Doctor: I really won’t agree with you! Too stringy! And I’ll keep repeating! Come on, come on! Why did I let Amy keep the sonic screwdriver –
Again, this unites a one-shot story with a three-parter, both by Tony Lee. We start with the Tardis going astray on its way to the 1966 World Cup final (though I think that Amy, being Scottish, might have had mixed feelings about that), and getting mixed up with a conflict between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the future site of Wembley stadium, which maybe fails to interrogate the full historical detail, especially as regards gender; Matt Smith of course in real life was captain of the youth team of Leicester City, before a back injury ended his football career and forced him into acting. The art is by the always reliable Mark Buckingham.
The rest of the book takes the Tardis crew to a world where they encounter various parallel versions of themselves, a trope that always appeals to me, and it turns out to be all part of a Truman Show-like entertainment; and there are Nazi Sontarans tied up with it all. Enjoyable writing and art by Matthew Dow Smith (as opposed to any other person with a similar name involved with Doctor Who). You can get it here.
Last of these updates for the year (next week will cover the next 7 days, the whole month of December and the whole of 2024).
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells
Last books finished The Aztecs, by Doris V. Sutherland Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien The Nightwatch Winter, by Jenny Overton
Next books The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy
How the mighty are fallen; in olden days I was fairly easily able to see what my top Facebook and Twitter posts of the year had been, but changes to the interfaces make that impossible now. Bluesky also has yet to get in the game of accessible metrics, and once they do, their offer will become even more attractive.
Mastodon is not my favourite of the microblogging platforms, but it does at least let me see how well my posts are doing through MastoMetrics. My top four most liked and most boosted Mastodon posts were the following:
4th most liked, 3rd most boosted (this got dozens of replies as well, well worth looking at):
1 ) Back in the real world, my analysis of the impact of the new boundaries on the elections in Northern Ireland (cf the #2 post on Instagram and one of the top LinkedIn posts):
So, it seems that there are several different sets of readers. My infrequent statements on Northern Ireland are still seen as pretty authoritative. My involvement with the Hugos received a lot of attention. And people just like pictures of cute kids, even if I am also in them.
When we closed up at six, he’d say, “Good job today, Carrot. Don’t know what I did without you.” Then he would go home and I would go next door to the coffee shop and leech on the Wi-Fi. If I could think of something fun to say, I’d update the museum’s social media. I had grandiose visions of overhauling the web page and doing more with it than the occasional blog post about the history of Feejee Mermaids, but I hadn’t quite gotten there yet. And you had to be careful when you posted pictures of skulls and taxidermy because there were always people who wanted to tell you that this made you a murderer and the moral equivalent of Ed Gein. My internet armor had been built up in the fanfic battlegrounds and was thus impenetrable, but Uncle Earl was a gentle soul, and I was afraid that someone might hurt his feelings.
One of Ursula Vernon’s books that I had somehow missed, this is about a young woman, recovering from divorce, looking after her uncle’s Wonder Museum and then discovering, together with the gay barista next door, that through a hole in the museum’s wall they have access to numerous other dimensions where Bad Things happen and other Bad Things live and they need to keep our world safe. It’s funny and scary, and the characters are very believably delineated. Another good one. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (not at all representative of the book, whose paragraphs are generally very long):
What had he failed to see?
A reread of course, but a timely and sobering story from more than half a century ago. It has been widely interpreted, both at the time and since, as a reaction to and fictionalisation of the Vietnam War; but in fact the circumstances are much closer to the wars waged against indigenous people in Africa, Asia and the Americas, with the explicit agendas of the destruction and replacement of the original population – a pattern from seventeenth-century Ireland to today’s Gaza. There’s not much grey here – even the humans who try for better relations with the Creechie natives of the planet are fatally compromised by their participation in the project of conquest and domination.
Le Guin was familiar with the conquest and oppression of Native Americans, and the attempted counter-resistance by the earth soldiers is reminiscent of Rhodesia’s UDI in 1965. The part that perhaps does speak to Vietnam is the impact of new information technology, just as media coverage in the 1960s had an effect on the dynamic of support for the war in America. Reporting on atrocity was not new – it goes back at least to Bartolomé de las Casas – but there is a good point about the impact on a conflict when long-suppressed truth starts to leak out.
This was both my top unread book by a woman, and my top unread science fiction book. Next on those piles are The Light We Carry, by Michelle Obama, and I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman.
See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify. I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table, but that still leaves four countries from before I changed the system where I have recorded fewer than five books actually set in that country: Brazil, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Ethiopia. So to make redress, I’m revisiting these earlier posts with an updated table.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
State of Wonder
Ann Patchett
193,493
6,374
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann
101,244
5,139
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey
Candice Millard
70,908
3,669
The Seven Sisters
Lucinda Riley
152,628
1,360
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire
36,064
4,436
The Hour of the Star
Clarice Lispector
40,261
2,202
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Machado de Assis
33,496
2,582
My Sweet-Orange Tree
José Mauro de Vasconcelos
73,341
1,013
As noted in my previous entry, I am disqualifying a bunch of Paolo Coelho books: The Alchemist is set in Spain and Egypt, Veronika Decides to Die in Slovenia, Eleven Minutes in Switzerland, and both By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept and The Devil and Miss Prym are set in France. (Judging by The Alchemist, the only one I have read, none of them can be very good either.) Also John Grisham’s The Testament seems to be more than 50% set in America from an unscientific survey.
As also previously noted, nine of the eleven (long) chapters of Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder are set in Brazil. It’s a novel about a miracle cure found in the rain forest. The Lost City of Z is also about a quest in the rain forest, this time the non-fictional search for the lost British explorer Henry Fawcett. The River of Doubt is also about a journey through the rain forest. A bit of a theme here…
I did not disqualify any others than those mentioned before. The next six books on the table all seemed to be reasonably set in Brazil. The one edge case is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is a teacher training textbook, but it very explicitly draws on his experience of teaching in Brazil so I’m inclined to let it through. Freire is the top Brazilian writer on the list; the top novel by a Brazilian is nineteenth century classic The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas aka Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis.
I have been meaning to get around to watching the 1924 Soviet-era science fiction film Aelita, Queen of Mars, after being alerted to it by an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in 2021, and realising that the centenary year was about to run out, I found it online (various versions are available to watch for free) and sat through it. Here’s a trailer which is launching a new score as well (which I didn’t hear):
I thought it was tremendous. The bits set on Mars apparently established the aesthetic for making things look futuristic for decades after; though I winced at the title character’s “Press your lips against mine, as you do on Earth!” There’s a real vision of another world, even if (spoiler for a film that is literally a century old) it turns out that it was all a dream. The scenes of revolution against the oppressive rulers of Mars are also well done.
But I found the scenes set in the Soviet Union in 1924 almost equally interesting. In the remote radio station where the signal from Mars is first picked up, there is a Bactrian camel chewing the cud in the background, like you have in radio stations. In St Petersburg, there are black marketeers and counter-revolutionaries, and a love triangle, and the lead actor plays two characters who meet up with each other (on split screen) several times. Characters comment on how hard life is in Russia with the ongoing war and the lack of supplies – in a film made in the first year of Stalin’s rule, that went on public release in many countries. It’s a fascinating window into a world when things seemed on the verge of fundamental change.
You can easily find it online with the search engine of your choice.
I thought I had better read the book as well, by Alexei Tolstoy, a relative of the more famous writer. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
За воротами до набережной Ждановки лежал пустырь. За рекой неясными очертаниями стояли деревья Петровского острова. За ними догорал и не мог догореть печальный закат. Длинные тучи, тронутые по краям его светом, будто острова, лежали в зеленых водах неба. Над ними зеленело небо. Несколько звезд зажглось на нем. Было тихо на старой Земле.
Beyond the gate, an empty lot stretched all the way to the bank of the Zhdanovka. On the other side of the river loomed the blurred outlines of trees on Petrovsky Island, tinged by the melancholy sunset. Wisps of clouds, touched by the sun’s glow, were scattered like islands in the expanse of greenish sky, studded with a few twinkling stars. All was quiet on old Mother Earth.
Translation may be by Constantin von Hoffmeister who wrote the prologue to my edition
Unlike the film, the book concentrates on the Martian voyage which is very definitely real, and the hero and his sidekick explore a lot more of the Martian surface, meeting various parts of the social structure and encountering new dangers. It’s better than the average English-language pulp planetary romance of the day, but not a lot better; and it does fill out one’s appreciation for the film, which is much superior. You can get it here.
I have only just become aware of the Doctor Who Audiobook Originals range from the BBC, which looks very promising – I had listened previously to the First World War trilogy released in 2018 but hadn’t realised that they were part of an ongoing series, which I’ll have to work into my schedule somehow. This one caught my interest because it is set in Ireland – specifically in Galway in the 1890s. I winced at a couple of errors – Dún Laoghaire was Kingstown until 1920, and there is no County Connemara – but it’s a well enough done alien zombie menace story, apparently the fourth to feature the Eighth Doctor and companion James MacFarlane. And Dan Starkey, who is really tremendously versatile as an actor, does a great job of reading the text and bringing the characters to life. You can get it here.
“I have not any idea,” her mother said, jabbing at a potato. “Sarah, come in or go out, but either way shut that door.”
This is about two teenagers doing local history research in a corner of south-eastern England in the late 1960s. That may not hook you immediately, but it was a book that had a big impression on me when I was a kid. The two protagonists are Stephen the vicar’s son and an only child, and Sarah, in the middle of a large Catholic family, recently arrived from the North.
Stephen has been quietly transcribing the correspondence of the historical local landlords, whose sixteenth-century forebears were riven by family and religious tensions, and also enduring his parents’ efforts to inflict a social life on him; his friendship with Sarah goes through peaks and quite painful troughs, as they find the physical legacy of the Creed family in the countryside around them.
Some may find the supposed historical documents being recounted at length a bit too much (see spoilery review in Kirkus); I loved them as a younger reader, and I love them now, and perhaps it inspired me a bit in my own long-past historical research and my current project of putting my grandmother’s memoirs online here. But it’s also a good record of the fragility of friendship, as a teenager or at any other time of one’s life.
I also appreciated again the vivid and efficient portrayal of Stephen and Sarah’s very different families. Sometimes you can say a lot with a little; when an ancient tombstone is uncovered, and it turns out to be that of one of the key figures in the sixteenth-century part of the story, the chapter ends with “She [Sarah] looked at Stephen, and then quickly looked away again.”
Jenny Overton, the author, was a children’s books editor for most of her career and published a handful of novels, of which the best known is The Thirteen Days of Christmas, aimed at a younger age bracket than this but available with Shirley Hughes illustrations. There is a sequel to Creed Country, which I think concentrates on Sarah’s younger siblings, and I’ll report on it in due course.
“It’s the way things are in this town,” Milda explained. “There’s hundreds of poor women willing to work their fingers into blisters. And the rich people have to have their curtains ready on time.”
I had not previously read this novel, the second in both publication and internal chronology order of DWJ’s Dalemark Quartet. It’s really very good. We’re in the time before Cart and Cwidder when the tyrannical and brutal earls of the South are fomenting social discontent and revolutionary action. As is usual with this writer, she tells the story of a fermenting society with magical underpinnings through three children, one of them the abandoned son of a radical activitst and the other two being grandchildren of the ruling Earl; they end up together in a quest narrative on a small boat escaping from the South to the North, where tangled personal politics and primal mythical forces await them.
A key part of the book is the role played by the demigods Old Ammet and Libby Beer, who start as historical figures in a poorly understood but faithfully executed annual ceremony, and end as enforcers of order and social justice when correctly invoked. A lot of Diana Wynne Jones’ books involve a journey to achieve enlightenment by the protagonists, and I think it’s really well realised here.
I’m going on to re-read The Crown of Dalemark, to see if I get more out of it after reading the previous three books, but I think Drowned Ammet stands very well on its own. You can get it here.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow
Last books finished The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Hollow Places, by Christopher Hadley How To Stay Sane In An Age Of Division, by Elif Shafak Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise Doctor Who: The Aztecs, by John Lucarotti
Next books The Aztecs, by Doris V. Sutherland The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
For example, there can be no denying there was one Marjorie in the bundle who was immensely set up by the fact that she was engaged, and going to be at no very remote date mistress of a London house. She was profoundly Plessingtonian, and quite the vulgarest of the lot. The new status she had attained and the possibly beautiful house and the probably successful dinner-parties and the arrangements and the importance of such a life was the substance of this creature’s thought. She designed some queenly dresses. This was the Marjorie most in evidence when it came to talking with her mother and Daphne. I am afraid she patronized Daphne, and ignored the fact that Daphne, who had begun with a resolute magnanimity, was becoming annoyed and resentful.
Now that I’m concentrating on clearing the shelves of unread books acquired in 2019, there’s going to be a lot of lesser-known H.G. Wells over the next couple of months. This is one of them. A young physicist marries a younger woman, and they undergo stresses and strains in their relationship (and have four children) before going off together to darkest Labrador to rebuild their relationship and their lives.
I really liked most of it. I thought the portrayal of two young people who make a lifetime commitment before either of them is really ready for it was very well done, to the point that it was difficult for me to read in some places. The intersection of the academic career, capitalism and family life speaks directly to my own experience, although in our case we found a different solution to a somewhat different situation.
If you can swallow the premise of them going off to Labrador to find themselves while leaving their young children behind in England, the descriptive parts of those sections are also very good. In 1967, Ian Calder, a dentist who was married to a cousin of mine, and his friend Peter Bromley died when their canoe capsized as they explored the Back River in the Northwest Territories; Bromley’s teenaged son survived, but the two older men’s bodies were never found. I must say that Wells’ portrayal of the Labradorean desolation resonated for me with my cousin’s account of the unsuccessful search for her husband’s body.
(Incidentally Wells does not use the word ‘Canada’ even once in this book; Labrador and Newfoundland did not become part of Canada until 1949, 37 years after Marriage was published, so he did not consider his protagonists to be having a Canadian adventure as such.)
What does spoil the book for me is that, stuck in Labrador, his protagonists (especially the bloke, when immobilized after an accident) start going on and on at tedious length to each other about philosophy and politics. Wells’ views on women in society are less enlightened than he obviously thought they were. I think Wells had perhaps reached the point where he thought his readers expected this kind of thing, and perhaps they actually did, but it’s a bit of a yawnfest for us 112 years later. So not quite top marks, which otherwise the depiction of the protagonists’ emotional development in England and their travails in Labrador would have deserved.
The Peloponnesian War was the first real world war in human history. It lasted 29 years and was fought on three continents, Europe, Africa and Asia, involving the biggest part of the then-known western world. The war was fought between two city-states, Athens and Sparta (Lacedaemon) and it was also the first civil war in history. All combatant parties were speaking Greek.
I knew Basil Coronakis from his work as founder of the eccentric Brussels newspaper New Europe, no longer what it once was; Basil himself died in 2021 at the age of 82, but he had given me this book in 2016, soon after publication. Unfortunately I then mislaid it, and only recently found it (literally) at the back of an inaccessible shelf.
Rather like Basil himself, the book eloquently and discursively describes what he thinks is wrong with the EU. Like a lot of us, he did not see Brexit coming, and this book published two months before the referendum assumes that the UK / France / Germany axis will continue to run the EU in perpetuity. He reckoned that the EU was deeply damaged by the Eastern enlargements of 2004 and after, but does not really explain why.
He goes into quite intense detail on some of the cases of maladministration and outright corruption that he uncovered as a journalist. His central point, that EU officials enjoy the comforts of a privileged lifestyle where their decisions affect hundreds of millions, and could perhaps be more helpful to those who question it, surely goes without saying.
I’m not as thoroughly convinced as Basil was that the EU is fatally wounded or unreformable, but I’ve come across enough troubling cases in my own work to feel that he had a good point about continued vigilance. I feel that this would be a useful read for supporters of the European project, to see the criticisms of a former insider and check against their own gut feelings. The second (2017) edition has no doubt been improved; you can get it here.
I decided to bite the bullet and read this, because I am thoroughly ear-wormed by Judy Garland’s hit from the film-of-the-book, “On the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe”:
The film is based on a novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, published a few years earlier in 1942, and like the film set in the 1890s. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
“Your employment card shows experience,” he remarked with an effect of slight incredulity.
I found it terribly charming. The three central characters are young women who go out to Arizona from the Midwest and the East to work in one of the Harvey House chain of restaurants in the fictional town of Sandrock. This was a chain where the waitresses were relentlessly chaperoned and had to sign contracts for six months or a year, basically bargaining away their freedom for a steady income and the chance to meet lots of potential men in a safe environment.
The tone of the book is affectionately satirical. I think if I had been in a more grumpy mood when I read it, I would have found that annoying, but I wasn’t and I didn’t. The girls have to deal with the standard clichés of prospectors, ranchers, sex workers, the evil judge, an English aristocrat who has somehow got lost, and their own upbringings and expectations; one of them has been brought up in an evangelical cult and is Breaking Free.
“I wonder what it would be like to be a carnal snare,” she said to herself, and instantly suppressed the frightening and tempting hypothesis.
It’s a violent book – about a third of the named characters have been killed off by the end, and the threat of coercion lurks ominously in the background. But it’s also a rather cheerful interpretation of the Western legend, by a man but from the women’s point of view. There is a lovely postscript when the survivors get together fifty years later, in the present day (ie the 1940s), making the point to contemporary readers that the Wild West was well within living memory.
Of course the Western genre is thoroughly racist. I think I spotted precisely one black character, and there is a Chinese laundryman in Sandrock (though we are told in the epilogue that his grandchildren have totally assimilated). Native Americans are portrayed only as potential rapists. But it’s also a genre about women’s empowerment, as I have noted before.
The book is available on the Internet Archive, now that that is working again; if you want a hard copy for a huge price you can get it here (please do; I get commission). I had previously come across the author as the writer of the short story that was adapted into the excellent early Oscar winner It Happened One Night, starring Cary Grant and Claudette Colbert, and will keep an eye out for more of his work as it becomes available.
Of course, having read the book I really had to watch the film as well. One thing that struck me immediately is that although the YouTube-friendly cut of “On the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe” starts with Judy Garland emerging from the train that brings her to Sandrock, in fact there is a whole five minutes of song before that, started off by the one credited black actor in the movie, Ben Carter who plays John Henry, the barman in the Alhambra. (Sadly, he died aged 39 later that year.) Here is the whole thing for your delectation and delight – and it is delightful. Judy Garland did her first two and a half minutes here in a single take.
The girl from the crazy evangelist cult in the book is just another one of the girls in the film (played by Cyd Charisse, in her first speaking role) and that nobody actually dies (unlike in the sanguinary novel). Also Angela Lansbury is the lead among the bad girls across the road (and I think the only one who gets any lines), and Ray Bolger, reunited with Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz, does a great turn as the blacksmith who doesn’t actually like horses.
Virginia O’Brien got written out during filming because her pregnancy was impossible to conceal (and she gets one of the good songs as well just before she disappears). Of course the whole thing is firmly wedded to the white colonialist narrative of the American West – a little more so than the book if anything. the Native Americans in the film are silent and passive, there is the one black character and no Asians.
But at the same time, at a moment historically when women were being squeezed back out of the American workforce, this is a story about women carving out their own space in American history and fighting back against men who try and put them in their place. The end of the film sees the ‘respectable’ Harvey girls reconcile with the sex workers across the road to defeat male violence and promote true love. There’s a lot going on here.
1946 was a tremendous year in film. I really liked the Oscar winner, The Best Years of Our Lives, but that year also saw It’s A Wonderful Life and The Big Sleep, neither of which I have seen but both of which are generally rated as more memorable. The Harvey Girls was a pleasant winter’s evening diversion, and I recommend it.
Well, I was worried that this list would be completely dominated by war porn, telling the story of people who know Iraq only through having been been sent there in a brutal and illegal invasion, but in fact I am delighted that a real indigenous epic, possibly the earliest known work in the sff genre, wins this week; also amusing to have two Agatha Christies in the top four.
I disqualified Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, because although it is about the recent Iraq war, it is mostly set in Texas, as is the film.
The top book on my list by an Iraqi writer is Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi, which sounds rather good. (Gilgamesh was probably written by a local, but millennia before the concept of ‘Iraqi’ had any meaning.)
Next up: Argentina, Afghanistan and Yemen. (Yep, despite everything, Yemen has a bigger population than Canada or Poland.)
Published as La Foire aux immortels in 1980, this is set in a near-future Paris which is basically independent, France having collapsed as a state, and run by the fascist mayor Choublanc (Bunglieri in my translation) who is now facing re-election. The suburbs are decaying and run by local gangs. Everyone reads their own preferred news bulletins and information is therefore politically fragmented – an accurate anticipation in some ways.
Less accurately (probably – but who knows?), a giant floating pyramid inhabited by the gods of ancient Egypt has materialised over central Paris, and won’t go away unless supplied with fuel. Meanwhile Alcide Nikopol, a former astronaut who has spent thirty years frozen in suspended animation in orbit, returns to the city. His leg breaks off but is repaired in a rush job by the Horus, who allies with him against his fellow deities to shake up the politics of Paris in 2023.
It’s political and passionate, and fits in with the other lefty French-language 1980s comics which I read a few years back, Les Chroniques du Fin du Siècle by Santi-Bucquoy (Autonomes, Mourir à Creys-Malville, Chooz). It’s less ideological, but similar in the sense of the corruption and decay of the ruling classes, and the need for revolutionary action to bring about a better state of affairs. And the art is riveting.
Though also worth noting that the ice hockey team from Bratislava all speak Russian and their uniforms carry the initials ЧССР – not only did Czechoslovakia stay together in this version of 2023, it was also apparently annexed by the Soviet Union, which is still going strong. Bilal’s mother was Czech, so he knows perfectly well that Russian is not spoken much in Bratislava, nor is the Cyrillic alphabet used much there. (There would have been more of it in 1980 than now, but that’s not saying a lot.)
The second part is set in 2025, but I found reading it that the third part is set in 2034. So it’s only The Woman Trap (La Femme Piège) that concerns my 2025 project. It introduces the iconic character of Jill Bioskop, who is much more interesting than either Nikopol or his son (who looks conveniently identical to him). The art is great but the plot kinda weird, as Jill encounters various men, including the god Horus and the two Nikopols, and finds a fax machine that sends her reports back in time to 1993. (It’s difficult to judge whether a time-bending fax machine is less or more realistic than a fax machine that actually still works in 2024.)
The third part, Cold Equator (Froid Équateur), rather lost me; it’s mostly set in an African city under the rules of the sinister KKDZO, Nikopol gets into a tremendously violent chess-boxing match, and a new woman character, Yéléna the geneticist, forms a rather unexplained connection with Jill. This seems to be all about Stuff Happening with not much clue as to why. Maybe I was just tired.
List the places where you spent a night away from home in 2024; indicate non-consecutive stays with an asterisk. This is the twentieth successive year that I have made this list. I’m not expecting any further trips this year.
* Dublin Airport, Ireland (ie hotel at the airport, I wasn’t sleeping on the concourse) Prague, Czechia * Glasgow, Scotland * Los Angeles, USA Telford, England Bratislava, Slovakia Belfast, Northern Ireland Sheffield, England Antwerp, Belgium * Ferry between France and Ireland, and back Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland Washington DC, USA * London, England Ljubljana, Slovenia Bled, Slovenia Zgornji Brnik, Slovenia Hythe, England Paris, France Prishtina, Kosovo Tbilisi, Georgia
That’s 20 places, same as last year. (Counting the two overnight ferries on the same route, but not the two overnight plane flights.) It’s bang on the historical median since I started counting in 2005. (High – first two years in my current job, 2015 and 2016; low – the plague years of 2020 and 2021.)
Those 20 places were in 12 different countries, as opposed to last year’s 9. (No new countries this year, as compared to two last year.) I also changed planes in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Türkiye, and had a day trip to Luxembourg, so that’s a total of 18 countries, beaten by only three of the fifteen years where I have tracked that number too.
When I first watched the two-part ending of the second Jodie Whittaker season, I wrote:
I was tremendously excited by one aspect of the first episode – no single minute of TV Doctor Who had ever previously been set in Ireland, as I have previously written. Of course, with the revelation of the second part, it turns out that there is still no moment of Doctor Who set in the “real” Ireland, is the one that exists in the same universe as the Doctor and the Tardis rather than just being in the Doctor’s imagination. Again, as someone who saw The Brain of Morbius first time round, I’m not unhappy with the disruption of what a lot of people thought was established continuity.
Rewatching it, I felt that there was a bit too much telling and not enough action. If the real point of the story is the true nature of the Doctor, why are we worrying about the Cybermen? (Except that they are obviously a Bad Thing.) But again, I enjoyed the Irish sections in the first episode, and the revelation of the Doctor’s origins in the second.
Ryan Bradley’s Black Archive on the story is longer than usual, but has only three chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, so that’s a bit of a variation on the usual format. In the introduction, ‘Everything You Know is About to Change’, he sets out his stall: he believes that Chibnall’s agenda as show-runner always was to have the Doctor experience the ‘ego-death’ of psychedelia, and that the story considered here draws heavily on the story of the (real-life) CIA’sa MK-Ultra brianwashing project. These are strong claims.
But in the first chapter, ‘The Harp That Once’, he diverts from those issues to one that is very close to my own heart: the question of how Doctor Who treats Ireland, and especially how Ireland is treated in this episode. I have written myself (at length here in 2018, abbreviated and updated here in 2019 a few months before Ascension of the Cybermen was broadcast) about Ireland in the show. Before getting into Bradley’s analysis, I’ll recapitulate my own: I believe that TV Who doesn’t go to Ireland for much the same reason as it doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or to other historical atrocities: these are topics too controversial for a family show.
Chibnall did nibble at the edges here, with Rosa and Demons of the Punjab, but I would argue that these are different cases – Rosa Parks’ heroism is not remotely controversial these days, and the worst aspects of the 1947 Partition are somewhat sanitised by telling it as the story of one rural family, rather than the urban massacres. It’s also worth noting that Chibnall never returned to that semi-historical format after his first season: The Haunting of Villa Diodati is not presented as historical fact, let alone Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror or War of the Sontarans.
There are more, but still not many, references to Ireland in spinoff novels and comics, and they are generally unsatisfactory – note especially the First Doctor era villain Questor.
Audio is a different matter. There are no less than six Big Finish plays and a BBC Audio Original which are entirely set in Ireland. These go to places where I don’t think TV Who could go – Cromwell’s atrocities; the Famine. Of course, for audio it’s very easy to portray an Irish setting by simply hiring actors with the right accent; TV has to try much harder with the locations (and even here, the relevant bits of Ascension of the Cybermen are filmed in Wales, but indicated as Ireland by diddly-dee music).
Ryan Bradley, like me, is from Northern Ireland, and in this first chapter he explores the conception of Ireland in British culture and in Doctor Who. He points out that Ashad the semi-Cyberman is actually played by a Northern Irish actor, Patrick O’Kane, and draws a parallel between Ashad’s half-transformed nature and Ulster Unionism, or indeed Northern Ireland itself, constructed political concepts which have outlived their original purpose. Ko Sharmus in this story is also played by an Ulsterman, Ian McElhinney.
He goes on to look at some of the previous mentions of Ireland in Old Who, including the Gallifrey joke, and makes the point (which I had missed) that in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Terror of the Autons, Harry Towb’s Northern Irish character McDermott is transformed into a ‘stocky Northcountryman’. He misses a few other examples: Casey in Talons of Weng-Chiang, the less obvious case of Clark in The Sea Devils, and the fairly major characters of McGillop in Day of the Doctor, Morgan Blue in Into the Dalek and Angstrom in The Ghost Monument. (I’ll forgive him Bel in Flux, as it post-dates 2020.)
He then looks at law enforcement, especially the dubious aspects of the history of the Garda Síochána in Ireland (more briefly also the RUC), and at Chibnall’s previous depictions of (British) law enforcement in Broadchurch and Born and Bred. To my surprise my great-great-uncle is mentioned – not one of my Irish family connections (and my great-great-grandfather James Stewart actually was an Irish policeman), but the former US Attorney-General, George W. Wickersham, who chaired the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement in 1929-31. His report is mainly remembered as giving the Hoover administration a ladder to climb down from Prohibition, but it made many interesting findings on police brutality and corruption as well.
But, perhaps because of his concentration on the Gardaí (and to a much lesser extent the RUC), Bradley misses what is surely the most spectacular portrayal of Irish law enforcement in science fiction and fantasy: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which also features human beings turning into machines. (Well, bicycles anyway.) The Third Policeman himself is clearly in the old RIC rather than a Garda, and the novel is set firmly in the Irish Midlands rather than on the coast, but I’d have thought it worth a mention.
[Edited to add: The author himself got in touch to tell me that references to Frankenstein and The Third Policeman were cut from his draft for reasons of space.]
Having said all that, the chapter is very rich in detail and references, and while there are some things that I would have liked to see included, there are others that were new to me, and I found it all very thought-provoking. I don’t think I have ever before written 800 words on a single chapter of a Black Archive (or indeed of any other book).
The second chapter, ‘Any Idiot Can Make Themselves Into a Robot’, starts by looking at Ashad in the context of Bradley’s overall themes of loss of self and hybridization, and briefly notes poor old Lisa in the Torchwood episode Cyberwoman, before moving on to absorption of personalities in Chibnall’s other work, with reference also to Robert Graves and to the First Doctor story The Savages.
The third chapter, ‘Half Sick of Shadows’, looks at what we learn here about the Doctor. Its second paragraph is:
The story has been critiqued for being a ‘scroll through a newly updated Wikipedia page’, but it essentially creates new sections on that page with entirely blank or fragmented entries under them³. Paradoxically, we know more and, perhaps more significantly, less about the Doctor than we previously knew. Their home planet, their species, the number and order of their lives, are all unknown now. Whether audiences should know more or less about the Doctor’s apparent home and past has long been a subject of spirited debate⁴. In one of the most quietly important moments in Ascension of the Cybermen, the Doctor tells Ravio, ‘Don’t need your life story’. While this appears as an oddly self-aware jab at the ill-served side characters of both this story and the Chibnall era as a whole, it anticipates the central issue that the Doctor wrestles with before deciding – both here and at the end of Flux – that she doesn’t need to know everything about her own life story either. ³ Moreland, Alex, ‘Doctor Who Review: The Timeless Children’. ⁴ See Howe, David J, and Stephen James Walker, Doctor Who: The Television Companion, pp313-14.
I’ll be honest, this one lost me a bit in discussion of the Buddhist concept of anattā, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Chibnall’s previous work (again) and She-Ra, among others, but it succeeded in convincing me that the story as a whole is semiotically much thicker than perhaps I first appreciated. (Which maybe makes up for it not being better television.)
A brief conclusion argues that the story is “worth ruminating on”, and I think the book as a whole makes that argument well, though I also think Bradley goes on about the CIA’s MK-Ultra programme at unnecessary length. You can get it here.
‘Don’t ask me, sir,’ replied the harassed man, who had just extricated himself with difficulty from the embrace of a Bessarabian refugee who wanted 237 AA 15 r 3 b Street. ‘All I know is that this is D Street that we’re in—and I believe it, straight. If I was you, I should make a cast up by the Marble Arch.’ He had once upon a time been in the old City police force and still retained traces of a courteous bearing.
I had read a collection of Bramah’s Kai Lung stories in 2015, spotted this going for sale at Eastercon in 2019, and bought it as a potentially interesting future history. It’s pretty horrible actually. Written in 1907, it is set in 1918 after a Socialist government has come to power in the UK (and Ireland has Home Rule); the lefties turn out to be disastrous at actually governing (for certain values of ‘disastrous’) and the forces of conservatism mount a successful campaign of civil disobedience to overthrow the democratically elected ministry, rather as the Unionists did in Northern Ireland in 1974. The book ends with the happy reform of the franchise to restrict it to men with more than £10 to their name, with the extra provision that if you are rich you get more than one vote; this is considered to be a Very Good Thing. Meanwhile in Ireland,
The Parliament sitting at College Green deemed the moment opportune for issuing a Declaration of Independence and proclaiming a republic. Three years before, all Irishmen had been withdrawn from the British army and navy on the receipt of Dublin’s firmly-worded note to the effect that since the granting of extended Home Rule, Irishmen came within the sphere of the Foreign Enlistment Act. These men formed the nucleus of a very useful army with which Ireland thought it would be practicable to hold out in the interior until foreign intervention came to its aid. Possibly England thought so too, for Mr Strummery’s Ministry contented itself with issuing what its members described as a firm and dignified protest. Closely examined, it was discoverable that the dignified portion was a lengthy recapitulation of ancient history; the firm portion a record of Dublin’s demands since Home Rule had been conceded, while the essential part of the communication informed the new republic that its actions were not what his Majesty’s Ministers had expected of it, and that they would certainly reserve the right of taking the matter in hand at some future time more suitable to themselves.
Irish independence is of course portrayed as a Bad Thing.
The pace of the book is energetic, but the politics so repulsive that I cannot really recommend it. If you still want to, you can get it here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2019 and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on both lists is The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett, which I am certain I will enjoy a lot more.
When I first wrote up this year’s Doctor Who episodes, I wrote:
And the fourth in a good run of four episodes was Rogue, in which it turns out that aliens in the Doctor Who universe are also fans of Bridgerton. This had particularly good emoting from Ncuti Gatwa, suddenly taken by feelings for Jonathan Groff’s Rogue, but also had Millie Gibson playing Ruby pretending to be an alien pretending to be Ruby, and getting away with it. The contrast between spaceship and 1813 was well done.
Jonathan Groff of course was the very first King George in Hamilton, and so his voice was the first heard by the audience. I felt that (unlike Jinkx Monsoon) he avoided chewing the scenery here. And I also cheered for Indira Varma, the Duchess here, but previously seen by me in Game of Thrones and the first season of Torchwood.
Re-watching before reading the novelisation, I felt again that as an episode it hangs together very well, even if the imminent peril seems to slightly come out of nowhere (which, let’s face it, is hardly unusual in Doctor Who). Millie Gibson is really spectacularly good. There is, however, one costume that doesn’t really do it for me.
The novelisation is by the writers of the TV episode, Kate Herron and Briony Redman. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
It had been a good night, all in all, but none of it could have prepared Ruby Sunday for a party like this. This was the kind of party she’d dreamed of.
As well as the efficient and effective transfer of script to page, we get lots more back story about Rogue himself and the lover who he lost on a previous mission, and a little more on the Chuldur. Rogue’s ship is named as the Yossarian, perhaps as a nod to Catch-22, though I note also that there is a London band with that name. The book has a lot of humorous flashes as well, reminiscent of Douglas Adams but not trying too hard to be him. This is the best Fifteenth Doctor book so far. You can get it here.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Hollow Places, by Christopher Hadley The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien
Last books finished The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis Sunstone, vol 3, by Stepan Sejić
Next books Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow
According to historian Branden Little, approximately 120 American relief committees were operating in 1914, including organizations such as “Father De Ville’s Milk Fund for Belgian Babies; the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee… King Albert’s Civilian Hospital Fund… the Belgian Relief Fund; the Belgian Relief Committee; and the Commission for Relief in Belgium.”
A few months ago I was showing off the delights of Leuven a friend who has recently moved to Brussels, and challenged her to guess which American president has a square named after him in the city. If you don’t already know, I confidently predicted, you won’t get it in your first ten guesses. I was right. The story of how future president Herbert Hoover co-ordinated the delivery of food to occupied Belgium during the First World War is not well known outside this country, and indeed is a fading memory even here.
This book is a brief but detailed history of the effort an amazing triumph of non-governmental diplomacy and organisation, with food bought in the UK and distributed to the Belgians (and northern French) living under occupation. Hoover had to fight turf wars with other American do-gooders, and establish clear demarcation with the Belgian relief committee about how the distribution was to managed; but those issues pale into insignificance in comparison with the need to get the British and Germans to allow the effort to proceed in the first place despite being locked in vicious war.
The Germans come out as the bad guys, no matter how you look at it. When the Commission for Relief in Belgium complained to the military governor that German soldiers were mistreating their staff, he refused to believe them and sent one of his own men to observe the situation on the ground. The undercover German soldier was beaten up, arrested and jailed by his own comrades who refused to believe his story.
A small team of young Americans, mostly young men, supervised the relief operation on the ground. The recruitment process was basically any Rhodes scholar, or other upper-class white male American student in western Europe, who spoke decent French (as most well-educated Westerners did in those days). That obviously meant that the ‘delegates’, as they were known, were mostly from the northeastern white elite, especially since they were paid a very meagre stipend on top of expenses so that those from a less wealthy background could not afford to do it.
But it reminded me of the OSCE and other international staff who I knew in Bosnia when I was working there immediately after the war of the 1990s, people who were recruited as much for availability as for expertise, whose main role was really to demonstrate the continuing commitment of the international community to the country. It’s not such an awful thing. Going back to the First World War, my grandmother’s elder brother, Lyman C. Hibbard, volunteered not in Belgium but with the ambulances of the American Field Service in France, and was awarded the Croix du Guerre for it.
The author himself is the grandson of one of the American delegates and the Belgian industrialist‘s daughter who he fell in love with, but he doesn’t let that colour the story, which relies on the copious documentation in English. He has laudably put a lot of his source material online for wider use. However, I see only two books in French and two in Dutch out of eighty in the bibliography.
One other point that is not mentioned: the captains of Belgian industry who were able to marshal local resources as part of the effort had made most of their money from exploiting the Congo.
Anyway, it’s a short and digestible book about a quietly heroic moment of history, which is not well enough known. You can get it here.
This is Erivansky Square in the city which was then known as Tiflis, photographed in the 1870s.
And this is Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia, photographed by me this afternoon.
I’m pleased that I was able to stand in almost the same place as the photographer from 150 years ago – note the City Assembly building on the left, and the mountain crags visible down Giorgi Lionidze Street – but the photographer of the 1870s had the advantage of height, maybe on a platform or from the window of a now-vanished building.
On 26 June 1907, this square was the scene of a massive act of Bolshevik terrorism, organized by Stalin and Lenin and executed by Stalin’s Armenian mate known as Kamo. 241,000 roubles were stolen, and dozens of people killed and injured in a bomb and gun attack on the stagecoach transporting money from the main post office to the bank headquarters. The banknotes’ serial numbers were all recorded, so it turned out to be impossible to cash them in Russian banks, and when the Bolsheviks tried cashing them in other European cities in January 1908, they were all detected and most of them were arrested.
Maxim Litvinov, a future Soviet foreign minister, was one of those arrested in January 1908, and expelled from France where he had been living. The French however ruled that the crime was political and refused Russia’s extradition request. Litvinov went instead to stay with his sister, Rifka Levinson, who lived at 15 Clifton Park Avenue in North Belfast. He hung around Belfast for two morose years, smoking cigars, climbing Cave Hill and occasionally teaching Russian at the Berlitz language school. It is rumored that he also worked as a traveling salesman for his brother-in-law’s clothes business, covering the whole of Ireland,
He then moved to England ,where he stayed until 1918, ending his time as the diplomatic representative of the revolutionary government and addressing that year’s Labour Party Conference; he also married Ivy Low in 1916. Back in Moscow, he rose through the ranks, serving as foreign minister of the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1939 and then ambassador to the USA from 1941 to 1943. I doubt that he ever went back to Belfast.
Freedom Square is exciting again these days – it is the centre of the current wave of anti-government demonstrations. But more on that in a future post.
“No woman?” he asked in consternation. He was beginning now to be accustomed to these conversations with her in which her part was little more than a movement of head or hand, or at most an occasional word dropped unwillingly from her wide mouth. He had even come to feel no lack in such conversing. “But it will be odd with only two men in the house!” he continued. “My mother had a woman from the village. I know nothing of these affairs. Is there none in the great house, no old slave with whom you were friends, who could come?”
The best-selling novel of the early 1930s, telling the story of Wang Lung, a Chinese farmer who goes from poverty to wealth, his two wives, his evil uncle, and his various children, one of whom is disabled and requires full-time care (as did one of the author’s own children). I am sure that there are many errors of detail, but its heart is very much in the right place, confronting its American and European readers with a vast and ancient culture where the foreigners are probably the bad guys, and where power is shifting rapidly away from the old rulers. I found it gripping and efficiently written. You can get it here.
It would be interesting to know how it is regarded in China, if at all. Its Chinese Wikipedia entry has just a dry plot summary. (Japanese Wikipedia discusses the possibility that it was written as anti-Japanese propaganda.)
The book itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 on the back of this and its two sequels. It bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously – top book acquired so far this year, top unread book by a woman and top non-sf fiction. Next on those piles are The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne (though I may not get all the way through it, it sounds rather dull); The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.
Not a big surprise for the top spot here. There is a myth that Albert Camus was goalkeeper for the Algerian national football team. This is not true; there was no Algerian national football team until the war of independence, and while it’s true that the teenage Camus was goalkeeper in the 1930s for the junior team of Algeria’s top club, Racing Universitaire d’Alger, he had to give it up when he contracted tuberculosis at 18. Football clearly had a lasting effect on him though.
Quite a lot of books had to be excluded here because, despite their authors’ Algerian origins, the books themselves are largely or entirely set elsewhere, if anywhere at all. The Confessions of St Augustine are more in modern Tunisia (and Italy). Camus’ The Fall is set in France and the Netherlands, and his The Myth of Sisyphus is a non-fiction piece with no specific geographical setting. So is Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The Roman-era author Apuleius was born in Madaurus in the province of Numidia, but his best known work, The Golden Ass, is set in what is now modern Greece.
And Yasmina Khadra’s two top books, Swallows of Kabul and The Attack, are set in Afghanistan and Israel respectively. Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night, which is set in Algeria, just missed the cut and is ninth on the ranking.
I’m allowing The Eight by Katherine Neville, although it sounds like a very silly book. Apparently the more modern of the two timelines is firmly moored in Algeria. I am not tempted to find out for myself. And five of the six short stories in Camus’ Exile and the Kingdom are definitely set in Algeria, so that’s good enough for me. And the first two of the three stories in the initial Rabbi’s Cat album are in Algiers.
The numbers here did show a big cultural difference for one writer in particular: Ahlam Mosteghanemi, whose two top books Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses have been ranked by a massive 25,290 and 19,812 Goodreads users respectively, in fifth and sixth place by GR stats, but they are owned by only 92 and 41 LibraryThing users, so they fell some way below my cutoff when I multiplied the two together. She sounds like a really interesting writer.
I have been chasing an odd little pair of footnotes in the family genealogy. My great-great-grandfather had seven sons, five of whom died during the Napoleonic wars (including Thomas Whyte). The oldest, Charles John Whyte, died in November 1803 leaving a pregnant wife; their son, also Charles John Whyte, was born in February 1804. In the usual course of things, the family estates would have gone to the younger Charles John after his grandfather; but in December 1804 his mother remarried a much older Protestant Englishman with indecent haste, and the Whytes disinherited the baby Charles John Junior, who was being brought up as a Prod.
Despite this unpromising start, not to mention the well-publicised travails of his older sister Letitia, Charles John Whyte Junior did well. He enlisted in the 95th Regiment of Foot and rose to the rank of captain; he married a young widow in 1832 and settled in Spanish Point in County Clare (later the home town of President Patrick Hillery); and they had seven sons and three daughters, all of whom survived childhood (with perhaps one exception, as we shall see) and about half of whom have living descendants, some of whom I have met.
The oldest three of the seven sons went into the army, and the next two into the navy. The younger of these two was Joseph Whyte, born in Limerick on 12 October 1840. On 10 January 1856, three months after his fifteenth birthday, he enrolled in the Royal Navy with the rank of Master’s Assistant, and was assigned to H.M.S. Sappho, which left Portsmouth in March 1856 with orders to fight the slave trade off the West African coast.
The Sappho, under command of Fairfax Moresby (whose father of the same name is more famous), intercepted and seized three American ships in 1857, and liberated hundreds of slaves. However the owners and crew of the first to be seized, the Panchita, successfully argued that they really weren’t involved in the slave trade and just happened to be hanging around the African coast at the time; Congress passed a resolution condemning the British actions against it and Moresby was reprimanded by the Admiralty and reassigned, with H.M.S. Sappho to Australia.
They never got there, or at least not to landfall. Sappho left the Cape of Good Hope on 8 January 1858 and was seen by another ship at the western end of the Bass Strait, not far from Melbourne, on 18 February. This would have been only a couple of days sail from the ultimate destination, Sydney. But as the months went on, there was no trace of the Sappho, and eventually it was concluded that they were lost in a storm soon after they were last seen; and the 147-odd crew were all declared dead, including 17-year-old Joseph Whyte.
The fate of the Sappho is still a topic of interest to Australian historians. Its wreckage has never been found, but the Bass Strait is fairly shallow, so if that is where it did meet its fate, it should be a good target for scientific investigation. See more about it here.
Joseph Whyte was the sixth of his parents’ ten children. The youngest, Frederick Whyte, was born on 8 July 1852, when his older brother was not quite 12, and was 5 when the Sappho disappeared. We don’t have a lot of detail about Frederick’s life. He qualified as a Master Mate in June 1873, the month before his 21st birthday, and he signed on as Able Seaman with the SS Baroda in May 1874. The Baroda was one of the ships of the Liverpool-based Brocklebank Line; it was built in 1864 by the then recently founded Harland and Wolff in Belfast.
The only other record I have of Frederick is from twenty years later, when he was serving as Third Mate on the SS Hydarnes, also a Liverpool ship with the Houston Line, which specialised in an express weekly steamship service from Liverpool to Buenos Aires. All of the Houston Line’s ships had names beginning with H; in 1897 the other were the Hellenes, the Hesperides, the Heliades, the Heraclides, the Hellopes and the Hippomenes. The name Hydarnes is unusual here because it’s actually Persian; all the rest are obviously Greek.
The SS Hydarnes
On 27 February 1897, the Hydarnes set off on its usual run to Buenos Aires, with a crew of 43; and, like the Sappho thirty-nine years earlier, it never arrived. The usual sailing time would be around a month, so it was probably not until April that people would have started to worry. But there is nothing that can be done; they were gone, without a trace. Assuming that the ship sank in mid-ocean, the wreckage is thousands of metres below the surface and will probably never be located.
It’s a bit surprising that Frederick Whyte left no further official bureaucratic trace than this in the 44 years of his life. One of the other brothers (as it happens, the other naval recruit) had died in the meantime, but the other four all married and had children, as did all three sisters. (The pioneering gynaecologist Gladys Sandes was the granddaughter of the oldest sister). Perhaps a physical investigation of the archives in Liverpool will tell me what Frederick was doing between the Baroda and the Hydarnes. Perhaps he had good reason, now lost in history, to cut off links with the rest of the family.
I don’t know how often shipwreck was a cause of death for Irishmen in the second half of the nineteenth century; but I also don’t know of any other cases in my extended genealogy, and it’s an odd coincidence that the only two should be brothers in the same generation, my second cousins twice removed. When the Hydarnes sank, Kitty Hawk was still six years in the future, but for all its inconveniences, I suspect that air travel is much safer all round.
First off, I have pretty much dropped off WeChat over the course of the year. My mornings are bleary-eyed enough without also thinking about posting last night’s blog post to a new audience, and I wasn’t really getting much traction. My 122 WeChat friends, I love you all (well, apart from you obviously) but I’m a very occasional visitor these days.
Bluesky (2.6k followers, 1.6k following) is the clear winner for me of the current microblogging platforms. There has been a massive shift towards it from both sf fans and Irish/EU political commentators, which are two of my core areas of interest, and I seem to have featured in a few ‘starter packs’ so my follower count has rocketed over the last few weeks. I’m definitely getting more engagement there than on any of the others right now. It’s also rather easy to block or mute people you really don’t want to engage with, whereas Twitter/X has made that more difficult. My one big complaint is that there isn’t yet a good way to auto-post from WordPress to Bluesky, whereas all the others make it easy. There is a simple auto-poster, but it posts only your featured image and the title of the post and summary as a caption to that image; it’s not very flexible though it does work.
X/Twitter (8,059 followers, 5,044 following) is still a place where I need to be keeping an eye on things, because the American commentariat has not yet made the jump to elsewhere. I’m doing a series of meetings next week with half a dozen US foreign policy specialists, and some Europeans who are in that area too; all of them still have X/Twitter accounts, most of them fairly active. I think the day will come when Elon loses that community also; for now I’m monitoring but not really engaging, and in return the engagement rate on my posts has dropped off a cliff – usually 200 views if I am lucky, which is 0.25% of the accounts who theoretically follow mine.
Mastodon (780 followers, 673 following) is a bit too much like hard work, the Linux of the microblogging world. As I have commented before, it’s almost impossible to find new and interesting content; you have to hope that you sample the content firehose at the right moment and see the good stuff as it passes by. (And when I have brought this up before, Mastodon advocates tell me proudly that it’s deliberately designed that way.) I did get a massive take-up there of the IKEA product name meme last weekend, but I think I had a couple of strategic boosters working to my advantage.
Threads (526 followers, 909 following) is also low on my list for continued engagement. The thing I really hate is that the default display is the algorithmically chosen feed; while that’s not as bad as it once was (there was a time when I was being shown exclusively content about illness, bereavement and divorce) I still want to see the stuff chosen by me rather than by the computer. There are a few people who I follow there who are not on other platforms, but otherwise I’m at the X/Twitter stage of monitoring without much enthusiasm.
Instagram (1324 followers, 2908 following) remains a fun place to post fun pictures. I like the fact that it crossposts to Facebook and Threads. I don’t expect much more from it. I have a mini-project of posting interesting art on Thursdays, which I usually then share on other platforms as well.
Facebook (4898 friends, another couple of hundred followers) remains a place where I catch up with my extended community, sometimes at greater length. The algorithm is getting worse though, and more variable. Too often I find myself logging on and scrolling through advertisements and community clickbait in order to reach actual content from actual friends. (And when I say ‘too often’, I mean ‘once or twice a week’, which is once or twice too many.) And sorry, no, I am not going to watch yet another video.
Finally, LinkedIn (7626 connections, also many more followers) is becoming more and more of a professional necessity, which is astonishing given that it is the oldest of the lot. (LinkedIn dates from 2003 – compare Facebook 2004, Twitter 2006, Instagram 2010, WeChat 2011, Mastodon 2016, Bluesky 2019, Threads 2023.) It is the one platform which has managed to shift user behaviour to a different sort of content production. Granted, a lot of it is “what a fantastic job I have working for such a fantastic company”, but I’d rather have relentless (if insincere) positivity than relentless (and impassioned negativity. And I find it useful for other purposes.
So, as I said last year, LinkedIn is the surprise winner so far of the decline of Twitter, as far as I am concerned; though Bluesky is chasing hard, and as soon as the American commentariat realise that they can switch platforms, the final collapse will happen.
As for the future of this blog: I am looking with interest at the various paid models. My most important audience here is myself, but I do miss the glory days of Livejournal when I could have dozens of comments on an interesting post. Maybe those days are gone, whatever the platform; but I miss them.
‘I couldn’t possibly,’ said Peri politely. ‘I’m still full after our lunch.’
Second last of the Sixth Doctor books that I read in 2015 and failed to blog at the time. To be honest, I didn’t get much out of this; the Doctor and Peri land on a planet where Autons are re-enacting the dramas of 1980s soaps, a cultural phenomenon that I’m not especially invested in. It turns out that the Nestene Consciousness is the offspring of Shub-Niggurath from the Lovecraft mythos. There are some fun nods to other parts of the Doctor Who canon. One for completists. You can get it here (at a price).
Next up: Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Beyond Utopia: The Dystopian Capitalist Society in Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863)”, by Murielle El Hajj):
At first sight, the reader thinks that Paris in the Twentieth Century depicts a utopian aspect of the Parisian society in the twentieth century. Verne opens the novel with a portion of the Parisian populace heading to the metro stations from where local trains will take them to Champ-de-Mars. It was August 13, 1960: The Prize Day at the Academic Credit Union. The latter and the age’s industrial aims were “in perfect harmony” (Verne 1996, 21). However, this ideal state of society, where no distress prevails and where no one is unhappy or hopeless seems to be just an illusion. The reader deduces the declination of society, and even its dehumanization, underlining a dystopian world controlled by tyrannical governments and facing environmental disasters.
A collection of ten short essays on futuristic science fiction, a topic which I also enjoy reading and writing about, all rather academic and unfortunately imperfectly edited; the English is clunky in places, and I was startled to read that “Victoria Butler” wrote Parable of the Sower.
But the essays, all written in the shadow of COVID for this 2022 collection, are all decent enough looks at specific works, some of which I know and some of which I don’t:
French writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 (1771)
Argentinian writer Leopoldo Antonio Lugones Argüello’s short stories collected in Las fuerzas extrañas (1906)
Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century, unpublished until 1994
Martin Robinson Delany’s African-American freedom novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1859-1862)
Two Russian works of the early Communist era about human-animal hybrids: Alexander Belyaev’s novel The Amphibian Man (1928) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella Heart of a Dog (1925)
The great French sf writer René Barjavel, especially his 1943 novel Ravage / Ashes, Ashes
For the four essays where I already knew the source material, the authors gave me new insights (the Orwell chapter perhaps the weakest), and all of the other chapters succeeded in making me want to read the works they were about, with Blake and the long-lost Verne sounding the most attractive. I was sorry though that in their analysis of successors and imitators of Edward Bellamy, Majed Al-Lehaibi and Bernard Montonori don’t mention Oesterreich im Jahre 2020!
(Fewer than a dozen nuclear weapons, small ones, had been used in twelve years of war. A large one had destroyed Atlanta, and although the Ngumi denied responsibility, the Alliance responded by giving twenty-four hours notice, and then leveling Mandellaville and Sao Paulo. Ngumi contended that the Alliance had cynically sacrificed one nonstrategic city so it could have an excuse to destroy two important ones. Julian suspected they might be right.)
Next in my sequence of joint Hugo and Nebula winners. When I first read it in 2002, I wrote:
Julian Class and his lover Amelia Harding are physicists at a Texas university in 2049. Julian is also a part-time conscripted soldier, fighting ten days a month in the Central American front of a war between the developed world and the developing world, but doing his fighting by remote control as the brains of a military robot. He and his platoon are linked by a neurological modification known as “jacking” which enables them to share each others’ sensations, experiences and memories. He is also the part-time narrator of the book, which drops into third person now and then, giving the impression that his memories have been assembled by a later editor to make a coherent whole. Haldeman used a slightly similar presentation in his earlier The Long Habit of Living and I first came across this technique used to devastating effect in the books based on the TV series Yes, Minister! and Yes, Prime Minister! In this case, of course, it helps the author get around the problem of a first-person narrator who has suicidal impulses; by dropping into the third person now and again we readers are kept guessing as to whether or not the narrator makes it to the end of the book (cf. Podkayne of Mars, Flowers for Algernon.)
When Haldeman writes in the foreword to Forever Peace that it examines some of the problems of his earlier novel, The Forever War, “from an aspect that didn’t exist twenty years ago”, one of the problems in question must surely be the evolution of humanity towards the day “when violence towards another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh”, to use the words of Martin Luther King quoted in the first pages of the book. The aspect that (I guess) didn’t exist in 1974 is the concept of nanotechnology and by extension the whole set of ideas about the human/computer interface associated with the cyberpunk movement, which came to the fore in sf only in the 1990s. It transpires that those who have been “jacked” with other people for more than two weeks become “humanised”, incapable of deadly violence against other human beings. Julian and Amelia (who for various reasons are both excluded from being affected in this way themselves) decide that this is a Good Thing and conspire with their friends to get the entire command structure of the US military modified in this way.
There is a second conspiracy, one which they are working against. It turns out that the vastly ambitious particle physics experiment Amelia has been working on has the potential to end the universe (or at least the solar system) by replicating the conditions of the Big Bang. A millennialist conspiracy within the higher reaches of the US government decides that the end of the world would be a Good Thing and resolves to thwart Amelia’s efforts to prevent the experiment from being carried out. Various agents are sent to stop them, including a memorably sexy female assassin. But the good guys triumph just in time. Some find the idea of such conspiracies at high level in the US government unconvincing. Well, first of all, it’s a novel, and novels contain things which are not true but make a good story. Secondly, I’ve been sufficiently involved in shedding light on various Balkan conspiracies involving the highest levels of government that little can surprise me any more.
The future war in Central America is between a developed world fighting largely by remote control, and an indigenous population absorbing most of the casualties; from the 1997 perspective, this must have seemed a reasonable extrapolation from the 1990-91 Gulf War, and indeed Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 were largely fought on that basis. Haldeman even has a massive, one-off attack on a major American city, though it’s nuking Atlanta rather than jumbo jets in New York. The descriptions of the conflict are graphic, on a par with Lucius Shepard’s Life In Wartime, and the narrative is particularly gripping as the assassin closes in on our heroes towards the end. As a novel, it works. The portrayal of Julian’s suicidal impulses and emotional confusion is convincing, and we the readers can see what is really going on for Amelia through his perceptions. The fact that neither main characters is able to share in the jacked consciousness of the newly enhanced humanity is rather poignant. The final couple of pages, describing the victory of the good guys, are perhaps a little too rapid, and when we first encounter those who have already been “humanised” in their North Dakota hideout, I found the scene rather reminiscent of the decaying scientists in the 1983 Doctor Who story Mawdryn Undead, which slightly spoiled it for me. But in general, I felt the tone was more mature and the ending more plausible, if the style a little less raw, than Haldeman’s earlier Hugo and Nebula winner, The Forever War.
One of the least successful aspects of Haldeman’s earlier book is its portrayal of a pacifist end-state for the human race. The Big Idea of Forever Peace is that this pacifist end-state can be achieved by technological intervention; through the sharing of our common humanity via “jacking”. Now, the idea that the Next Big Step in human evolution will involve a fundamental shift in consciousness is quite an old one, with honorable antecedents in Olaf Stapledon and George Bernard Shaw up to Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Greg Bear’s Blood Music. The angle is still an unusual one. I was reminded a bit of Frank Herbert’s minor novel, The Santaroga Barrier, where the hero begins by rejecting the prospect of a new form of human consciousness but end up eagerly participating. Forever Peace‘s biggest flaw, as a novel examining issues of humanity and morality, is that it lacks an examination of the ethics of forcing major (and risky) brain surgery on people to bestow on them the benefits of the evolutionary leap forward.
Coming back to it twenty-two years later, I feel that it has not aged especially well. The waging of war remotely, and the attached civilian horrors, perhaps resonate with today’s atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza, though of course these are being largely waged by drone and missile, with deployment of human troops a smaller part of the story than was the case fifty years ago (though still very important). We can see now that Haldeman’s anthropomorphic soldier robots are militarily unnecessary.
And who would have thought that rather than conspiracy theorists in government needing to hide their activities from the authorities, they would actually be getting cabinet-level appointments from the incoming president of the United States?
And the woman assassin at the end is just a little bit too homicidally competent to be true.
Anyway, you can get it here. Next up is “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson.
Usually in these entries I go through the other Hugo and Nebula contenders for that year, but this was in the odd period when the Nebulas seemed to part company with quality control. I wrote at the time (though I think my views have shifted a bit over the last two decades):
Since the Nebulas changed their eligibility criteria to allow novels to be considered two years running, the number of works winning both Hugo and Nebula has decreased quite dramatically. Between 1966 and 1996, 15 novels and 34 shorter works pulled off the double, ie on average more than one each year, in each case winning Hugo and Nebula for different years but awarded in the same year. Since 1996, one novel (Forever Peace) and one shorter work (Jack Williamson’s “The Ultimate Earth”) have managed to win both awards, in both cases for the same year but awarded in different years. [We now know that in fact “The Ultimate Earth” kicked off a new sequence of joint wins, but that wasn’t knowable in December 2002 when I wrote this.]
It seems quite clear that, for whatever reason, the profiles of the sf likely to win each award has diverged. My own experience is that the Nebula Award final ballot is not very useful for me in identifying novels that I would like to read, and two of the three awards for Best Novel made since Forever Peace are, in my humble opinion, completely incomprehensible.* The Hugo shortlist, on the other hand, always includes several books that I already own and I usually enjoy tracking down and reading the others; and while I may disagree with three of the four Hugos for Best Novel awarded since Forever Peace I can at least understand what the voters saw in them.** Perhaps there are SF readers out there for whom the Nebulas in recent years make sense, but I have not heard from any of them.
* For the record: I consider The Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler, to be a comprehensible and worthy winner of the Nebula Award for 2000, though had I been voting I would probably have gone for George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings or Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division. I cannot say the same for Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, which beat both A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold and Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson for the 2001 award. And while the 2002 shortlist is generally uninspiring, with the singular exception of George R.R. Martin’s superb A Storm of Swords, I simply cannot comprehend the award going to Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose, with its awful stereotyped romantic lead characters and contrived attempts to link the plot to quantum mechanics.
** The Hugo Award I agree with was the 1999 one to To Say Nothing Of the Dog, by Connie Willis. For 2000 I’d have picked A Civil Campaign or Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon over A Deepness in the Sky, for 2001 Ken MacLeod’s The Sky Road or George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords rather than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and for 2002 Bujold’s Curse of Chalion rather than Gaiman’s American Gods, but I’ll admit that it’s a close call in all three cases and I certainly respect the judgement of those who voted the other way.
There were no novels on both the relevant Hugo and Nebula final ballots other than Forever Peace; it beat the following year’s Hugo winner, To Say Nothing of the Dog, for the Nebula. That year’s Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo winner was Contact; there was no SFWA equivalent.
