Sunday reading

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Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
The Rapture of the Nerds, by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the U.K., 1930-1980, by Rob Hansen
To Lie with Lions, by Dorothy Dunnett

Last books finished
V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore
The Other Islam, by Stephen Schwartz
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley
The Humans, by Matt Haig

Next books
Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch
A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth
Short Trips: Time Signature, ed. Simon Guerrier

Books acquired in last week
Politics: Between The Extremes, by Nick Clegg
Eurofiles: A Cartoonist’s View of Europe and the Wider World, by Peter Schrank
Many Grains of Sand: A sourcebook of ideas for changing the world, tried and tested in Catalonia, by Liz Castro
THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the U.K., 1930-1980, by Rob Hansen
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
The Famished Road, by Ben Okri

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Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet, by Douglas Adams and James Goss

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

To describe the Captain would be to spoil the surprise. It's probably safest to describe his chair, which was very large and dominated the Bridge of the Citadel. From here, the Captain could look out through the vast domed windows, down the mountain, across the city of Zxoxaxax and over the plains of Malchios. The cities were easier to see than they were to spell.

I was in London at the start of the month, and who should I find in Forbidden Planet but James Goss, autographing copies of the very newest Doctor Who book!

As my regular reader knows, I rate James Goss as possibly the best regular writer of prose for Who at present. Here he follows on from the success of his novelisation of City of Death to tackle the missing book from the Key to Time series. And it's great, turning a somewhat problematic and wobbly screen story into a rather well developed narrative, filling background, foreground, and much else. The Doctor/Romana banter remains, cranked up a bit if anything; even K9 gets some good moments, plaintively calling "¿ɹǝʇsɐW" after lading upside down at one point. The Captain, the Queen and Mr Fibuli, who are all of course cartooney characters, none the less get a bit more depth and dimensionality in this treatment, and the Mentiads, renamed Mourners, make a lot more sense on the page than on the screen.

For a bonus we get the original story treatment by Adams, where the nature of the planet and the character of Romana had not yet fully evolved, and his thoughts on the Key to Time (which end with the hand-written word "Mice") – a lot more insight into story development usual. And there are some interesting hints about the true identity of the so-called White Guardian.

The first Doctor Who book published this year – a good start.

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Interesting Links for 28-01-2017

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No longer welcome: the EU academics in Britain told to ‘make arrangements to leave’
#TakingBackControl
(tags: ukpolitics brexit eu )
5 Reasons to Vote for the Hugo Awards
Thanks, @DanKoboldt!
(tags: sf hugos )
John Hurt, versatile star of The Elephant Man, Alien and Harry Potter, dies aged 77
Sad news.
(tags: doctorwho death )
Five Roger Zelazny Books that Changed My Life by Being Awesome
By @StevenBrust.
(tags: sf )
Fanzines, Cover Art, and the Best Vorkosigan Planet: An Interview with Lois McMaster Bujold
Yay!
(tags: sf )
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See How Much I Love You, by Luis Leante

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The second paragraph of the third chapter is so long that it's almost a short story in its own right, at more than 500 words both in English and in the original Spanish:

En realidad aquel día no tenía turno de guardia, pero lo cambió con un compañero porque le resultaba muy duro pasar sola en casa una Nochevieja por primera vez en su vida. Fueron numerosas las ocasiones, durante los últimos meses, en que había hecho guardias en fechas que no le correspondían. Sin embargo aquélla, por lo que significaba para algunos la entrada en el nuevo siglo, resultaba algo especial. El Servicio de Urgencias del Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau estaba preparado para afrontar una noche de mucha actividad. Muy pocos albergaban la esperanza de dormir acaso dos o tres horas. Pero hasta las doce de la noche las urgencias que llegaron fueron incluso menos numerosas y graves que las de un día de diario. Aunque sin mucho trabajo que atender, la doctora Cambra iba de un sitio a otro tratando de mantener la mente ocupada. Acudía a la farmacia, rellenaba los huecos de gasa en el armario, se aseguraba de que las botellas de suero coincidieran con las que se habían pedido. Cada vez que entraba en la sala en donde estaba encendido el televisor, agachaba la cabeza y canturreaba por lo bajo para no reconocer su fracaso. Temía derrumbarse delante de sus compañeros en cualquier momento, como aquella vez en que rompió a llorar en mitad de un reconocimiento, mientras la auxiliar la miraba asustada, dudando entre atender a la doctora o a aquella anciana que se ahogaba por la presión de una costilla sobre los pulmones. Ahora, cada vez que escuchaba su nombre por la megafonía del Servicio de Urgencias, acudía enseguida sin pensar en otra cosa que en su trabajo. A veces algún residente o algún interno con muchas entradas en el cabello y nariz aguileña le recordaban a Alberto, todavía su marido. Pero, a diferencia de unos meses atrás, era capaz de sonreír. Llegaba incluso a imaginarlo preparando la cena junto a aquella radióloga de gimnasio y peluquería; él, que nunca había fregado un plato, que jamás había abierto los cajones de la cocina si no era para llevarse el sacacorchos. La última vez le pareció incluso que se había teñido las canas de las patillas y de las sienes. Lo imaginó también haciéndole la danza del vientre a la radióloga, y corriendo detrás de ella alrededor de la mesa del salón, en una de aquellas carreras de jungla que hacía tantos años que no practicaba con ella. Los sentimientos que le provocaba Alberto habían evolucionado de la amargura a la ironía, y de la ironía al sarcasmo. Nunca pudo imaginar que aquella persona que ocupó su vida desde muy joven pudiera parecerle, en apenas diez meses, un ser de trapo, vacío, falso, un auténtico hijo de puta. Le costaba trabajo recordar la cara de su marido cuando lo conoció, o cuando la paseaba por Barcelona en aquel Mercedes blanco, impoluto, brillante, perfecto, como él. Médico de estirpe, cardiólogo joven de carrera meteórica, seductor, inteligente, bello. La doctora Cambra no podía quitarse de la cabeza la imagen del que había sido su marido, durante veinte años, corriendo tras la joven radióloga. Cuando se cruzó en el pasillo con la doctora Carnero, anestesista de guardia, aún llevaba dibujada la sonrisa sarcástica en el rostro. Se miraron con complicidad.

She wasn’t actually supposed to be on duty that day, but she swapped her shift with a colleague because she would have found it very hard to spend New Year’s eve at home on her own for the first time in her life. In the last few months she’d taken extra shifts on numerous occasions. Still, this one was something special, given what the arrival of new century meant for so many people. The Casualty Ward of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau was prepared for a very busy night. Few staff were hoping to get more than two or three hours’ sleep. But, in fact, before midnight they admitted fewer, less serious cases than on a regular day. Although she didn’t have much to do, Doctor Cambra walked up and down trying to keep herself busy. She would go to the pharmacy, restock the cupboard with gauze, and make sure they had received as many bottles of saline solution as had been ordered. Every time she walked into the staff room where the TV was on, she would hang her head and sing to herself in a mumble to stave off her despair. She was afraid she might break down in front of her colleagues at any moment, like that time she had burst into tears in the middle of an examination, while the nurse looked on in distress, not sure whether he should tend to the doctor or to the elderly woman who couldn’t breathe because a rib was pressing on her lungs. Now, every time Doctor Cambra heard her name through the loudspeakers of the casualty ward, she went wherever she was needed without thinking about anything except her work. At times an intern with a badly receding hairline and an aquiline nose would remind her of Alberto, who was still her husband. But, unlike a few months before, she was able to smile. She could even picture him cooking dinner with that radiologist who was obsessed with the gym and the hairdresser’s; he who had never done the dishes and had never opened a kitchen drawer except to take out a corkscrew. The last time she’d seen him it looked as though he had dyed the grey hairs on his temples and sideburns. She also imagined him belly dancing for the radiologist, and chasing her around a coffee table, in one of the wild cat-and-mouse games that he hadn’t played with her for years. Her feelings for Alberto had changed from sadness to irony, and from irony to sarcasm. She would never have imagined that someone who had been such an important part of her life since her youth would become, in barely ten months, a sort of rag doll, an empty, fake being – a veritable bastard. She found it hard to remember what he looked like when they’d met, at the time when he drove around Barcelona in that white, impeccable, polished, perfect Mercedes of his, it was just like him. A doctor from a family of doctors, a young cardiologist with a brilliant career, he’d been seductive, intelligent, handsome. Now, Doctor Cambra could not rid her mind of the image of her husband of twenty years chasing the young radiologist. When she bumped into Doctor Carnero, the anaesthetist on duty, she was still wearing a sarcastic smile on her face. They looked at each other in complicity.

This novel won Spain's prestigious Alfaguera Prize in 2007; I bought it in 2010 because I was then working with the Frente Polisario for the cause of Western Sahara, and there are not a lot of books set there.

It's a story of interlocking timelines. In 2000, Montse Cambra, a Barcelona doctor whose marriage has broken up, unexpectedly finds a link to the boy who loved her and left her in 1974, as the Franco regime neared its end, We follow their romance early in that crucial year, his fate as a disappearing member of the Spanish Foreign Legion as the year ended and the Moroccans invaded, and her journey from Barcelona a quarter-century later after she finds a clue to his fate in the possessions of an accident victim who dies in her hospital. It's very well done – Barcelona of course is well realised, both in the 1970s and the turn of the century, but so are the different environments of North Africa – the corrupt garrison town at the end of the regime, the refugee camps near Tindouf, the town itself and the desert; and indeed the desperate human relationships between Montse and Santiago in the earlier timeline and between each of them and the people they respectively encounter in the Sahara later on. The twist ending is rather well done. But the point of the book is the scenery as much as the plot; it is (rightly) sympathetic to the plight of the Saharawis, promised self-determination by the International Court of Justice and denied it by Spain, Morocco, and the indifferent great powers, and the interleaving of the plot strands works particularly effectively. Recommended.

This was the non-genre fiction book that had been lingering longest on my unread shelves, since I bought it in 2010. Next on that list is Every Step You Take, by Maureen "Vicki" O'Brien.

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Interesting Links for 27-01-2017

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May is weak in Europe but strong at home
More good analysis from @CER_Grant.
(tags: ukpolitics eu brexit )
Plight of EU nationals seeking UK residency to be investigated
Go @SophieintVeld!
(tags: eu brexit migration )
Post-Brexit trade deal with Trump will take years not days, warns former US ambassador to EU
Yep.
(tags: ukpolitics Uspolitics brexit eu )
The State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned
*gulp*
(tags: Uspolitics )
The Star Wars Death Star trench isn’t where you think it is
Wow!
(tags: sf )
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Northern Ireland Elections Website has been updated

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I’ve spent the weekend updating the Northern Ireland Elections Website with the details of last year’s Assembly election. I had thought I might have a bit longer to work on it, but circumstances have changed and the update is needed now – or indeed ten days ago, to be honest, but other issues have kept me from it.

The coming election is going to see at least 18 of the members of Northern Ireland’s Assembly lose their jobs, because each of the 18 constituencies will elect five rather than six MLAs, for a total of 90 rather than 108. We are already seeing dignified withdrawals (most notably from Martin McGuinness). The 18 constituencies are East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, East Antrim, North Antrim, South Antrim, North Down, South Down, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Foyle, Lagan Valley, East Londonderry, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh, Strangford, West Tyrone, and Upper Bann.

Thanks as ever to Conal Kelly who updated the graphs and did some of the heavy lifting elsewhere as well.

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Sunday reading

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Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
The Other Islam, by Stephen Schwartz
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore

Last books finished
Every Heart A Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
See How Much I Love You, by Luis Leante
Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet, by Douglas Adams and James Goss
Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Rip Tide, by Louise Cooper
Penric’s Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Colour Of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
Monstress Volume 1: Awakening, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
The Dead Men Diaries, ed. Paul Cornell

Next books
The Humans, by Matt Haig
The Rapture of the Nerds, by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
To Lie with Lions, by Dorothy Dunnett

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The Palace of Dreams, by Ismail Kadare

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

As he went along the corridor he was assailed by all sorts of doubts and surmises. Could he have made some mistake in his work? Could someone have appeared from the depths of the Empire and come knocking at every door, going from office to office and vizier to vizier, claiming that his valuable dream had been thrown in the wastepaper-basket? Mark-Alem tried to remember the dreams he'd rejected recently, but couldn't recall any of them. Perhaps that wasn't it, though. Perhaps he'd been summoned because of something else. It was nearly always like that: when you were sent for, it was almost invariably for some reason you could never have dreamed of. Was it something to do with breaking the secrecy rule? But he hadn't seen any of his friends since he'd started working here. As he asked his way through the corridors he felt more and more strongly that he'd been in this part of the Palace before. He thought for a while this might be because all the corridors were identical, but when he finally found himself in the room with the brazier, where the square-faced man sat with his eyes glued to the door, he realised it had been the Director-General's office he had knocked on his very first day in the Tabur Sarrail. He'd been so absorbed in his work since then that he'd forgotten it even existed, and even now he had no idea what the square-faced man's job was in the Palace of Dreams. Was he one of the many assistant directors, or the Director-General himself?

This was the novel that got Albania's greatest writer, Ismail Kadare, into trouble with the Communist authorities when it was written and sneakily published in 1980 and 1981. Our protagonist, Mark-Alem of the ancient Quprili family, is recruited to the Palace of Dreams in the capital of the Empire, where feuding bureaucrats together analyse and report on the portents opened up to the Imperial rulers through the dreams of the populace. You don't have to be very smart to see this as a rather clear analogy of the Sigurimi under the Hoxha regime, gathering information neurotically and monitoring the loyalty of the population closely, yet also vulnerable at the top to the whims of the man at the very centre of the state.

The Writers' Plenum which condemned the book showed only that they could not appreciate the talent they had amongst them. As well as being rather like a Kafka story told by an insider, Kadare adopts a lot of Latin American-style magical realism in the story (there is a particularly bizarre and vivid police raid on a dinner party). My linguistic instincts are sharp enough also to spot that there is something going on with the protagonist’s name: Qubrili, we are told, is linked with the word for “bridge”, in modern Turkish “köprü”; but of course the standard Albania word for bridge these days is “urë”, and what it anyway made me think of was the novel by Ivo Andrić of the old Yugoslavia, Na Drini ćuprija, The Bridge on the Drina (the modern word is “most” rather than “ćuprija”). It would be interesting for someone to do an annotated edition of this some time.

Edited to add: I was over-analysing here. The Albanian Köprülü / Qubrili family were indeed a perfectly real powerful political family in the Ottoman empire, so there is no explicit reference by Kadare to Andrić.

This was the most popular book on my shelves acquired in 2010. Next in that ranking is a Dutch translation of an Italian children's book, De piraten van de Zilveren Kattenklauw, supposedly by the heroic mouse protagonist Geronimo Stilton, which has already popped up this month.

The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury

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Second paragraph of third story ("The Other Foot")

In her kitchen Hattie Johnson covered the boiling soup, wiped her fingers on a cloth, and walked carefully to the back porch.

The mid-point of the century was an extraordinary moment of creativity for Ray Bradbury. One of these stories was published in 1947, another in 1948 and the rest in 1949, 1950 and 1951. You can see his genius in applying the writing style of the mainstream to sf tropes – the end of the world, Mars, alien contact. He was ahead of his time as well: the very first story is about parents worrying that their children are spending too much time in virtual reality (first published in the Saturday Evening PostThe Martian Chronicles do, so it makes sense for them to be linked by a narrative of moving tattoos on the ever-flexing skin of the Illustrated Man. And a lot of them are allegories on mid-century America, dressed up as SF tropes, and perhaps a little odd in the pulps where most of them were first published. I did once meet someone who wondered if Ray Bradbury could really be counted as an sf writer because he is so literary in approach. Bradbury hinmself, however, had no doubt.

This was the top sf book recommended by you in my poll at the end of last year. Next on that list is Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold, which I will read but not review online until its fate in this year's Hugos has become clear.

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Rhyme Stew, by Roald Dahl

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Second verse of third poem:

I was running the tombola
At our church bazaar today
And doing it with gusto
In my usual jolly way…

…and shortly afterward the narrator gets groped by the vicar, because sexual assault is funny.

A collection of poems by Dahl, ostensibly for children. The longer poems, which are subversions of well-known stories – Dick Whittington, the Tortoise and the Hare, the Emperor's New Clothes, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Hansel and Gretel and Aladdin – are generally much better than the short ones which seem too often to be doggerel encoding a club-room joke, usually missing the mark of good taste (let alone appeal to the target audience). It is perhaps a product of a different time (though published in 1989 when things were surely already changing).

This was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2010. Next in that ranking is a Dutch translation of an Italian children's book, De piraten van de Zilveren Kattenklauw, supposedly by the heroic mouse protagonist Geronimo Stilton.

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Interesting Links for 18-01-2017

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Enhancing the EU’s Engagement With Separatist Territories
Interesting as ever from @Tom_deWaal.
(tags: georgia Armenia Azerbaijan moldova eu )
May’s 12-point shopping list
Euractiv’s analysis.
(tags: eu brexit )
A full English Brexit is on the menu
Brilliant Spectator analysis.
(tags: eu brexit ukpolitics )
The problem with the English: England doesn’t want to be just another member of a team
Polemic on difference between English and British.
(tags: ukpolitics brexit eu )
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Jeremiah: Een Geweer in het Water, by Hermann

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Second frame of third page:

(a bird steals a biscuit from Jeremiah's bag)

I asked a friend some time back which Flemish comic series he would recommend, and without too much hesitation he named Jeremiah, an extended story about the odyssey of Jeremiah and his buddy Kurdy through a post-apocalyptic America. So I got this volume, whose title translates as "The Rifle in the Water" and then lost it for several years, finding it only the other day in a big household cleanup.

I have to say I wasn't hugely impressed. Jeremiah and Kurdy encounter an extended family in the swamps, all of them pretty awful people with a secret to hide (there's a rifle in the water, and more besides). Lots of shooting and conspiring, but it didn't hugely engage me. I should possibly have tried the story from the beginning – or else just skipped it entirely.

This was my top unread non-English comic, and will be followed by another.

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Short Trips: Farewells, edited by Jacqueline Rayner

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Second paragraph of third story ("The Bad Guy", by Stephen Fewell):

‘Whenever I think of you,’ she said, ‘I’ll always remember you with fondness —’ She’d been trembling as she took my hand, her rings clustered cold against my fingers.

Another of the Big Finish anthologies, unusually taking the first eight Doctors in chronological sequence with stories about saying goodbye. A strong start and end, with the First Doctor taking Ian and Barbara along Route 66 and the Eighth Doctor re-enacting The Wicker Man with contemporary garden furniture (one for , I think), by Gareth Wigmore and Paul Magrs respectively. The others that grabbed me were an elegiac Fourth Doctor story, “Into the Silent Land” by Steven A. Roman, and a grim Sicth Doctor story by Joe Lidster, “Curtain Call”. In general 2006 seems to have been a good year for the Short trips anthologies, as it was for New Who in general.

Next in sequence of these anthologies is Short Trips: The Centenarian, edited by Ian Farrington, but I read it back in 2010, so I’ll move on to Short Trips: Time Signature, edited by Simon Guerrier.

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Sunday reading

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Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet, by Douglas Adams and James Goss
See How Much I Love You, by Luis Leante
Every Heart A Doorway, by Seanan McGuire

Last books finished
Jeremiah: Een Geweer in het Water, by Hermann
Rhyme Stew, by Roald Dahl
The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
The Palace of Dreams, by Ismail Kadarë

Next books
The Colour Of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
The Other Islam, by Stephen Schwartz
Rip Tide, by Louise Cooper

Books acquired in last week
Five Go On A Strategy Away Day, by Bruno Vincent
Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton
The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin
Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
Monstress Volume 1: Awakening, by Marjorie Liu
The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Penric’s Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler

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Second paragraph of third chapter, with bonus Akkadian fable:

The names of civilisations that arose in the ancient Near East now ring with the note of remote antiquity. Three dozen and more are known that flourished in the three millennia from the start of records c.3300 BC until the invasion of Alexander in 330 BC, among them such powers as Babylon, Assyria, Phoenicia, Lydia and Persia. They bring to mind visions of oriental absolutism, breathtaking ruthlessness and gaudy magnificence. Despite their many pretensions, their cultural fertility and sometimes truly universal power, they have left no heirs. Something of this was foreseen by at least one of their own writers:

arad mitanguranni
         annû bēlī annû
umma usātu ana mātia luppuš kimi
         epuš bēlī epuš
         amēlu ša usātam ana mātišu ipuš
         šakna usātu-šu in kippat ša marduk
e arad anāku usātamma ana mātia ul epuš
         la teppuš bēlī la teppuš
         ilīma ina muḫḫi tillāni labīrūti itallak
         amur gulgullē ša arkûti u pānûti
         ayyu bēl lemuttima ayu bēl usāti

Servant, listen to me!
         Yes, master, yes.
I will benefit my country
         So do, master, do.
         The man who benefits his country
         has his good deeds set down in the record of Marduk.
No, servant, I will not benefit my country.
         Do not do it, master, do not.
         Go up to the ancient ruin heaps and walk around.
         See the skulls of the lowly and the great.
         Which belongs to one who did evil, and which to one who did good?

from "the Dialogue of Pessimism", Akkadian.

This fascinating book turned out to be very interesting as paired reading with The Horse, the Wheel and Language. It looks at the history of those languages which have become dominant for a while in areas far from their origins – Sumerian, Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Arabic, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Nahuatl, Quechua, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Russian, and English (plus a few others of course) – and asks how this process happens, and also how such languages get displaced by their successors.

He starts with the Middle East, and I probably learned more from this section than from any other. I would have found it difficult to distinguish between the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians; now I appreciate the lovely continuity between Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, all fairly closely related and the lingua franca of Mesopotamia and far beyond for centuries. The Greek chapter also pulls apart the roles of the different Greek dialects in both literature and politics; again, information that I had been vaguely aware of but packaged here comprehensibly. And it had not occurred to me that Ancient Egyptian survived as Coptic until a few centuries ago.

I particularly appreciated was the account of the linguistic shifts of the Chinese languages. I've found it very difficult to get to grips with Chinese history in the past – the names mean nothing to me and I don't have a good sense of the geography; and I've sensed some writers steering away from the question of internal cultural or ethnic differences in China. Of course, if you approach it through the lens of language, it is impossible to ignore the cultural and ethnic aspects, and equipped with those tools I suddenly found a lot of what I had previous read fitting together much better in my mind. And it's important for understanding how our world will work in the future – Mandarin has about the same number of speakers as the second, third and fourth languages in the world combined (Spanish, English and Hindi/Urdu), and the other Chinese languages are level pegging with major European languages like French and Italian.

The linguistic approach also offers a somewhat different perspective on imperialism and colonisation. It's actually rather rare in historical terms for a language to jump tracks and become a widely spoken mother tongue in places far from its origin. Most of the ancient languages discussed were languages of commerce, religion and/or administration which took a very long time to percolate into the population as a whole; apart from settler colonies, the same is true in more modern times – Dutch is not spoken in Indonesia (and barely in the Caribbean); English may be the national language of India but it is spoken by only 10% of the population. It is relatively unusual for the colonisers' language to completely displace the previous incumbents. English has been lucky twice: when Germanic tribes conquered the Western Roman Empire, Britain was the only province where their language stuck, everywhere else either retaining Latin (or Basque, which had been around for even longer) or switching from Aramaic to Arabic when the time came. Surviving a narrow brush with Norman French, it then became the core language of European settlement in North America. In both cases, depopulation of the indigenous population by plague, helped by ethnic cleansing, appears to have been a crucial factor, as with Spanish in Latin America. (Simple conquest is not enough; cf German and Japanese.) Similarly, Portuguese has Brazil, but none of the other ex-colonies is really lusophone in the same way; as for French, there is no country apart from France where it has a majority of native speakers – not Belgium (38%), not even Monaco (45%).

But Ostler is very far from being an anglophone triumphalist, and takes his last chapter to look ahead at the eventual fall of English as a world language, and to speculate about what might replace it. One would have to bet on Chinese, already an official language or an unofficial language of commerce all round the South China Sea. He makes the point that Chinese, English and Malay/Indonesian have all been helped in their success by rather simple internal structures which make them relatively easier to learn to speak. Chinese, however, is hampered by its writing system which is much more difficult to grasp. I must say I can see English clinging on for centuries to come, as a lingua franca for humanity, even with a relatively decreasing share of native speakers.

(Note for self: I would love to understand why it is that the parts of Moldova which were actually in the Roman Empire are precisely the areas where the non-Romance-speaking minorities, the Bulgarians and Gagauz, are concentrated.)

Anyway, very much worth reading, full of detail and connections which I had not thought of before.

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Goodreads/LibraryThing stats: BSFA longlist

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The BSFA longlist was published last weekend, and as ever I'm running the books through Goodreas and LibraryThing, to track both number of owners on each system (you have to dig into Goodreads a bit for that, but it is there) and the average rating of each book.

The results are as follows (ranked by geometrical average of number of owners), the top nine of the 34 entries in each column indicated in bold:

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
Colson Whitehead – The Underground Railroad 161127 4.07 1052 4.14
N K Jemisin – The Fifth Season 73486 4.32 755 4.28
Charlie Jane Anders – All The Birds In The Sky 55332 3.59 567 3.67
V E Schwab – A Gathering Of Shadows 69915 4.35 408 4.19
Cixin Liu – Death's End 14362 4.51 160 4.26
Alan Moore – Jerusalem 8052 3.98 188 4.13
Claire North – The Sudden Appearance of Hope 13191 3.62 112 3.59
Yoon Ha Lee – Ninefox Gambit 8858 4.02 151 4.06
Becky Chambers – A Closed and Common Orbit 10489 4.43 105 4.43
Charles Stross – The Nightmare Stacks 5132 4.22 162 4.06
Lavie Tidhar – Central Station 4127 3.59 107 3.73
Johanna Sinisalo – The Core of the Sun 3792 3.89 91 3.77
Alastair Reynolds – Revenger 5942 3.91 57 3.5
Peter Tieryas – United States of Japan 5159 3.55 62 3.65
Stephen Baxter & Alastair Reynolds – The Medusa Chronicles 3394 3.82 67 3.21
Naomi Alderman – The Power 4570 4.17 43 3.75
Elizabeth Bonesteel – The Cold Between 2690 3.65 58 3.17
Adrian Tchaikovsky – The Tiger and the Wolf 1760 4.02 22 3
Daniel Godfrey – New Pompeii 1372 3.33 26 3.17
Christopher Priest – The Gradual 1090 3.78 29 3.4
Matthew de Abaitua – The Destructives 964 3.8 26 2.5
Stephen Aryan – Bloodmage 1154 3.86 16 3.5
Tricia Sullivan – Occupy Me 691 3.4 21 3.81
Simon Kurt Unsworth – The Devil's Evidence 881 4.15 16 4.33
Paul McAuley – Into Everywhere 616 4.09 15 3.7
Dave Hutchinson – Europe in Winter 284 4.19 28 3.71
Matt Hill – Graft 1325 3.36 4 3
Chris Beckett – Daughter of Eden 394 4.19 9 4.25
Nick Wood – Azanian Bridges 180 3.67 18 3.13
Mark de Jager – Infernal 341 4.04 3 4
Ren Warom – Escapology 798 3.73 1 –
Gavin Chait – Lament for the Fallen 173 3.62 4 4
Steph Swainston – Fair Rebel 70 4.5 7 4
Al Robertson – Waking Hell 68 3.74 5 –

Some may be surprised to see last year's Hugo winner, The Fifth Season, on the list; but its UK publication was not until 2016. It is one of three books to finish in the top quartile of all four measures, for what that is worth, the other two being A Gathering Of Shadows and Death’s End.

This of course tells us nothing more than the popularity of these 34 books among users of Goodreads and LibraryThing; the BSFA voters may have a very different set of views.

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