Rising Damp by UA Fanthorpe.

‘A river can sometimes be diverted but is a very hard thing to lose altogether.’
(Paper to the Auctioneers’ Institute, 1907)

At our feet they lie low,
The little fervent underground
Rivers of London

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet

Whose names are disfigured,
Frayed, effaced.

There are the Magogs that chewed the clay
To the basin that London nestles in.
These are the currents that chiselled the city,
That washed the clothes and turned the mills,
Where children drank and salmon swam
And wells were holy.

They have gone under.
Boxed, like the magician’s assistant.
Buried alive in earth.
Forgotten, like the dead.

They return spectrally after heavy rain,
Confounding suburban gardens. They inflitrate
Chronic bronchitis statistics. A silken
Slur haunts dwellings by shrouded
Watercourses, and is taken
For the footing of the dead.

Being of our world, they will return
(Westbourne, caged at Sloane Square,
Will jack from his box),
Will deluge cellars, detonate manholes,
Plant effluent on our faces,
Sink the city.

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet

It is the other rivers that lie
Lower, that touch us only in dreams
That never surface. We feel their tug
As a dowser’s rod bends to the surface below

Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Styx.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I seemed to be looking at an enormous illuminated painting, lit both by the unsettled water and by a deep light transmitted through the body of the cavern. What surprised me, as I pushed the cabin door against the current, was the intense clarity of every detail. In front of me, above its sloping lawn, was the half-timbered Tudor mansion. A number of people were watching me, like figures posed by the artist in a formal landscape. None of them moved, as if frozen by the burning aircraft that had burst out of the afternoon sky and fallen into the water at their feet.

For all that the BSFA Best Novel award has its faults (notably, that the first thirty recipients included twenty-nine men and one woman), it has often looked to more inventive, if less enduring, works than the Hugo or Nebula. This is a case in point – a year when the two US-based awards both went to The Fountains of Paradise, a book that I love but which is hardly ground-breaking in its description of the engineering challenges of constructing a space elevator, with a couple of sideswipes at organised religion. By contrast, The Unlimited Dream Company is about a bloke who may or may not be killed in a plane crash at the end of the second chapter, and emerges to become the magical ruler of Shepperton (which is of course the Surrey gateway to other worlds, thanks to the film and TV studios located there, as I will discuss when I finally do my reviews of Here Come the Double Deckers). It’s vivid, erotic, lush, surprisingly readable, and rather out of date even in 1979. It seems a much better fit for the sf of ten years earlier, though perhaps it is informed by the disappointments of the 1970s. It’s very interesting that it won an award when it did.

Of course, awards are hit and miss. This was the only book by Ballard to win a major SF award. (Empire of the Sun, which is not SF, won a couple.) We know now that the best-selling and possibly also most influential sf novel of 1979 was The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Unlimited Dream Company now looks more like a last gasp of the New Wave (which was almost twenty years old by then) than a pointer to the future of the genre. Brian Aldiss, whose earlier work was more in line with Ballard, was about to shift decisively towards harder SF with Helliconia. Christopher Priest perhaps has stayed closest to the Ballardian path, but I don’t think any of his writing is quite as, well, gonzo as this. Michael Moorcock still writes books like Michael Moorcock, at least. I’m glad that the sf community did eventually honour Ballard for his contribution to the genre, both in content and visibility; it’s just a bit surprising that it took so long.

Seond paragraph of third section:

“That, Mr. Pond, is no ordinary milk-float. That float has been rendered spaceworthy! As you said, what we are lacking in space travel today is a viable means of propulsion, and even then we are limited by the speed of light. But there is one substance which can travel faster than light —boiling milk, when it thinks you’re not looking!”

This was one of the many Neil Gaiman works made available a couple of weeks ago in the most successful Humble Bundle ever. Gaiman describes it as “my worst short story ever… It misfires in so many ways.” The above paragraph, as it happens, captures the punchline of the story. It really isn’t very good, is it?

• Cruel and increasingly unusual
  
  Capital punishment in the USA.
  (tags: uspolitics death )
• New here? Welcome to Brussels
  
  A guide fore the perplexed.
  (tags: eu )
• The UN draft climate treaty
  
  20 pages, PDF
  (tags: climatechange )
• This Insurance Agent Threatened Me, I Got Him Fired
  
  Uncomfortable reading [trigger warning].
  (tags: internet )
• What happens to British expatriates if the UK leaves the EU?
  
  Old news, but still not good news.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )

Whose hand is steering the Tardis?

The frightening truth: an unqualified driver is at the helm:

To explain. I have a cousin who works here:

And the weekend before last, he very kindly took a group of relatives around the studios, including me. I can't say much about what we saw, but we were allowed to take pictures of the interior of the Tardis itself (positioned right next to a square in ancient Athens for the forthcoming Midsummer Night's Dream).

It's a really big space. The set has the full 360° walls, which can be opened up if necessary, but fundamentally it's a very large circular room on several levels (and scary drops between them). The lights were not on, so all pictures are illustrated by my iPhone flash (apart from the first two in this post, which were taken more professionally by an uncle). But here's a view of the console from the gallery, my mother and most of an aunt dimly visible behind:

Down below the console is a further floor level, with the Tardis innards spilling out:

I was fascinated by the console itself, which is as elaborate as you would hope:

But even more fascinated by the gallery, whose elaborate designs are barely hinted at on-screen. What does the Doctor listen to and read on his travels?

What memories does he carry of past adventures?

And what is to come?

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Aisha and Halima told her what they wanted—General Tso’s Chicken Very Spicy, Chicken Wings, Orange Chicken—with the quick ease of people saying what they said every day.

You need to know more about Nigeria. It is the seventh most populous country in the world (after China, India, the USA, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan) and is becoming a middle-income country (wealth per capita a little ahead of Moldova, a little behind Armenia). It has the largest population and the largest economy in Africa, the 20th largest GDP in the world (just behind Australia, just ahead of Thailand). One in six Africans is Nigerian, and soon it will be one in five.

I went to Nigeria for 48 hours in July, and a couple of colleagues strongly recommended this book to me as a pathway to understanding the country. It was a good recommendation on their part. There are three major themes to the book: exile, race and hair. As an expatriate migrant myself, I have thought a lot about exile and distance from the country where you grew up, and the sense of betrayal at leaving it behind. Adichie’s protagonist Ifemelu eventually returns home voluntarily from the USA; her lost love Odinze is humiliatingly deported from the UK; and both find that while you can never completely leave, you can never completely go back either.

The book is sharpest in contrasting American (and to a lesser extent British) attitudes to race with the experience of people who have grown up in societies where it simply isn’t an issue because there are no (or hardly any) white people. Ifemelu achieves (slightly anonymous) fame as a blogger on race, with the rise of Obama as political backdrop to her years in America. She shocks her black friends as well as her white friends and colleagues in a very good way. She shocks me as well.

As for the hair question: I had no idea. Really.

Excellent book. Go and get it.

• Centre Right wins Portuguese election
  
  Just about, anyway.
  (tags: portugal )

I wrote a few weeks back of my determination to be a good Hugo nominator next year, and in particular to read the entire 2015 output of those sources which have given me most of my personal first choices in recent years – Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and Subterranean Press – plus also Strange Horizons as I'm a long-term supporter. Once I've established a baseline from those five sources, I'll look around what other people are recommending as well; there should be time enough for that.

The process so far hasn't been quite as straightforward as I would have liked. I was able to read all of Tor.com and Strange Horizons for free online, or rather by saving individual stories to the Read Later tab on Safari; I could probably have done the same for Clarkesworld, but opted instead to buy individual issues through iTunes. (NB one alternative that I have used in the past is to cut and paste stries from web pages to Evernote, which then makes them available across all my devices, but that risks losing formatting.)

Asimov's was much more difficult. After much wrestling with the website, I failed to find an easy way of getting back issues in any of my preferred electronic formats, and in the end, advised by "Mark" from File770, downloaded each issue to the Newsstand app on my iPad. Not expensive at all, but also not ideal; I found the font size just a bit too small to be comfortable, and that may have affected my judgement.

Subterranean Press was much the most difficult. Its online catalogue gives no hint whatsoever about dates, so it's impossible to look for 2015 publications per se. Fortunately the Locus guides to forthcoming books and books already published in 2015 came to the rescue, helpfully informing me that only two novellas have been separately published so far this year, and only one more was planned at that stage (now published, I believe).

But then actually getting hold of the novellas in legitimate electronic format proved impossible. Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble both informed me that the books are not available in Kindle or Nook format, presumably because I am in Belgium rather than the USA. And my wallet balked at paying the equivalent of the price of four paperbacks from my local English language bookshop to get hard copies of two novellas. In the end I was able to locate DRM-free copies of both and read them that way. But I'd rather have paid the fair price for the ebooks (and will still do so if it is made possible). It also strikes me that if they are so difficult to get hold of, they are unlikely to have been read by many people with Hugo nominating power.

Anyway, having gone to the lengths of acquiring Jacaranda by Cherie Priest and Forsaken by Kelley Armstrong, I don't think either will feature in my Hugo nominations. Jacaranda, though ostensibly set in Priest's steampunk alternate timeline of Hugo-nominated Boneshaker, is really a ghost story about a haunted hotel, and Forsaken (which I didn't finish) is urban fantasy about international werewolves in today's world; neither ticks my subgenre boxes (though Jacaranda is well spooky).

Strange Horizons also surprised me with the heavy proportion of fantasy to sf in its Jan-Mar output. A lot of it is good, of course, but I lean a little to the sf side in general and especially when considering the Hugos. The SH story I liked most, Amal El-Mohtar's "The Truth About Owls", is ineligible because of prior publication in 2014. The other story that really grabbed me with an emotional gut punch was the very first one of the year, L.S. Johnson's "Vacui Magia". I think it will be on my list in the Best Short Story category (at a little under 3500 words), though as will become clear my nominations in that category are already getting a bit crowded.

Tor.com also has a digestible number of good stories. I see a lot of love out there for David D. Levine's "Damage", which I don't really share; it's a neat enough story about a sentient warship, but didn't seem to me to push the envelope much. I guess the point is that the Puppies claim to like that kind of thing. My own favourite from Tor.com, which will definitely be on my nominations list, is Nino Ciprio's "The Shape of My Name" – time-travel romance, perhaps, but with a very new twist to that venerable trope. At 6500 words it too falls into the Short Story category.

It took me longer than it should have done to realise that only about half the stories in this year's Clarkesworld will be eligible for next year's Hugos, the rest being reprints. From issues 100-102 covering the first three months of 2015, Naomi Kritzer's "Cat Pictures Please" is getting a lot of positive reaction. Myself I thought it was a one-joke story, and I prefer the Hugos to go to more serious stuff, but I suspect it will tick a lot of people's boxes. Another story that I think is objectively good but didn't excite me was "Ether" by Zhang Ran, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu. The Clarkesworld story that really grabbed me hard, despite its graphic violence, was Kelly Robson's "The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill", at 5300 words yet another for the Best Short Story category.

The only traditional magazine in my initial roundup is Asimov'sF&SF and Analog and Amazing continue to produce good stuff, but for now I am establishing a baseline from a magazine that published three of my personal picks in the last five years. Asimov's publishes solid sf, often not terribly exciting and a little old-fashioned, but catering to an important part of the audience. Each of the three issues I read (January, February and March 2015) had a story that I reckoned was worth nominating for its traditional virtues. For January 2015 (but is it eligible, having been on the shelves the previous month?) it is Allen M. Steele's "The Long Wait," apparently the conclusion to a series of stories about a generation starship (drawing from the same well as his Coyote stories, which I also liked) and those monitoring its progress on Earth; I only found this out when writing this summary, and certainly found it perfectly accessible even though I had not read the previous parts of the series. It's marketed as a novella; I haven't counted the words but that seems right to me.

For February 2015 (again, I worry that this hit the shelves in late December) the standout story for me was a novelette, Eneasz Brodski's "Red Legacy", apparently the author's first professional sale, which throws together cloning, an alternate Cold War, Lamarckian genetics, Soviet heroes and fiendish Brits and Americans, and some moments of impressive horror. The issue also included Michael Bishop's "Rattlesnakes and Men", which I found a rather heavy-handed satire of American gun culture, but no doubt readers who are closer to that situation will get more out of it than I did.

The March 2015 issue ends with Kristine Kathryn Rusch's novella "Inhuman Garbage", an excellent detective story set on the Moon (and thus turned out to be good mental preparation for Ian McDonald's Luna: New Moon, of which more in due course). Apparently it too is part of a series, but I had no problem with getting into it. A dishonorable typographical mention, I'm afraid, for "Pareidolia" by Kathleen Bartholomew and her sister, the late Kage Baker, in which Byzantine-era Greeks address the narrator as "Kupios" in the Latin alphabet. First, the Greek word is properly spelt "Κύριος" which transliterates as "Kyrios". Second, if you're using it to address someone it should be "Κύριε", as in "Kyrie eleison", "Lord have mercy".

Score so far of potential Hugo nominees:

Novellas
Allen M. Steele, "The Long Wait" (Asimov's, Jan 2015)
Kristine Kathryn Rusch "Inhuman Garbage" (Asimov's, Mar 2015)
Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric's Demon (Spectrum)

Novelette
Eneasz Brodski, "Red Legacy" (Asimov's, Feb 2015)

Short Stories
L.S. Johnson, "Vacui Magia" (Strange Horizons, Jan 2015)
Kelly Robson, "The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill" (Clarkesworld, Feb 2015)
Nino Ciprio, "The Shape of My Name" (Tor.com, Mar 2015)

And on to the second quarter, April, May and June.

• New Doctor Who BBC Three Spin-Off Series – Class
  
  Hooray!
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Cameron’s ‘renegotiations’ (or Russian roulette) with the EU
  
  “Brussels seems manageable, but the UK wild cards remain or are getting wilder” – Michael Emerson, my former boss.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• Ten commandments for Brussels conferences
  
  Not just Brussels.
  (tags: eu )
• Ted Cruz is toast: It’s not just that he won’t be president — his days in the Senate are numbered, too
  
  Becoming a celebrity.
  (tags: uspolitics )

• Moldova’s Maidan
  
  Chișinău wakes up.
  (tags: moldova )
• APCO’s Party Conference Quiz
  
  Win champagne!
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Secret bank accounts, income inequality—and why Luxembourg matters
  
  A fascinating analysis of offshore assets.
  (tags: economics )
• EU Council adopts roaming charges ban and net neutrality rules
  
  Though the one may weaken the other.
  (tags: eu internet )
• Taxi tax scrutinised
  
  Uber backlash goes unexpectedly.
  (tags: belgium )

Mistakenly posted the September books list as “Thursday reading” yesterday, which was actually Wednesday. This entry really is my reading since last week.

Current
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds

Last books finished
The Unlimited Dream Company, by J. G. Ballard
Luna: New Moon, by Ian McDonald
Jacaranda, by Cherie Priest

Next books
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us: Or Why You Have No Idea How Your Mind Works, by Christopher Chabris
Business Unusual, by Gary Russell

Books acquired in last week
Whispers Underground, by Ben Aaronovitch
Lethbridge-Stewart: The Schizoid Earth, by David R. McIntee

Non-fiction: 3 (YTD 38)
The Ancient Languages of Europe, by Roger D. Woodard
Companion Piece, eds. L.M. Myles and Liz Barr
Who's Next?, by Derrick Sherwin

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 31)
Girls in Love, by Jacqueline Wilson
The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

SF (non-Who): 7 (YTD 96)
A Vampire Quintet, by Eugie Foster
The End of All Things, by John Scalzi (did not finish)
The Wild Reel, by Paul Brandon (did not finish)
Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Manuscript Found in a Milk Bottle, by Neil Gaiman
The Unlimited Dream Company, by J. G. Ballard
Luna: New Moon, by Ian McDonald

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 35)
The Shadow in the Glass, by Justin Richards and Stephen Cole
The Sleep of Reason, by Martin Day
Tempest by Christopher Bulis

Comics : 1 (YTD 13)
It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, by Seth

~4,600 pages (YTD 57,600)
4/17 by women (YTD 64/213) – Myles/Barr, Wilson, Adichie, Foster
2/17 by PoC (YTD 14/213) – Adichie, Foster

Reread: 0/17, YTD 16/213

Reading now:
Jacaranda by Cherie Priest
Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

By curious coincidence, as a team-building exercise at work today the entire global leadership team of the firm was coached into performing "Do You Hear The People Sing" from the musical version of Les Misérables.

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us: Or Why You Have No Idea How Your Mind Works, by Christopher Chabris
A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to "Faerie", by Verlyn Flieger
A Star Chamber Court in Ireland: The Court of Castle Chamber, 1571-1641, by Jon G. Crawford (2005)
Family Britain, 1951-1957, by David Kynaston
The Dark Tower and Other Stories, by C.S. Lewis
Axis, by Robert Charles Wilson
The Arabian Nights, tr. Muhsin Mahdi
Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro
The Summer Before the Dark, by Doris May Lessing
Saga Volume 4. by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Sleepyhead, by Mark Billingham
The Oxford Book of Christmas Stories, ed. Dennis Pepper
Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch
The Battle for Gaul, by Julius Caesar
Monkey Planet, by Pierre Boulle
The Invention of Happiness, by Brian W. Aldiss
Bits of Me are Falling Apart, by William Leith
Moon Over Soho, by Ben Aaronovitch
Helliconia, by Brian Aldiss
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
North Wind, by Gwyneth Jones
A Princess of Roumania, by Paul Park
Business Unusual, by Gary Russell
The Deadstone Memorial, by Trevor Baxendale
Walking to Babylon by Kate Orman

• Why is Richard Dawkins such a jerk on social media?
  
  Good question.
  (tags: twitter )
• A Hiker Found a 2-Year-Old GoPro that was Launched Into Space and the Footage is Awesome
  
  This is cool.
  (tags: space )
• How I learned to embrace my insomnia
  
  Sorry, can you say that again? I must have nodded off.
  (tags: health )
• Is UKIP becoming extinct?
  
  One can only hope…
  (tags: ukpolitics )

• The newly discovered tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh
  
  Hooray!
  (tags: sf history archaeology )

• Where do languages go to die?
  
  Decline of a Lingua Franca: The Story of Aramaic
  (tags: languages linguistics history )
• Beware Europe’s automotive-political complex
  
  The consequences of the Volkswagen scandal.
  (tags: eu climatechange pollution )
• EU lobbying credited with helping kill death penalty in US
  
  Getting something right at least.
  (tags: death uspolitics )

Current
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
Luna: New Moon, by Ian McDonald
The Unlimited Dream Company, by J. G. Ballard

Last books finished
Who’s Next?, by Derrick Sherwin
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Manuscript Found in a Milk Bottle, by Neil Gaiman

Next books
Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us: Or Why You Have No Idea How Your Mind Works, by Christopher Chabris

Books acquired in last week
Gráinne, by Keith Roberts
The Sea and Summer, by George Turner
Deep Time, by Trevor Baxendale
Big Bang Generation, by Gary Russell 
Royal Blood, by Una McCormack 
A Fall of Stardust, by Neil Gaiman with Charles Vess
A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff, by Neil Gaiman
An Honest Answer & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
Angels & Visitations, by Neil Gaiman
Being An Account of the Life and Death of the Emperor Heliogabalus, by Neil Gaiman
Blood Monster, by Neil Gaiman with Marlene N. O’Connor
Day of the Dead, by Neil Gaiman
Duran Duran, by Neil Gaiman
Feeders & Eaters & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
Free Speeches, by Neil Gaiman
Ghastly Beyond Belief, by Neil Gaiman
Gods & Tulips, by Neil Gaiman
Love, Fishie, by Neil Gaiman
Manuscript Found in a Milk Bottle, by Neil Gaiman
Neil Dreams, by Neil Gaiman
Outrageous Tales From The Old Testament, by Neil Gaiman
Sculpture Stories, by Neil Gaiman with Lisa Snellings
Seven Deadly Sins, by Neil Gaiman
Sweeney Todd & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
Ian S. Forrester: A Scot Without Borders – Liber Amicorum, 2 vols, eds Sir David Edward, Jacquelyn MacKennan & Assimakis Komminos

• A New Universal ‘New Yorker’ Cartoon Caption
  
  “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”
  (tags: funny linkedin )
• Masquerade
  
  I remember it well.
  (tags: books )

• Seven takewawys from the Greek election.
  
  Story continues.
  (tags: eu greece )
• Archbishop of Canterbury to host refugees at official London residence
  
  “Jesus was a refugee.”
  (tags: migration humanrights religion )
• Don’t Breathe Here
  
  “every major car manufacturer is selling diesel cars that fail to meet EU air pollution limits”.
  (tags: climatechange health pollution )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Now, with time on my hands, the relationship [with first wife Jane] blossomed as I worked hard at my career as an actor and supplemented my income by working as a stage hand with the London Festival Ballet, at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. With my knowledge of scenery I was put in charge of the 'flies' – the area directly above the stage where the backcloths and other scenery are stored on counter-weighted pulleys and lowered or raised as required. This was physically demanding but required little other than the discipline of following an ordered sequence. Changing sets from one ballet to another again required long nights of arduous work, but this was something I was used to from my years in weekly rep.

On paper, Derrick Sherwin was producer of Doctor Who for only two stories and 14 episodes, the shortest tenure of anyone in the old regime. In fact he was the man who rescued the programme from collapse in Seasons 5 and 6 (as script editor and de facto assistant producer), invented UNIT and the Time Lords, and successfully rebooted the show in colour with a new Doctor in 1970. He also wrote, uncredited, one of the best single episodes of the entire original run, the first part of The Mind Robber. This is his autobiography, written pretty blatantly with the intent of cashing in on the 50th anniversary of the programme, published by Fantom as one of their large biographical range with a Whovian bias.

Less than 30 pages of over 200 are about Doctor Who, which is not terribly surprising as it was just two years in the life of an author now in his late seventies. Sherwin is frank but also very sympathetic about the difficulties of Patrick Troughton's difficult relations with the BBC and the show, and frank but less sympathetic about some of his other colleagues. His career in television lasted only a few years after Doctor Who; after various failed experiments (and relationships) he moved to Thailand, and more than half of the book is taken up with the details of his efforts to make a decent expat living there, mainly catering to tourists through hospitality and bungee jumping.

To be honest, this book would have been well served with a bit more editorial input; there is a sense that it was rushed out for November 2013. The first part is rather over-supplied with exclamation marks, and the long Thai section could perhaps have cut down on the detail of every single failed project and relationship that Sherwin started over three decades. I was really shocked to find a blatantly anti-Semitic remark on page 81. I can't warmly recommend it as an example of the showbiz autobiographical genre, but Whovian completists like me will want it on the shelves.

What do the Twelfth, Twenty-second, Twenty-fourth, Twenty-fifth and Thirty-second amendments to the Irish constitution have in common?

They don't exist.

• VW Is Said to Cheat on Diesel Emissions; U.S. Orders Big Recall
  
  Appalling.
  (tags: uspolitics climatechange )
• Birmingham council underpaid women for decades
  
  Old news, but extraordinary and shameful.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality ukpolitics )
• Doctor Who companions
  
  Epic numbercrunching by @telegraph’s @MartinBelam.
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Grandmaster of the Great Game
  
  Very pro-Obama piece, but very interesting.
  (tags: uspolitics )

Windows 10 irritation #1: Every time I open Chrome after restarting, it tells me Chrome is not the default web browser and asks if I want it to be. I say yes every time. And then it happens again.

Windows 10 irritation #2: iTunes has disappeared from the apps menu and the icon has disappeared from the desktop. I can still open it by finding a file associated with it and opening that. But that is not exactly efficient.

Second paragraph of third essay:

I'm going to look at Barbara and Ian not only as televisual companions to the Doctor, but as icons within the wider worlds of Doctor Who. Who were they, why were they key to the success of the series, and why do we still keep returning to them over 50 years after Ian was the first person to say "but it was just a police box"?

This is the sixth of the Geek Girl Chronicles, and the third of them to collect essays by women about Doctor Who (following on from Chicks Dig Time Lords and Chicks Unravel Time). Published earlier this year, it is eligible for next year's Hugo nominations as Best Related Work; the first in the series won that category in 2011, and Mad Norwegian Press has had three more nominations since (Chicks Unravel Time, Chicks Dig Gaming and Queers Dig Time Lords).

Obviously this is mainly going to appeal to Who fans with a decent knowledge of both Old and New Who, but I commend it to the rest of you anyway. I think the weakest essay here is better than the weakest ones in the two previous volumes; I think that there are a couple of really standout pieces (the para I quote above is from "Scheherazade and Galahad in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks", by Mags L. Halliday, which was one of my favourites); and I think that the best of them relate the ongoing story of Doctor Who to wider cultural and literary trends in a way that should be relevant to anyone with an interest in the genre.

It's quite likely to get one of my nomination slots next spring. But this is the one category where my shortlist is already overpopulated, and mostly with Whoviana at that. I'll leave you with the opening para of the final chapter, Amal El-Mohtar on "A Question of Emphasis: The Doctor as Companion":

• “They didn’t think he had a bomb.”
  
  My schools were regularly subject to bomb threats when I was a kid.
  (tags: waronterror uspolitics )
• Migrant crisis: “If we don’t stop climate change, then what we see right now is just the beginning” – Quartz
  
  Strong warning.
  (tags: climatechange migration )
• Across the Globe, a Growing Disillusionment With Democracy
  
  The future is uncertain.
  (tags: politics )
• Every Single Doctor Who Story, Ranked from Best to Worst
  
  There’s room for debate here!
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Way to go: the woman who invented Britain’s road signs
  
  50 years on.
  (tags: art history )

• Special Report of the High Representative
  
  Republika Srpska “in clear breach” of Dayton Agreement.
  (tags: bosnia )
• Nostalgia, rape culture, thick texts and obsession
  
  Roz Kaveney revisits the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  (tags: theatre music sexandgenderandsexuality )

Current
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Who’s Next?, by Derrick Sherwin

Last books finished
The Ancient Languages of Europe, by Roger D. Woodard
Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Companion Piece, eds. L.M. Myles and Liz Barr

Next books
The Unlimited Dream Company, by J. G. Ballard
Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds

Books acquired in last week
The Apex Book of World SF 4, eds Lavie Tidhar and Mahvesh Murad
Forsaken, by Kelley Armstrong
Jacaranda, by Cherie Priest
Luna: New Moon, by Ian McDonald

• What’s your favorite “WTF” moment in Mario history?
  
  For @mariofannio.
  (tags: games )
• Jenna Coleman ‘quits Doctor Who’ for new role as Queen Victoria
  
  Fair enough.
  (tags: doctorwho )
• 20 Cognitive Biases That Affect Your Decision-Making
  
  Why we choose as we do.
  (tags: lifehacking psychology )
• A Brief History of MidAmeriCon
  
  The 1976 Worldcon revisited.
  (tags: sf )
• The End of War
  
  Why C.J. Chilvers is no longer a war correspondent.
  (tags: war journalism )
• Malmström pitches new TTiP court
  
  Old ISDS system dumped.
  (tags: eu ttip )

• This book explains why Jeremy Corbyn now leads Labour. Its author died in 2011.
  
  The late great Peter Mair saw it coming.
  (tags: ukpolitics )

• Which are more successful in lobbying – business or civil society?
  
  Empirical research suggests the latter!
  (tags: eu )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Its rock was mostly black dolerite, smoothed flat by the ice of an ice age. The ferries carrying people landed near its west coast without incident, close to the robotic landers they had sent down previously.

I am on the lookout for likely Hugo candidates at the moment, and given KSR’s two Hugos and three Nebulas this seemed a decent prospect when I saw it in our local FNAC. It’s also a good hundred pages shorter than any of the other novels by him that I have read (except Forty Signs of Rain).

Aurora is the story of a generation starship sent to Tau Ceti, where there are massive internal tensions among the population which spill over once they finally arise, causing a deep division and a surprising plot development. That happens half way through the book, and without spoiling it, I have to say that’s where I started wondering what the actual point of the story of the journey was. I felt also that the same narrative techniques which I found attractive in the Mars trilogy, written twenty years ago, were getting a bit stale here; and there is one central character whose thoughts are given to us (by whom?) right up to the moment of physical destruction. Huge numbers of people are killed, both in the main narrative and in the back-story, and hardly referred to again. I loved the Mars trilogy as an exploration of how a new world could lead us to new ways of thinking; at the end of Aurora, I wasn’t sure what this was all for. So I don’t think it will make my nominations list, but I did at least finish it.