Well, you know, nothing much ever actually happens in these books. Our heroine is called in to solve some mysterious deaths; but the answer is obvious, and anyway the culprit is not brought to justice. Another character resigns from her job; and then changes her mind. Yet another character gets a new car; but it crashes and is wrecked, though he is uninjured. Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like.
Links I found interesting for 12-05-2014
- What Not To Say to a Parent of an Autistic Child
Yep, had all of these.
- Voters can’t name their MEPs as poll highlights disengagement with EU
Must try harder.
- Still Paying For The Civil War
The 84-year-old whose father just missed Gettysburg.
- Eurovision: A continent divided in its sexual attitudes?
Less than you might have thought, apparently.
- Why can’t you remember being a baby? Science explains
The answer lies in neurogenesis. (It says here.)
April Books 12) Deathless, by Catherynne A. Valente
Didn’t quite work for me, I’m afraid. Heartfelt and detailed evocation of Russian legends and how they might have played out for real in the early years of Stalinism, and I picked up amusing references to those excellent books The Twelve Chairs and The Master and Margarita, but I didn’t care about the characters very much. Obviously appeals to a lot of people so I’m in a minority here.
April Books 11) Revelation, by C. J. Sansom
I’m even further behind with bookblogging than I was last time I complained about being far behind with bookblogging, but I will eventually catch up, even if it means only thumbnail write-ups for some books.
This won’t be one of those. By peculiar coincidence I was reading this at the same time as two other books with a Tudor setting, the sternly historical Anglicising the Government of Ireland and the less factually based Doctor Who ebook A Handful of Stardust. Revelation is set a bit earlier, in the last years of the reign of Henry VIII, and involves an established character, lawyer Matthew Shardlake, pursuing a serial killer who is repeating the opening of the seals in the Book of Revelation. I quite enjoyed the mystery and some of the chrome (the henchman’s unhappy marriage, the African doctor) but thought that Sansom laid it on a bit thick in invoking Copernicus and other contemporary thinkers (De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium as a topic of conversation in London in its year of publication? Hardly!) and also overestimates the power of the Tudor police state in successfully covering up gruesome murders, particularly the ones it wasn’t actually responsible for. Hilary Mantel catches the idiom of the period much more convincingly in Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. But it is entertaining enough.
Links I found interesting for 11-05-2014
- Voting advice websites
Asimov saw it coming.
Science fiction and fantasy set in Ireland
Somewhat out of the blue, I’ve had two messages today from people urging me to add particular works to my (very out-of-date) list of science fiction and fantasy set in Ireland. Has there been a link to it somewhere than I don’t know about?
Links I found interesting for 09-05-2014
- JSCEM Recommends Optional Preferential Voting for the Senate
Australian proposal to help bigger political parties beat smaller ones.
- First Job Dictionary
What those ads really mean.
- Apples of Eden: Saving the Wild Ancestor of Modern Apples
Ancient fruit.
Links I found interesting for 08-05-2014
- Independentism and the European Union
Lucid analysis from EU enlargement guru Graham Avery.
- Wikipedia, the Difficulties of Mapping World Religions, and a Most Bizarre Map
Someone is Wrong on the Internet.
- What are the marginal European Parliament seats in the UK?
I have crunched the numbers.
- The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos
… at an abandoned McDonald’s.
- Khiva
Peter presses onwards through Central Asian history.
- State Executioners: Untrained, Incompetent, and “Complete Idiots”
Sheer barbarism.
- Nagorny Karabakh: Keys to a Settlement
US co-mediator speaks.
- Rights concerns cast shadow on Azerbaijan’s political rise
@ESI_EU and @giorgi_gogia are quoted.
Wednesday reading
Current
The Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker
Warbound, by Larry Correia
Mr Norris Changes Trains, by Christopher Isherwood
Last books finished
Neptune’s Brood, by Charles Stross
10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights, by Ryu Mitsuse
The Finches of Mars, by Brian Aldiss
[Doctor Who] Island of Death, by Barry Letts
Last week’s audios
[Vienna Salvatore] The Memory Box, by Jonathan Morris
[Blake’s 7]: The Armageddon Storm, by Cavan Scott
Next books
Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
Cyberabad Days, by Ian McDonald
The Road To Middle-Earth, by Tom Shippey
[Doctor Who] The Death of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones
Books acquired in last week (actually some from birthday weekend which didn’t get logged then)
The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White
Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis
The Prisoner: A Day in the Life, by Hank Stine
Monkey Planet, by Pierre Boulle
Carson of Venus, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Saga, Vol. 2, by Brian K Vaughan
Gallimaufry: A Collection of Short Stories, by Colin Baker
Buffy: The Lost Slayer v1: Prophecies, by Christopher Golden
Buffy: The Lost Slayer v2: Dark Times, by Christopher Golden
Buffy: The Lost Slayer v3: King of the Dead, by Christopher Golden
Buffy: The Lost Slayer v4: Original Sins, by Christopher Golden
Links I found interesting for 07-05-2014
- What price for your nation’s soul?
The sale of Blencathra.
- The Arms of Individuals in Same-Sex Marriages
Garter, Clarenceux, and Norroy and Ulster speak.
- Pyramid Energy
Giza v Apollo.
Question inspired by Larry Correia’s Warbound
Links I found interesting for 06-05-2014
- None of the leading candidates will be Commission President: analyst
This scenario may be the closest we can get to a soft landing.
- How Much Source Material Does HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ Have Left to Work With?
The statistics of Westeros.
- Chandler, Joey, Ross, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe—which friends were closest on the sitcom?
Yes, I was actually interested.
- UK train fares & European train fares compared!
Britain rather good – if booked ahead.
- Read this email exchange in which a local resident takes apart UKIP
Weymouth is not swamped.
Links I found interesting for 05-05-2014
- UKIP’s European elections campaign is starting to remind me of Yes to AV
A referendum insider comments.
- Game of Thrones travel guide to Northern Ireland
More! More!
- Commander Power v Blackwatch
When superheroes and supervillains get older.
- A U.S. actor succeeds in China
How stereotypes evolve.
- The Year Climate Change Closed Everest
Ice isn’t only melting at the poles.
- After the Adams arrest, what do we know and what has changed?
@mickfealty reflects.
Links I found interesting for 04-05-2014
- SFWA’s Orwellian and Hellish Philosophy
The SFWA President speaks.
- Ombudsman’s report on Jean McConville abduction and murder
How the police failed to do anything for 20 years.
- Top Gear, Teletubbies and Doctor Who to be shown in North Korea
Yup.
- My benefits were cut by 40% when I got cancer
British government continues its war on the sick and poor.
- The Deadliest Animal in the World
According to Bill Gates, humans are in second place.
- How to read more and remember it all
Interesting. (I do a lot of this already.)
- Our manifesto for Europe
Piketty, @quatremer and others call for fiscal and political union.
- Hotel! (2001)
Peter Capaldi confronts Paul McGann
The Bizarre and Bendy Borders of Baarle
This was a screenshot from my phone's native maps app for where we had our cup of tea this afternoon:
The town of Baarle is split between two municipalities – Baarle-Nassau, part of the Netherlands, and Baarle-Hertog, a Belgian enclave which has existed, in one form or another, roughly since 1198.
Here is F standing in front of the monument to the 1198 decision. Behind him, just below his shoulder level, you can see a line of crosses in the pavement which then turns into a brick line in the road, and takes a left turn away from us. That is the border between Belgium (where we were standing) and the Netherlands.
In fact outside the church there is a nice wee model of Baarle, with a button you can press which elevates the Belgian parts of the town so you can see what is where, as it were.
In the centre of the town, the border is usually marked clearly on the pavement:
Further out, you can sometimes tell only by the registration of the cars on each side of the street:
(Note Dutch on the right, Belgian on the left.)
One does feel a little sorry for the owners of this house as they deal with paperwork from competing jurisdictions:
There are several cases here of double enclaves – bits of the Netherlands, marooned inside the larger chunk of Belgian territory which is most of Baarle-Hertog, inside the Dutch municipality of Baarle-Nassau. You will have to take my word for it that F is standing here just inside one of the double-Dutch enclaves.
Not surprisingly, there is a monument to Baarle's longest-standing and most successful commercial activity:
Smuggling.
The tourist office rather plays the situation for laughs – the guide book, available only in Dutch, is aimed at Dutch visitors wondering why those peculiar Belgians have a few scraps of territory inside the more northerly of the two kingdoms. And truth be told, there's not a lot else to be said about the place except that it has complicated borders.
Two serious points, though. One is that while China Miéville took it to extremes, there are a bunch of divided cities out there; I was in one only three weeks ago, and was born in another. Sometimes an older physical division is gone but not forgotten. The people, or peoples, of both sides of Baarle seem to have found a viable modus vivendi, and good on them.
The other point is that that modus vivendi has come under threat in the last century. The "Belgian church" is adorned at the moment with artificial poppies, commemorating the events of 1914-18, when the Baarle-Hertog enclaves in the neutral Netherlands were a small part of the small area of unoccupied Belgium. In the Second World War, of course, both parts of the Baarle were occupied from 1940. The monument in the background is to the 1st Polish Armoured Division who liberated it in 1944.
As the Poles advanced, the Germans arrested and executed local draper Maria Cornelissen-Verhoeven, known locally as Miet Pauw. She had been running one of the escape lines for Allied soldiers to get out of occupied Europe, and she paid the ultimate price; but has not been forgotten.
It's worth a visit, if you happen to be in that part of the world.
PS – We were inspired to do this trip by F's discovery of this rather pleasing Youtube video:
April Books 10) Anglicising the Government of Ireland, by Jon Crawford
Another step in my investigations of my sixteenth-century ancestor Sir Nicholas White. This is a forensic and detailed examination of the role of the Irish Council (strictly the Privy Council of Ireland, but normally referred to just as the Council) which carried out the executive functions of government from Dublin Castle, focussing on the period from 1556, when Thomas Radcliffe, shortly to become Earl of Sussex, arrived with a reforming mandate from Queen Mary, to 1578, by when a generational change in the Council’s members had been completed. Sir Nicholas White was appointed to the council in 1572 as an early part of that generational change (and stayed on it until 1592 when he was chucked in the Tower of London and died there the following year).
Crawford argues, contra many other recent historians, that there was no grand colonising plan inspired in London and implemented by its minions and appointees. rather he sees a genuine and even partially successful attempt to extend the Queen’s writ throughout the island, building on the surrender and regrant policy of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, eventually running foul of a lack of attention from London and a succession of poor leaders.
Policy development and implementation was anyway very tricky even in the best of circumstances. The chief executive, the Lord Deputy, would arrive with a political mandate from the Queen, but usually without the means to execute it, which had to be negotiated locally through the Council (and occasionally the Parliament); and he was also vulnerable to back-channel messages to Whitehall, either directly to the Queen from the Irish nobility (Anne Boleyn had been an heiress of the Butler Earls of Ormond) or by connections between the Irish Council’s members and the Westminster administration (Sir Nicholas White had a close personal tie with William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who ran the English government).
I think Crawford makes a good case against conspiracy to colonise, and in favour of bureaucracy being much more interesting than people had hitherto thought. I think he is less good at building that into the bigger picture – it’s not surprising and indeed excusable if you are mining a rich seam of material which has been unjustly ignored by previous writers, but by concentrating on the paperwork, he does miss the important role of military coercion from both sides. I can accept that the violence of the period has been perhaps over-emphasised by other writers, but it’s underplayed here.
One very nice touch is that Crawford goes against historiographic tradition by actually using the spellings that his subjects themselves used – Sir Henry Sydney rather than Sidney; Sir Thomas Cusake rather than Cusack; Sir Edward Fyton rather than Fitton. It is a slight shock if you are well-read in the history of the period, but a healthy one to remind us to allow the people we are reading about to speak in their own voice, and their own name.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) 2014 Hugos
This category was basically set up as the Buffy category and has become the Doctor Who category, though it should be noted that DW has only (“only”) won it six times in the last eight years, losing to Dr Horrible in 2009 and to the Blackwater episode of Game of Thrones last year. This year there are two real Who episodes, two non-sf dramas about Doctor Who, and two other episodes of other shows for our consideration. I reckon it’s the Red Wedding v the 50th anniversary, but my own vote is slightly different…
7) No Award. None of these was awful.
6) Orphan Black: Variations under Domestication. I haven’t watched any of the rest of this series, but if this episode is representative I’ll get around to it some time – the show is about a group of clones who have only just discovered that they all exist, and the major plot of this episode is a screwball comedy (I suspect untypical for the how) where one of them is convinced that her husband is spying on her and ties him up in the basement, forgetting that the entire neighbourhood of their Canadian town is coming round for a pot-luck party; identity confusion between her and one of the other clones, combined with some brief but nasty violence, rounds out that plot strand, while meantime another clone sister is being seduced by a sexy biologist in Minnesota. I didn’t understand all of it but it was enjoyable enough. The scenes where Tatiana Maslany is simultaneously playing two different clones, one of whom is pretending to be the other, are particularly pleasing.
5) Doctor Who: The Name of the Doctor. Don’t get me wrong – I actually really loved this, particularly the insertion of Clara into the archive footage, and the various crossings between different realities and timestreams, and the setup for what was to come. But it’s rather blown into the shade by the other entries – I don’t think I even nominated it.
4) Game of Thrones: The Rains of Castamere. I saw a comment on Twitter after this was broadcast to the effect that “somewhere out there is a couple who are hastily rethinking their plans for a Game of Thrones themed wedding”, a sentiment which is of course reinforced in this year’s season. Of course those of us who had read the books knew it was coming, but this is a rare case of the televised version being an improvement on the original.
3) An Adventure in Space and Time. A lovely portrait of how Doctor Who came to be, with David Bradley, the bad guy in The Rains of Castamere, ending up as a heroic William Hartnell, setting the scene for the next fifty years. In a previous year I might have marked this down for not being sfnal enough, but not this year for reasons which will become clear.
2) Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor. This was an incredible event; I drove to Germany to see it in the cinema with my family to watch it in 3D in the cinema, and it was tremendous – the return of Tennant, the interaction between Smith, Tennant and Hurt, Zygons, Billie Piper and all. Glorious.
1) But I must vote for The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot for the top spot, because I am actually briefly if shadily visible in it myself around 8:04, the camera then panning to get a good view of my son before dissolving to Paul McGann. This may be the only opportunity I ever get to vote myself into a Hugo winner, and no way am I missing it. I’m sure that The Day of the Doctor will actually win, but for the first and possibly only time in my life, I am casting my Hugo vote for myself.
(For reference: my note from 24 November about the Whoniversary weekend.)
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
Five Fourth Doctor audios
Night of the Stormcrow, by Marc Platt
King of Sontar, by John Dorney
White Ghosts, by Alan Barnes
The Crooked Man, by John Dorney
The Evil One, by Nicholas Briggs
I had never got round to writing up Night of the Stormcrow, a Fourth Doctor/Leela special release from Big Finish back in December 2012, so I listened to it again recently. Marc Platt is usually a clear hit or clear miss for me (in fact, normally a clear hit) so I have to say I was a little disappointed – it’s the story of an observatory where a strange entity shifts from object of scrutiny to horrible intrusive destroyer, and there are a couple of standout scenes (both with Louise Jameson) and some good one-liners from Tom Baker, but I felt the plot slightly lost its way in the second half. Chase Masterson makes her first Whoniverse appearance as a manipulative academic.
Big Finish went for over a decade without doing a Sontaran story, finally breaking in with Heroes of Sontar in 2011; they have succeeded in actually doing interesting things with the Sontarans much more than the TV show ever did before the arrival of Strax. Here, the Doctor and Leela are faced with a super-Sontaran warrior, played by Dan Starkey, Strax himself, and again Louise Jameson pulls off a great performance with some actual character development for Leela, and some very interesting shout-outs to the Doctor’s past. A good start to the 2014 season of Fourth Doctor stories.
Alan Barnes is one of those writers who has contributed a lot to non-TV Who (editor of DWM at the start of the century, writer of various comic strips, a dozen audios and the animated TV story The Infinite Quest), and it’s a bit surprising that he’s never appeared as a writer for the programme itself. White Ghosts is as usual good stuff, with a base under siege from some really scary carnivorous plants (and doing carnivorous plants in an audio play is impressive in itself), a plot that is much more complex than it first appears, and some more brilliant moments for the Doctor/Leela relationship. Barnes on form again. Virginia Hey, who I hadn’t heard of but was a regular in Farscape, guests.
The Crooked Man is an awfully good horror-type story: strange murders in a English seaside town, an ideal husband who is perhaps a little too ideal, works of literature where fictions becomes fact, two excellent guest performances from Neil Stuke as the eponymous Crooked Man and Sarah Smart (who was one of the Also People on TV) as effectvely a one-off companion. I was listening to this in the supermarket and found it impossible to concentrate on the shopping. I would recommend this story in particular to anyone wanting to try the Fourth Doctor audios; it works well as a stand-alone and gives a good flavour. The one downside is that it has a bit less Leela than the others.
Whereas The Evil One is all about Leela, starting with a flashback to the death of her father, and then bringing her into close contact with the Master played here by Geoffrey Beevers; Michael Keating also makes a guest appearance, in a role so different from Vila that I didn’t recognise his voice. When we first met her on New Year’s Day 1977, Leela addressed the Doctor as the Evil One; the appearance of the Master in this story gives us another possible interpretation of the title; but in fact the Evil One here turns out to be someone I did not expect. Once again brilliant stuff from all, particularly Louise Jameson. This season of Fourth Doctor stories has turned out pretty well; two more to go
Links I found interesting for 02-05-2014
- The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
Legacy of 1971 in crowdsourcing.
- Five key questions – and answers – about the arrest of Gerry Adams
Henry informs the American audience.
- My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal
“identifying a single pregnant woman is worth as much as knowing the age, sex and location of up to 200 people”
- Queen Mary
My old mate John Norris with a brilliant piece about journalist Mary McGrory.
April Books 9) Aldébaran #5: La Créature, by Leo
Final volume in the first sequence of bande dessinées by Leo, in which Marc and Kim encounter both the mysterious creature, the gigantic mantrisse. which has been lurking behind their adventures so far, and have a showdown with the authoritarian government which has been dogging their footsteps since Book 3; also contact with Earth is resumed after a gap of centuries. Perhaps because I’d left it longer than planned to read, it didn’t have quite the punch I expected – though there are some really mindblowing scenes when they walk into the belly of the beast – but I will now look for and start on the second series, Betelgeuse. I am also glad to say that I’m not having much problem with the French; it’s pitched just about right for my reading level.
April Books 8) A Handful of Stardust, by Jake Arnott
I have enjoyed the Time Trips sequence of short Who novels; we must wait until later this year for the last two, from Cecelia Ahern (surely the first scion of a head of government to write a Who story?) and Joanne Harris, pausing for now after Jake Arnott’s mild romp round Elizabethan times with the Sixth Doctor, Peri, John Dee and the Master. It’s light in some ways, but actually drills down linguistically to explain Peri’s name (I don’t think I’d ever seen that before) and is respectful enough of the historical setting.
By complete coincidence I was reading it at the same time as two other books focussing on the sixteenth century, Anglicising the Government of Ireland, by Jon Crawford and Revelation, by C. J. Sansom. Reviews of those to come.
Links I found interesting for 01-05-2014
- Stemtest 2014
I got Groen for federal, sp.a for Flemish and Open VLD for European!
- EUandI Party Matching
Apparently I’m closest to the Partito Democratico of Italy…
- www.myvote2014.eu
Apparently I’m close to the S&D group, esp Slovak and Romanian MEPs, and to Luís Paulo Alves of Portugal.
- Are you voting for the wrong party? Take our exclusive MyVote survey to find out – BelfastTelegraph.co.uk
Apparently I’m closest to the PUP (Alliance second).
- 7 Things Men Should Do At Work To Help Women Get Even
All very sensible.
- Are there any jokes in the Bible?
Hmmm.
- 21 Social Media Tips You’ll Wish You’d Known Sooner
Some of these are actually useful!
- The Brutal 35-Year War Between Sony, Stephen Popovich & Meat Loaf
Musical infighting is the worst kind. Much nastier than fannish feuds, let alone real politics.
- earth :: an animated map of global wind and weather
Where the wind blows! Beautiful.
April Books
Adventures with the Wife in Space, by Neil Perryman
Anglicising the Government of Ireland, by Jon Crawford
Understanding the Lord of the Rings, eds. Rose A. Zimbardo & Neil D. Isaacs
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
Other People’s Countries, by Patrick McGuinness
Need for Certainty, by Robert Towler
Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 12)
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
Revelation, by C. J. Sansom
The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith
Cheese, by Willem Elsschot
SF (non-Who) 5 (YTD 27)
Any Given Doomsday, by Lori Handeland
Inverted World, by Christopher Priest
Deathless, by Cat Valente
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, by Neil Gaiman
Assassin’s Quest, by Robin Hobb
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 26)
Amorality Tale, by David Bishop
Return of the Living Dad, by Kate Orman
Hope, by Mark Clapham
A Handful of Stardust, by Jake Arnott
Comics 1 (YTD 3)
Aldébaran #5: La Créature, by Leo
~6,300 pages (YTD ~26,300)
5/20 (YTD 24/85) by women (Zimbardo, Handeland, Valente, Hobb, Orman)
0/20 (YTD 2/85) by PoC
Reread: 1/20 (YTD 3/85) (Inverted World)
Reading now:
10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights, by Ryu Mitsuse
The Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker
Neptune’s Brood, by Charles Stross
Coming soon (perhaps):
The Finches of Mars, by Brian Aldiss
Cyberabad Days, by Ian McDonald
Goodbye To Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
The Road to Middle-Earth, by Tom Shippey
Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, by Mary and Bryan Talbot
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
Green Living for Dummies, by Michael Grosvenor
Flora Segunda, by Ysabeau S. Wilce
The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delany
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, by Theodore Roszak
Orbitsville by Bob Shaw
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Ireland Under the Tudors, by Richard Bagwell
Desert Wisdom, by Henri J.M. Nouwen
A Guide to Tolkien, by David Day
Brussel in beeldekes
Crash, by J. G. Ballard
Teenage Religion and Values, by Leslie J. Francis
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler
Rogue Queen, by L. Sprague de Camp
[Doctor Who] Island Of Death by Barry Letts
[Doctor Who] The Death of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones
[Doctor Who] Anachrophobia by Jonathan Morris
Wednesday reading
Current
10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights, by Ryu Mitsuse
The Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker
Neptune’s Brood, by Charles Stross
Last books finished
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, by Neil Gaiman
Cheese, by Willem Elsschot
Assassin’s Quest, by Robin Hobb
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
Other People’s Countries, by Patrick McGuinness
Need for Certainty, by Robert Towler
Last week’s audios
[Doctor Who] The War To End All Wars, by Simon Guerrier
[Orson Welles] Around the World in 80 Days
[Orson Welles] Dracula
[Orson Welles] A Christmas Carol
[Doctor Who] Night of the Stormcrow, by Marc Platt
current: [Vienna Salvatore] The Memory Box, by Jonathan Morris
Next books
Cyberabad Days, by Ian McDonald
Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
[Doctor Who] Island of Death, by Barry Letts
Books acquired in last week
Het Verdriet van België, by Hugo Claus
Other People’s Countries: A Journey into Memory, by Patrick McGuinness
The Rise and Fall of Languages, by R. M. W. Dixon
Finches of Mars, by Brian Aldiss
Warbound, by Larry Correia
Parasite, by Mira Grant
Neptune’s Brood, by Charles Stross
The Butcher of Khardov, by Dan Wells
Links I found interesting for 30-04-2014
- Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan Speculate Their Characters’ Futures 25 Years after ‘When Harry Met Sally’
25 years? I feel old!
- Quite Interesting Numbers from #EUdebate2014
Go Jenny!
- Travellers to Bukhara
Go Peter!
- If Scotland says Yes, so should Barroso and Europe
Senior EU official contradicts leadership.
- Billion-Story Building
Certain problems explained.
- Star Wars Expanded Universe No Longer Canon
(Doctor Who fans shrug.)
- Hoće li BiH prodavati svoje prirodne resurse?
Bosnia’s natural resources: an expert speaks.
- Scotland is getting its referendum – next up Catalonia
President Mas writes for the Guardian
April Books 7) Adventures with the Wife in Space, by Neil Perryman
One never knows, with a book based on a blog, if it’s going to be just a recycling of the best pieces, perhaps augmented a little, or something a bit different. This is something a bit different. As many fans know, Perryman persuaded his wife Sue to watch every single episode of Old Who first shown from 1963 to 1996, and then blogged her distinctly non-fannish reactions. Watching Old Who from beginning to end is something that others have done (myself included) but it is of course fascinating to see what someone unburdened by fan lore makes of it. Her three 10/10 stories, incidentally, were Spearhead from Space, The Seeds of Doom and City of Death, and her lowest rating, -1/10, was for Time and the Rani.
But the book has surprisingly little of the blog in it; it’s the story of Neil’s life, and his life with Sue, and his life with Doctor Who, and it’s a moving tale of growing up in the late twentieth century and living in the early twenty-first, and making sense of the world through a show that started the day after Kennedy was shot, ended just after the Berlin Wall fell and then started again in 2005. And what is nice is that the project, which started as his request of Sue, became for her a matter of pride – to get through the next story, and the next, and the next. (And there are a lot of them.) It’s a lovely book, and anyone who knows a Doctor Who fan will enjoy it.
April Books 6) Hope, by Mark Clapham
Fairly standard Eighth Doctor story, with the Doctor unravelling a local political intrigue as the price of regaining the Tardis, mislaid as so often. There is a very nice Anji subplot exploring her relationship with poor Dave who was killed in her first appearance, eleven books ago.
April Books 5) Inverted World, by Christopher Priest
I had of course read this many many years ago; it won the BSFA Award in 1974 and got a Hugo nomination (beaten by The Dispossessed, which is fair enough). I liked it back then, and I liked it again on re-reading. The core concept is that our protagnist and his people are involved in transporting their city, on rails, across a landscape of varied terrain; and we discover that the landscape itself changes drastically, as does their experience of it, depending on how far ahead or behind they venture on the city's path.
The at the end there is a Big Reveal, which completely inverts our take on the city and what exactly is going on. I see some critics complaining that this spoils the story, but for me it doesn't – it makes the point that everyone's perspective is wrong, in the end, and the inversion may not be where you think. Having said that, the logic of the conclusion is not a hopeful one for the people of the city.
By the way, this is one of the longest great circles on land, Hong Kong to Lisbon:
I have spent some fruitless time trying to identify a credible longer route from south-eastern China to Sierra Leone or Liberia, skirting north of the Gulf of Suez and south of the Caspian, but am not convinced by any of the options. If there is one, it would be significantly longer than the Portuguese option.
The Drashani trilogy
The Burning Prince, by John Dorney
The Acheron Pulse, by Rick Briggs
The Shadow Heart, by Jonathan Morris
This is a brilliant idea, though it’s taken me over a year to write it up; Big Finish did a trilogy featuring successively Peter Davison (who I met in Slough last August), Colin Baker (who I met in Antwerp today) and Sylvester McCoy (who I met in LA in February last year) as the Doctor, travelling alone on each occasion, and intervening in the affairs of the Drashani Empire. Kirsty Besterman, who I hadn’t otherwise come across, plays a different character in all three plays, the beautiful Princess Aliona, then Aliona’s cousin Cheni, than Aliona’s clone; James Wilby appears as the mysterious character Tenebris in the second and third plays.
They are three quite different plays. In the first, The Burning Prince, the Fifth Doctor gets stuck into a dynastic marriage situation which turns out to have more complications than expected; there are a couple of excellent plot twists. The Acheron Pulse is a bit weaker, featuring some comic barbarians who are fine but don’t add a lot to the story; but at the end it picks up quite significantly, with the Doctor trying to set things right. The Shadow Heart has some memorable guest characters – Chase Masterson as intergalactic bounty hunter Vienna Salvatore, Eve Karpf and Alex Mallinson as a couple of scrap merchants who roam the stars in a gian snail – and a lovely plot structure where the story starts halfway through the Doctor’s timeline, and he first comes into it (from his perspective) half way through us listening to it.
On reflection I think the first of these is the best, but they are a neat assemblage.
April Books 4) Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, by Thomas Mann
Anyway, the Woods translation did me very well. It’s the story of the Buddenbrook family in Lübeck in the 19th century, and how things basically go downhill for Tom and Tony, the son and daughter of Consul Jean/Johann Buddenbrook who built up the business empire, and at the end an account of the childhood of Tom’s son Hanno. The history of Germany rumbles by in the background, 1848 and 1871 and so on glanced at in passing; but Mann is much more interested in the family dynamics of the siblings (there’s also a disinherited half-brother, a disreputable younger brother and a much younger sister who gets married off to a Baltic clergyman) tied up with continual and increasing worries about money. There are a lot of interesting things in the telling, about architecture, colour and music (this last especially important both for Hanno and his disreputable uncle Christian), and I can see why one might want to come back to it again.
At the same time, it feels like a bit of a literary sidetrack. Yes, it draws in a good way on Middlemarch and War and Peace, but I think that both are better books in themselves, and also both are more satisfactorily linked to the politics of their setting. Mann is perhaps a bit better at engaging our interest in characters who are themselves pretty flawed. At a time when European loved family sagas like this, you can understand that it won him his Nobel prize. Yet 1902 was the year that Joyce graduated from UCD, Virginia Woolf had just wound up her studies at King’s College London, and Proust was getting to grips with translating Ruskin. Greater things were around the corner.
I do appreciate, with tinges of regret, the care taken by Woods in translating the various German accents and dialects. Lübeck and Hamburg are close but different; Tony’s second husband is Bavarian, and Woods translates him as an American redneck, rough at the edges but with a heart of gold, encountering a much posher set of in-laws. It’s hilarious and effective, though of course it introduces a slightly different dynamic; the original Herr Permaneder is actually a proud Central European, always going on about the mountains and the beer of his homeland in nearly impenetrable Bayrisch, and the Munich/Lübeck dynamic is completely different from the Texas/Sussex dynamic. So, while it’s very entertaining, it’s also a bit of a step from the original authorial intent. I guess it’s unavoidable. Certainly, “Why, howdy do?” is a decent enough translation of “Ja, grüß Eana Gott!” and I don’t think a translation could be much more accurate without excessive resort to footnotes.