My question to the Member of Parliament for Eastbourne:
@nwbrux I was in Remembrance of the Daleks (part 2). Tiny role which made me appreciate I was likely the most unsuccessful actor in London!
— Stephen Lloyd (@StephenLloydEBN) November 2, 2014
The latest in Sandifer’s collections of pieces from his long-running blog, this time looking at the post-Hinchcliffe Fourth Doctor stories (and therefore including not only the Graham Williams era, but the first year of Jon Nathan-Turner’s producership). This includes some of the least popular stories ever (eg Underworld) but also some of the most (City of Death). Sandifer mounts a credible defence of Graham Williams – unfairly maligned by Nathan-Turner, and by fandom during the JNT era; dealing with appalling constraints both creative (instructed to tone down the violence after the Hinchcliffe years; then instructed to dial back the humour, which didn’t leave much) and technical (the show, and the BBC, simply running out of money). He also finds more evidence than I thought possible for the influence of Douglas Adams on the show, not only during his time as scipt editor, but both before and after. (And, of course, vice versa.)
Most importantly, he finds that Williams was compelled to turn Doctor Who into the Tom Baker Show, which is of course great for us Tom Baker fans, but not so great for the show’s long-term health. Nathan-Turner then took over and found himself in the same position as Innes Lloyd in 1966 – the show was defined around the lead actor; how to take it forward without him? One senses that Sandifer has more to say about JNT in future volumes, but here he concentrates on Christopher Bidmead’s contribution to Season 18. There are the usual excellent side essays – one previously unpublished on versions of Shada, several on comics, novels and other SF media (in particular Star Wars), an explanatory note on the Winter of Discontent, and what I think is the first write-up of a Big Finish play in this series of books (a lovely piece on The Auntie Matter).
I confess I was a little disappointed on one or two points. The pieces on The Invasion of Time and The Leisure Hive didn’t actually say much about either story, and I think both are interesting in their own right, for good or ill. Although he rightly singles out Lalla Ward for praise, I would have liked to read more about Louise Jameson and particularly John Leeson, who is given less page time than Matthew Waterhouse. A sequence of thought about David Fisher is started but not finished. There seems to be a lot of dialogue with Wood and Miles. And some of the key points about Williams and Nathan-Turner, summarised above, are repeated as often as you would expect in a series of blog posts, but perhaps more often than you would expect in a book that has been edited.
Still, if this is the weakest of the four volumes so far, that should in no way be considered faint praise; I’m nominating it enthusiastically for the BSFA and Hugo awards next year, and I hope you will too.
This is the very latest Doctor Who prose to be published, a short ebook by Holly Black, well-known horror writer for younger readers, which is actually a coda to the eleven ebooks published last year, one for each Doctor; presumably the whole lot will appear in paper as a collection soon. (My advice – buy it, but skip the rather weak opening story by Eoin Colfer.)
This is very good. We have a non-human protagonist and the Twelfth Doctor (between Deep Breath and Into The Dalek) having an adventure as a consequence of getting coffee at an interplanetary coffee joint, in which you find just precisely the sorts of aliens from both Old and New Who who you would expect to see stopping off for a break between adventures. The tropes of both the Whoniverse and sf more widely are beautifully handled and the story, though very short, packs a decent punch. Well worth the (very low) price.
I had not read any of Black’s work before, being a couple of decades out of the target readership, but if this is her standard I can see why she has a following.
This was given to us by a dear Alaskan friend in Bosnia back in 1998, and I read it pretty avidly then; my other half, however, gave it up as too awful after the second dead baby. (The second is not the last.) Rereading it, I still think it's a tremendous tour de force, an agonising story of poverty and how Ireland can wreck your family; I am perhaps a little better read in this sub-genre now, but it remains a classic.
If you haven't read it, it's the Pulitzer-winning autobiography of Frank McCourt, son of a Limerick lass and an Antrim lad, born in New York in 1930, but propelled back to Limerick by the Great Depression and by his father's alcoholism and utter inability to hold down a job. Angela, his mother, sometimes holds it together and sometimes doesn't; they are treated by church and layfolk as the undeserving poor; significantly, rather late in the book, Frank gets his first real break working for the remnant Protestant community of Limerick. There are some funny moments, but in general it's a grimly realistic account of the Years of the Great Test, and how they played out for the most vulnerable. (Perhaps a little exaggerated – I don’t believe a word of the Theresa Carmody subplot.)
So; I think it’s a great story about poverty and social exclusion, and the damage caused by addiction; I think one has to take it with a slight pinch of salt; but even without the pinch, it’s a compelling tale.
Having been disappointed with the first Twelfth Doctor novel I read, I can reassure you that Justin Richards (who I regard as New Who’s Terrance Dicks, in terms of his output of books and general ability to produce readable prose) is on form here, with the Doctor and Clara dropping in on the Paternoster Gang, who are investigating mysterious deaths linked to a carnival. Strax gets some particularly good lines (I see Jenny/Vastra fans complaining that we don’t get enough of them, so be warned) and there are also some great moments of horror, pitched well for the target age group. And we get cameo appearances from the other Doctors (or an alien pretending to be them) as well. Great fun.
As you know, Bob, I spent a lot of time reading The Decline and Fall of he Roman Empire a few years back, and it certainly made me a Gibbon fan. This is a collection of essays from a conference commemorating the 200th anniversary of his death, in 1994, concentrating on the second half of the great work. Most of them are solid contributions, acknowledging Gibbon’s pioneering genius on a particular topic, noting also his flaws, and updating us on how scholarship has moved on since. There were a few that stood out for me.
Well worth getting hold of for us Gibbon fans.
The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, by Jillian Lauren
Edward Gibbon and Empire,eds. Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault
Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt
Fiction (non-sf) 1 (YTD 37)
The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë
SF (non-Who) 9 (YTD 94)
β2
γ2
δ2
Wool, by Hugh Howey
Up the Walls of the World, by James Tiptree
ε2
ζ2
η2
θ2
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 52)
Divided Loyalties, by Gary Russell
The Room with No Doors, by Kate Orman
Camera Obscura, by Lloyd Rose
Silhouette, by Justin Richards
Lights Out, by Holly Black
Comics 0 (YTD 17)
~6,500 pages (YTD ~71,600)
9/19 (YTD 67/244) by women (Lauren, McKittrick, Brontë, γ2, Tiptree, ε2, Orman, Rose, Black)
0/19 (YTD 16/244) by PoC
Reread: 1/19 – Angela’s Ashes (YTD 9/244)
Reading now:
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
two others
Coming soon (perhaps):
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing
Liberal Language, by Graham Watson
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
Elizabeth’s Bedfellows, by Anna Whitelock
Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards
The Jonah Kit, by Ian Watson
The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
Stopping for a Spell, by Diana Wynne Jones
Kushiel’s Justice, by Jacqueline Carey
Tree and Leaf, by J R R Tolkien
Wages of Sin, by Andrew M. Greeley
Getting the Buggers to Behave, by Sue Cowley
Het achterhuis, by Anne Frank
The Balkans, by Misha Glenny
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Een geweer in het water, by Hermann
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
Transit of Earth
The Painted Man, by Peter V. Brett
The Egyptian, by Mika Waltari
Empire of Death, by David Bishop
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
Time Zero, by Justin Richards
The Eighth Doctor Adventures were getting pretty self-referential by this stage, but this is a good case study – Rose brings the Doctor, Fitz and Anji to a very well realised Victorian Engliand, where they find a rogue time machine and a stage act very reminiscent of a Christopher Priest novel that came out not long before; and there are references to Evil of the Daleks and City of Death which are subtle and not pushed too hard. And Sabbath, a recurring character who had so far failed to engage me, turns into a very interesting adversary here, both a foe and an unwitting ally for the Doctor. One of the good ones.
This is pretty good – a book with three plot lines, human researchers in a secret lab and two different alien viewpoints, of which the most memorable is the race of telepathic flying creatures inhabiting the upper reaches of a gas giant’s atmosphere. Part of it is the interaction between the three groups – when the narrative strands decisively intersect about half way through, it comes as a real structural shock to the reader. But Tiptree also uses the aliens for whom child-rearing is the highest-status occupation as a mirror to reflect and observe our own world, gender roles and power politics and all. She is of course best known for her short stories but I’d recommend this as well (to the three of you who haven’t already read it).
The New Adventures coming to an end – only two more to go, only one of those with the Seventh Doctor – and here we have lots of closure for the Doctor and particularly for poor Chris, suffering guilt over the demise of Roz two books ago, not to mention what’s happened since. The plot involves Japan during the Shogunate and aliens which resemble chickens, and it’s a bit confusing to be honest, but one feels that Chris is getting a decent send-off.
Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
ℵ1
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
θ2
Last books finished
Camera Obscura, by Lloyd Rose
ζ2
Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick
Silhouette, by Justin Richards
η2
Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt
Lights Out, by Holly Black
Next books
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Empire of Death, by David Bishop
Books acquired in last week
Lights Out, by Holly Black
Europe, a Leap into the Unknown, by Victoria Martín de la Torre
T.K. Whitaker: Portrait of a Patriot, by Anne Chambers
This book was recommended to me by a former professional ice-hockey player called Elvis. A good call – it's set in a future where what's left of humanity is trapped in cramped underground silos, protected from the poisoned and corrosive atmosphere, and the worst punishment imaginable is to be sent outside for a "cleaning", to slowly die in the tainted air. Of course, the existing power structure is founded on lies and oppression, and one young woman finds herself with a mission to overturn the existing order. I really enjoyed it – apparently a case of self-publishing going right – and am rather surprised I hadn't picked up much buzz about it from my usual fandom sources.
I took a week off earlier this month, and decided to read something a bit different if I read anything at all. I ended up with this account of a teenager who graduated from New York escorting to joining the girls maintained by the Sultan of Brunei's younger brother in his palace, providing company and occasional sex. As one might expect, there was a constant jockeying for position, with one woman (who we are told was a former Filipino soap star) ensconced as #1 girlfriend until she decided to leave; Jillian Lauren describes her own short-lived ascent to the position of #2 girlfriend, and one senses that her heart was not in the intense political and emotional combat with her co-workers which would have been necessary to maintain that position. She got a decent amount of cash and vast amounts of material goods in return for being available for sex with the prince at his whim, before she too decided that she had had enough and moved back to the USA.
Given that harems have been a part of how courts operate in many different cultures throughout history, it is interesting to read this very recent account. Of course, the girls in Brunei were able to leave much more easily than most historical harem women were; they were paid handsomely for staying (though they were also under strict orders not to leave the palace, which is the only coercive element reported), and one suspects that the royal family's external agents got a decent commission as well for finding them. The voices of sex workers are pretty silent in general, and it's refreshing to read a story that packs in so much without being titillating.
Lauren waited fifteen years to publish her account, which perhaps gave her the necessary perspective to make it a clear-eyed coming-of-age story. It's uncomfortable reading in places – particularly, I found, in the American sections at the beginning and end, rather than the Brunei episodes which are too different from my own experience to do more than boggle at. A farly brief and breezy read, which you finish with a strong sense that the author is glad to have put it all behind her.
Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.
When I asked people to guess the origin of this quote, eight years ago, nobody identified the work it came from and only
I must say I found it pretty interesting in its own right. I'll admit that it's journeyman stuff – there is some tedious front-matter packing our hero off to Belgium, and an extraneous happy-ever-after final chapter; the Belgians themselves get a rather poor press; there are a couple too many happy coincidences; and not all of the characters are as rounded as perhaps one might like. But the narrative core is sound: Charlotte Brontë has gender-flipped her own experience, with the (male) narrator falling in love with one of his colleagues; he overcomes adverse circumstances so that their love can win out. There is a moving climax in the Protestant cemetery, demolished long since but located at the northern end of what's now Rue Du Noyer just off the Chausée de Louvain.
It’s not great literature in itself, but it’s a promising start, and it’s much more firmly rooted in the Brussels environment than Villette. Certainly it will give me something else to think about next time I’m wandering past the Palais des Beaux-Arts.
Kindly bought for me by my in-laws as a Christmas present a few years back, this is a biography of the physicist Paul Dirac, and how he navigated the difficulty of being the smartest person in the room in almost every room he was ever in. As a former student of physics in Cambridge, I was of course familiar with his work, and in particular the bra-ket notation which I always found very elegant. There may even have been a time when I understood the Dirac equation; I can at least put it into HTML:
| (βmc2 + c(α1p1 + α2p2 + α3p3)) ψ(x,t) = iℏ | ∂ψ(x,t) |
| ∂t |
Anyway. Dirac had a more interesting life than the average academic physicist; brought up in Bristol, as the child of a Swiss father and English mother (who did not get on but stuck it out with each other for decades), and ending up eventually in Cambridge and finally Florida, with spells elsewhere, notably Princeton, where he married the sister of the bloke whose office was between his and Einstein’s. He is the chap bang in the middle of the 1927 Solvay Conference photograph, behind Einstein’s right shoulder (left as we look at the group). He was 25, and the youngest participant.
I quite often pass the spot where this picture was taken (the building is now a school, just beside the European Parliament) and if I am with someone I tell them the story of how the universe was reshaped there, 87 years ago. (Incidentally I caught Farmelo out on a point of Brussels geography – he says that the conference delegates were staying at the Hotel Britannique “near the site of today’s European Parliament”, but in fact it was on the western corner of Place du Trône, much further from the future European Parliament than the conference venue.)
Farmelo does his best to explain the inexplicable: how a chap from a fairly modest background, with no family history of contributions to science, was able to revolutionise how we think about the fundamentals of existence. It’s an interesting effort: Dirac had several good ideas in his lifetime, some of which were timely and some only later recognised as such; his most implementable idea was separating out uranium isotopes by gas centrifuge, which is bizarrely practical in comparison with his theoretical innovations. Farmelo argues that Dirac was uniquely qualified to think of this because of his early training in engineering, but it seems more of an anomaly than part of a pattern in his account. Really the most interesting thing is that Dirac was driven by a concept of and commitment to mathematical beauty, and that gave him a lot more hits than misses. There’s also quite a lot about the political connections of the nuclear physics community in mid-century; Dirac comes across as not particularly ideological, but fiercely loyal to his few friends, with little patience for political sectarianism, and generally more left than right in his sympathies.
Dirac was famously difficult as a person. Here he is writing to his future wife:
Dear Manci,
Thanks for your 8th letter, which I received yesterday. It was a nice cheerful letter. You say I do not answer all your questions. I have read again your more recent letters and I give here the answers to the questions that I have not answered before.
letter number question answer 5 Have you seen Marietta’s baby? No. 5 What makes me (Manci) so sad? You have not enough interests. 5 Whom else could I love? You should not expect me to answer this question. You would say I was cruel if I did. 5 Isn’t Gabor a clever little fellow? Yes certainly, I expect so. 5 You know that I would like to see you very much? Yes, but I cannot help it. 5 Are you “Dear Dirac”? Sometimes. 5 Do you know how I feel like? Not very well. You change so quickly. 5 Were there any feelings for me? Yes, some.
Gawd, poor Manci!!! But she married him anyway, and they had two children together as well as bringing up her two from her previous marriage. She was Hungarian; Farmelo speculates toward the end that many autistic men form successful relationships with partners from different cultures, who go into it expecting to have to work harder at communicating than perhaps someone from the same background might do. I’m sure that, like me, you can immediately think of plenty of examples – and counter-examples – of this proposition. (The relevance of autism in discussing Dirac’s personality goes without saying.)
This book won the Costa biography award in 2009, and I suspect was a worthy winner. Strongly recommended.
Top unread non-fiction:
Peleponnesian War | Innocents Abroad | Terre des Hommes | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Race of a Lifetime / Game Change | Proust and the Squid | The Tipping Point | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Elementary Forms of Religious Life | Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man | History of Christianity | History of the World in 100 Objects | A Room of One’s Own | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | The Last Mughal | Reading the Oxford English Dictionary | Jane Austen | Homage to Catalonia | The Road to Middle Earth | Essence of Christianity | The Strangest Man
Dear lord, it’s 25 October and I have not blogged a single book so far this month – and I have finished 11 so far, though four of those are Clarke submissions which won’t be recorded here except by Greek letter.
Anyway, to this novel, which is actually the only original Who novel to feature the Celestial Toymaker (The Nightmare Fair is based on an unmade TV story), along with the Fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan. I see from online commentary that the book is generally hated by fans; I am really rather puzzled by this. Perhaps this is the effect of reading it in 2014, when we have had a number of Fifth Doctor audios reuniting Tegan and Nyssa (and Turlough rather than Adric), and the Doctor’s relationship with Gallifrey has been remoulded rather substantially; what was described as fanwank in 1999 seems if anything rather forward-looking now.
Anyway. Each of the four main characters is forced, as part o the Toymaker’s games, to relive elements of their past lives, which I thought were extrapolated rather well given that we saw bits of Adric and Nyssa’s home planets on TV and live on Tegan’s. The most entertaining bit for me, especially knowing now that I am re-reading Lungbarrow next month, was the idea of the young Doctor hanging around with nine friends on Gallifrey, including basically almost all the renegade Time Lords we had ever heard of and a couple more; I found it a neat effort to explain and make consistent our hero’s observed relationships with, for instance, the Monk and Drax, not to mention the Master.
It was still a bit rambling in places, so it won’t get top marks for me, but I’m genuinely surprised by the vitriol this drew from fandom on first publication. It seems to me rather unfair on Gary Russell, whose record has many more hits than misses.
Deadline for 2013 tax return is next Monday.
Old, formerly reliable accounting firm recently taken over by “the fifth largest accountancy network in the world”, emailed earlier this week to ask for various documents which had in fact been sent to them in June.
Phone calls to their offices to ask what had happened to the documents in question produced no useful response. (“We’ll call you back” is not a useful response, especially if no phone call is actually received.)
Draft tax return, assembled by accountants, arrived at lunchtime. The amount we allegedly owe the Belgian state is *cough* somewhat higher than anticipated. There is no indication one way or the other as to whether they had actually found the documents which were the subject of the earlier enquiry.
Close comparison with last year’s tax return suggests that a second set of documents, also sent to accountants in June, has gone astray, which would be sufficient to cut the amount allegedly payable by literally more than 50%.
Sent very cross email, and followed up with phone call to original contact point in old, formerly reliable accounting firm, who had not been copied in on any of the previous correspondence except for said cross email from me. I tell him that I don’t think I can work with “the fifth largest accountancy network in the world” in future. He says that as a matter of fact he too is leaving them at the end of this month. I ask him to keep me posted as to his own movements.
Mildly grovelling email has now arrived from someone with the title “Senior Tax Manager”. But I do not think that they will be managing my taxes after Monday.
Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
ℵ1
[Doctor Who] Camera Obscura, by Lloyd Rose
Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick
Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt
Last books finished
δ2
Wool, by Hugh Howey
[Doctor Who] The Room with No Doors, by Kate Orman
Up the Walls of the World, by James Tiptree
ε2
Last week’s audios
Night of the Triffids, by Simon Clark
[Doctor Who] The Doctor’s Tale, by Marc Platt
Next books
ζ2
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
[Doctor Who] Silhouette, by Justin Richards