The Sword In The Stone won a convincing victory in the Best Novel category for last year’s 1939 Retro Hugos. The Ill-Made Knight, which is the third part of The Once And Future King, will have it tougher this year – despite being in large part the basis for the musical Camelot, I think it’s less well-known than the first part, and faces strong rivals with traditional fan appeal in Slan and Gray Lensman. It will, however, get one of my nominations and probably my vote. Years before The Mists of Avalon, White grappled with the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle and came up with his own solution, of real people trying on the whole to do the decent thing in a time of bitter conflict, to a certain extent making it up as they go along; drawing on Malory and Spenser and Tennyson, but also making the story his own. I think I first read it when I was thirteen, and had maybe reread it once in the subsequent 35 years, but I was pleased at how much of it seemed both familiar and fresh. Well worth your consideration.
Mysterious poem
A relative found this poem written inside the back cover of her copy of George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (and Some Lesser Tales), and wondered if anyone can identify its origin? There is no other inscription on or in the book.
Strangers all……
But to me
Must fall
Odd romances
Of words
and passions
and strange
Confessions……
“Tis not all”
The Devil
Laughs
“But more?”
I pray not……
To lose all
ALWAYS
Till end of Tyme?
Sleepyhead, by Mark Billingham
I picked this up via BookMooch after it was picked for World Book Night four years ago, despite one disrecommendation, and have finally got around to reading it. It’s a very gruesome crime novel, of a serial killer who is obsessed with our police detective hero and who attacks women to prove a point. It’s well constructed – the love lives of the main characters become intertwined with the plot, and there is an elegantly constructed red herring. The murderer’s modus operandi is very memorably horrible. Not wowed enough to seek out other Billingham novels but I won’t ignore them if they fall in my path.
Links I found interesting for 21-11-2015
- Non-standard English on the Islands of the South Atlantic
Falklands, St Helena, Tristan da Cunha
- Sir Ian McKellen’s Monologue: Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More speech
Chilling.
- Syrian Refugees Don’t Pose a Serious Security Threat
From the right-wing Cato Institute.
- How globalization and emerging markets are transforming communications
@bradstaples describes our working environment.
To The Slaughter, by Steve Cole
Penultimate book in the Eight Doctor Adventures range of novels, written (as the author explains in an afterword) to explain away a minor continuity error in Revenge of the Cybermen, but actually quite successful in its own terms as a story of grand redesign of parts of the Solar System for ostensibly aesthetic purposes that gets hijacked by several different groups with their own agendas, and a vehicle for the somewhat obscure companion Trix McMillan. Although the tone of the book is comedic for most of the story, Cole does manage to make the chaos and carnage wrought on the worlds he has created come across as really mattering – TV Who (both Old and New) sometimes seems to have a reset button after every alien invasion of Earth; it reminded me that he is one of the better Who writers – he hasn’t done a Who novel since Sting of the Zygons in 2007, but has done several rather good Big Finish plays (as well as other work, of course).
Links I found interesting for 20-11-2015
- The Failures of Belgium
Tim King casts a cold eye.
- US gives Russian newspaper grammar lesson over ‘fake letter’
Funny, also awful.
- Anne Frank Was a Refugee
In case you had forgotten.
- It’s OK to be upset by the news
Sage advice from the BBC.
- Behind the Headlines on Violent Radicalisation in Belgium
@tanjatania takes a look.
- Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Starring David Niven (1949)
Wow.
Thursday reading
Current
Dodger, by Terry Pratchett
Short Fiction Eligible for the 1941 Retro-Hugos Vol 1, ed. von Dimpleheimer
The Battle for Gaul, by Julius Caesar
Last books finished
Sleepyhead, by Mark Billingham
The Ill-Made Knight, by T.H. White
Somewhere! / هُناك , by Ibraheem Abbas
Oblivion, by Dave Stone
A Million Years to Conquer, by Henry Kuttner
Monkey Planet, by Pierre Boulle
Twice in Time, by Manly Wade Wellman
[Doctor Who: The Glamour Chronicles] Deep Time, by Trevor Baxendale
North Wind, by Gwyneth Jones
Next books
The Invention of Happiness, by Brian W. Aldiss
Bits of Me are Falling Apart, by William Leith
Books acquired in last week
Twice in Time, by Manly Wade Wellman
Short Fiction Eligible for the 1941 Retro-Hugos Vol 1, ed. von Dimpleheimer
Short Fiction Eligible for the 1941 Retro-Hugos Vol 2, ed. von Dimpleheimer
Links I found interesting for 19-11-2015
- Why are terrorists drawn to Belgium?
Sober assessment from @KristofClerix.
- Second Volume of Free Stories Eligible for 1941 Retro Hugos
Hurray!
- Are Referenda Blocking the EU’s Progress?
Good question.
- Falling for our own propaganda (PDF)
Sir Nick Harvey looks back on the party’s internal polling.
- This Tool Lets You See Exactly Who’s Tracking What You’re Reading Online
Interesting. Horrifying.
- The Earliest Known Abecedary
Cool.
- The Suicide Clusters at Palo Alto High Schools
Horrifying, with a hint of redemption.
- My white neighbor thought I was breaking into my own apartment. Nineteen cops showed up.
- This is the group that’s surprisingly prone to violent extremism
@HenryFarrell explains.
- Police Find Paris Attackers Coordinated Via Unencrypted SMS
Sometimes it *is* that simple.
- How the Baseless ‘Terrorists Communicating Over Playstation 4’ Rumor Got Started
Reality.
#RetroHugos1941 The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Another of the books that I identified as potential Retro Hugo material, originally published in Spanish in 1940, by a protégé of Jorge Luis Borges (who contributed a foreword). I’m pretty sure that this is a novella. The English translation has 350-400 words per page, and of the 100 pages, several are taken up by Jorge Luis Borges’ introduction and several more by Norah Borges’ illustrations (see her map of the book’s setting). So it’s unlikely to be be over 40,000 words, and the same probably goes for the original Spanish text.
It’s worth chasing down, as an example of surrealism meeting magical realism. The unnamed protagonist finds himself on a possibly deserted island, and becomes increasingly obsessed and frustrated by its inhabitants, who he can see perfectly well but is unable to interact with. The sinister scientist Morel appears to be behind it all. Like Kallocain, the story reflects on the surveillance society, though in a different and perhaps more modern way, tying in also fairly explicitly with the then-recent invention of television.
As with Kallocain, the (male) narrator’s attempt to conduct a relationship with a woman under the new conditions is the emotional hook of the story – somewhat creepy rather than desperate here, which reduces one’s sympathy for the central character. But the story itself kept my attention and will probably get one of my nominations for Best Novella.
Links I found interesting for 18-11-2015
The Summer Before the Dark, by Doris Lessing
I did not get on well with the only other Doris Lessing book I have read, The Grass is Singing, but I thought this was excellent – a short novel about a woman in her mid-40s who suddenly gets an opportunity to break away from her family and friends, and grabs it with both hands. I found the geographical and character descriptions excellent, and Kate's journey to freedom rather exhilarating. Recommended.
(Yes, I know that icon is Agatha Christie. Sorry.)
Links I found interesting for 17-11-2015
- Belgium’s Terrorism Problem
The interior minister explains.
- Why is English so weirdly different from other languages
McWhorter on form as usual!
- Teach peace
How to fight terror, by @IrinaBokova.
- Free Collection of Stories Eligible for #RetroHugos1941
Hooray! First volume of (hopefully) three.
#RetroHugos1941 Kallocain, by Karin Boye
This is a short Swedish novel published in 1940, set in a near-future totalitarian state, where the narrator, Leo Kall, invents a drug that compels people to tell nothing but the truth. Naïvely committed to the regime, he observes its use to enforce thought control rather passively, but it all gets real when he starts to consider the drug's potential impact on his relationship with his wife.
It's an original theme, intensely and eloquently described, at reasonably short length (220 pages). I'm really surprised that I had not heard of it before I started my research into the sf of 1940 for next year's Retro Hugos. It seems to me to stand firmly in the tradition of Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Presumably the twin effects of it being in Swedish and by a woman meant that it was overlooked. The 2002 film Equilibrium picked up some of its ideas, as of course did Zelazny's Today We Choose Faces and the first episode of Blake's 7.
The whole thing can be read online here. I do hope that voters will give a nod to a Scandinavian writer in advance of Helsinki.
Links I found interesting for 16-11-2015
- Brussels: From a city for cars to a city for people
The minister responds.
- A Seismic Shift in How People Eat
This is probably a good thing.
#RetroHugos1941 If This Goes On—, by Robert A. Heinlein
I read this as a teenager, and was hugely impressed by it. Growing up in the calcified conservative culture of Catholic Ulster, I felt a lot of sympathy for Heinlein's unsophisticated hero who realises gradually that those who claim to speak for God may actually be speaking for themselves, that a political reality can be deliberately constructed, and that girls are human beings too. Since the 1940 original text is eligible for next year's Retro Hugo for 1941, I returned to it with interest and a little trepidation. I must have been 15 or 16 when I first read it, two-thirds of my life ago; would it hold up?
And actually, yes it does. If anything, Heinlein's portrayal of a theocratic dictatorship ruling a dystopian future America seems a bit closer to the bone in 2015 than it did in 1983. (Though maybe that just reflects on my relative ignorance about the USA in the 1980s.) His thoughts about political messaging are pretty up to date as well, though of course the techniques turn out to be different. I was startled to read Ken MacLeod's assessment of Heinlein's importance to political SF in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, but he was absolutely right; particularly here in the early stages of his career.
Bill Paterson's article on If This Goes On— for the Heinlein Society goes into some detail about the differences between the 55,000 word version of the story, revised in 1953, that we now have access to (in Revolt in 2100 and The Past Through Tomorrow) and the 33,000 word original. The biggest difference is that Sister Maggie, the most interesting character in the revised version of the story, appears to be largely absent from the original version, where our hero ends up with Sister Judith in an epilogue. There is also apparently much less about the Freemasons, and a couple of odd plot adjustments – Judith is horrified, not by the Prophet's sexual advances but by his cynical approach to taxation; and the victorious rebels decide to go for mass hypnotic reorientation of the formerly subject population rather than rejecting the idea as they do in the revised version.
I don't know how easy it will be to get hold of the 1940 text. A couple of things are clear to me, however. First, it's definitely a novella for Retro Hugo purposes; even if it was marketed at the time as a novel, the 2016 rules are clear that 40,000 words is the cutoff and it's a long way short of that. Second, without having read the 1940 version, but bearing in mind what Patterson says about the differences between it and the 1953 version, it's a pretty strong contender and is likely to get one of my own nominations in the Best Novella category. (NB that Jamie Todd Rubin has read the original and found the first half better than the second.)
More thoughts on the eligible short fiction of 1940 in due course.
Saga, vol 4, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
This missed getting on the Hugo shortlist this year by a single vote, or rather because the Puppies nominated a completely crap webcomic about zombies and 26 people nominated Saga without specifying which volume they were voting for. Having said that, volume 3 (which I enjoyed) did make it to the list and duly came second to Ms Marvel. This volume takes the relationship between the protagonists in a new and not very happy direction, while at the same time showing us the weird dynastic dynamics among their enemies and setting up for further developments.
Among the list of potential Best Graphic Novel nominees on the , the next volume, vol 5, is third in both Goodreads and LibraryThing ownership, behind only Ms Marvel vol 2 and The Sculptor. I’ll get hold of it soon.
Links I found interesting for 14-11-2015
Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro
This is another brilliant collection of short stories by Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro, as usual grabbing you by the guts and concentrating character and plot into exquisitely distilled doses of everyday life. A lot of them seem to have been published first by the New Yorker and are still online there – I particularly commend Dimension and Free Radicals, which are both about death and murder but in very different ways. Well worth getting hold of.
Links I found interesting for 13-11-2015
- Britain and the Spectre of Geopolitical Irrelevance
What James Bond films tell us.
- Why Did the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ Fail?
Ivan Krastev draws lessons from 1851.
- It’s going to be okay.
A mind-blowingly effective short comic. (There’s some dust in my eye.)
- EU referendum: could Britain vote to leave?
Peter Kelner sees trouble ahead.
Thursday reading
Current
Sleepyhead, by Mark Billingham
The Ill-Made Knight, by T.H. White
Somewhere! / هُناك , by Ibraheem Abbas
Oblivion, by Dave Stone
Last books finished – a long list, augmented by the fact that I had nearly finished several on Thursday, had a long journey Friday, and many of these are short books anyway
The Quantum Archangel, by Craig Hinton
Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories vol 2, eds. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg
The Sculptor, by Scott McCloud
Axis, by Robert Charles Wilson
Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro
Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree, by Ernest Bramah
Saga Volume 4, by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples
The Clock Strikes Twelve And Other Stories, by H. Russell Wakefield
The Past Through Tomorrow, by Robert A. Heinlein (1940 stories only)
Kallocain, by Karin Boye
The Summer Before the Dark, by Doris Lessing
The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares
To the Slaughter, by Steve Cole
Last week’s audios
Welcome to Night Vale eps 76-77
Terror of the Sontarans
Next books
The Oxford Book of Christmas Stories, ed. Dennis Pepper
Dodger, by Terry Pratchett
Books acquired in last week
The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, by Kai Ashante Wilson
Witches of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
Sunset Mantle, by Alter S. Reiss
Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor
Speak Easy, by Catherynne M. Valente
Bételgeuse, tome 3 : L’Expédition, by Leo
Links I found interesting for 12-11-2015
- Do fish fart?
In case you were wondering.
- A Milestone Not a Turning Point
Theo Moore @ChairmanYaffle on Cameron’s EU demands.
- Chemical element symbols that are also ISO 3166 country code abbreviations
Because you needed to know.
- The Misuse of Interpol’s Database
Getting other countries to pursue your dissidents.
- John Bossy obituary
Lovely write-up in the @guardian.
- The Hidden Message of Saga, or, Why We Can’t Help But Love It
Amen.
Axis, by Robert Charles Wilson
I really loved Spin, to which this is a sequel; in fact, Spin was the first Hugo winner that I actually voted for. Axis is not as good a book, but it’s still a good enough read; a complete change of central characters, pursuing a quest up the back country of an unknown parallel world, with a lot more emotional depth than you usually get in a two-fisted adventure tale. Took me ages to get around to reading it, but I am glad I finally did.
Baron de Keverberg de Kessel and Mary Lodge
We took a couple of days off last week to go and explore Bruges (and saw while there, which was nice). There’s lots to see, and despite the early November rain it was still seething with tourists – God knows what it’s like in the high season. I don’t particularly recommend the Historium exhibition, an animatronic attempt to convey life in Bruges in 1435 to us modern grockles; I’ll stick with Dorothy Dunnett for my images of the fifteenth century. I did like the permanent Dali exhibition, including his illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. The Basilica of the Holy Blood was very William Morris, slightly to my surprise as I had been expecting something more medieval. In the St Salvator cathedral, my eye was particularly caught by Jac Bisschops’ contemporary Stations of the Cross, “De kruisweg van de verstilling”.
The major museum is the Groeningemuseum; I’m not actually a huge art connoisseur (as my successive postings here about the artist categories in the BSFA Awards and Hugos have probably made clear) but I loved a lot of things here, starting with Jan van Eyck’s The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele and ending with the pre-graphic novel woodcuts of Frans Masereel. But I was especially struck by the nineteenth century portraits; in the era just before photography, artists often managed to catch an inner truth which we struggle to get at with the camera.
In 1818, 23-year-old Mary Lodge, born in England, married the recently widowed Governor of West Flanders, Charles-Louis de Keverberg de Kessel, who had just turned 50. Their portraits, painted by Joseph-Fran&cced;ois Ducq, dominate one of the Groenigemuseum’s rooms.
I found this a tantalising pair of pictures. He looks, frankly, as if he’s already had a brandy too many before lunch, staring out of the portrait at us; she looks like a very smart young woman, her gaze cast aside – towards him, if his portrait was hung to the right of hers? Or were the portraits meant to face each other, given that she has her back to the garden and he to an interior wall? If the latter, it seems odd to have the couple looking in different directions.
I did a little more research. Baron de Keverberg, born in what is now Dutch Limburg, made himself very useful to successive regimes in the cockpit of Europe – he rose gracefully through the local administration of his home territory, first under Prussia, then under the French. Then Napoleon put him in charge of small bits of Germany from 1810 (and he married for the first time); and after the fall of the Empire (which coincided with the death of his first wife), the new Kingdom of the United Netherlands made him governor first of Antwerp and then West Flanders, giving him his title of Baron into the bargain.
I found it much more difficult to find out about the background of Mary Lodge. French Wikipedia thinks that she was born in Stonor, Oxfordshire; Dutch Wikipedia thinks she was from Rochdale, and Nederland’s adelsboek goes further and names her parents as John Lodge and Frances Croft. I found (and then lost) one online source saying that her father owned a textiles factory in Halifax. In any case, she seems to have been an orphan, staying in Bruges with her uncle, where she caught the Governor’s eye. He wrote a novel, Ursula, princesse britannique, inspired by her and the art of Memling. Perhaps the manuscript for the novel is among the papers he is proudly pointing to in his portrait. In hers, she is holding the published book open at the title page (it clearly says “D’Ursula”).
The year after their marriage, he was appointed to the Dutch government (as one of the officials in charge of Belgian affairs) and they moved to the Hague (where he originated the de Keverberg dilemma). They settled down and had four children, three of whom are recorded as having been born in Stonor, Oxfordshire – now the home of Jeremy Paxman; but is there therefore a connection with the Stonor family, also linked to the Blounts of Maple Durham, one of whom married my great aunt? The Baron’s political career was interrupted by the Belgian revolution of 1830, but he got back in the game and died an elder statesman in 1841 aged 73. She lived until 1879, almost four decades of widowhood, and died at the Keverberg family seat of Aldengoor. Her portrait is often cited as a key example of Regency fashion.
I found it an interesting if frustrating exercise to look into the background of these paintings. A lot of the Baron’s voice has been preserved for history, as he climbs the political pole while also positioning himself as a cultural guru; we get much less of Mary, whose role is that of his muse and future mother of his children. But she has a very interesting smile. I bet she was much more fun to know than him.
Links I found interesting for 11-11-2015
- The Historic China-Taiwan Meeting Will Not Serve Xi
Less than the sum of its parts.
- Living and Dying on Airbnb
“The rental that killed my father.”
- Former British soldier arrested over 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings
Never thought that would happen!
- Spain after Franco
British diplomatic analysis from November 1975. Fascinating.
- Britons Perturbed by a Troubling Shortage of Curry Chefs
Protecting the country from good food, er, migrants.
The Sculptor, by Scott McCloud
Of the graphic stories listed on the , this is owned by more LibraryThing users than any other and is behind only Ms Marvel vol 2 on Goodreads. So I went out and got it. (Incidentally, I find the spreadsheet a lot more user-friendly in general than the impenetrable Wikia.)
I was aware that McCloud is well known as a comics critic and writer; his Wikipedia article suggests that this is the first actual graphic story he has published this century. If so, it was worth the wait; The Sculptor is a gripping fantasy about a young artist who does a deal with Death, to achieve fame and fortune at the cost of years of his own life. There are lots of allusions to other themes, particularly the many ways in which people express themselves, and a tragic love story running through the core of the plot. I thought it was a great example of the graphic novel, and if the other Hugo nominees are as good as this we are in for a treat.
Links I found interesting for 10-11-2015
- Passports to paradise
The global trade in citizenship.
The Quantum Archangel, by Craig Hinton
A sequel to The Time Monster, featuring the Sixth Doctor, Mel and the Ainley!Master, and a host of other references to other Who stories, the epitome of “fanwank” (a term Hinton himself invented). Actually rather good fun, which is impressive given how awful the original story is, with a high point being the splintering of the narrative into various potential parallel realities where the history of the universe has worked out differently. Hinton also does a good job of capturing the Sixth Doctor. The Home Secretary has the same name as a prominent Doctor Who fan, but when I checked with her she thought it must be coincidence (because she was not yet prominent when this was written). Above average, I would say.
Links I found interesting for 09-11-2015
- Meet King Bansah: Part-Time Monarch, Full-Time Auto Mechanic
Modern monarchy.
- To the parliamentary staffer upset about our new charges
A lesson in online economics.
- Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution at the National Maritime Museum
I’ll go to this if I can.
- Ukip is ‘on the brink of going bust’
Oh *dear*.
Family Britain, 1951-1957, by David Kynaston
This is the second volume of Tales of a New Jerusalem, a series of books pulling together the findings of Mass-Observation and various other sources to create a detailed, almost week-by-week popular history of Britain. (The first volume covers 1945-51, and the third 1957-59; Kynaston’s plan is to take it up to Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979.) It’s a tremendous piece of work, but I’ll stipulate up front that it has limitations – although the title references “Britain”, it’s mainly England, with some Wales and a very small amount of Scotland; Northern Ireland is mentioned precisely once.
Having said that, I still found it very interesting, and if you are English or particularly interested in England it will be fascinating. Particular highlights are Kynaston’s analysis of Fifties sexuality, both straight and gay (though I missed any reflection on how things might have been different during the War); his account of the political arguments around race (though here I would have liked to see some framing in terms of theory); his careful account of the major capital punishment cases (Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis
Links I found interesting for 08-11-2015
- Languages Are Products of Their Environments
Fewer consonants in the jungle.
- Dubai and New York – both are vertiginous cities. So why is only one of them full of surprises?
The art of serendipity.
- Brexit lunatics will destroy Britain
@chrisdeerin gives it both barrels.
- Astronaut plays bagpipes on International Space Station
Good heavens.