• ‘Belgische vlag is ongrondwettelijk’
  
  Belgians have been flying flag wrong way round!
  (tags: belgium )

• On translating Bujold’s “The Hallowed Hunt” into Frisian
  
  Fascinating!
  (tags: languages frisian sf )
• Labour plans to cut benefits for young jobless
  
  Continuing Tory war on the poor.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Seanad row over marking of 750th anniversary of first known Irish parliament
  
  Very edifying!
  (tags: ireland Seanad )

Current
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, by Theodore Roszak
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Nexus, by Ramez Naam

Last books finished
Two Serpents Rise, by Max Gladstone
Het Verdriet van België, by Hugo Claus
[Doctor Who] Trading Futures, by Lance Parkin
A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar
Bételgeuse v. 1: La Planète, by Leo
[Doctor Who] The Bog Warrior, by Cecelia Ahern
The Global(ized) Game: A Geopolitical Guide to the 2014 World Cup, by Harrison Stark

Last week’s audios
Tomb Ship, by Gordon Rennie and Emma Beeby
Elixir of Life, by Paul Magrs
1001 Nights, by Emma Beeby, Gordon Rennie, Jonathan Barnes and Catherine Harvey
Current: The Wrong Doctors, by Matt Fitton

Next books
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler
Ireland Under The Tudors, by Richard Bagwell
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

• Why Audiences Hate Hard News—And Love Pretending Otherwise
  
  Not very encouraging.
  (tags: news )
• Surviving Baghdad: How a Resident Navigates Life in the City
  
  Bush/Blair’s legacy.
  (tags: iraq )
• Hugo voting: to express a preference, put it on the ballot
  
  How it actually works.
  (tags: voting )
• The Tedium of Authoritarianism
  
  How censorship and propaganda fail to achieve their aims.
  (tags: humanrights freespeech spain germany )

• Predicting When ‘Game of Thrones’ Author George R. R. Martin Will Come Out With His Next Book
  
  (tags: sf statistics livejournal )
• Artur Mas: Catalonia’s unlikely revolutionary
  
  Useful background.
  (tags: catalonia )
• How Sinn Fein “SDLPed” Fianna Fail in 2016
  
  @jasonomahony consults his crystal ball.
  (tags: ireland politics )

The previous book in the series, Three Parts Dead, was included in last year’s Hugo voter package. I confess that I may have bounced off this one a bit more; I couldn’t remember much about the previous book, and though I appreciated the baroque detail of the setting, I wasn’t particularly excited by the relationships between the characters (and found rhe central father-son narrative particularly unconvincing).

A nice wee book about how to conserve energy and resources on a personal and household level. I shall start using a shaving mug.

I think Russell T. Davies is the only Who showrunner to have written a novel set in the Whoniverse before he took over, and this is it: published in 1996, set in 1987, and a really important taproot text for New Who and particularly for Rose, its very first episode. The number of common elements is pretty remarkable:

• The first character we encounter in the story is the daughter of Mrs Tyler, who is a single mother
• She says to the Doctor at one point, "You think you're so funny", a line almost echoed by Rose Tyler a decade later
• The Tylers live on a council estate where strange things are happening
• The strange things include (but are not restricted to) a doppelganger of a black neighbour created by an evil alien intelligence
• The Doctor's female companion is Roz
• At the very end the Doctor goes back in time to meet the young Tyler girl before the adventure started in her time line
• As the alien invasion fully manifests lots of people die horribly and swiftly
• There are several pretty mosntrous middle-aged women characters for whom motherhood is a driving motivation

All of this is not to say that Rose, let alone New Who as a whole, is "just" a rewrite of Damaged GoodsThe End of Time.

Having said all that, I thought this was a cracking good book of the New Adventures series, taking the Doctor Who framework and fitting it to an unexpected setting, a gritty council estate. It's a complex plot with lots of elements, and Davies keeps all the balls in the air, juggling furiously. Even his monstrous maternal characters are a bit more sympathetic than they somehow ever came across on screen. I'm surprised that this isn't better known among fans; a lot of the elements that brought the show back are here, and also we can see some ways in which it might have gone differently. I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in how New Who came to be the way it was in 2005.

I read the first volume of this last year, when it was nominated for a Hugo, and didn’t quite buy it. I thought this second volume, also Hugo-nominated, was much improved; a fairly straightforward story arc about families and conflict, with a little bit of magic and interplanetary skullduggery. I still found the plot a bit unsurprising (one element in particular reminded me of the old saying about the pistol on the mantelpiece), but it is lifted immensely by Staples’ superb art.

I’m clear on my top vote in this category, but very uncertain about the next three.

No vote: Writing Excuses Season 8. I completely defend and support the eligibility of podcasts, whether as a series or as individual episodes, for Best Related Work. However, I myself just don’t really have time to listen to a representative sample of this long-running series, and I’ll therefore leave it off my ballot. It won last year and no doubt has a good chance of doing so again.

No vote: No Award. There has been nonsense written about how you shouldn’t allocate preferences below “No Award”. This piece explains in more detail than I care to right now that all you have to do is list your choices in order of preference until you no longer care about the outcome. That includes “No Award”.

All of the rest were reasonable potential winners. To be honest I am having real difficulty with my #2, #3 and #4 rankings, and I may end up ordering them differently when I actually finalise my ballot. As of right now, they are:

4) Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, by Jeff VanderMeer, ill. Jeremy Zerfoss – very nicely produced, very interesting; I am not quite the target audience.

3) Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It, eds Sigrid Ellis & Michael Damian Thomas – not that I didn’t like it, but I felt the content a little repetitive, and could have done with some more overarching analysis of what is actually going on here.

2) “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative” by Kameron Hurley – again, I completely defend and support the eligibility of individual blog posts to be nominated in this category, and it’s perhaps a little surprising that this hasn’t happened before; and this particular piece is part of a very important debate. However, it’s only a part of that debate; it’s possibly better than any of the individual essays in my top choice, but collectively I think they outweigh it.

1) Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary, eds. Justin Landon & Jared Shurin – the fact that I am personally namechecked in it is a nice bonus, but I think this really does give a good overview of what was being talked about in fandom in 2012, and of where the debates on its future are coming from and going; if you want to understand what’s going on in the field, it’s a very good starting place.

You can vote in this year’s Hugos, and the 1939 Retro Hugos, by joining Loncon 3 at http://www.loncon3.org/memberships .

2014: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Related Work | Best Graphic Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Artist
1939: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist

Having only dipped into this, I gave it my vote for the BSFA Award (which it won); now I’ve read it from beginning to end, and feel confirmed in my immediate reaction that this is an excellent and beautiful guide to the craft of writing, and specifically fantasy writing, with insights not only from VanderMeer but from many others (including an interview with George R.R. Martin). I don’t have particular ambitions to write fiction myself, but I found this very useful in looking at how stories come into being (and perhaps how they can be improved, even that doesn’t always happen). The one annoying thing is that the numerous inserts on particular themes do quite often break up the reader’s experience of the flow of the book. But even there it’s not as bad as The Steampunk Bible, from the same stable.

• HBO’s Michael Lombardo: “Belfast is not the most cosmopolitan of cities to spend half of the year.”
  
  Good discussion in comments.
  (tags: sf northernireland )
• Living with cancer; assisted dying
  
  @LiamClarkeCJ on his diagnosis, and how the law should change.
  (tags: death northernireland )

For all the primacy of Frankenstein, I reckon this must be one of the earliest known sf books by a woman, at least in English. The Duchess of Newcastle was a well-known eccentric of Restoration England – Samuel Pepys has several awestruck entries in his diary about simply wanting to look at her in astonishment, including her visit to the Royal Society – and wrote various pieces including this exploration of politics, science, religion and learning from 1668. 

Her unnamed heroine, kidnapped by sea from her home, is blown by storms to the North Pole and thence to another world which adjoins ours there. The inhabitants immediately make her their Empress, and we then settle down for a hundred pages or so of exposition and world-building, some of it a little satirical, some simply speculative and imaginative (some of it perhaps inspired by her visit to the Royal Society the previous year). The Empress then causes further point-of-view confusion by inviting the Duchess of Newcastle to come visit her on her own planet, and, using otherworldly technology, exterminates all of England’s military enemies to ensure that Britain can be Top Nation. 

It’s a undisciplined, rollicking, diverting ramble through the mind of one of the era’s most interesting personalities, and I’m really surprised that it is not better known – I think I came across it only browsing Wikipedia, though I then found an essay about it in Speculative Fiction 2012 when I was already half way through. I also detect one or two elements which surely Swift must have put directly into Gullver’s Travels; he would surely have known and read this.

It says the same thing in each case. (Couldn’t identify the Khmer spelling, unfortunately.)

A nominee for this year’s Hugo for Best Graphic Story, adapted and illustrated by Golden from a story first published by GRRM in 1976. I have to say that the story itself didn’t hugely appeal to me – Martin’s early work was very dark indeed, and the theme of animated corpses serving people’s industrial, entertainment and sexual needs is pretty grim. I was also struck by a lack of physical variation among the women characters, as illustrated, compared to the men. Not quite my cup of tea.

I’ve finished all the Third Doctor novels now, and am onto the Fourth Doctor: here, he ends up separated from Harry and Sarah as they are leaving Skaro by Time Ring, and the three are caught up on different sides of a protracted war which turns out not to be all it seems. It’s a story which has been done both before and since (most recently by Big Finish), but it’s done well enough here and Sarah gets to befriend and humanise an android without pushing my I-hate-cute-robots buttons.

• Football and the Brussels Brontë Story…
  
  Unexpected connections!
  (tags: belgium bronte football )
• jean-paul sartre on: the problem with other players
  
  Some of this might not be true.
  (tags: football france )
• WWII Films
  
  Did WW2 last longer than the films about it?
  (tags: films history )

Current
Het Verdriet van België, by Hugo Claus
Two Serpents Rise, by Max Gladstone
[Doctor Who] Trading Futures, by Lance Parkin
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, by Theodore Roszak

Last books finished
Orbitsville by Bob Shaw
Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary eds. Justin Landon & Jared Shurin
[Doctor Who] A Device of Death, by Christopher Bulis
The Blazing-World, by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
The Meathouse Man, by George R.R. Martin and Raya Golden
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, by Jeff VanderMeer, with Jeremy Zerfoss
Saga, Volume 2, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
[Doctor Who] Damaged Goods, by Russell T. Davis
Green Living for Dummies, by Michael Grosvenor and Liz Barclay

Last week’s audios
The Rosemariners, by Donald Tosh
Current: Tomb Ship, by Gordon Rennie and Emma Beeby

Next books
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler
Ireland Under The Tudors, by Richard Bagwell
[Doctor Who] The Bog Warrior, by Cecelia Ahern

I am easily pleased sometimes. This is a collection of online commentary on sf which was published in 2012, pulling together the sorts of essays I always like reading and wish I could write more often. All the usual suspects are here – in-depth examinations of race and gender as they are manifested in the genre, but also simple critiques of writing as writing. It’s not perfect – the internal ordering of the pieces seems half thought through (is it alphabetical by author’s first name? Not quite, but if not, then what?) and I would have dropped most of the shorter pieces in favour of some more long ones – but I was pretty sure from an early stage that I would give it a high place on my Hugo ballot. Then I reached page 297 and found my own name in the first line. Yep, I’m easily pleased.

• The Judges of Miss World, 1970: Bombs, Blacks And The Angry Brigade
  
  The past is so weird.
  (tags: history sexandgenderandsexuality )
• So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish
  
  Chris Davies MEP says goodbye to Brussels.
  (tags: ukpolitics libdems eu )
• 8 Million City: a Scandinavian Megalopolis
  
  A three-country corridor?
  (tags: maps denmark sweden norway )

One of the classic Big Dumb Object novels of the 1970s, which won the BSFA Award for 1975 (other nominees not recorded; also got third place in the 1976 John W Campbell Award, Silverberg's The Stochastic Man coming second and no award made for the top spot; this was the year that The Forever War won Hugo and Nebula). It's rather of its time, which is to say that the evil ruler is all the more evil because she is a woman, and the hero's wife doesn't get to do much more than be his wife (he bravely fends off sexual advances from one of his own crew in a moment of crisis). In fairness, Shaw was good at portraying troubled marriages (always from the male partner's point of view) in his fiction, and this is another case in point. Orbitsville itself is a Dyson sphere, totally enclosing a star at earth-orbit distance, which our hero stumbles upon after fleeing the evil ruler; I felt a bit short-changed in that Shaw concentrates on the human politics of his story and devotes much less time to describing it than Niven does Ringworld or Clarke does Rama, and we end up in the climactic section of the book just doing a long aircraft trip across relatively featureless landscape. Perhaps the sequel has more stuff that I would like in it.

I’ve been a cheerleader for the series of books on Who produced by Mad Norwegian Press, but I did wonder if there was really room for an entire book on LGBTQ takes on the series. I fear my concerns were well founded; sure, the narrative of coming-out as non-straight is linked with their love of Who for an awful lot of people, and it’s an important and emotionally freighted story for all concerned – and a lot of these stories are moving, empowering, cheering and sometimes appalling. But this seemed to me more a source of primary material for further research than a great set of pieces in itself, even though some of the authors are pretty significant people in the Whoniverse (Paul Magrs, David Llewellyn, Nigel Fairs, Gary Russell) or more widely in the genre (Amal El-Mohtar, Rachel Swirsky). John and Carole Barrowman contribute a foreword.

There is some very interesting stuff too – obviously it’s rather difficult to miss the lesbian subtext in The Stones of Blood, but Julia Rios goes into it in convincing depth. (The only point she misses is that Christopher Isherwood dedicated Goodbye to Berlin to Beatrix Lehmann and her brother.) Naamen Gobert Tilahun provides the best analysis I have read of the role of Mickey in new Who (and there are several other chapters concentrating on particular characters). None of the pieces is actually bad, and that’s a decent strike rate in itself. Still, I am not sure that this will go to the top of my Best Related Work ballot.

• It’s Brazil’s World Cup to Lose
  
  Nate Silver weighs in.
  (tags: worldcup )

I do recommend reading sf classics at the same time as you work your way through this year’s Hugo shortlist. It’s a good yardstick for checking what’s changed in the field and what hasn’t. This is quite a long book, which ends without an ending, promising a second half of the story which has never appeared (and now that we are thirty years on probably shouldn’t); there’s lush and intense description, innovative use of pronouns (as in this year’s top nominee Ancillary Justice, slavery, brain damage and a fair bit of bloke-on-bloke sex. The far future environment is rather reminiscent of the Culture, though of course the inspiration if any must be the other way round. Not a super fun read, but glad to have absorbed it and let it sink in.

I enjoyed this more than I expected. It’s quite deceptive – starts off as just another story of a teenage daughter of the local warrior ruler (slight twist in that it’s her mother rather than her father) who gets into trouble by picking sides in difficult politics and trying to intervene. But about two-thirds of the way through it turns out that we have been slightly misdirected, and the story is now about Flora needing to escape from the life-threatening consequences of her own (well-intentioned) actions; and then it gets into the unexpected re-imagining of her family’s own recent history, and ends very well. Points also for use of ð and þ.

I was moved to seek this out by F.R. Leavis’s praise, and because it’s often recommended on lists of Great Books. I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t blown away (so to speak) and wondered a little what the fuss is all about. It’s about a family where the husband is an agent provocateur in London working for a foreign power, unknown to his wife; he sends her brother (who has learning difficulties) to blow up Greenwich Observatory, and it all goes wrong. As a psychological study of people failing to communicate with each other, it’s rather good, and the husband and wife are realistically and somewhat brutally portrayed. But I found myself approaching it also through the lens of a hundred years of spy fiction written since it was published in 1907, and there are now various things that I expect from novels about spies and secret agents which this doesn’t have – in particular the police and security forces seem moored more in Conrad’s imagination than in the real British bureaucracy. (Not that James Bond is especially moored in reality, of course.)

This is another book of scholarly essays on New Who (and I think it’s just great that I can type “another book of scholarly essays on New Who”), looking exclusively at the Matt Smith era – disappointingly cutting off at Christmas 2012, so missing the last few episodes, the 50th anniversary special and the regeneration. As I’ve come to expect from books like this, it’s generally well-rooted in the discipline of media studies, and includes a piece by Livejournal’s own . The standout chapters for me were actually those at the end that looked beyond the TV series at the computer games (even though I have barely played them myself), online fandom’s reactions to Matt Smith, and the way in which Death of the Doctor was marketed as both a Sarah Jane and Doctor Who episode. All generally good to excellent stuff, with one curious exception – the introduction is clunky and seems to have been written in a rush to capture the 50th anniversary market, not really doing justice to the quality of the essays. However, as I have said before, I regret not reading it in time to nominate for the BSFA or Hugo Awards.

• ‘Tuam babies’ mass grave allegations must spark urgent investigation
  
  Amnesty International speaks out.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Tuam: Nothing to see here, move along now please.
  
  The Bon Secours nuns have hired a PR agent.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Midwife’s memoir reveals the horror of Bessborough
  
  Published in 1998.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• ‘You became so frightened eventually you toed the line’
  
  More from Bessborough, inc from 1989 book.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• No country for young women: Honour crimes and infanticide in Ireland
  
  Stephanie Lord @stephi08 analyses brutally.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Tuam: What lies beneath? | Philip Boucher-Hayes
  
  Latest update.
  (tags: ireland appalling )
• Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story
  
  Getting the story straight.
  (tags: ireland appalling )

This wasn’t too difficult a ranking.

6) I thoroughly bounced off Galactic Patrol, by E.E. “Doc” Smith when I tried it eight years ago, and I don’t see any reason to revisit it now. I am sure that 1939 fandom, as it then was, probably would have awarded it the Hugo if they had thought of awarding Hugos that year. But we are not bound to replicate the mistakes that 1939 fans might have made; we should make our own judgements (and our own mistakes).

5) Carson of Venus, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

4) No Award

3) The Legion of Time, by Jack Williamson

2) Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis

1) The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White

What I did find striking was that in all but Galactic Patrol (possibly even there, if I had read more sympathetically) there is a real sense of the impending conflict, of the old order being about to disintegrate in violence, again. I wonder what the readers of 2089 will spot as common themes of this year’s Hugo nominees?

You can vote in this year’s Hugos, and the 1939 Retro Hugos, by joining Loncon 3 at http://www.loncon3.org/memberships .

2014: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Related Work | Best Graphic Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Artist
1939: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist

This is the last of the Retro Hugo nominees for Best Novel for me – actually surprisingly short (I got it in a joint printing with After World’s End from 1939, which I haven’t read yet). I hadn’t appreciated that this was where the phrase “jonbar point” originated; I twitched with some excitement about a reference in a 1938 book to the defence of Paris in 1940 (though there are then Russian rocket pilots from 1947 which is a bit early); I was struck by the intense descriptions of hand-to-hand combat, practically trench warfare, which presumably must have been much in the war literature of the time reflecting the previous conflict (Williamson himself would have been too young to have any direct knowledge of it); I was amused by the notion of gathering together the best soldiers of all time, copied of course by Doctor Who among others; I winced a bit at Good Princess vs Bad Princess; and I was a bit surprised when it was over after less than a hundred pages. Compared to two of the other entries, this is light stuff, but it’s ahead of No Award on my list.