Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
1491, by Charles C. Mann
JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner, by Richard Marson

Last books finished
Legacy: A Collection of Personal Testimonies from People Affected by the Troubles in Northern Ireland, by BBC Northern Ireland
Lethbridge-Stewart: The Schizoid Earth, by David McIntee
Whispers Under Ground, by Ben Aaronovitch

Next books
Gorgon Child, by Steven Barnes
Thing Explainer, by Randall Munroe
Selected Stories, by Alice Munro

Books acquired in last week
Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy
Doctor Who: Four Doctors, by Paul Cornell and Neil Edwards
Drama and Delight: The Life of Verity Lambert, by Richard Marson
Unquenchable Fire, by Rachel Pollack
Banewreaker, by Jacqueline Carey

Episode 13: Barney
First shown: 5 December 1970 (US), 15 January 1971 (UK)
Director: Harry Booth
Writer: Glyn Jones
Appearing apart from the Double Deckers:
Julian Chagrin (Barney)
Ivor Salter (Policeman)
[Melvyn Hayes is credited as Albert, but if he appeared I missed him.]

Plot

Tiger befriends Barney, a one-man band, who is down on his luck but soon charms the rest of the gang, apart from Doughnut. They end up successfully starring on stage in front of the Queen, and even charm the policeman who has been pursuing Barney.

Soundtrack

"One Man Band", by Ivor Slaney and Glyn Jones. This is a somewhat curious song. When Billie first sings it to Barney in the middle of the episode, she is challenging him to stop spreading his resources too thinly: "If you do a lot of everything, you won't be much of anything." But at the end of the episode, when the gang ends up doing their royal performance, the message has shifted around completely: "If you try your best at everything, you won't miss out on anything". As with some of Jones' other songs, it seems a bit didactic, with the difference that here the basic message is confused.

Glorious Moments

Chagrin is at his best doing classic mime with a musical theme, and those bits are good; the dance routine at the end is very good; poor Doughnut, as ever the butt of the joke, carries it off well and leads a couple of decent slapstick and chase sequences.

Less glorious moments

I'll be honest; this isn't my favourite episode. The dynamic of Barney charming Tiger and then the other kids just comes across as creepy by today's standards – unlike the Pop Singer of an earlier episode, he's clearly a fabulist. The rapid costume changes, both when he is messing around in the junkyard and when the kids suddenly transform into top and tails on stage, break the classical unities. Barney's first costume change, into a Chinese mandarin, is perhaps the most racist moment of the entire series. And the song is not very good.

What's all this then?, and Who's That?

Julian Chagrin was born in 1940 and is still going strong. This episode appears to have been written (by script editor Glyn Jones) purely to allow him to show off his skill in musical mime, which is how he became best known. I remember particularly his ten part series, The Orchestra, which was shown on Channel 4 in 1986-87. To be honest I thought it was pretty rubbish, depending entirely on sight gags, but the first episode won the Golden Rose at Montreux; judge for yourself:

Chagrin's first break came as one of the mime tennis players at the end of the very odd 1966 film Blowup:

Although he emigrated to Israel in 1976, he stayed on British TV screens for years as the Secret Lemonade Drinker in the R. White's advert, where his wife is played by Harriet Philpin, known to Doctor Who fans as a Thal soldier in Genesis of the Daleks:

Where's that?

The cinema was at 231 Shenley Road in Borehamwood. It was demolished in 1981.

See you next week…

…for Man's Best Friend.

DWP ‘punishing’ low-paid full-time workers under new benefits rule

Fighting poverty by making the poor poorer…
(tags: ukpolitics )

Baiting the bear

Russia struggles with the consequences of its illegal seizure of Yukos a decade ago.
(tags: russia )

Luck Is a Bigger Contributor to Success Than People Give It Credit For

Food for thought.
(tags: work )

Dolmio and Uncle Ben’s firm Mars defends limit on products

Hardly controversial! Impressive for Mars to go public though.
(tags: food )

Alien ‘Wow!’ signal could be explained after almost 40 years

Sneaky comets!
(tags: astronomy )

Protesters who blockaded London arms trade fair acquitted after judge sees evidence of illegal weapons on sale

Hooray!
(tags: war )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Benny was baffled. These were not academics; there were no tweed jackets with leather patches on the arms, all beards were neatly trimmed and the conversation was bawdily macho rather than shriekingly bitchy. As she waded into the decrepit melee, she looked around her for a flash of corduroy, a hint of brogue in the elderly throng. The hotel bar was large but low slung, with the precise shabbiness that comes of trying to deliberately give your hostelry a ‘lived in’ feeling.

I really liked this, and I write as one who has often bounced off Lance Parkin’s work (and sometimes Mark Clapham’s). Mars, whose history was the foundation of Bernice Summerfield’s early career, has become both a home for the elderly (due to low gravity) and a centre of commemoration (due to war). Benny gets involved with dangerous investigations into what really happened, complicated by a rekindling of affection for her disreputable ex-husband and various strange individuals each with their own agenda. There is even a sentient computer which failed to annoy me as they usually do. I must have been in a good mood when reading it.

Next in this sequence: Where Angels Fear, by my old friend Rebecca Levene in collaboration with Simon Winstone.

Protesters ransack Macedonia president’s office as crisis deepens

Crumbs.
(tags: macedonia )

Blake’s 7 star Gareth Thomas dies at age 71

Sad news.
(tags: sf deaths )

America Hasn’t Gone Crazy. It’s Just More Like Europe

Ivan Krastev’s take.
(tags: uspolitics )

Man accidentally ‘deletes his entire company’ with one line of bad code

The code was good; the user incompetent!
(tags: work computers )

Ivanov Has Spat in Macedonia’s Face

Yep.
(tags: macedonia )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Really.”

I’m afraid that I gave up on this not quite half way through; it seemed to me a fairly standard portal fantasy, similar to say the Fionnavar Tapestry, with the difference that where I thought Kay took the established Arthurian mythos and did vaguely interesting things with it, Park didn’t really do much with Romanian lore and if anything veered very close to stereotype territory in the portrayal of a lot of the characters. I’ve read many better examples of this sort of story, and so I moved on.

This had bubbled to the top of my list both as the most popularbook on Librarything on my unread shelves from 2009 acquisitions, and also the sf book which had lingered longest on those shelves. Next in the first category is George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt, by Lucy Hawking with Stephen Hawking; next in the second category is The Hidden War, by Michael Armstrong.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I took a shower, maddened by the sudden shrinking of the supply, spinning the hot tap and getting nothing but a feeble rope of cold. I stood out on the floor, leaning in through the curtain to test it. Then there was a far-off whining and knocking from the cistern in the roof, and the hot came thrashing back in an instant devilry of steam. Of course! It was my new neighbours at work, their shower had some kind of priority over mine, they could draw my water off and leave me shivering with annoyance.

This was the book that kicked off my sudden interest in the James Tait Black Memorial Prize last week. I thought it was excellent. It's been described as halfway between Death in Venice and À la recherche du temps perdu, but I think that's a bit unfair; yes, the central emotional relationship is the narrator's crush on a young boy, but there's a lot of well observed stuff about art, sex, youth, bars, education, the German occupation of Belgium in the second world war, annoying Spanish girls in the neighbouring flat who use up your hot water, and what it's like being an Englishman in his early thirties living in Belgium who has enough Dutch to get by. The narrator knows that his behaviour is foolish, but he is surrounded by other flawed people behaving equally foolishly, and there are dark secrets that he does not spot until he is led into them. An intense novel of both the soul and body. Recommended.

This was the most popular book in Librarything added to my uread shelves in 2010. Next in that list is Godslayer: Volume II of The Sundering, by Jacqueline Carey, but I wonder if I'll want to leap straight to the middle book of one of her trilogies just after reading the middle book of another.

Hanna and Barbera: the last portraits

Lovely!
(tags: photos )

The Dutch Referendum on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement: Legal options for navigating a tricky and awkward situation

Indeed.
(tags: Netherlands eu ukraine )

Who Can Forget the Inheritance Tax Riots of 1990?

“I feel morally certain that these riots were incited by ‘the most hated tax in Britain’.  Now it so happens that I’m so old and stupid I’m not clear as to what that tax was.  But it must have been the inheritance tax musn’t it?  I could waste a few moments checking which tax it was – but why should I?  If I can’t trust Conservative Central Office and Tabloid headlines – then who can I trust?”
(tags: ukpolitics )

The dark side of Guardian comments

Reader behaviour.
(tags: internet )

First paragraph of 2 March entry:

John McAnespie – I live in a little village here in Tyrone – Aughnacloy. I had lost a son here some years ago, it was in ’88. He was shot going to a football match on a bright, summer, February morning. He was someone that had got a lot of hassle from the so-called security forces. A lot of my hope was taken away the Sunday that my son was shot.

This was a collection of short radio pieces broadcast at the rate of one a day throughout 1999, the year after the Good Friday Agreement when the peace process seemed to be lurching back into crisis. Very simply, each day someone who had been affected by the Troubles got a couple of minutes to reflect on their story. The very first one, told on 1 January, gave me an instant shock of recognition: it was the account of someone who I vaguely know, who actually shares my surname, of the death of his mother, killed in a Loyalist bomb attack on her home in a Belfast street which I know very well, 32 years ago today. And I think for a lot of people there will have been a shock of recognition as each voice gave a human dimension to incidents which we might or might not remember having happened – Omagh, Bloody Sunday, Loughinisland, Brighton, Kingsmills, come up several times, but many accounts are just of isolated incidents, forgotten except by those who were most closely affected. And we hear from all angles: the paramilitary, the policeman, the soldier, the businessman, the bystander, the mother, the father, the brother, the sister, the orphan, the widow.

It’s tough reading, and I think it would be even tougher listening. Grief and horror are not easy subjects. Some have found it difficult to move on from loss, and resent the failure of the state and of politicians to give them closure through justice. Some have moved into numb forgiveness, rejecting all sides. Some have found the grace to move into reconciliation. One can admire the last of these while sympathising with the others. These are awful things to have to deal with.

Putting my comparative hat on, I think Legacy is remarkable. It is genuinely broad and diverse. Many post-conflict initiatives – including also some in Northern Ireland – concentrate on telling only one side of the story. That offers a certain catharsis to those involved, but also entrenches narratives. It is of course a political choice, to emphasise the common humanity of suffering rather than seeking to portray one side’s experience as noble and discount other perspectives. But it was the right political choice.

Unfortunately this excellent work is not very widely available. A handsome package including hardback book and 12 CDs was published in 2007, several years after the initial 1999 broadcast, and seems to be now out of print (and cost £25). A dozen of the stories were originally uploaded to the BBC website but have disappeared now. It’s a real shame that this particular moment in time, really crucial for the embedding of the peace, has almost been lost.

How hot-desking offices can wreck productivity

Obvious, really.
(tags: work )

This Will Be the Biggest Dam-Removal Project in History

Impressive.
(tags: geography )

Internet mapping turned a remote farm into a digital hell

Location, location…
(tags: maps internet )

How the Average Triumphed Over the Median

Fascinating!
(tags: mathematics )

Brexiteers trade on a myth

The Commonwealth chimera.
(tags: eu ukpolitics )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

From his earliest memory he had been interested in music, in sound, without the slightest interest in crops or cereal processing. His father and brothers had tried to pressure him into joining the family business, he remembered that, but his mother had always stood by him, encouraged him, sending him to boretha lessons when he was old enough, buying him Blinnati classical opera for his event-days.

I’m realising that Mike Tucker is one of the unsung talents of Who spinoff fiction. He has specialised in the Seventh Doctor/Ace period immediately between Survival and the New Adventures; here he brings them to a satire on reality television secretly controlled by aliens which is reminiscent of both Vengeance on Varos and Bad Wolf, but frankly hits the target rather better than either, and also brings in a body-horror Master who is still infected with the cheetah virus from Survival. It’s true to the spirit of late-1980s Who, and well-paced and characterised. Great stuff.

Next in internal chronolgy is another Past Doctor Adventure, Heritage by Dale Smith.

A serious question. In the last year or so I’ve contacted four people who I thought of as friends but who had blocked me on Twitter, sending grovelling and apologetic messages apologising for whatever I might have done to offend them – and in each case received a puzzled response saying that they had no idea how it happened and it was entirely unintentional.

There is no obvious pattern – one was a family member, one a science fiction friend, one an Eastern European politician and the last an EU official working on Africa.

I’m not claiming that there is anything more to this than human error, but I’d be interested to know if anyone else reading this discovers that they have blocked me – @nwbrux – or indeed vice versa.

Oh, So Now I’m Bangladeshi?

On hyphenation and nationality.
(tags: race )

How Europe Can Pay For The Solution Of The Refugee Crisis

George Soros’s recommendation.
(tags: eu migration )

UK scores worst on electoral integrity in Western Europe. Here’s why.

Yup.
(tags: ukpolitics democracy elections )

Oh frabjous day! I discovered yesterday that the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency has released enough information to enable me to map the District Electoral Areas, used for local government elections, onto the existing parliamentary constituencies.

Election results in Ireland and the UK are not released with the granularity you get in other countries, where it's not uncommon to publish how many people voted for each candidate in a given polling precinct or even village (Dixville Notch being the classic case). If, as I do, you're sometimes in the business of aggregating vote statistics from an election at one level to those at another, this is a problem. It's an even bigger problem if, due to non-coinciding schedules of the boundary revision processes, the boundaries for one set of elections are completely out of whack with those for another.

The local government structure of Northern Ireland was overhauled a few years ago, and elections held in 2014 to a whole new set of 11 councils with 80 electoral areas. The electoral map is a bit cluttered. But using the 2011 census figures, I've been able to reconstruct the share of population of each DEA onto parliamentary / Westminster / Assembly constituencies as follows:

It’s not going to be a perfect match for the distribution of voters, since not all those in the 2011 census can vote (some are too young, some are not eligible). But it’s a good starting point, and I hope to be publishing the projected results from 2014 on the elections website soon.

(So no Double Deckers update this weekend; I’ve been busy number-crunching.)

Edited to add: Winston Duff challenges me on Twitter:

@nwbrux @LiveJournal good job Nicholas, quick correction. FST has all of Clogher Valley and 93% of Dungannon. wee switch just.

— Winston Duff (@WGDuff) April 10, 2016

I disagree:

@WGDuff No, I've checked; it's Clogher Valley that is split. Parts of old Altmore & Donaghmore in new Castlecaulfield & Ballygawley.

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) April 10, 2016

@WGDuff Old map: pic.twitter.com/OSZUfHxQZL

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) April 10, 2016

@WGDuff New map: pic.twitter.com/WZuURe3wtC

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) April 10, 2016

Winston replies:

@nwbrux forgot about that bit, there is a section of Dungannon too at Annaghmore/Clonoe.

— Winston Duff (@WGDuff) April 10, 2016

This illustrates the limitations of the census approach – when I look at it more closely, there are indeed five Small Areas that are described as being mostly in the new Torrent DEA but partly in the new Dungannon DEA, and I guess five small parts of small areas could well add up to a bit more than nothing. Oh well, a health warning on these figures is always appropriate.

Two friends of mine have suffered strokes this month (and it’s only the 10th) – both women of about 40, living in Belgium. I’m glad to hear that is recovering, but Keni has been taken from us far too soon. Everyone, remember FAST:

Facial weakness: Can the person smile? Has their face fallen on one side?

Arm weakness: Can the person raise both arms and keep them there?

Speech problems: Can the person speak clearly and understand what you say? Is their speech slurred?

Time: If you see any one of these three signs, it’s TIME to call emergency services. Stroke is always a medical emergency that requires immediate medical attention.

It can happen to any of us.

Lunch with the FT: Nigel Farage

A very entertaining read.
(tags: ukpolitics )

Obama can appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court if the Senate does nothing

Interesting thought!
(tags: uspolitics )

Sowing History: A Gardener’s Tale

@UrsulaV goes outside.
(tags: writing )

Phil Collins Reshot All His Original Album Covers for the 2016 Reissues

Cool!
(tags: photos )

Molenbeek, Maalbeek, Schaarbeek. How many beek?

Belgian toponyms!
(tags: Belgium maps )

Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
Legacy: A Collection of Personal Testimonies from People Affected by the Troubles in Northern Ireland, by BBC Northern Ireland
Whispers Under Ground, by Ben Aaronovitch
Lethbridge-Stewart: The Schizoid Earth, by David McIntee

Last books finished
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers
Short Trips: Life Science, ed John Binns
Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregillis
Prime Time, by Mike Tucker
The Folding Star, by Alan Hollinghurst 
A Princess of Roumania, by Paul Park    
Beige Planet Mars, by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

Next books
Gorgon Child, by Steven Barnes
1491, by Charles C. Mann
Thing Explainer, by Randall Munroe

Books acquired in last week
None!

The Day I Failed on Stage at TEDx

That drying up moment…
(tags: publicrelations )

Gaps and holes: How the Swiss cheese was made

Tax avoidance and secrecy.
(tags: economics )

What you've read:

24 – 1934: Robert Graves, I, Claudius

22 – 1934: Robert Graves, Claudius the God

19 – 1924: E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
       1995: Christopher Priest, The Prestige

15 – 1984: Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
        2000: Zadie Smith, White Teeth

14 – 1984: J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

12 = 2006: Cormac McCarthy, The Road
        2009: A. S. Byatt, The Children's Book

11 = 1938: C. S. Forester, A Ship of the Line
        1938: C. S. Forester, Flying Colours
        1977: John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy
        2005: Ian McEwan, Saturday

10 = 1952: Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms
        1956: Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

9 = 1936: Winifred Holtby, South Riding
       1981: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

8 = 1928: Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
       1982: Bruce Chatwin, On The Black Hill
       2002: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

7 = 1948: Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
       1996: Graham Swift, Last Orders

6 – 1981: Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast

5 = 1947: L. P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda
       1965: Muriel Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate
       1967: Margaret Drabble, Jerusalem the Golden

4 = 1922: David Garnett, Lady into FoxMonkey by Wu Cheng'en; 1990: William Boyd, Brazzaville BeachSacred CountryThe Folding StarMaster Georgie

3 = 1929: J. B. Priestley, The Good CompanionsEngland, Their EnglandAfter Many a Summer Dies the SwanTroy ChimneysAt Lady Molly'sThe Devil's AdvocateDoctor CopernicusDarkness VisibleThe Lost Girl

2 = 1921: Walter de la Mare, Memoirs of a MidgetWithout My CloakThe New Men and The MastersThe Black PrinceMonsieur: or, The Prince of Darkness

1 = 1919: Hugh Walpole, The Secret CityThe InformerAdam's BreedMiss MoleThe Far CryMother and SonThe Ha-HaA Guest of HonourGA DisaffectionDownriverGB84The Secret Scripture

0 = 1923: Arnold Bennett, Riceyman StepsPortrait of ClareBoomerangThe Root and the FlowerHighland RiverThe VoyageA House of ChildrenTales from Bective BridgeYoung TomTravellersPoor Man's TapestryThrough the ValleyFather GooseThe Middle Age of Mrs. EliotImperial CaesarAct of DestructionA Slanting LightThe Ice SaintsSuchLangrishe, Go DownThe GasteropodEva TroutThe Bird of ParadiseThe Great Victorian CollectionPlumbWaiting for the BarbariansAllegro PostillionsWinter GardenPersephoneThe Golden Bird: Two Orkney StoriesA Season in the WestCrossing the RiverJustineIngenious Pain; 1999: Timothy Mo, Renegade, or Halo2Something Like a HousePersonalityOur Horses in EgyptThe Lotus EatersYou and IIn the Light of What We Know

I realise I meant to separate out the two C.P. Snow novels, but failed to do so; however I guess most people who have read one have read the other as well.

Thnaks for filling in the poll, and for excellent recommendations in comments.

Second para of third chapter:

It had begun soon after Spain, when training regimens across the board went to live-fire exercises twice per week. And the training periods with nonlethal combatants doubled in length. “For endurance,” said the doctor.

I got this when offered it as part of a freebie pack a few years ago, when it was getting some buzz; there wasn’t enough buzz for me to read it any sooner. It’s a story where the outcome of the Second World War is altered by people with psychic powers on each side, the British and German secret services trying to control their respective paranormal resources. I wasn’t hugely satisfied by it; despite the existence of psychic powers, it takes until 1940 for history to diverge from our timeline; the Soviet Union barely features and the Holocaust not at all; and as with many such novels, the paranormal extends and then stops rather arbitrarily to suit the plot. The wartime Doctor Who novel that I read last month did it all much better.

This was the most popular book on LibraryThing that I bought in 2011 and had not yet read. Next on that list is Peter and Max (a Fables novel), by Bill Willingham.

Bafflin’ Islands: How Many Big Ones Can You Name?

A matter of size.
(tags: maps )

Royal Mint starts new £1 coin production

It’s gonna be a dodecagon!
(tags: uk money )

Solve the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict Before It Explodes

@Tom_deWaal calls for action.
(tags: armenia azerbaijan nagornokarabakh )

Pentagon Report: The F-35 Is Still a Mess

More on the US military’s mega-boondoggle.
(tags: uspolitics war )

Second paragraph of third story (“The Northern Heights”, by Mark Stevens):

As you approach the watchman’s gate, you feel your muscles tense.This is one of those moments where they often try to reach out to you, probing at your foremost thoughts, trying to rearrange them into some sort of suggestion to which they hope you’ll adhere. Sometimes they’ll try to talk you into turning away, hoping you’ll forget you were ever an employee of the King and Empire Railway Company. Sometimes they’ll beckon you, attempting to lure you away from whatever it is you’re doing, trying to guide you into the darker, unfamiliar areas of the engine yards, where accidents can happen.

Seventh in the series of short story collections from Big Finish featuring the first eight Doctors, this time with a theme around the science of life – which normally means biological, but can extend into other areas too. To be honest I felt his was a bit flat, with only two stories that grabbed me, both more about artificial intelligence: “Lant Land”, by Jonathan Morris, bringing Five, Tegan and Turlough to a world where the local version of the Sims has become something much more horrible, and “The Reproductive Cycle” by Matthew Griffiths which takes the frankly unpromising concept of positing that Kamelion and the Tardis had a secret love-child, and does it rather well.

Next in sequence is Short Trips: Repercussions, which I read in 2009 (and also wasn’t too impressed by). So next month I’ll be reading Short Trips: Monsters, edited by Ian Farrington.

Mummy genomes reveal just how catastrophic European contact was for New World

Horrifying.
(tags: biology archaeology )

Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong.

Indeed.
(tags: uspolitics history )

Europe’s Last Dictator Comes in From the Cold

Lukashenko’s geopolitical success.
(tags: belarus )

What exactly is going on in Iceland?

Good question!
(tags: iceland )

Paralympics hopeful Carly Tait: ‘My lifeline is being taken away’

Britain’s war on its own disabled citizens continues, despite Duncan-Smith’s departure.
(tags: ukpolitics disability )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Rosemary imagined the lengthy letter of complaint her mother might write after such a trip. She tried to imagine the circumstances in which her mother would travel by deepod at all. She couldn’t even picture her mother setting foot within a public spaceport. Rosemary had been surprised to find herself in such a place. The dingy waiting area, the twitching pixel posters, the stale smells of algae gunk and cleaning fluid. Despite the exoskeletons and tentacles milling around her, she had felt like the alien there.

A great new style space opera, with our heroine carrying a dreadful secret yet bonding with her multi-species crew, who I think owe at least as much to Traveller as to Larry Niven or David Brin, while undertaking what at first seems a tricky but plausible engineering mission that turns out to have major political consequences. What’s particularly interesting is Chambers’ portrayal of interspecies sex and love – not without problems or consequences, but that’s equally true of relationships between humans as well. And there are plenty of pleasing nods to the history of the space opera sub genre going back to Heinlein. I’m surprised to say I missed the inaccuracies spotted by .

As I noted before, this was the only book submitted for the Clarke Award that a) finished in the top 20% of all four Goodreads/LibraryThing measures and b) was not a later volume in a series. It’s been getting a decent amount of buzz (including from Martin Wisse at Eastercon), so I bought it and read it – too late for Hugo nominations, alas; I don’t think it would have got into my Best Novel list (and I’ll be surprised if others vote it in), but Chambers would certainly have got my nomination for the Campbell Award, as she is getting many others’, and would surely stand a good chance of winning it – if Andy Weir were not already certain to do so this year.

Having hugely enjoyed The Folding Star, it occurred to me that I didn’t know much about the one major award that it won, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Looking at the list of winners (there have been 100 awards, to 102 books), I realised I had read more than I knew. How many have you read? (You can sign into the poll using Facebook or Twitter IDs, maybe even Google for all I know.)

I’ve read CLAVDIVS, Men at Arms, The New Men, The Masters, Doctor Copernicus, Midnight’s Children, Empire of the Sun, The Folding Star, The Prestige, The Corrections and The Road, and liked them all except The Corrections. Further recommendations welcome in comments.

Belgium is No Failed State

Sir Michael Leigh with a breath of sanity.
(tags: Belgium waronterror )

Gun lobby stirs to life in Europe

Jeepers.
(tags: guns eu )

Britain Can’t Afford to Leave the EU

@profalanriley1 thinks the numbers don’t add up.
(tags: eu ukpolitics )

What Brexit would mean for the NHS

It would be bad news.
(tags: eu ukpolitics )

So, I got wondering the other night, what is the longest run of episodes in which the Doctor a) doesn’t visit Earth and b) doesn’t leave?

Possible answers to the first question:

• The biggest gap between two episodes set mainly on Earth is 36 – the nine four-part stories between City of Death and Logopolis. Even if we break that run for the Tardis’s brief visit to Brighton in The Leisure Hive, that’s still 23 consecutive Earth-free episodes.
• Close behind is the 22-episode, five-story interval between Image of the Fendahl and The Stones of Blood.
• There are 18 episodes between The Stones of Blood and City of Death.
• There are also 18 episodes between the second episode of The Three Doctors and The Green Death, if we don’t count the Doctors’ brief return to Earth after Omega is defeated.
• There are 16 episodes between Fury from the Deep and The Invasion (The Wheel In Space, The Dominators, The Mind Robber), and also between The Seeds of Death and Spearhead from Space (The Space Pirates, The War Games).

If we are stricter, and look only at episodes set on near-contemporary Earth, there is a gap of 41 between the very first episode, “An Unearthly Child”, and the first story of the scone season, Planet of Giants, and, if we don’t count a fleeting visit to the Empire State Building, there are another 51 episodes between Planet of Giants and the TARDIS crew encountering the English police on Christmas Day, 1965.

Possible answers to the second question:

• The first 39 episodes of the Pertwee era are basically set on contemporary Earth, though some of them on an alternate Earth and with some near-Earth space flight.
• The middle stories of Season 5, five six-parters with 30 episodes, are all set on our Earth with some hopping around in time (The Abominable Snowmen, The Ice Warriors, The Enemy of the World, The Web of Fear, Fury from the Deep).

If we allow settings in space near Earth as well as those on our planet, the 29-episode run starting with the last season of Old Who, including the TV Movie and the entire Ecclestone era, and ending with the first Tennant episode, The Christmas Invasion, is also a close runner.

There, aren’t you glad you know that?

What’s Behind the Flare-up in Nagorno-Karabakh?

Magdalena at @Crisisgroup writes.
(tags: armenia azerbaijan nagornokarabakh )

Paul Ryan Is Running for President

Yup.
(tags: uspolitics )

Top Republicans talking up Paul Ryan as nominee

Yup.
(tags: uspolitics )

Second paragraph of third chapter of the second book of the third trilogy:

For the most part, it was a lonely time. I though I was accustomed to solitude. I’d grown up in the Alban wilderness with only my mother’s companionship. But she had been a constant in my life; and later, there had been Cillian, my lost first love, killed in a foolish cattle-raid.

I generally enjoy Carey’s big huge fantasy bonkbusters, but this one left me with a slightly sour taste in my mouth. Like the previous seven books of the series, it is set in an alternate version of our world, in this case in “Central Asia”, “Russia”, and “India”. Our heroine is seeking her True Love, and is sundered from him by treachery and violence; first she must escape a dismal hardline religious sect, the equivalent of evangelical Orthodox Christians; then she must rescue her lover and defeat the evil sorcerers who have enslaved him. That’s all fine; but at the very end, the “Indian” queen who she has befriended (well, more than just befriended) decides to abolish the caste system in her society as a result of our heroine’s strong advice. There’s something very unfortunate about a character who is, when all’s said and done, “British”, making “India” change so that it can come closer to “European” norms of civilisation. I felt this was a rare slip from Carey; unless I have missed earlier lapses, I think she is normally more sensitive.

This was the most popular book on LibraryThing that I bought in 2012 and had not yet read. Next on that list is Quantico, by Greg Bear.

Dangerous Days in Karabakh

This is very bad news.
(tags: armenia azerbaijan nagornokarabakh )

Why everything about the way we report on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is wrong

A timely warning.
(tags: armenia azerbaijan nagornokarabakh )

Have you been threatened with legal action by “Scientists for Britain”?

Brexiters trying to chill scientific discourse.
(tags: eu ukpolitics science law )