Owen Smith, the anti-immigration candidate who has risen without trace to challenge Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour Party leadership, has been making hay with this apparent contradiction between Corbyn’s current and past statements:

Confusion over Article 50https://t.co/hVPnt6QOpc …

— Owen Smith 2016 (@owensmith2016) August 6, 2016

I think I’ve made it clear that I am not a Corbyn fan. However, it’s clear to me that when he said “Article 50 has to be invoked now” on 24 June, he meant “We are now in a situation where Article 50 has to be invoked at some point”, and did not think that he was calling for the immediate invocation of Article 50.

It was incompetent of him to express himself in the way that he did, and incompetent not to clarify as rapidly as possible with his real view (whatever that may be) when it became clear that his words were being interpreted in the form that they came out of his mouth rather than the form they had had in his head before he spoke. He expressed himself poorly on the morning after a sleepless night, and failed to absorb any speaking points which might or might not have been prepared for him by party staff. A competent leader would not have made that mistake in the first place, or would have rapidly corrected by scheduling a major interview to set the record straight (and journalists would have been cutting each others’ throats to get that interview). But it’s a mistake rather than equivocation.

It was a very big mistake, because both the MPs who I linked to in my previous post saw this very statement as effectively the final straw. (Thangam Debbonnaire: “On the day after the referendum he asked for an early Brexit… That was the tipping point for me”. Lilian Greenwood: “we heard Jeremy calling for the immediate triggering of Article 50. Without any discussion with the Shadow Cabinet or the Leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party… How can that be right?”)

For those who had worked closely with him, and who would theoretically have been among those populating the ministerial benches of a Corbyn-led government, it seemed entirely in character for Corbyn to have suddenly adopted a new policy position on a crucial issue of national importance without preparing colleagues for it (never mind consulting them), rather than considering the possibility that he might have misspoken – a possibility that I haven’t even seen his supporters raising. It seems that Corbyn’s poorly chosen “now” triggered the mass resignations from the shadow cabinet of the following couple of days, and thus was the spark that exploded the current leadership crisis (which looks likely to continue for at least twelve months after Corbyn trounces Smith in the coming ballot).

Needless to say, my analysis doesn’t change my view about the urgency for Labour to get a competent leader. For me this isn’t about policy at all (there seems little to choose between the two candidates, and where I can discern a difference I generally feel closer to Corbyn’s position), it’s about two of the most basic political leadership skills: communicating clearly and consistently, and building a good team around you which may well include those who have not always supported you. Corbyn is deeply incompetent on both counts, and the Labour Party and the British political system need and deserve better. The problem is, I’m not convinced that a better option is currently available.

Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
Merchanter’s Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
The Beggar Maid, by Alice Munro

Last books finished
Doctor Dolittle in the Moon, by Hugh Lofting
Drama and Delight: The Life of Verity Lambert, by Richard Marson
The Host, by Peter Emshwiller
Ghastly Beyond Belief, eds. Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman
Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins, ed. David Bailey

Last week’s audios
The Black Hole, by Simon Guerrier
The Isos Network, by Nicholas Briggs

Next books
The Last Theorem, by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl
Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment, by Bryan Talbot
Atom Bomb Blues, by Andrew Cartmel

Books acquired in last week
SPQR, by Mary Beard
To Lie with Lions, by Dorothy Dunnett
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham
City of Soldiers: A Year of Life, Death and Survival in Afghanistan, by Kate Fearon
Galactic Girl, by Fiona Richmond

I picked these up as an omnibus dubbed The Space Trilogy, though in fact they are not even slightly linked narratives which take place in different versions of the near future. They are a good reminder of the strengths and also the limitations of the Good Old Days. As I’ve said before, Clarke was one of my formative influences as a teenager, and it’s nice to report that his work holds up reasonably well under a more sceptical adult gaze, despite the scarcity of women and the complete lack of non-white characters (which Clarke corrected later in his career).

Islands in the Sky

Second paragraph of third chapter:

For the first time, I turned to see what Commander Doyle had been doing during the crisis. To my astonishment, he was still sitting quietly at his desk. What was more, there was a smile on his face, and a stop-watch in his hand. A dreadful suspicion began to creep into my mind, a suspicion that became a certainty in the next few moments. The others were also staring at him, and there was a long, icy silence. Then Norman coughed, and very ostentatiously rubbed his elbow where he had bruised it against the wall. If he could have managed a limp under zero gravity, I’m sure he’d have done so as he went back to his desk. When he reached there, he relieved his feelings by grabbing the elastic band that held his writing pad in place, pulling it away and letting it go with a “Twack!” The commander continued to grin.

I had read this before, long ago, and it remains good wholesome stuff, with boys becoming men in space: our protagonist gets to stay in the big low-orbit space station, where the entire crew appear to be English and male, and experience a few other adventures but also learn some important lessons about life and about engineering (though nothing much about other matters, the only women in space being an actor making a movie in orbit and the members of a friendly family of Mars colonists). The most striking difference for me between Clarke’s 1952 future and what has actually happened is that the cost of space flight has proven to be so high that economies of scale have pushed us much more to unmanned spacecraft and also to international collaboration than he anticipated, though I am sure he approved of both developments. It’s interesting that Clarke’s Wikipedia entry has forgotten this novel completely; I hadn’t.

The Sands of Mars

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was very disconcerting, at least to an inhabitant of Earth, to see two moons in the sky at once. But there they were, side by side, both in their first quarter, and one about twice as large as the other. It was several seconds before Gibson realized that he was looking at Moon and Earth together – and several seconds more before he finally grasped that the smaller and more distant crescent was his own world.

Now this, slightly to my surprise, was a Clarke novel that I definitely had not read before – and I thought I had raided the Belfast library system of its entire stock of his works when I was a teenager. Though bound second in my omnibus volume, it was Clarke’s first published novel, dating from 1951. It’s set a few years after the establishment of a Mars colony; the journalist protagonist (who is also an sf novelist) is being sent as what we’d now call an embedded member of the team, to write up what is going on in humanity’s new outpost; the details of how journalism is technically done have dated far more than the rest of the book – there is a loving detailed description of a fax machine, an unimaginable technological advance in 1951, archaic for us in 2016. It’s also a rare case of Clarke attempting to inject some emotional energy into his story, with one of the crew members turning out to be the protagonist’s long-lost biological son, who then falls in love with the only girl on Mars; characteristically, having laid out the situation, the author doesn’t dwell on it (and didn’t really try this kind of narrative trick again in his career). He’s on much more comfortable political ground when the discovery of a new form of Martian life upsets the balance of relations between the Martian base and its Earth master’s, though here again his viewpoint is firmly rooted in what’s good for the human colonists rather than the indigenous Martians. Still, I enjoyed it, and I’m surprised that this took me decades to track down.

Earthlight

Second paragraph of third chapter:

He had made mistakes before—but this time, surely, there could be no doubt. The facts were undisputed, the calculation trivial—the answer awe-inspiring. Far out in the depths of space, a star had exploded with unimaginable violence. Wheeler looked at the figures he had jotted down, checked them for the tenth time, and reached for the phone.

This 1955 novel did disappoint me a bit. It’s the story of a counterespionage accountant on a lunar observatory at a moment of interplanetary conflict between Earth and The Rest Of The Solar System; obviously the Moon becomes a critical location in that conflict (and equally obviously there are Cold War parallels in the author’s mind). There are some vivid observations of base life in the observatory (where again all the staff are white men) and the high-tech battle at the climax of the plot is well described. But otherwise the whole thing is a bit subdued, and the framing narrative of the protagonist’s mission gets a particularly unconvincing resolution.

This was both the top unread book that I acquired in 2014, and my top unread sf book. Next on the former list is The Collected Stories Of Arthur C. ClarkeMerchanters Luck, by C.J. Cherryh.

Love in Translation

A hilarious and moving piece about learning your spouse’s language. #fb
(tags: languages )

Why Don’t We Trust Our Leaders? by Ngaire Woods

What leadership is, and isn’t.
(tags: politics )

The only way to save the American dream

Be like Denmark.
(tags: economics USA denmark )

The secret origin of the Salisbury steak

Eat meat!
(tags: historyofscience )

Robert McLiam Wilson on Belfast and Paris

As you would expect.
(tags: writing waronterror northernireland france )

Thangam Debbonaire: ‘If Jeremy had rung, it would have been a conversation I remembered’

More detail.
(tags: ukpolitics )

I’ll take a united Ireland seriously when I hear Irish politicians tell us what they’ll concede.  

Yup.
(tags: ireland northernireland )

Two for the price of one: since the first panels of page 3 are wordless, I’m giving you both the second panel and the second panel with words:

Kim: “You’re a bit quiet, Hector. What’s up?”
Hector: “Er, well…”

What’s up with Hector is that he’s in love with Kim, as are many people in the world of Bétélgeuse; this is the climax of the second of the Aldébaran cycles of graphic stories by Leo, and though it starts somewhat unpromisingly with Kim and two other female characters discussing the size of their breasts on the first first page, actually it then settles down into a rather satisfying conclusion for the series, with the peculiar behaviour of human technology and settlers and of the indigenous inhabitants all explained just enough to make you want to buy the next volume, and Kim established as a competent kick-ass heroine ready to lead the rest of us onwards.

This came handily to the top of the pile when I was looking for a non-English language graphic story to read. Next in that pile might be De Mexicaan met twee hoofden, the Dutch translation of Le Mexicain à deux têtes, the first of the Professor bell series by Joann Sfar. Or it might not.

WFC 2016: Programming Thoughts

Another major screw-up.
(tags: Sf sexandgenderandsexuality )

Policy or Project? France, Germany, and EU Defense

A reality check on the mythical EU army. #fb
(tags: eu germany france )

Putin’s ‘Human Rights Council’ Accidentally Posts Real Crimean Election Results

Oops.
(tags: ukraine russia )

7 Things I Did To Reboot My Life

Wil Wheaton writes.
(tags: lifehacking )

Dark Ages royal palace discovered in Cornwall – in area closely linked to the legend of King Arthur

Wow.
(tags: archaeology )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Lieutenant Uhura’s quarters were a notable exception. They were richly, tastefully decorated with hanging fabrics, a non-regulation assortment of pillow-couches and a chair made especially for the extremely sensitive skin of a Deltan – a chair which was sheer heaven for a human. Sculpture ranging in size from a few centimetres to one meter betrayed Uhura’s particular obsession, collecting surrealistic and totemistic modern African ebony carvings.

I have read few Star Trek books, but back in 2012 on a Loncon 3 site visit I picked up three of them and have now finally got around to looking at them. It’s a book that is great on incidental detail, but a bit light on plot (and the back cover of my edition spoilered the important question of Who Is Behind It All, a point not revealed in the book until more than half way through). Still, I’ve read enough Doctor Who books to know that the point is sometimes to renew acquaintance with old friends rather than necessarily to push the literary envelope, and in fairness we do learn more here about the Vulcans (and indeed Uhura) which fills out the Trek universe nicely. Also mercifully short.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2012. The next on that pile is another of the Star Trek spinoffs acquired on the same occasion, Planet of Judgement by Joe Haldeman.

People Are Furious That Owen Smith Woke Them Up With A Text At 4am

Oops.
(tags: ukpolitics )

Questions all Jeremy Corbyn supporters need to answer

Long but well worth reading.
(tags: ukpolitics )

More sex please, we’re Swedish

Concerned government commissions new survey.
(tags: sweden sexandgenderandsexuality )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

There is sound, somewhere; a deep humming, on the threshold of audibility. Closer at hand his ears record the tiny rustlings of the girl’s blue robe. She rolls away the metal breakfast tray, sets dishes in the one small sink. The circular port or window high above him admits a beam of intense yellow light. She glances up, reaches to a wall panel. She touches a button and a green-gold filter slides across. It’s like an eyelid somehow; the nictitating membrane of a bird or cat. That memory though is still precise. He’s sitting in an aeroplane. Below him, turquoise, is minutely-wrinkled sea; ahead, a ragged green and yellow coast. It’s Ireland. The wing dips steeply; a grinding double clunk sounds as the undercarriage locks.

One of those books that I really enjoyed reading, but can’t quite explain why. The whole thing is told as flashback by the narrator, possibly undergoing psychiatric treatment; Gráinne is his former lover, his challenge and his inspiration for moving from a Middle England upbringing to creative heights inspired by Celtic myth; there is some social commentary along the way, but the real point is how the narrator/protagonist achieves his full creative powers through interaction with the entrancing Other.

I’ve seen a couple of reviewers stating that this is all about the relationship between Ireland and England. It’s not really; it’s driven by changing English perceptions of Ireland and Celtic heritage (as my excerpt above demonstrates). And that’s all right; but don’t claim it for more than it is.

This won the BSFA Award for 1987. Next in my motley sequence of award winners is George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, which beat Gráinne for the 1988 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Non-fiction: 9 (YTD 29)
Fanny Kemble and the Lovely Land, by Constance Wright
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, by Cliff Stoll
Hamilton: The Revolution, by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter
Boy, by Roald Dahl
Empire of Mud, by J.D. Dickey
Between structure and No-thing: An annotated reader in Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. Patrick J. Devlieger
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich
Tove Jansson: Work and Love, by Tuula Karjalainen
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fiction (non-sf): 5 (YTD 19)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: A Novel in Cartoons, by Jeff Kinney
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, by Jeff Kinney
Tales from the Secret Annexe, by Anne Frank
A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré
Holes, by Louis Sachar

sf (non-Who): 9 (YTD 56)
The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
The Secret History of Science Fiction, ed. James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel
Gráinne, by Keith Roberts
Corona, by Greg Bear
Islands in the Sky, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Sands of Mars, by Arthur C. Clarke
Earthlight, by Arthur C Clarke
Galileo's Dream, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Doctor Dolittle in the Moon, by Hugh Lofting

Doctor Who, etc: 4 (YTD 26)
Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury, ed. Paul Cornell
The Algebra of Ice, by Lloyd Rose
Dead Romance, by Lawrence Miles
Lethbridge-Stewart: Beast of Fang Rock, by Andy Frankham-Allan

Comics: 3 (YTD 17)
The Divine, by Boaz Lavie, Asaf Hanuka and Tomer Hanuka
Invisible Republic, Vol 1, by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman
Bétélgeuse v.5: L’Autre, by Leo

7,500 pages (YTD 40,100 pages)
6/30 (YTD 47/139) by women (Wright, Alexievich, Karjalainen, Frank, Rose, Bechko)
2/30 (YTD 10/139) by PoC (Miranda, Coates)

Reread: 4 (Holes, Islands in the Sky, Earthlight, Doctor Dolittle in the Moon), YTD 12

Reading now
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
Drama and Delight: The Life of Verity Lambert, by Richard Marson
The Host, by Peter Emshwiller
Ghastly Beyond Belief, eds. Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose, by Alice Munro
Merchanter’s Luck, by C. J. Cherryh
The Last Theorem, by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl
Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment, by Bryan Talbot
Oracle, by Ian Watson
The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe
Dictionary of Methodism, by John A Vickers
Robot Dreams, by Isaac Asimov
The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Vol 3: This Mortal Mountain
A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay
The Sea and Summer, by George Turner
Planet of Judgement, by Joe Haldeman
The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 4, ed. Usman T. Malik
De Mexicaan met twee hoofden, by Joann Sfar
Even Dogs in the Wild, by Ian Rankin
Cauldron, by Jack McDevitt
The Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
A History of the World in Twelve Maps, by Jerry Brotton
The Parrot’s Theorem, by Denis Guedj
Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge
Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins, ed. David Bailey
Atom Bomb Blues, by Andrew Cartmel
Tears of the Oracle, by Justin Richards

Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
Drama and Delight: The Life of Verity Lambert, by Richard Marson
The Host, by Peter Emshwiller

Last books finished
Holes, by Louis Sachar
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich
Tove Jansson: Work and Love, by Tuula Karjalainen
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Next books
Ghastly Beyond Belief, eds. Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman
Merchanter’s Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins, ed. David Bailey

Not recorded above, but I have also been catching up with a backlog of Doctor Who Magazines, in particular the glorious Tom Baker interviews in Issue 501.

Theresa May and her six-pack of difficult deals

Good analysis by @CER_Grant. #fb
(tags: ukpolitics eu )

Correction – Amazing things we get back if we leave EU – 26/7/2016 | Clarifications and Corrections | News | Daily Express

Shameless.
(tags: eu ukpolitics )

Kimberly Abbott | Vice President of Communications

My friend and former colleague.
(tags: sexandgenderandsexuality politics )

Lethbridge-Stewart: Beast of Fang Rock, by Andy Frankham-Allan

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Hamilton pulled in a few favours and Fang Rock was once again off-limits for all but essential personnel and Owain, who Lethbridge-Stewart had asked to remain at the lighthouse, along with the BBC cameraman, one James Ratcliffe Saunders. Meanwhile a D-Notice 05, covering United Kingdom Security & Intelligence Special Services, was given to BBC-3. All those on the rock, including the keepers and the chap from Trinity House, had been held for a few hours while statements were taken; they were all released with a stron warning to keep their silence on what they’d seen. Hamilton had made calls to the Royal Navy, and HMS Warspite had been pulled from her usual duties and sent to comb the waters surrounding Fang Rock for any sign of the UFO.

Allow me once again to boost this series of novels about the life of Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart in the year(s) between his encounter with Yeti in the underground and the foundation of UNIT in time to deal with the Cyberman invasion. Here he and Ann Travers are sent to investigate strange goings-on at Fang Rock, the lighthouse which saw a set of mysterious deaths at the turn of the century which themselves followed previous odd happenings decades earlier. It turns out that the Travers family has a connection to events, and that the timelines of the three periods are intertwined in unexpected ways.

It’s very daring of Frankham-Allan to take this approach, with the Brigadier and Ann turning into the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Horror of Fang Rock (with the important difference that they were not actually in the original story). But he pulls it off, giving depth and background to the lighthouse, the Rutans and the human protagonists. These books are going to become hidden gems of Who lore. The one problem with this one is that Frankham-Allan, as both author and editor of the series as a whole, seems not to have proofed it as closely as other volumes – I caught a number of silly slips, including a South American llama in Tibet.

No one told me to ‘go home’ for 16 years. Then we voted for Brexit

Shameful.
(tags: migration ukpolitics eu )

An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting)

Noam Chomsky endorses Clinton in his own special way. #fb
(tags: uspolitics )

Tales from the Secret Annexe, by Anne Frank

Second paragraph of third story (“Eve’s Dream”):

“Same to you, Mum.”

Quite a short book of the brief stories written by Anne Frank while in hiding, bulked out a little by prose set-pieces from her diary. To be honest they are more interesting as further enlightenment about the state of mind of the writer than as literature in themselves; not very surprisingly, the themes of being enclosed or trapped, and parental and family relations, recur in most of the pieces. Still, I doubt if my own scribblings at the age of fourteen or fifteen would stand up to scrutiny as these do.

This hit three of my lists simultaneously: top unread book acquired last year, top unread book by a woman, and top unread non-genre fiction book. Next in each of those lists, respectively, are A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay; Merchanters Luck, by C.J. Cherryh; and The Beggar Maid, by Alice Munro.

Second paragraph of third story (“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your crisis”, by Kate Wilhelm):

They were in the mountains. That was good. Lotte liked it when they chose mountains. A stocky man was sliding down a slope, feet out before him, legs stiff – too conscious of the camera, though. Lotte couldn’t tell if he had meant to slide, but he did not look happy. She turned her attention to the others.

This is an anthology of stories and writers which supposedly straddle the boundary between mainstream fiction and sf. I confess that I didn’t really see the point of the question (“What if sf didn’t exist as a genre, but was being written anyway?”) but I did enjoy most of the stories. One or two I already knew (“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, “Salvador”) but the one I particularly enjoyed, contra my own expectations (also contra other reviewers who I’ve read) was “Ziggurat”, an interesting and convoluted short by Gene Wolfe, who I’ve tended to bounce off in the past.

This was the most popular remaining book on my unread shelf which I had acquired in 2009. Next are two more collections, Vols 3 and 4 of the Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny.

Why Trump Fails—and Clinton Passes—the Commander-in-Chief Test

A former top spook speaks.
(tags: uspolitics )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

In August 1814, in one of the last acts of the futile and misnamed War of 1812, British forces dropped anchor at Benedict, Maryland, some forty-five miles southeast of the District. Avenging the American army’s devastation of the Canadian city of York, the British marched to Bladensburg, where they routed a force of capital militia. From there they attacked Washington City from the north, only to find it abandoned by its defenders. The British torched the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and other public buildings before finding a fully prepared meal laid out for guests at the Executive Mansion, which they gobbled down before burning that building too.

I love going to Washington, and indeed spent three days there two weeks ago, in the course of which I bought this book at Busboys and Poets meeting for dinner, and then read it on my flight westwards. It’s a nice little micro-history of Washington City during its lifetime as an independent governmental entity from 1802 to 1871, with appropriate consideration of what happened before, after, and in the neighbourhood – considering also how the city’s peculiar relationship with the nation, ruling and ruled by the United States but not part of any of them, constrained its development.

One of my favourite songs in Hamilton deals with the choice of site for the new nation’s capital:

[BURR] Congress is fighting over where to put the capital—
[Company screams in chaos]
[BURR] It isn’t pretty
Then Jefferson approaches with a dinner and invite
And Madison responds with Virginian insight:
[MADISON] Maybe we can solve one problem with another and win a victory for the Southerners, in other words—
[JEFFERSON] Oh-ho!
[MADISON] A quid pro quo
[JEFFERSON] I suppose
[MADISON] Wouldn’t you like to work a little closer to home?
[JEFFERSON] Actually, I would
[MADISON] Well, I propose the Potomac
[JEFFERSON] And you’ll provide him his votes?
[MADISON] Well, we’ll see how it goes

Dickey goes into this in some detail, and there is more back-story than is in the musical. From Alexander Hamilton’s side, he was concerned at the vulnerability of a government located in Philadelphia, or any pre-existing city, to mob pressure. George Washington, who was empowered by Congress to choose the site for the new government, chose partly due to military defensibility (from naval attack – he did not anticipate that the British would land elsewhere and march in from the northeast) but also with an eye to his own personal interests – his own home, Mount Vernon, was a couple of dozen miles away, and he also had investments in local infrastructure, particularly a failed attempt to build a canal linking the capital to the North East. But by 1802, when the city government was established, Washington was dead, Hamilton’s career was over, and there was nobody to champion the interests of Washington City; until the Civil War successive administrations and Congresses were suspicious of a powerful central government and therefore unwilling to invest much in its seat. So the Capitol, the White House and a few other buildings existed as islands of decent architecture in a grubby network of streets which still honoured L’Enfant’s original design, but the city as a whole was dilapidated and geographically isolated until the railways came. (One little detail – I was fascinated to learn that before the Pentagon there was the Octagon, a six-sided building which still stands near the White House, where slaves worked in the cellars for the Tayloe family and where President Monroe ran the country for a few months in 1814 while the White House was being repaired.)

Dickey goes into the physical and human geography of Washington City – not just the elites, but the slaves, the prostitutes, the small traders, the elites. There are many fascinating snippets: The Supreme Court judges all rented rooms in the same house up to the 1840s. The area between the White House and the Capitol, now the glistening Federal Triangle, was previously known as Murder Bay and was a haven of liminal activity. Mary Ann Hall ran a successful brothel for decades on the site of what is now the National Museum of the American Indian, and rests under an impressive monument in the Congressional cemetery, no doubt close to many of her clients. The Washington Monument remained an embarrassing half-built stump for twenty-five years, due to wrangling over costs and control.

The story shifts gear dramatically with the Civil War, which made Washington City a key defensive asset and also a target for attack. Montgomery Meigs, the army engineer who had already brought in fresh water and renovated the Capitol, tends to be remembered for his role in establishing Arlington Cemetery during the war, but actually put a lot more effort into making the city fit for purpose as a military base. By the time the war was over, the District of Columbia’s population had soared and its political image had changed completely; Meigs’ efforts led directly to the abolition of the independence of Georgetown and Washington City and the institution of congressional rule over the Dictrit of Columbia in 1871. That’s pretty much where his story ends, and he gets a little too caught up in the detail of what was going on with Boss Shepherd, who carried out further city development to personal profit and huge cost in the early 1870s.

The book is lavishly illustrated with maps, photographs, and occasional portraits, and is also reasonably digestible at 245 pages of the main text. I think even readers who don’t share my fascination with its subject would enjoy it.

POLITICO – Morning Exchange 26 July

Lots of interesting stuff on consequences of Brexit today.
(tags: ukpolitics eu )

Owen Smith: There are too many immigrants in parts of Britain

Appalling.
(tags: ukpolitics migration )

Pokemon GO, Eleven Days Later

Lydy’s take on class and disability.
(tags: games )

Yes, Your Opinion Can Be Wrong

On facts.
(tags: rhetoric )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

If you‘d asked me that at the time, I probably would have answered by staring at you. Blankly. Well, why shouldn’t I have been there? That was the way we were, before the end. Me, and Cal, and Dorian, and all the others. No job, no routine, just starting my fourth year at an art college I’d actually been to only once. (My family had been middleclass for only a couple of decades, in case you were wondering, and none of them had ever even seen London. They didn’t have a clue how higher education worked, which is why I could get away with telling them that it could take me anything up to ten years to get my diploma, and why they kept sending the money for whatever it was that art students were supposed to need. Yes, it worked. Really.) The point is, I didn’t have any reason to be anywhere. I was a goddess of the new bohemian age, remember?

I don’t quite get the immense reverence shown to Lawrence Miles and the Faction Paradox concept by the more literary end of Whovian fandom; on the other hand I thoroughly enjoyed this, even though it is a book in the series of Bernice Summerfield novels where she doesn’t appear at all except as a personality of the far future, the Doctor appears only in distorted form, and the one continuity character is Chris Cwej. Paradoxically, this makes it a rare case of a Who book that one can readily recommend to non-Whovian readers because it is so very detached from the main narrative – indeed, Miles stresses that it should be considered as taking place in a pocket universe detached from the main timeline of the Whoniverse.

That’s all beside the most important point, which is that it’s a really good read. Christine Summerfield, the slightly reliable narrator, fills up numerous notebooks writing about how the world ended in October 1970; there are many many references to the pop culture of the late 1960s, in a slightly different timeline to our own; the Time Lords are restored to their original position of dubious god-like beings, manipulating the physical forms of their allies (that’s a new one) and much else; the whole universe is a grim place, and yet I found myself immersed in it. It’s a rare example of a diary-format novel where the narrator actually survives; but to what end? I found it a complex, multi-layered story, but one that did at least keep me reading with satisfaction to the final page.

Next in this sequence is Tears of the Oracle, by Justin Richards.

Buried Treasure: Sword that lay in farmyard barn for 50 years is rare Bronze Age discovery

Wow!
(tags: archaeology northernireland )

Reddit answers “Tell me why Trump is a fascist”.

Pretty clear. And chilling.
(tags: uspolitics )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

But here again, I can remember very little about the two years I attended Llandaff Cathedral School, between the age of seven and nine. Only two moments remain clearly in my mind. The first lasted not more than five seconds but I will never forget it.

A rather charming short autobiography of Roald Dahl’s childhood: he was the son of a Norwegian immigrants to Wales; his father died when he was only three; he attended boarding school from the age of nine to eighteen; and the book ends with him getting a job with Shell and going to Africa. It’s not a particularly remarkable childhood, but the background of grim uncertain interwar Britain is conveyed very well, and there are some memorable passage about sweets (including the inspiration for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and the horrible environment at Repton School in Derbyshire, where physical beatings were administered by the headmaster, a future Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a reflective but also humorous and passionate short book, intended for the younger reader, and will be appreciated by them I think.

This was the most recently acquired book that I hadn’t particularly tagged when adding it to my catalogue but on reflection looked worth a try. Next up on that list is a bit different: the Dictionary of Methodism by John A. Vickers.

Clinton campaign — and some cyber experts — say Russia is behind email release

Moscow helping Assange?
(tags: wikileaks uspolitics russia )

The Mandela Effect

When memory collectively cheats.
(tags: psychology )

A British asylum seeker’s guide to Europe

Gaining second citizenship (aimed at British Eurocrats).
(tags: eu migration )

I picked up a tweet from a Puppy supporter the other day complaining that there is a media blackout of the Hugo Awards this year “because they can’t smear Chuck Tingle like they did Brad Torgersen”. Of course, to those who had not heard of the Hugos before last year, it seems odd that there is less coverage this year; in fact things are pretty much back to normal or perhaps a little above normal – my survey of bloggers on 21 July this year found roughly half as many as last year on 18 July, but roughly twice as many as on 21 July 2013. (My 2014 and 2011 surveys were done much closer to the deadline.)

The big difference, of course, has been that while the slate organisation has been even more obviously politicised this year, the slate candidates themselves have been less so. Last year we had repeated stirring of the pot by Brad Torgersen (his own worst advocate) and Larry Correia; this year, both have largely quit the field and left it to the somewhat incoherent Kate Paulk and to Vox Day, for whom this is not a top priority. Last year we had one of their nominees making death threats, and another trying to get a critic fired from his day job and even trying to call the police to Worldcon itself to move against one of the Guests of Honour, and others fulminating in the most offensive manner possible; we had George R.R. Martin and Eric Flint weighing in repeatedly. This year I’ve seen around half of the slated nominees openly repudiate their slate support, including every single one of the Best Novella finalists. Last year, four finalists withdrew, a process that took a couple of weeks of drama. This year, two withdrew the day after the final ballot was announced, and then it was over. It has simply been less dramatic.

My own sense is that “No Award” is likely to win in Best Related Work, Best Professional Artist, and Best Fancast, which are completely dominated by slate nominations which would have been unlikely to make it without slate support; that’s three categories ratehr than five last year. It’s quite possible that Best Novelette, Best Graphic Story, Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), Best Semiprozine, Best Fanzine and the Campbell Award will go to finalists who had slate support, but who probably would have made it to the ballot anyway. And in the other categories, I’d be surprised to see the slated candidates win. It’s not exactly global domination.

This all has an effect on how future ballots should be approached. I’ve put my name to two amendments to be discussed at this year’s WSFS Business Meeting in Kansas City (which I will not be able to attend). The most extensive discussion of these amendments (plus others) is on File 770, and I’d encourage you to comment there rather than here on the substance. The two amendments which I am supporting are:

1) To move the deadline for eligibility for nominations back a month, from 31 January of the year of the convention to 31 December of the year before. Apart from the obvious points about making the process easier to manage (particularly if other amendments are adopted which will add further complexity to the process), it just struck me as incongruous that 31 January is the only calendar date mentioned in the entire WSFS constitution.

2) To introduce a qualification stage, to allow Worldcon members to to reject candidates that they believe have benefited from inappropriate promotion. The argument is discussed at some length on File 770. I’ll summarise my own position by saying that this was pitched to me last year by someone who did not know what they were talking about, including running tallies for the top 20 nominees (which is completely unimplementable), and I was very sceptical. But two things changed my mind. First, the BSFA Awards introduced an extra stage of the nomination process this year, and I felt that it materially improved the outcome, particularly in the Best Non-Fiction category. The second was that WSFS veteran Kevin Standlee came up with a version that I thought could work to improve not only the robustness of the system against slates, but also several other issues, and I signed on in support as soon as I saw his proposal. Slightly refined, that is what is going to the WSFS Business Meeting next month.

I am the 2017 Hugo Administrator, and I’m not expressing a view on any of the changes approved last year and going to this year’s WSFS Business Meeting for ratification, other than to repeat that I’ll be ready to implement any or all of them. And please don’t read too much into my non-support of the other proposed amendments going to this year’s WSFS Business Meeting; life is too short to express an opinion on absolutely everything.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Half and half, ma’am.”

Weirdly, I had never actually read this (though thought I had). I got an electronic copy as part of a humble bundle in February, and then found I had a paper copy on the shelf, with a business-class boarding pass for a plane flight from Zagreb to Frankfurt on October 30 of an unspecified year stuck in the back cover. I was a bit puzzled – I have flown business-class seldom enough that I can still remember almost every occasion that it’s happened – and checking back through my records I realised that it must have been when I was guest speaker at an OSCE conference in Zagreb on 29-30 October 2003; I dimly recall a late night with old friends at the hotel bar, wondering fuzzily why we couldn’t see the towering Intercontinental from the top floor of our hotel (embarrassingly, this turned out to be because we were actually staying in the Intercontinental which had meantime changed names to the Opera; it’s now the Westin) and a sleepy journey home in the course of which I must have had the book on my lap unopened save for tucking the boarding pass into it. In that case, it must have been literally the last book I acquired before I started book-blogging on Livejournal in November 2003.

It’s far ahead of its time (which was 1957). Bester is sometimes described as the fore-runner of cyberpunk; but he also reaches back to The Count of Monte Cristo, and to various other tropes. Gully Foyle’s story is a compelling push for revenge, in a society where the availability of instant transportation to everyone has actually reinforced the control of resources and society by the rich and powerful. The prose is effervescent and intestinal. It’s a great piece of writing, but Gully Foyle is a deeply unpleasant protagonist and a rapist – that last point being probably the single element that has dated most badly. Still, I’m glad I finally got around to reading it.

This turned out to be the most popular unread book I had acquired so far this year, and also the most popular unread sf book. Next on those lists respectively are The Dinner, by Herman Koch (recommended by Lisa from work), and Earthlight, by Arthur C. Clarke.

In the map room with Theresa May

@economist’s gloomy take on role of FCO is the most upbeat analysis I’ve read!
(tags: eu ukpolitics )

A 3SV Endorsement

Amazing Stories likes our proposed change.
(tags: hugos sf )

Erm, a couple of long flights and sleepless nights here.

Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)

Last books finished
Lethbridge-Stewart: Beast of Fang Rock, by Andy Frankham-Allan
Gráinne, by Keith Roberts
Corona, by Greg Bear
Islands in the Sky, by Arthur C. Clarke
Between structure and No-thing: An annotated reader in Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. Patrick J. Devlieger
The Sands of Mars, by Arthur C. Clarke
Bétélgeuse v.5: L’Autre, by Leo
Earthlight, by Arthur C Clarke
Galileo's Dream, by Kim Stanley Robinson
A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré

Last week’s audios
Torchwood: Ghost Mission, James Goss

Next books
Holes, by Louis Sachar
The Host, by Peter Emshwiller
Ghastly Beyond Belief, eds. Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Not our usual line, is it, sir?’ said Ramsey. ‘Hoaxes and all that.’ His tone was curious rather than dismissive.

Next in the internal sequence of Seventh Doctor novels outside the New Adventures (only four left after this, actually). Lloyd Rose is a particularly good Who writer, who has published no other written fiction as far as I can tell (she has a non-fiction piece in a 2013 Sherlock Holmes anthology, and a couple of TV scripts). This is the last of her works that I have come to, having already greatly enjoyed The City of the Dead and Camera Obscura (and her audio play Caerdroia). I’m glad to say that I really enjoyed this as well; it starts with the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and from then on there are a lot of balls in the air: crop circles, weird ice, the Brigadier, the Riemann hypothesis, Ace having a fling with a brilliant mathematician, the Doctor as a partlially successful manipulator; also the flavours of both the last TV seasons and the first New Adventure novels inform the narrative and combine for a very tasty treat. I’m not completely certain that I can really tell you what the book was about, but it satisfied me on a lot of levels.

Next in this sequence is Atom Bomb Blues, by Andrew Cartmel.