The vagaries of my reading list threw up two short pieces with some similarities, so I am bracketing them together.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Desdemona and the Deep::
She read the article through twice: headline, byline, lede, body, conclusion, then straightened up on a sharp inhale.
A novella that came with the 2020 Hugo packet, which I have now reached as I drill down through that pile. It’s set in an alternative 1920s; Desdemona is the daughter of an evil mining magnate, who does a deal with the underworld, and she pledges to undo it, along with her trans best friend. Lots of mythic resonances with legends from all over the world, and of course a critique of capitalism and gender conformity. I found it rather refreshing. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020, from the Hugo packet that year. Next, from the same source, is Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow. (Which is a bit longer.)
Second paragraph of third section of “They Will Dream in the Garden”:
—Oye, ¡no hagas eso, Tomás! Todavía ni la conoces. Salúdala, dile cómo te llamas primero –el tono de la auxiliadora no será de reproche y procurará ignorar los pucheros del niño producidos por la corriente eléctrica.
“Hey, don’t do that, Thomas! You don’t even know her yet. Greet her, tell her your name first” the tone of the assistant will not be one of reproach and she will be able to ignore the pouts of the boy produced by the electric current.
Translated by Adrian Demopulos
A short but powerful piece about how commemorating the women killed by men, using AI to bring their stories to life, can play a role in transforming society, told from a number of perspectives with characters seen from different angles. At less than 5000 words, it must be the shortest piece to have won the Tiptree / Otherwise Award, but it packs a heck of a wallop. You can read it here (and original Spanish, “Soñarán en el jardín”, here).
This was the last winner of the Tiptree Award under that name, with the translator getting a special citation from the judges. Also on the Honor List were six novels, three short pieces and a magazine issue, none of which I have read, and also Janelle Monáe’s superb album Dirty Computer. I have to say I’d have voted for Janelle Monáe if I’d been on the panel.
That year the Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Rosewater, by Tade Thompson; the BSFA Award to Embers of War, by Gareth L. Powell (I voted for Rosewater); and the Hugo and Nebula to The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (I was the Hugo Administrator). Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik, and Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse, were on both Hugo and Nebula ballots. Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee was a finalist for the Hugo, BSFA and Clarke awards.
The first winner of the Otherwise Award, and so next in this sequence for me, is Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi.
Do I decide for myself what to do next, or let someone else decide for me? If I decide for myself it seems I have two options. I can move on from here with Stewart. Or I can return underground.
An Australian YA post-apocalyptic novel, where a teen girl and boy (and his faithful basset hound, Stewart) take the first tentative steps to rebuilding society. Her parents have eked out a living on the surface of a devastated and polluted world for years; his people have retreated underground to hide from the poisoned planet. Nothing very remarkable plot-wise, but the protagonists’ voices are caught distinctively and believably. You can get it here.
We discover at the very end of the book that the whole story is set in 2025, which was my reason for reading it – yet another dystopia for next year…
Second paragraph of third essay (“Wandering Scholars and Saintly Cults: The Liturgical Legacy”, by Ann Buckley)
Waddell never seemed drawn to ‘Celtic’ nationalism and its tendency towards cultural narrowness and isolationism which in the past has so often dogged progress in research on Irish liturgical and ecclesiastical history and the history of the arts in Ireland. And yet her account fully acknowledges and values the critical importance of Irish achievements in early medieval Europe. Her focus is largely on the intellectual impact of these churchmen (we do not know of any women), illustrated through references to literature and poetry. Complemented by her characteristic eye for detail and signs of individual introspection, she also provides vignettes on their thoughts and emotions culled from anonymous marginalia in manuscripts from former centres of Irish activity which still survive in libraries such as Reichenau, St Gallen, and St Paul in Carinthia. These include verses about Pangur Bán (the monk’s cat), the weather, homesickness, a blackbird – being given new voice today in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Ciarán Carson, and the singing of Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin. The excitement at these discoveries took Waddell ‘in the legs’, as she said in a letter to her sister Meg.¹
They have an odd grace, the names of wild earth side by side with the sophistication of the older world, something of the strangeness of the Irish glosses in the ninth century manuscripts of Berne, Leyden and St Gall: ‘We are from Inch-madoc, Cairbre and I’, and most moving of all to one who remembers the low grey ruins on the island in Strangford Lough, ‘Mahee of Nendrum.’²
¹ Quoted in Felicitas Corrigan, Helen Waddell: A Biography (1986; London: Gollancz, 1990), 229; Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (1927; London: Constable, 1980), 34-5. ² Waddell, Wandering Scholars, 33-4.
This is a collection of academic essays about Helen Waddell, who I have written about here occasionally – if you still don’t know who she was, I recommend this short and powerful piece by Kate Mosse. I’m far enough out of the academic game that I rate such pieces for entertainment value rather than resonance with the scholarly Zeitgeist, and I found all of these entertaining and enlightening.
I was struck that several of the essays separately mentioned two crucial points from Helen Waddell’s career: the first, her stay in hospital in Paris in 1924, when she remembered hallucinating as Heloïse; and the second, the death of a rabbit at the end of her Peter Abelard novel. Both are moments of intense personal experience, which connect life and art inextricably. You can get it here.
A little bit of a side track, but I was interested to learn from Helen Carr’s essay that although both Helen Waddell and Ezra Pound translated lots of Chinese poetry, there was only one poem that they both published in English, a “brief, enigmatic poem by the painter-poet Wang Wei“. The two translations are as follows:
Helen Waddell
Ezra Pound
Peach blossom after rain Is deeper red; The willow fresher green; Twittering overhead; And fallen petals lie wind-blown, Unswept upon the courtyard stone.
Peach flowers turn the dew crimson, Green willows melt in the mist, The servant will not sweep up the fallen petals, And the nightingales Persist in their singing.
It took me a while to track down the original, and of course my Chinese is largely machine-translated, but here it is:
The peach blossoms are still tinged red with the night rain, and the green willows with spring mist. The fallen flowers have not been swept away by the boy, and the orioles are singing though the mountain visitor sleeps.
It’s interesting that both Waddell and Pound omitted the sleeping visitor (山客, shān kè) at the end. Daniel Skeens has done a much deeper analysis (based on better knowledge of Chinese than mine) but his headline conclusion is the same as mine: these are both good translations in their own right, which demonstrate the difficulty of translating poetry.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Ireland Under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley.
Current NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman Ireland under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett Midnight, by Philip Purser-Hallard
Last books finished Burning Heart, by Dave Stone New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyer and Suzy Jagger The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch Monica, by Daniel Clowes Doctor Who: 73 Yards, by Scott Handcock
Next books A Friend of the Earth, by T.C. Boyle Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
“Just swallow two of these tablets, Peter, to render you more susceptible to controlled hypnosis, then we’ll get to work and knock all that silly sex stuff clean out your head,” Miss Delarge told me confidently.
I read a couple of Peter Pook’s books when I was a teenager and rather enjoyed them, though I remember thinking even at the time that the humour was pretty basic. Out of curiosity I decided to have a look at one of them again, forty years later. I don’t know if it is typical, but this one was dull and sexist. It is 1968, and our hero signs up as the only male out of 600 students at a teacher training college, and boring and unfunny antics ensue. A total waste of time. You can get it here, but honestly, don’t bother.
Румата остановился перед таверной и хотел было зайти, но обнаружил, что у него пропал кошелек. Он стоял перед входом в полной растерянности (он никак не мог привыкнуть к таким вещам, хотя это случилось с ним не впервые) и долго шарил по всем карманам. Всего было три мешочка, по десятку золотых в каждом. Один получил прокуратор, отец Кин, другой получил Вага. Третий исчез. В карманах было пусто, с левой штанины были аккуратно срезаны все золотые бляшки, а с пояса исчез кинжал.
Rumata stopped in front of a tavern and was about to go in, but then realized that his coin purse was missing. He stood in front of the door in complete confusion (he just couldn’t get used to such occurrences, although this wasn’t the first time) and spent a long time digging through his pockets. There had been three pouches, with ten gold pieces in each. He gave one to the procurator, Father Kin, and another to Waga. The third one had disappeared. His pockets were empty, all gold buckles had been carefully cut off his left pant leg, and the dagger had disappeared from his belt.
Translate by Olena Bormashenko
This is billed as a new translation of one of the classic Soviet science fiction novels. Our hero, Don Rumata, has been dropped as an observer into a planet with a feudal society, as one of a team from a future (Communist) Earth guiding the society in the Right Direction. There are actually quite a lot of Western sf books with this sort of theme, but the ultimate concerns here are different to what I am used to; the lurch towards fascism on the planet clearly spelt out as a cause for possible intervention by the Earth folks.
It’s not brilliant on women characters, but it does have both action and thoughtfulness. My edition also has an afterword by Boris Strugatsky explaining the difficulties of sneaking the book through the process of political approval for publication. I’m glad they succeeded. You can get it here.
This was my top unread sf book, and my top book acquired last year that isn’t by Ben Aaronovitch (who I’m breaking out into his own sequence, as I have done with Wells and Pratchett). Next on those piles are The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula Le Guin, and The Light We Carry, by Michelle Obama.
I received the following query with regard to the 2024 Hugo Awards:
Can you clarify one point for me?
Under Best Fanzine, File 770 apparently got 14 nominations and was carried through the EPH procedure (until eliminated in Round 33). Yet Brother Glyer in 2018 withdrew himself and File 770 permanently from all future consideration.
If nominators fail to become aware of this, or choose to disregard it e.g. by way of making some kind of public statement, I do not see that the administrators are at fault.
But why was File 770 not excluded at once, with a suitable notice, as e.g. for System Collapse, under Best Novel?
I have replied:
You ask why we did not exclude the nominating votes for File 770 from the 2024 Hugo nomination vote tallies, bearing in mind Mike Glyer’s declared withdrawal back in 2018.
In my view, the duty of the Hugo Administrator is to ascertain the will of the voters, and then (and only then) to assess the conformity of voters’ choices with the rules.
For that reason, we do not check the eligibility of any nominee other than those that make it to the top six, or which replace any of the top six which are disqualified or withdrawn. Had File 770 qualified numerically for the ballot, we would then have contacted Mike Glyer, who would have then had the option to decline or not. In fact this is precisely what happened in 2019, when I was also Administrator.
It is not realistic or reasonable to expect Hugo Administrators to track every public statement of intent from potential finalists – there are an awful lot of them! Also, Mike Glyer would have been within his rights to change his mind and accept the nomination if File 770 had qualified; it is not the Hugo Administrator’s job to hold a nominee accountable for a statement that they made in 2018.
You also ask “Why was File 770 not excluded at once, with a suitable notice, as e.g. for System Collapse under Best Novel?”
I’m afraid you are under a misapprehension here. As noted above, File 770 was neither included nor excluded; we did not make a formal determination of its eligibility in 2024 at any stage. (Though our researchers gave us a strong indication that it would be eligible if it qualified for the ballot.)
As for System Collapse, Martha Wells had not made any prior public or private statement of her intention to decline the nomination. After we counted the nominating votes, we contacted Ms Wells with the news that two of her novels had qualified for the ballot. She replied declining the nomination for one of them and accepting for the other. System Collapse was not excluded “at once”, but only after the votes had been counted and the author consulted.
I hope that this clarifies the situation.
Here for reference are the statistics for Best Novel and Best Fanzine.
I disqualified only three books this time – Eat, Pray Love (as previously discussed under India and Indonesia, less than half of it is set in Italy), and Dante’s Inferno and Divine Comedy, tallied separately, which are set not in Italy but in the afterlife.
I’m allowing The Prince, however, because the great majority of the historical examples given are Italian. I’m also allowing A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway is doing well in these lists) because although some of the action is in Switzerland, and some in today’s Slovenia, I think the majority of the book is set within Italy’s current borders – the town of Gorizia is on the Italian side of the river Isonzo, even if most of the battles were on the other side.
When I first did this exercise in 2015, Angels and Demons was the runaway winner, so I’m delighted that a surge of Shakespeare fans on LibraryThing has now pushed it into second place. Romeo and Juliet is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays anyway. I know that is not a widely held view, and I’m also aware that a play supposedly set in Verona somehow manages to avoid mention of the whacking huge landmark which defines the city, but I’d rather have it at the top than Dan Brown.
I did not realise that Dan Brown has written another terrible book set in Italy as well, also called Inferno.
Sources differ as to whether Myanmar or Kenya is next in the list of countries by population, but they agree that Colombia and South Korea are both close behind. I will take them in that order, I think.
This is the earliest film set in 2025 that I have been able to identify (the initial scene has a radio announcer announcing that it is 10 May 2025). It actually made rather an interesting pair with Stephen King’s The Running Man – it starts with our hero as a player in a survivalist game show in what we are told are the ruins of New York. Violent reality TV is a surprisingly frequent theme in sf set in 2025; there’s another one coming up. The second half of the film then switches to Mad Max mode as our hero leads his gang across the desert (that flat desert which, as we all know, is located in the vicinity of New York). This very very graphic trailer will give you an idea.
It’s a silly and violent film, which you can skip in good conscience. The script barely makes sense and jumps from place to place without explanation. Al Cliver as the protagonist is pretty wooden. Laura Gemser, playing the leader of the mutants who he rescues, is much better known as the title character of the eleven Black Emmanuelle films, most of which were also directed by Joe D’Amato. Here she mostly keeps her clothes on, and effortlessly dominates any scene she is in.
The music is good, by Carlo Maria Cordio who went on to score Terminator 2: Judgement Day six years later. There’s also a very memorably unpleasant blue mutant. But this is not going to be more than a footnote in my roundup of sf set next year.
Another of the books set in 2025 which I have been reading through, this one a grim grim dystopia from 1983 where inequality has soared and the public get their kicks from watching a reality TV show where the contestants are hunted to death across the urban streetscape of a decaying USA. Several of the sf stories set in 2025 feature violent reality TV; a couple more to come.
Our hero does his best to beat the system, but the odds are stacked against him. Like Disch’s 334, it starts in New York, but the hunt for the protagonist takes him up the northeastern seaboard as far as Portland, Maine (where the author actually lives). You can get it here. The dystopia hits uncomfortably close to home, and…
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SPOILER
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…the book ends with a rather prophetic denouement as our hero flies his plane into a skyscraper to wreak vengeance on the system.
War releases other aggressions too — all those hostilities that have been present in peacetime, but restrained — and so when war comes, other, ‘little’ wars come too: the war of the old against the young, the war of the old-fashioned against the modern, the war of the national against the foreign and of the conforming against the non-conforming. It is not surprising, then, that once the Great War had begun, conflicts of values began, and grew violent, or that qualities that cultivated Edwardians had taken to be the very signs of their nation’s civilization were seen to be the symptoms of a national disease.
I enjoyed this tremendously, a survey of the impact of the First World War on British culture – although the subtitle uses the word “English”, I’m glad to say that Ireland at least is referenced throughout. In 470 pages, Hynes looks at the brutal reset of the UK’s way of life that started in 1914, climaxed in 1916 and continued to reverberate long after the guns had formally fallen silent.
Almost every European family has a story here – my grandfather, born in 1880, was wounded three times in combat; his younger brother was gassed; one of his sisters lost her oldest son at Gallipoli, another lost her husband at Ypres. But Hynes’ focus is culture rather than combat, mainly prose writing, but also poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture, architecture and the nascent cinema industry, and he weaves an intense and diverse tapestry of how art responded to crisis and horror.
A lot of the names were familiar to me – Wells and Woolf dominating, of course, and Owen in poetry. Hynes does a great job of connecting them all together, mapping their mutual influences and in particular drawing out the changing perceptions of the war over time – those directly exposed to it realising the true horror of the situation quicker than those at home.
There is plenty of social commentary in the art, including the changing roles of women, and attitudes to sexuality. I had to grimly laugh at one quote from Asquith’s son, prosecuting a court-martial against a soldier for being gay, who he described in a letter to his wife as
a nephew of Robert Ross, lately a scholar at Eaton, who aroused everyone’s suspicions by knowing Latin and Greek and constantly reading Henry James’ novels.
Sounds like a wrong ’un, for sure!
The book gave me a lot to think about, and I picked up a couple of intriguing recommendations. Sonia: Between Two Worlds, a novel by Stephen McKenna, seems to pick up the Irish dimension and do a bit more with it. And the Sandham Memorial Chapel sounds like it is well worth a detour next time I have reason to venture to northern Hampshire.
This is a great summary of an awful time, and the art that it generated, some of which was great and lasting. You can get it here.
The loyalists of Ireland were far more exposed to suspicion for resisting the royal claim to supremacy over the Church than were those of England. In England, refusal to submit might be regarded as the outcome of loyalty to the pope rather than of disloyalty to the king. In Ireland, those at first called on to conform were the inhabitants of the Pale, and resistance to the law was exceedingly difficult for people with such a strong tradition of loyalty. Disobedience to the king’s laws was their perpetual complaint against the Anglo-Irish outside the Pale, and they hesitated to act in any way which might result in their being identified with the older colonists. Hence their tacit acceptance of the ecclesiastical changes. There was an equally tacit acceptance by those Irish or Anglo-Irish lords who were coerced or persuaded into submitting to the royal authority during the course of the reign. In the actual operation of the new laws can be traced the real attitude of each class in the country.
I did not know Robin Dudley Edwards, though I saw him in action, heckling shallow Nationalist interpretations of Irish history at a UCD seminar only a few months before he died in 1988. He published this in 1935 when he was 26; it is the book of his PhD thesis from a couple of years earlier. It’s a remarkable piece of research for the day, looking in detail at the records for the efforts by the governments of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I to impose the Reformation in Ireland (and Mary I’s efforts to reverse it).
He concentrates a bit more on the early part of the period, which I am less interested in, rather than the 1560s and after, but I can understand first of all that any writer have more energy for dealing with the earlier bit of research and second that there was simply more going on in the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s in terms of the dynamics of religion and government.
There are two stories here. The first is that the government of Ireland was weak and London was not prepared to put in enough resources to make it effective, so the story of Tudor Ireland is of one chief governor after another failing to make much impact until the very end, in 1603. The second is that the Protestant side was unable to find resources to staff the religious effort; most Irish people spoke Irish, but the state was constrained to operate in English; any sensible rising Protestant evangelist stayed in England where it was safer and the monetary rewards better; and the ability of the state to enforce religious behaviour (let alone belief) even in the most loyal areas was correspondingly weak.
Despite its weight I also found it quite a quick read. I know that much more research has been done on the topic since, but it’s good to go back to basics sometimes. You can get it here (at a price); I was lucky enough to get my father’s copy.
This was the shortest unread book that I added to my shelves in 2018. Next on that pile is New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyes.
Current The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch Burning Heart, by Dave Stone New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Suzy Jagger NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman
Last books finished The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop
Next books Doctor Who: 73 Yards, by Scott Handcock Ireland under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley Monica, by Daniel Clowes
And, sure enough, when the rescue team pulled the car out of the Dula, all the passengers in it — a bull, a goat and a rooster — were indeed found dead, the bodies still strapped to their seats. But there was no sign whatsoever of the vice president. While the rescuers painstakingly searched for him, those who really know about things ventured to declare it a waste of time; the horse had most probably been saved by his talismans and escaped. They weren’t, in fact, too, too far from the truth. By the time the car landed at the bottom of the Dula, Tuvy’s hooves were busy eating the road, tholukuthi bearing the vice president to the safety of his sorcerer’s homestead.
One of the Clarke Award submissions from last year that was clearly fantasy rather than science fiction, but which I found interesting enough to come back to. It’s a parable of politics in a post-colonial African country with a strong resemblance to the author’s native Zimbabwe, but with the difference that all of the characters are animals; the old president and his successor are horses, the central character is a politically aware goat, and we have dogs, hens, cows, everything.
Obviously the root is Animal Farm, but it’s a bit less heavy-handed and the plot is more complex; also the language is effervescent, with the word “tholukuthi ” frequently interjected – it means something like “you find that…” in Ndebele, but seems to be used here to mean something more like “that is to say” or the German “beziehungsweise”; also “Tholokuthi Hey” was a massive hit song at the time of the 2017 revolution in Zimbabwe, which is part of what the book is about.
So, quite a lot of fun. Also shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, and for a couple of other awards, so I don’t feel too bad that we overlooked it for the Clarke. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on that pile is The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang.
The Happiness Patrol, from the dying days of 1988, is a fairly standard rebels against the system story, lifted by some fairly memorable characters and concepts – especially Sheila Hancock as the dictator, and her vicious pet Fifi. It comes close to looking convincing – the coherent style of the Happiness Patrol themselves is almost genius. I started off being quite impressed by how well the Candyman worked, but I had completely gone off him in the end, and the musician and the census official, while nice touches, didn’t quite seem to integrate into the whole thing. Not awful, but definitely not one of the great ones either.
When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
Continuing along this theme of rehabilitation [after Remembrance of the Daleks], I found The Happiness Patrol an excellent piece of sinister dystopia, following on from Paradise Towers. The interaction between Helen A and her retainers and servitors is tremendously engaging, with Fifi one of the great non-speaking parts (like the dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona, only much more vicious); and one wonders why it came as a surprise to anyone to learn that it was a deliberate though not hugely accurate tilt at Thatcherism. Doctor Who does not do space opera terribly well, but this is not space opera, it is allegory played with bitter ironic comedy, and fits McCoy’s portrayal beautifully.
Watching it again I find myself somewhere in between. Great performances, but a lot of running around in circles in terms of plot, no real sense of how the various bits of city connect with each other, and people just standing around to be captured or executed. We’ve had more violent assaults on our willing suspension of disbelief in the Moffat and Chibnall and Davies years since, but it felt like the director was working more on the script than the audience perception.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Graeme Curry’s novelisation of his own script is:
She could not believe her eyes – the TARDIS was pink. From the shadows of Forum Square they had a clear view of the Happiness Patrol carrying their pots of paint and putting the final touches to their work. Daisy K stood some distance from the others, overseeing the job.
I wasn’t overwhelmed by the original TV story, but Curry has produced a novelisation which is passionate and convinced – the rather odd plot holes remain, but liberated from cheap-looking special effects, it turns into rather a good yarn. Definitely one of those where the book is an improvement. Also an easy pass for the Bechdel test, with Helen A and her women warriors running around after Ace.
Nothing more to add. You can get it here. (Incidentally I tried tracking Bechdel passes and fails for all the fiction I read this year, but ran out of steam in June.)
Mike Stack’s Black Archive monograph on the story looks at its reception rather than its creation, which is fair enough given the changes in public notoriety the story has enjoyed. The first chapter, “Evaluation” looks at how poorly the story was rated by fans at the time and since, and asks “So, Is it Any Good?” He disarmingly admits its weaknesses: the padding of the plot, the unambitious design, the controversial Kandyman, the ambiguous postcolonial treatment of the Pipe People, Fifi; but comes back to the good performances.
The second and longest chapter, “Political Readings”, starts with the media flap in 2010 when several British newspapers discovered that the story had a critique of Thatcherism, and goes on to point out that spoofs of Thatcher were so universal on TV in 1988 that The Happiness Patrol easily slipped below the radar of contemporary critics. The real target, Stack argues convincingly, is authoritarianism of all kinds.
The third chapter, “Queer Readings”, addresses one of the other key points about the story. Its second paragraph, with the quote it introduces and its footnotes, is:
However, such bold statements are not universal or uncontested. In The Television Companion, Howe and Walker gave only a brief mention to the interpretation of gay themes, tentatively noting ‘some commentators have suggested that there is a gay rights message here’⁴. They do not take this observation further. Tat Wood, in About Time, went further:
‘While we’re debunking fan lore, the dispatched Andrew X (or Harold L, it hardly matters) isn’t wearing a pink triangle badge. Novelist / new series writer Matt Jones’ reading of the story as being explicitly and exclusively about gay rights misses the point, although none of his evidence (except the mention of the triangle badge) is actually invalid.’⁵
⁴ Howe and Walker, The Television Companion, p518. ⁵ Wood, About Time 6, p252.
The chapter points out that the story is actually very ambiguous in its use of queer / gay imagery. Pink is the colour of the oppressor here, not the liberator. The two main male villains escape together at the end – romantically, perhaps? On the other hand, the enforcement of happiness has echoes of the Section 28 debate of the 1980s (weirdly being played out again in attacks against trans people today). Personally I think that the ambiguity is itself rather successful.
The fourth chapter, “Happy Readings”, starts by citing the Easter 2011 sermon delivered by then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in which he mentioned the story in the context of the importance of happiness as a societal aim. (I met Lord Williams once, in passing, as I was heading to a meeting at the House of Lords and bumped into him at the entrance to Parliament.) Stack looks at the concept of happiness, and why Helen A is doomed not to find it. (Certainly she ain’t gettin’ much from Joseph C.)
A Coda comes back to the question of whether the story is any good. Admitting his own personal love for it, Stack concludes:
I leave myself open to the criticism that I have credited The Happiness Patrol with more intellectual clout than it deserves. However, what strikes me is the story more than holds its own when held up to scholarly scrutiny. It elegantly depicts totalitarianism, anticipates the reclaiming of the word ‘killjoy’, and provides a parable about the need to negotiate our emotions.
Again, the Black Archives have given me new appreciation for what a Doctor Who story I don’t especially love. You can get this one here.
Incidentally, the Seventh Doctor is proportionately by far the best represented in the Black Archive (apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors). 64% of the Seventh Doctor’s episodes are covered in Black Archives as of late 2024; the closest of the rest is the Thirteenth with 46%. The gap is even bigger just counting stories: 7 of the 12 Seventh Doctor stories now have Black Archives, 58%, twice the score of the Fourth Doctor, with 12 out of 41, 29%.
(Since you asked, the end of the table has the Second Doctor, with only 13% of his episodes and 14% of his stories, though we have also yet to see any Black Archives covering either the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Doctors.)
The Battle of Ramillies in 1706 was one of the biggest battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, also crucial for the future career of the Duke of Marlborough, and the cause of what is now Belgium switching from Spanish to Austrian rule. 62,000 troops of the Anglo-Austrian alliance inflicted s severe defeat on 60,000 French troops, a quarter of whom were killed. I have seen a claim that it was the largest cavalry battle in history. On a much more intimate level, the doctor treating one of the veteran British soldiers for injuries received at the battle realised that the patient had breasts; this was the famous Christian Davis, aka Mother Ross., who had joined the army disguised as a man many years before.
But in 2016 I was unable to find any memorial of the actual battle in 1706. The memorial at the centre of the village of Ramillies is to a First World War skirmish, not to the much bigger fight of two centuries earlier.
However, dedicated Googling eventually found a small plaque, placed in 2006 beside a shrine to St Donatus way to the north of the battlefield. I have marked it on the below map (taken from Wikipedia, showing the order of battle at the beginning of the fighting) with a blue X. I’ve also marked the Hottomont tumulus, to the southwest, with a blue circle.
So I set off with B to find it today. It’s about 30 minutes’ drive from her home, and she likes car journeys. I was unable to persuade her to smile for the camera when we located it, but she gives a sense of scale.
The plaque, placed by local enthusiasts for the tercentenary of the battle, speaks for itself, though I do find the placement a bit odd; it’s at the junction of two minor, unnamed roads, some way from the most intense point of the fighting.
The chapel is in poor shape. It could date from anywhere between the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the various heritage websites offer no clue. It is referred to in some sources as “la Chapelle des Quatre Tièges”, but I am unable to find a translation for “tiège” – it could perhaps be a dialect form meaning “tree trunk” from “tige”, which means “stem”. Within the chapel, St Donatus looks out cheerfully through a protective grille. (This is probably St Donatus of Münstereifel, who protects you against lightning and was a Roman soldier, hence the tunic.)
I also tried to find the nearby caves of Folx-les-Caves, which I visited in 2005; but they have been closed since 2019.
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
Trevor Noah
723,706
6,349
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
109,054
11,011
Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton
75,975
9,603
Long Walk to Freedom
Nelson Mandela
88,752
4,980
The Power of One
Bryce Courtenay
90,350
4,752
Life & Times of Michael K
J.M. Coetzee
19,789
2,858
The Promise
Damon Galgut
44,804
1,146
The Covenant
James A. Michener
21,305
2,062
Trevor Noah has clearly made a big hit with Goodreads users, and somewhat less so with LibraryThing where his book is only third, behind two more traditional classics. There’s only one foreigner (Michener) on the list; unfortunately however it is an all-male list, with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing just missing the cutoff.
I disqualified two other books – Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee, which is set in an unnamed colonial outpost which doesn’t sound very much like South Africa, and The White Lioness by Henning Mankel, which is mainly set in Sweden.
This is an update to my previous research on Benjamin Cleveland (1783-1853). He had eleven children with his wife Lydia nee Cooper, between 1805 and 1830; all but two survived to adulthood. However the DNA evidence fairly clearly indicates that he was also the biological father of my great-great-grandmother Sarah Smith, who was born in 1815; her legal father is recorded as a mysterious and largely absent Scot, embroiled in the misleadingly named War of 1812.
Through Benjamin Cleveland, I am related to my sixth cousin three times removed President Grover Cleveland, to my ninth cousin, sf writer Fritz Leiber, to Leiber’s third cousin, also my ninth cousin, Shirley Temple, and to my Worldcon colleague and seventh cousin twice removed Jesi Lipp. (NB there was a military Benjamin Cleveland, also born in 1783, who lived to 1858, five years longer than mine; but mine is a Yankee and the general was from Georgia.)
Poring through Ancestry.com on an insomniac night recently, I came across an interesting cluster of eight DNA connections who were linked to me and to other known descendants of Benjamin Cleveland. I found a family connection for all of them to Glens Falls, New York, and for seven of the eight I found a clear genealogical line of descent from a couple who I will identify here as John and Ophelia. Ophelia was born in 1840; John was born either in 1817 or 1820 – the documentation is unclear. One of my eight connections, F.W., is their great-granddaughter; five of them are great-great-grandchildren of John and Ophelia, including two daughters of F.W.; and one is the son of one of the great-great-grandchildren, making him the 3x great-grandson of John and Ophelia.
The eighth, C.P., caused me some head-scratching. He has researched a beautifully detailed family tree going back generations. However it seemed to me pretty clear that his mother was F.W.’s half-sister, born to a 17-year-old girl who then married her first husband (who is the person C.P. has in his tree as his grandfather) ten months later, but fathered by a grandson of John and Ophelia who later became F.W.’s father as well. C.P.’s DNA link to F.W. is that of half-nephew to half-aunt, which matches this theory exactly. His DNA links to F.W.’s daughters, N.K. and K.K., are also consistent with this hypothesis (half first cousins).
So the full family tree as I have reconstructed it is as follows:
(Click to embiggen; those on Ancestry.com are indicated with thicker box outlines, along with the strength of their DNA link to me)
The descendants of John and Ophelia listed here are:
C.P., provided that we believe my theory about his mother being the biological daughter of John and Olivia’s grandson C
F.W., definitely the great-granddaughter of John and Olivia, half-aunt to C.P.
N.K., daughter of F.W., half first cousin to C.P.
K.K., daughter of F.W. but with a different biological father so half-sister to N.K., also half-first cousin to C.P.
C.H., descended like the above four from the John and Olivia’s Son A, whose mother was F.W.’s first cousin and he is himself second cousin to C.P., N.K. and K.K.
D.W., descended from John and Olivia’s son B, second cousin once removed to F.W. and third cousin to C.P., N.K., K.K and C.H.
J.U., D.W.’s first cousin who therefore has the same relationships to the others mentioned above
G.T., J.U.’s son who is therefore first cousin once removed to D.W., second cousin twice removed to F.W. and third cousin once removed to all the rest.
If I am also descended from one of the parents of John or Ophelia, then F.W. is my half-third cousin once removed, G.T. is my half-fourth cousin once removed, and the other six are all my half-fourth cousins, ie we share a single 3x great-grandparent. My DNA connection to all of them is around 20 centimorgans, which is consistent with a relationship of around third/fourth cousin-ish. Significantly, we all also share connections with other descendants of Benjamin Cleveland.
I know that I am not descended from John or Ophelia, because all my recorded ancestors in America at that date are accounted for, and I have other DNA connections through all of them. (And also I would expect to see stronger DNA connections with John and Ophelia’s known descendants if I was also one of them.) On the other hand, I know that Benjamin Cleveland had at least one child out of wedlock, my great-great-grandmother Sarah Smith, born in 1815. So the likelihood is that either John or Ophelia was Benjamin’s extramarital child.
Both John and Ophelia came from the same village near Glens Falls. Benjamin Cleveland was living in Unadilla in the 1810s, over 200 km away across the state of New York, but if he was able to father Sarah Smith over in New Hampshire in 1815, a short excursion from Albany doesn’t seem unreasonable at the time of John’s conception in 1816 or 1819. By 1839 Benjamin had moved to Pennsylvania, a step in the westward trek that eventually took him to Wisconsin where he died in 1853. So it seems less likely that he was Ophelia’s father, since she was born only in mid-1840.
John’s mother, who rejoiced in the name Annis or Annice, was born in March 1797. She married Samuel, the man generally recorded as John’s father, on 15 October 1820. John’s gravestone says that he died on 3 October 1889, aged (rather precisely) 68 years, 11 months and 26 days, giving a birth date of 8 October 1820. The 1880 federal census and the 1865 New York state census both give ages for him consistent with being born in late 1820. But there’s one crucial detail here – if Annis married Samuel on 15 October 1820, she can hardly have given birth to John the previous week! So the gravestone must be wrong.
The 1870 federal census gives John’s age in that year as 54, and the register of his Civil War service gives his birthday firmly as 8 October 1817. To me it’s pretty clear. The war service record is the one document that John is likeliest to have completed by himself, and it’s also the only one (apart from the gravestone, which we know cannot be right) that gives a precise date of birth. It was probably Ophelia who gave the census takers the information they wanted in 1865, 1870 and 1880, and also who gave instructions for the tombstone in 1883, and she may have been vague, perhaps deliberately so, about his precise age.
I am certain that John was born on 8 October 1817, three years before his mother Annis married Samuel; and that Benjamin Cleveland was his biological father. I still have no idea what business Benjamin was on, travelling so much around New York and New England, impregnating my married great-great-great-grandmother in 1814, and 19-year-old Annis in 1817. But the evidence of his active life runs in my veins, and in the veins of dozens of his living descendants.
Second paragraph of third chapter (and the quote that it illustrates):
The pattern and character of local government must be such as to enable it to do four things: to perform efficiently a wide range of profoundly important tasks concerned with the safety, health and well-being, both material and cultural, of people in different localities; to attract and hold the interest of its citizens; to develop enough inherent strength to deal with national authorities in a valid partnership; and to adapt itself without disruption to the present unprecedented process of change in the way people live, work, move, shop and enjoy themselves (Royal Commission on Local Government in England, 1969a, p. 1). This is a typical statement about the functions of local governments. Sharpe (1976), for example, recognizes three major functions for local governments. The first is the liberty function, with a strong local government system providing a division of power and responsibility and preventing the growth of a centralized autocracy. Secondly there is the participation function, with local government allowing individuals to participate in local democracy-often as a training-ground for later service in higher levels of government—and diffusing power amongst the populace. Finally, there is the efficient provision of services function. Certain services are local in scope, being concerned with local consumers only, and are best provided by local governments.
I had some very friendly correspondence with the late great Ron Johnston, professor of geography at Bristol, back in 2015-2016, culminating with him sending me an old paper of his, in which I spotted that he quoted from a document I had written twenty years earlier. Sadly he died in 2020, two months after his 79th birthday. (Though not from COVID, I understand.)
This is a basic undergraduate-level textbook looking at the politics of human geography, examining political systems in the UK and USA, getting deep into the weeds of why more government money is spent in some places than others, and the difficulties of designing good systems for the sharing of resources. I got it for the bits about electoral systems and gerrymandering, but I stayed for the wider analysis of the role of state and local governments in society. It’s all stuff that I more or less knew, but it was helpful to have it laid out like this. It would have been good to see some nods towards gender and geography, and some more countries than the USA and UK, but it is what it is. You can get it here.
I got this second hand (obviously) and, to my delight, I spotted that the previous owner is a retired Cambridge don who was a university official during my years in student politics. I have sent him a note but he hasn’t replied; he must be in his eighties by now.
This was the last of the stash of books acquired in 2016 that I had mislaid when I thought I had reached the end of that pile. Though I am still looking out for a couple that have not turned up yet.
Information emerges on a computer screen as lines and dots, but there are pieces missing. The DNA extracted from this tooth has spent more than a millennium in the ground, resulting in incomplete genome coverage.3 It doesn’t show the individual’s eye colour or provide information on their appearance. However, while the minute sequences of the DNA prove difficult to decipher, the chromosomes are clear. The team members search repeatedly, yet across every sample they find no evidence of a Y chromosome anywhere. Instead, there is a clear pattern of two X chromosomes. 3 Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson et al, ‘A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 164, No. 4 (2017), pp. 853-860.
A book asserting that there are lots of interesting stories to tell about the centrality of women in the Middle Ages, which basically is preaching to the converted as far as I am concerned. It starts however in 1913: Emily Davison, who was trampled to death by the King’s horse when her suffragette protest went wrong at the Derby, was a qualified and enthusiastic medievalist who saw the political empowerment of women as fully consistent with history.
Ramirez goes on to look at the Loftus Princess; Cyneðryð and Æðelflæd of Mercia; the Viking woman from Birka; Hildegard of Bingen; the women who made the Bayeux Tapestry; the women of the Cathars; Jadwiga of Poland; and Margery Kempe. It’s a solid piece of work which simultaneously rides the two horses of “these were remarkable individuals” and “women in general were much more important in the Middle Ages than you have probably been told”.
I didn’t know much about any of these particular cases, and had never heard of some of them – and I’ve read quite a lot of medieval history in my time. So I felt enlightened and encouraged by the end of the book. You can get it here.
The crowd apparently hardly knew at first how to receive the Sultan of Turkey, but the universal good feeling was in his favor, and finally rounds of hand clapping and cheers greeted his progress along the splendid avenue.
This is a rollicking 1898 Edison fanfic sequel to The War of the Worlds, in which the nations of the earth, shocked by a Martian attack on New York, fund a retaliatory mission to Mars led by Thomas A. Edison and Lord Kelvin, with the author putting himself in first person in the middle of the fray. Edison has conveniently invented both a disintegration ray and an anti-gravity drive, so the large Earth expedition is ultimately successful despite tribulations along the way. (This is not a spoiler – the end of the story is given away by the title of the book.)
There’s an amusing fantasy diplomacy bit at the beginning with the rulers of the world converging on Washington and Queen Victoria dancing with President McKinley (she turned 79 that year). The cliches of space travel and war with other planets are explored here for the first time; the Martians are subhuman savages, with all that that implies; there is a beautiful human hostage, the last of her kind; and Thomas Edison wins the war, for humanity. (Apparently he was consulted about being made the hero of the book, and consented.)
The Project Gutenberg version is enlivened by the illustrations created by Bernard Manley, Jr, for the 1947 printing of the story. Manley lived to 91 and died as recently as 2012. You can get it from Project Gutenberg here.
Current The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch
Last books finished The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline MacDonald Desdemona and the Deep, by C. S. E. Cooney “They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals, by Diane Duane
Next books Burning Heart, by Dave Stone New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Suzy Jagger Monica, by Daniel Clowes
Having enjoyed my return to Cart and Cwidder last year, I thought I should read the complete Dalemark cycle by Diana Wynne Jones. The Spellcoats was new to me; although the third published of the series, it’s the first in internal chronology, set in “prehistoric Dalemark” where the only written language is runes woven into garments – hence the “spellcoats” of the title.
It’s a different sort of society to most of DWJ’s books – a low-tech country coming into being, with indigenous inhabitants in conflict with newcomers, and evil men trying to take advantage of the situation, including through magic. Like a lot of DWJ’s stories, there is a long and transformational journey; like a lot of DWJ’s stories, there are siblings who have different talents and find different destinies. But there’s something attractively raw and pared-back about the setting here, along the banks of a primeval river, and there is a nice framework of telling the story as a woven rather than written text. Sorry it took me so long to get around to reading this. You can get it here.
This was the top unread book by a woman on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, but I’m also adding a small pile for the other two Dalemark books, Drowned Ammet and The Crown of Dalemark.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 63) South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917, by Ernest Shackleton Truss at 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister, by Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston The Happiness Patrol, by Mike Stack Church and State in Tudor Ireland: A History of Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1543-1603, by Robert Dudley Edwards A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. Jennifer FitzGerald
Non-genre 3 (YTD 25) Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse Shame, by Annie Ernaux Pook at College, by Peter Pook (did not finish)
SF 11 (YTD 72) Titan, by John Varley A Crack in Everything, by Ruth Frances Long The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo The Running Man, by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky The Lake at the End of the World, by Caroline Macdonald Desdemona and the Deep, by C.S.E. Cooney “They Will Dream in the Garden” by Gabriela Damián Miravete Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals, by Diane Duane
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 26) Grave Matter, by Justin Richards Doctor Who: Space Babies, by Alison Rumfitt Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol, by Graeme Curry
Comics 1 (YTD 22) The Sapling: Roots, by George Mann et al
6,700 pages (YTD 52,200)
11/26 (YTD 98/214) by non-male writers (Ramirez, FitzGerald, Ernaux, Long, Wynne Jones, Bulawayo, Macdonald, Cooney, Damián Miravete, Duane, Rumfitt) 1/26 (YTD 26/188) by a non-white writer (Bulawayo) 3/261 rereads (Steppenwolf, Grave Matter, Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol)
282 books currently tagged unread, down 18 from last month, down 70 from September 2023. At this rate I’ll have cleared the unread shelves in four years’ time.
Reading now The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, by Jenny Uglow Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors, by Frank Dunlop The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al
Coming soon (perhaps) Burning Heart, by Dave Stone Doctor Who: 73 Yards, by Scott Handcock Midnight, by Philip Purser-Hallard New State, Modern Statesman: Hashim Thaçi – A Biography, by Roger Boyes and Suzy Jagger Ireland under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch Monica, by Daniel Clowes Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy Marriage, by H.G. Wells How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman
See here for methodology; I am excluding books not actually set in Tanzania.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Green Hills of Africa
Ernest Hemingway
12,287
2,315
The Lioness
Chris Bohjalian
23,336
463
Paradise
Abdulrazak Gurnah
10,774
664
Afterlives
Abdulrazak Gurnah
11,782
481
We All Went On Safari
Laurie Krebs
660
1,081
Hard Rain
Irma Venter
4,002
140
Golden Boy
Tara Sullivan
2,227
223
Elizabeti’s Doll
Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen
320
540
I had to exclude a lot of books here which only briefly touched on Tanzania (eg Going Solo, by Roald Dahl) or are largely about somewhere else entirely (eg The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński). Not completely certain about She, by H. Rider Haggard, which could really be set in any one of a number of African locations.
Dismaying that the top two books here are about Americans on safari, but very glad to see local Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah putting in a strong showing.
Next up, while I’m in the neighbourhood, is South Africa.
I had one of those nights last night, and as I browsed the internet insomniacally, I came across some striking pre-dawn photographs of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS taken by one of my cousins in Hawaii. I checked and it seemed possible that I might be able to see it from the Torenvalk watchtower six km away from us, so got up at 6 and drove over.
Unfortunately the light pollution in our part of Belgium, one of the most densely populated parts of Europe, is too great. I got a nice photo of the Moon with Earthshine, and Regulus visible below it, but that’s all I was getting. The comet is lost in the haze on the horizon; the diffuse streak across the picture is a light beam from a streetlight, and the small streak on the left is an aeroplane trail.
You may not be familiar with the magnitude scale of brightness in astronomy. The human eye responds logarithmically to light, so a first magnitude star is 2.512 times brighter than a second magnitude star, and a second magnitude star is 2.512 times brighter than a third magnitude star. (And a first magnitude star is exactly 100 times brighter than a sixth magnitude star, because 2.512 is the fifth root of 100.) Most people can see stars down to sixth magnitude in a nice dark sky far from any other light source, once their eyes have adjusted.
The earliest record we have of a classification of the magnitudes of stars is by Ptolemy in about 150 AD. His judge-it-by-eye measurements turn out to be pretty robust when compared with modern scientific measurements, and when an nineteenth-century astronomer called Norman Pogson proposed the ratio of 2.512 because it fitted Ptolemy’s classification rather well.
The brightest star in the night sky is Sirius, at magnitude -1.46 (the lower the magnitude, the brighter the star). Venus can get as bright as -4.9. The Full Moon is -12.7 and the Sun around -26.8. Those are fairly meaningless numbers; I find it easier to remember that Arcturus and Vega are almost exactly magnitude 0.0, Aldebaran and Spica around magnitude 1, and the six brighter Big Dipper stars between 1.8 and 2.4, with Mizar (the middle star of the Big Dipper’s handle) dead on 2.0 (though in fact it’s a much more complex system than appears to the naked eye).
This morning, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS’s brightness was 2.6 according to the most optimistic sources, and when I arrived at the observation tower, I could clearly see Regulus, which at magnitude 1.4 is three times brighter, and indeed the Big Dipper. But as dawn arrived, the Big Dipper was long gone, Regulus faded into the surrounding sky, and I could see that the sky where the comet should have been was even brighter, so I came home and went back to bed.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is predicted to be really spectacular in the evenings of the second week of October, starting from Wednesday 9th through the weekend. That’s something to cheer us up in the Northern Hemisphere as the evenings start to draw in. Keep an eye out for it!
Yesterday I found myself lunching (for the second time in a few days) at one of my favourite Thai restaurants, La Deuxième Élément in Ixelles, and after lunch I spotted that the Church of St Boniface, which looms over the square, was open. One of the cultural loose ends that I have been thinking about chasing for a while is a report in Dutch Wikipedia that the church contains some of the work of fin-de-siècle artist Jean Mayné, so I seized the chance to go in and have a look.
There are four large paintings on the ends of the transepts in the church, and another in the Lady Chapel, all sadly somewhat dingy and in need of restoration. (Which may be tricky, as they are canvas glued to the wall.) The altarpiece is also flanked by two painted wooden panels which looked like they might be by the same hand.
Frustratingly, the church has a mini-exhibition about the stained glass windows, which have recently been restored, but there was nothing about the paintings or the altarpiece – nor are they mentioned in the bilingual leaflet you can get online, though I found an older pamphlet with more info.
I took photos of them all, hoping that they might turn out to be obscure works by Jean Mayné. But a bit more research this morning revealed that they are actually by a different fin-de-siècle artist, Ernest Wante, who was much more into religious art. Next time you are enjoying La Deuxième Élément’s yummy Keng Kaï Noh Maï (my personal favourite), do take a moment afterwards to pop across the road and look around.
Jesus heals the paralytic (1923). Strictly speaking this should be an indoor scene. Note the chap brandishing his crutches in joy, though the guy in front of him with a walking stick seems less sure.“Suffer little children to come unto me” (1923). Interestingly multi-ethnic crowd. The young woman at the front looks to me like she is wearing a fin-de-siècle dress.The Adoration of the Shepherds (1910). Accompanied by angelic choir, sheep, ox, ass and goat. When I went back for another look I realised that someone has squiggled over the baby with green felt tip pen.Shows how St Boniface tested out a supposed fragment of the True Cross at the abbey of Hooidonk, by seeing if it sank in water. It did, and started shedding drops of blood. Boniface actually recorded this himself. (1909)The angels come to help St Boniface serve Mass. Oddly enough he didn’t leave us personal documentation of this incident.The Wedding at Cana (altarpiece, 1910)Doubting Thomas (altarpiece, 1910)
The stained glass windows looked interesting too, but I was in a bit of a rush to get back to the office and will have to return for another look. And I’m still wondering about the rumoured work of Jean Mayné. Maybe it was just a mistake by whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry.
He wasn’t entirely sure if Ruby was listening to him. She was standing still with the toes of her shoes touching the edge of the cliff, completely enraptured by the dinosaurs. Of course she was! Who wouldn’t be?
When I wrote up the most recent season of Doctor Who, I commented of this story:
The actual premise of Space Babies is very silly indeed, but was executed with poker faces by all concerned. The flaw in the plot (alas, not the last time I will use that phrase) is that if Jocelyn has been hiding in a storage room all along, why did she not make herself known earlier?
I watched it again before reading the book and writing this post, and what struck me is the mismatch between, on the one hand, brilliant effects and performances, and on the other, a really poor story concept. Nothing about the situation makes sense, and re-watching it only draws your attention more firmly to the plot flaws. No doubt this is why they slipped it out as part of a double on the same night as Eurovision.
Alison Rumfitt is new to Who writing but has a couple of horror novels under her belt. This is a decent novelisation, adding a little top-and-tail narrative about a child and a monster, and digging a bit more into Ruby’s background and the resonances of the babies for her. There are also a couple more poo jokes, I think (I didn’t go back and check.) It may be difficult for an established writer to stamp their own authority on a Doctor Who story that they did not actually write, but I guess that wasn’t the point, and it’s perfectly serviceable. You can get it here.
Les deux grandes villes de par chez nous, Le Havre et Rouen, suscitent moins d’appréhension, elles font partie du langage de toute mémoire familiale, de l’ordinaire de la conversation. Beaucoup d’ouvriers y travaillent, partant le matin et revenant le soir par « la micheline ». À Rouen, plus proche et plus importante que Le Havre, il y a tout, c’est-à-dire des grands magasins, des spécialistes de toutes les maladies, plusieurs cinémas, une piscine couverte pour apprendre à nager, la foire Saint-Romain qui dure un mois en novembre, des tramways, des salons de thé et des grands hôpitaux où l’on emmène les gens pour les opérations délicates, les cures de désintoxication et les électrochocs. À moins d’y travailler comme ouvrier sur un chantier de reconstruction, personne ne s’y rend vêtu en « tous-les-jours ». Ma mère m’y emmène une fois par an, pour la visite à l’oculiste et l’achat des lunettes. Elle en profite pour acheter des produits de beauté et des articles « qu’on’ ne trouve pas à Y. ». On n’y est pas vraiment chez nous, parce qu’on ne connaît personne. Les gens paraissent s’habiller et parler mieux. À Rouen, on se sent vaguement « en retard », sur la modernité, l’intelligence, l’aisance générale de gestes et de paroles. Rouen est pour moi l’une des figures de l’avenir, comme le sont les romans-feuilletons et les journaux de mode.
The two big cities from around these parts, Le Havre and Rouen, arouse less suspicion; they are inscribed in the linguistic memory of all families and belong to ordinary conversation. Many factory hands work there, leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening on the micheline, a small local train. In Rouen, the larger city, closer to us than Le Havre, they’ve got everything you need – department stores, specialists for every type of complaint, several cinemas, an indoor pool for learning how to swim, the Saint-Romain festival lasting the month of November, tramways, tea rooms and huge hospitals where people are taken for major operations, detoxification programmes and electroshock treatment. Unless you happen to be a labourer working on a building site, you would never go there in your ‘everyday’ clothes. My mother takes me there once a year to visit the eye specialist and buy me a pair of glasses. She takes advantage of the trip to purchase beauty products and other articles ‘you can’t get in Y’. We never feel quite at home there because we don’t know anyone. People appear to dress and speak better than in the country. In Rouen, one always feels slightly ‘at a disadvantage’ – less sophisticated, less intelligent and, generally speaking, less gracious in one’s body and speech. For me, Rouen symbolizes the future, just like serialized novels and fashion magazines do.
Translated by Tanya Leslie
Out of curiosity, because Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, I went to Filigranes near my office and got hold of this – I think because it was the cheapest on the shelf of English translations of her work. It’s a very intense story of a teenager in provincial Normandy in 1952 and the poisonous relationship between her parents – the very first sentence is “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” The environment is dominated by social inequality and unthinking piety, not a million miles or a million years from the Catholic Belfast where I grew up. Clearly autobiographical, and I understand it’s rooted in Ernaux’s bigger project of re-examining her entire life in fictional form. But I suspect this is a good taster, at only 85 pages. You can get it here (and here in French).
His instincts stirred, the deep-seated ancient knowledge of hunter and hunted, intuitive and primal. Standing still as a statue, the late afternoon crowds flowed around him. Light broke through a far off gap in the clouds and fell on her. She glowed with it – special. He couldn’t shake the sense that she was special. And that discomfited him more than he could say. Mistle had already noticed her, after all, and it took something mighty special to get him to crawl out of whatever bottle he was currently drowning himself in.
Fantasy novel set in Dublin – very much in Dublin, firmly moored to the city’s landmarks, and yet also a Dublin that exists in parallel to the supernatural world of Dubh Linn where the Sidhe keep an eye on us mortals and often intervene. Our teenage protagonist discovers that she is connected to both worlds and has a destined role to play in the battle between evil and not-quite-so-evil factions on the supernatural side. Well observed, in terms of both human and physical geography. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018 and also the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. (Sorry Ruth!) Next on the former pile is Yes Taoiseach, by Frank Dunlop; next on the latter is Lost Objects, by Marian Womack, but it will have to wait until I have finished all my 2018 books.
