section:

I write of how I am inspired to teach by my own instructor, and how I am already of use to him in the classroom. I write of my knowledge of Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare, of Keats, of my understanding of the parts of Chaucer that are considered suitable reading, and of how I excel at the multiplication of large numbers. I am proud of how the passion within me becomes visible on the page.

This novella is along as all the others put together (must be bumping up against the 40,000 word limit) – and I think it’s as good as all the others put together as well, a splendidly creepy story of a West Country village just after the first world war and how one young woman becomes the instrument of preventing future conflict. Only a short extract is included in the BSFA short fiction publication – it’s well worth hunting down to read in full, and I hope that the relative lack of availability won’t hurt its chances. (On the other hand, it’s the only one of the shortlisted stories that is available electronically at all, I think.) Gets my top vote, firmly.

Novel | Art | Non-Fiction | Short Fiction

March pretty much disappeared as a reading and blogging month, thanks to the Hugos and also the election in Northern Ireland. I think it will be a little easier now that those two votes are over. I don’t need to be as discreet about what I am buying or reading (though Hugo finalist write-ups will have to wait until the second half of August). The one book I’m working through from my standard reading lists is Very Long Indeed, which also didn’t help my tally.

Non-fiction: 2 (YTD 9)
The Intimate Adventures Of A London Call Girl, by Belle de Jour
The Princess Diarist, by Carrie Fisher

sf (non-Who): 1 (YTD 18)
Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex, by Stix Hiscock

Doctor Who, etc: 1 (YTD 8)
Short Trips: Snapshots, ed. Joseph Lidster

Comics: 1 (YTD 5)
Black Panther Vol. 1: A Nation Under Our Feet, by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze

1,000 pages (TYD 10,100)
3/5 (YTD 15/45) by women (“Bell de Jour”, Fisher, “Stix Hiscock”)
1/5 (YTD 3/45) by PoC (Coates/Stelfreeze)

Reread: 0 (YTD 2)

Reading as of 31 March
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth
Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Habit of Loving by Doris Lessing
The Parrot's Theorem by Denis Guedj
Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock
Argonautica by Valerius Flaccus
The Stormcaller by Tom Lloyd
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold
Every Step You Take by Maureen O'Brien
The Innocent Man by John Grisham
Saga Volume 6 by Brian K Vaughan
Warriors ed. George R. R. Martin
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
Europe In The Sixteenth Century by H. G. Koenigsberger and George L. Mosse
Dune by Frank Herbert
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J. K. Rowling
De Mexicaan met twee hoofden by Joann Sfar
De piraten van de Zilveren Kattenklauw by Geronimo Stilton
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
1688: A Global History by John E. Wills
New Europe by Michael Palin
The Angel Maker, by Stefan Brijs
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
HWJN by Ibraheem Abbas
The Cabinet of Light, by Daniel O'Mahony
The Gods of the Underworld, by Steve Cole
Short Trips: Ghosts of Christmas, ed. by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright

Sunday updates will return tomorrow.

Theresa May is right: if we let someone drop ‘Easter’ off an egg hunt, we may as well hand Britain to the jihadis

Glorious.
(tags: ukpolitics )

Latvia Mayor Upstaged by Cat in Interview

Yes.
(tags: latvia tv cats )

The Trump Lifestyle Is Bleeding the Secret Service Dry

Ostentation costs.
(tags: uspolitics )

When I agreed to take on the role of Hugo administrator for Worldcon 75 back in late 2015, almost the first decision I made (with my then deputy, Colette Fozard) was about timelines.

Worldcon this year is comparatively early – the second weekend of August (and Tuesday-Sunday rather than Wednesday-Monday) and Easter relatively late (16 April). Worldcon timing has become more flexible in recent years; four of the first six were held in July, but for the half century from 1949 to 1998, only one (1975) was in mid-August, all the rest at the end of August or early September. In the last 20 years, however, the 1998, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2014, 2015 and 2016 Worldcons were all held earlier in August. Both 2018 and the Irish bid for 2019 will also be in mid-August.

I'm one of those who rather like the idea of announcing the Hugo finalists at conventions held over the Easter weekend. But that would have led to a very squeezed timetable for voters, and indeed for us. Working backwards, it seemed best to aim for an announcement in the first week of April, and to close votes two weeks and an extra weekend before that, knowing that it was likely that the 2016 WSFS Business Meeting would give us a larger task than before. That led inevitably to the decision that we'd close voting on St Patrick's Day, 17 March, and aim to make the announcement on 4 April – the first sensible weekday more than two weeks after the close of the vote. (Mondays are almost as bad as weekends for stories like this.)

I was not at all surprised to hear that MidAmeriCon II also decided not to make the announcements at Easter – for the opposite reason, ie that Easter last year was comparatively early, 27 March. The announcement of the final ballot came on my birthday last year, as I was stuck in a noisy pub with a former British MP, trying to discuss serious politics but very distracted by the news coming in from Twitter. I did like the style of graphics for each category (which allow you to tag those finalists with Twitter handles). However I missed the feeling of immediacy that you get with a live announcement.

I toyed with various ideas, such as doing a live webcast announcement (but by whom? And from where?), or organising a sponsored evening event (again, sponsored by whom? And where?). At the same time, at the back of my mind were lurking the images of Helsinki conjured up by Tuula Karjalainen's biography of Tove Jansson, both the city as Tove herself knew it, and her father's sculptures in the city centre for which she modelled.

And I woke up in the middle of the night at the start of February, and I had it – a video tour of Helsinki, with 18 celebrities and fans announcing the 18 Hugo categories for the longest ever Hugo final ballot. If it didn't work, we could always fall back on the tested MidAmeriCon model of timed tweets. But it was surely worth a try. It would be a bit different from the usual way of doing things, and would also be a way to showcase Helsinki for the international audience of Worldcon.

My crazy idea was agreed with surprisingly little fuss. Once we got started, things went really well. Katariina Ihalainen, who is in charge of videography for Worldcon 75 as a whole, accepted the challenge of filming 18 short segments on 1 April and then combining them. Sanna Lopperi took over the inviting and scheduling of individual announcers. Charlotte Laihanen took on logistical wrangling on the day. And before I knew it I was on the plane to Helsinki last Friday, staying overnight with Jukka Halme and Sari Polvinen, and ready for a full day's work on a day of very uncertain weather. And here it is:

The final sequence that you have seen is, of course, very different from the order of filming. It was also a bit different from the original set of ideas. I'd have loved to have had some Finnish politicians, some of whom are sympathetic, but there are municipal elections in Finland this coming weekend and everyone was busy campaigning. If we'd had more time I would have liked to try our luck filming at the old observatory, or the Suomenlinna island fortress, but we were constrained by the calendar and the hours of daylight. We had intended to do shots of the Uspenski Cathedral, Senate Square and the harbour, but the weather was against us. On the other hand, one venue turned us away – luckily by then the weather had improved and we retreated to the Tove Jansson statue in Kaisaniemi Park.

We had actually started next door to there, at 9 am in the main railway station with Johanna Vainikainen, aware of the chilly wind blowing in from the outside. By the time we got to the Finlandia Hall and National Museum, it was actually snowing a little. At the Sibelius monument, I took a selfie with my favourite composer as the snow turned to sleet. Johanna Sinisalo stood in the well of a dormant fountain with a Tove Jansson mermaid, reading the Best Novel finalists with rain dripping off her umbrella. The last shot of all, which was actually the first shown (Hanna Hakarainen and the Campbell Award finalists), was filmed at 5.30 in the very foggy Malmi cemetery, eight and a half hours after we started. But we were still more or less on schedule, and (perhaps more amazingly) we were all still on speaking terms with each other.

We were happy but also glad it was over. (Though Katariina then had the task of editing it all together, and did a fantastic job.)

I don't think this need be seen as some sort of challenge to future Worldcons to replicate (or exceed) what we did. Easter is at a more normal time next year (1 April) and Worldcon 76 is a little later in August, so a return to the Easter weekend announcement is perfectly feasible. But I think it was good to do something a little different, and I hope you enjoyed watching it.

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