This will never be more than minor Tolkieniana for the completist, but it is awfully pleasing to see how what started as just a couple of short notes to the oldest Tolkien children in 1920 had turned into heavily illustrated stories about the adventures of the North Polar Bear and battles against the evil goblins by the time the youngest of the family had grown out of them in 1942. John Rateliff has pointed out the considerable amount of imaginative cross-fertilization between some of the later and the Hobbit, which was being written at the same time. Tolkien can hardly have imagined that future scholars would pore over his Christmas fun in such detail.

This is the first of two volumes compiling Sfar's graphic fiction stories about the Rabbi's Cat, set in pre-independence Algeria, in the local cultural tradition that gave us Jacques Derrida and Bernard-Henri Lévy. The cat (who is the narrator) learns to talk in the very first pages by eating the rabbi's parrot, and becomes a commentator on his human family and their friends, partly naïf, partly satirical, and the plot weaves between actual experience and fantasy rather pleasingly. The precarious social position of the Algerian Jewish community is very sympathetically portrayed; I felt Sfarr went a bit off the boil in the last story, when the Rabbi and his cat go to visit the son-in-law in Paris, where the Rabbi's very understandable alienation became a bit Orientalist, but I have the second volume (in English this time) on my shelves and look forward to reading it.

• Romania and Bulgaria: ‘If people go to Britain, of course it’s to contribute’
  
  Confusing the rhetoric with, y’know, facts.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu migration romania bulgaria )
• Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana
  
  How Newsweek got it wrong in 1995.
  (tags: internet history )
• How Fanzines Helped Put Doctor Who Fans in Charge of Doctor Who
  
  Great article from The Atlantic.
  (tags: doctorwho )

When this book was published in 2008, it must have seemed safely theoretical: the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission for Northern Ireland had never found much favour with any of the political decision-makers, and there was no reason to think it would change. Now, I understand that the creation of some such mechanism is actually one of the crunch points in the current political negotiations led by Richard Haass, so David Park's somewhat sideways look at the Troubles is going to hit closer to home than he perhaps expected.

I'm going to be personal about this. The one person who is most responsible for this change of circumstance is Ann Travers, whose sister Mary was shot dead by he IRA one Sunday morning in 1984 as she and her father, a magistrate, were leaving church (he was badly wounded in the attack, but survived, and died exactly four years ago today). During the Troubles, both Republican and Loyalist terrorists would occasionally target their victims at church, which tended to provoke more than the usual amount of revulsion from anyone with any ounce of humanity. The Travers attack was more than usually upsetting for my own social group, because they were Catholics, and had been at Mass at the ultra-respectable St Brigid's on Derryvolgie Avenue; and for us middle-class South Belfast Catholics, the shooting made it very clear that the IRA were not on our side. Mary Travers, who was training to be a teacher, had done a student placement in my school. Her brother later became a friend of mine at Cambridge. The parish priest, Ambrose Macaulay, was a friend of my parents. As it happened I attended Mass at St Brigid's precisely a week after the shooting, one of the tensest religious ceremonies I can ever remember participating in (I can't remember why I was there, normally we were either Derriaghy or Aghaderg). If our own supposed side were happy to take pot-shots at the most successful members of the community, not caring about destroying other family members, where the hell did that leave us with regard to the Loyalists or the British? Lots of people had it worse than we did during the Troubles; but none of us had it easy.

Anyway, the clock moves on; and the only person convicted of involvement in the Travers shooting (not one of the gunmen, but a female accomplice) was appointed by Sinn Féin to a particular political patronage position in 2011 after the last Assembly election. There followed a very raw political controversy, led by Ann Travers, with the immediate result that new legislation was passed to prevent people with terrorist convictions getting that sort of job; and the net result has been to make unviable the pacto de olvido approach which had hitherto seemed dominant (this of course at a time when the original pacto de olvido is also fraying). Combined with the dispute over how often particular flags should fly over Belfast City Hall, we have the current Haass process, which apparently will recommend setting up a new Independent Commission for the Recovery/Retrieval of Information, rather similar to the Truth Commission of David Park's novel. So what seemed a slightly stretched political fantasy when published almost six years ago turns out to be oddly prophetic.

Having made that lengthy excursion, the book is quite engaging in a masculine sort of way – there are four alternating viewpoint characters, the two IRA men who shot a young informer many years ago, the informer's police handler, and the titular Commissioner who is drawn into this particular story by his own complex family dynamics. I found a number of details a bit jarring, particularly with regard to the internationally appointed commissioner himself (I guess that's a realm I move in more than the author does), but it's a fine character study of four men coming to terms with the damage they have done to themselves, to each other, to the women in their lives and to the long-ago victim. There are no winners, and perhaps that is the moral.

As with last month’s Torchwood book, this is another pre-Miracle Day story which features very few of the previous regular Torchwood team, but instead has Rex Matheson, CIA agent, getting swept up in mysterious goings on which are related to Torchwood and the post-Children of Earth cleanup. The villain is a splendidly spooky character, Mr Wynter, whose extensive powers are matched by a need which must be satisfied. There is an excellent set of forking time lines at the end – in a way that TV WHo never quite manages to pull off. A decent novel on the fringes of the Torchwood universe which feeds into and slightly reinforces Miracle Day.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The legacy of the teen heroine
  
  @naomialderman reflects.
  (tags: buffy sf )
• Every episode of Paddington, on YouTube
  
  You’re welcome.
  (tags: tv )
• Phobos 360
  
  The inner moon of Mars, from all angles.
  (tags: astronomy )

• Britain’s Bulgaria-Romania phobia
  
  @dimobe dissects the UK rhetoric.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics romania bulgaria li )
• Reading digital sources: a case study in ship’s logs
  
  Brilliant analysis of 19th-century sailing!
  (tags: maps history )

• Jason O Mahony’s Irish Political Predictions for 2014.
  
  (tags: ireland li )
• FREE, complete Big Finish Audios by big-finish on SoundCloud
  
  Sample of 8 great Doctor Who plays from @bigfinish.
  (tags: doctorwho audio )
• Zeno of Elea: the game
  
  (tags: mathematics funny )
• Turing: what happened and what should have been done.
  
  by @JackofKent.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality ukpolitics )
• Bah humbug behind bars
  
  The British government hits prisoners harder.
  (tags: ukpolitics )

A picture is worth a thousand words, or at least can graph the impact of 2,845 tweets since my last roundup on 15 December last year.

Basically my Tom Baker tweet of five weeks ago has broken all records, with 1,074 retweets and perhaps over 600,000 impressions directly, plus an unknown number (maybe 20% more, maybe 40%) who picked it up and modified it.

#fb Tom Baker's answer when asked about his favourite memory of #DoctorWho

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) November 14, 2013

As I said at the time, my only regret was not giving more prominence to the source. It's difficult to imagine that I will equal that level of virality again any time soon.

Up till then, my most retweeted tweet of all time was this one, a mere 92 retweets which still eclipsed my previous record of 33:

Dalek Found At Bottom Of British Pond, Probably Just Biding Its Time http://t.co/rAOvats1JJ Be afraid. Be very afraid.

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) May 23, 2013

Not quite so many retweets for this one a couple of weeks later (86 rather than 92), but slightly better eyeball numbers (about 100,000 rather than 40,000, thanks largely to Charles Stross and Nick Harkaway) for a tribute to a favourite author:

Iain Banks quotes http://t.co/dQLmUAAKFL Too many good lines here to single any one out.

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) June 10, 2013

The Tom Baker tweet got 43 direct replies, which is another record. Two other tweets managed 7, one a completely inaccurate prediction about the Mid Ulster by-election, and one where the replies may look like an irrelevant trolling of a Foursquare checkin with commentary about Somali politics, but it's actually a fair cop as I was at the cafe for a public meeting about Somali politics. Seven was also the previous year's record.

I am up from 1,296 followers on 15 December last year to 1,625 today.

• Mobile phone chargers to be standardised under EU law
  
  Hooray!
  (tags: eu )
• If the Prime Minister wants to change the EU, he has to stop making enemies
  
  …and also wake up to Germany’s real position.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk
  
  Strangely I appear to be from somewhere near the Gulf Coast.
  (tags: usa linguistics )
• When Marcel Proust Met James Joyce
  
  Nobody quite seems to remember what happened.
  (tags: literature )
• Accountant who claims he is Princess Margaret’s son wins court ruling
  
  Even the deluded have rights.
  (tags: law )
• Nontraditional Paths of Isolated Hugo Award Fans
  
  Very interesting take on Worldcons and Hugos.
  (tags: sf )

Five and a half years ago I was reminded of this book’s existence by , and as I was recovering from jetlag at her place last weekend, she kindly lent it to me and I zoomed through it as I lay on her spare bed. I have to confess that I still would have difficulty placing the 1547-48 siege of St Andrews in the wider narrative of Scottish history; but I guess McGregor’s evocation of a town pushed beyond breaking point by a religious conflict must have chimed with me as a teenager in Belfast, and I found it just as good today. In particular, she doesn’t allow either side a monopoly of good or evil; the leaders of both Protestants and Catholics are more likely to be evil and indeed arrogant, but there’s plenty of viciousness at lower levels as well. The core of the story is the path to maturity of the young hero, a Bildungsroman played out in times of civil war. I don’t think I ever read any other books by McGregor but now I wish I had.

I’ve read most of Miéville’s novels, but hadn’t come across much of his short fiction except insofar as it has been nominated for various awards. This was a good set of stories, mostly leaning towards horror, mostly set in contemporary London (one set in New Crobuzon). There’s a lot of very effective writing and scene-setting – I particularly liked the short story told through correspondence and diary entries about a wandering street. Nothing that quite grabbed me by the throat, but all very pleasing.

I’d read this Eighth Doctor Adventure five years ago, before starting my systematic read-through of the sequence, and enjoyed it well enough as effectively a standalone novel; I liked it even more as part of the series, having got to know companions Fitz and Anji rather better over the last few months of reading. In particular, the intense description of New Orleans as a setting really does stand out as an exceptionally good evocation of place. Good to return to it.

32 years on. Two years ago for the thirtieth anniversary, invoked John Donne.

• Via Catalana – “Catalunya should have the right to vote”
  
  Very nice video of September’s mass demonstration.
  (tags: catalonia )

• Azerbaijan: Prominent Election Monitor Arrested
  
  (tags: azerbaijan li )
• Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
  
  by @cstross.
  (tags: economics )
• Surviving the job hunt-It’s a jungle out there!
  
  @sluggerotoole brainstorms getting in the door.
  (tags: careersadvice )
• Defenceless?
  
  Remember the Eurosceptics predicting the army of an EU superstate? Yeah.
  (tags: eu li )

• Sculpture on the moon: Paul van Hoeydonck’s Fallen Astronaut.
  
  An extraordinary story. (With a certain Belgian theme.)
  (tags: space art li )
• 635 – Sex and Drugs and Border Changes
  
  How and why the Netherlands/Belgium border is being changed.
  (tags: maps belgium netherlands )
• “Opposition” – another example of Simplistic Progressives?
  
  @ianjamesparsley asks the sensible but hard questions.
  (tags: world: northern ireland )
• 35 фатальных ошибок перевода
  
  Mainly (but not entirely) for my Russian speaking friends.
  (tags: languages: russian funny )
• Stunning Photos Of The Ukrainian Protests
  
  Courage in the cold.
  (tags: eu world: ukraine li )
• The Shipping Forecast: From Britain’s Seas Into Its Soul
  
  Americans investigate a British institution.
  (tags: bbc )
• The fiction of Ted Chiang: Why you should read his stories
  
  In @TheEconomist, of all places.
  (tags: sf )

At the start of this year I met Hans Stein at a pub get-together, and we got talking about Brussels, politics and comics, which are three enthusiasms which as it turned out we shared, though they are surprisingly rarely combined. He told me proudly that he had managed to organise an international competition for people to write comic strips about the spirit of Europe – with a prize, and everything; we made sure to stay in touch.

And two weeks ago he announced the award, at a very nice reception at the Comic Strip Museum, along with this rather nice book including the winner and four other finalists (five, I suppose, because one entry is by two brothers). The winning entry is a pleasingly surreal tale by Hamburg-based artist Marco Tabilio of Erasmus and a talking seal having postmodern adventures in the belly of a whale. The judges made the right decision; the other stories are all OK (perhaps I woudn’t have included the second of the five) but this is the best of them.

If Hans’s party had managed a little more than 100,000 extra votes out of 44 million in September’s election, he would now be a member of the Bundestag; but as it is he remains in Brussels. Berlin’s loss is our gain.

I don’t think of myself as someone who likes the big fantasy trilogy, having bounced off several of the more celebrated examples recently; but I really loved this as much as I loved the first volume, perhaps even a little more. Our hero, excluded from university studies because his brilliance makes him the object of supernaturally expressed jealousy, wanders off to find several different sets of adventures which would each be worth a novel in themselves, as courtier, mercenary, lover of the fae and initiate of a warrior cult; and gets back to find that the plot still needs to be resolved. Meanwhile the framing narrative gets a bit darker as well. Excellent stuff, and I will be among those getting the third volume the day it is published.

• 38 Test Answers That Are 100% Wrong But Totally Genius At The Same Time
  
  It’s time for some old chestnuts…
  (tags: funny )
• Wow, That Took Off Quickly
  
  The power of social media – lost bears, sacked chefs – by @EyeEdinburgh.
  (tags: twitter li )

Continuing a decent run of Who books, this is the Seventh Doctor story which introduces Jason Kane, husband of Bernice Summerfield. I knew a lot of Jason’s later continuity from Big Finish audios, but had somehow not absorbed that he was actually from 1996. Anyway, I was delighted with his introduction to the character, whose whirlwind romance with Benny comes against a background of mildly comical terror; meanwhile the Doctor is attempting to sort out a complex conflict between three competing alien races, and Roz and Chris have a subordinate but still entertaining plot line.

Having returned from a jetlagged stopover in London with the eminently hospitable and , it’s time for the 2013 overnight meme:

List the places where you spent a night away from home this year, marking places where you spent two or more non-consecutive nightswith an asterisk.

Dubrovnik, Croatia
Munich, Germany
Los Angeles, USA
Berlin, Germany*
London, England*
Barcelona, Catalonia*
Bratislava, Slovakia
Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland*
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Kidderminster, England
Krynica-Zdrój, Poland
Strasbourg, France
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Nottingham, England
Edinburgh, Scotland
Cologne, Germany
New York, USA

17, which is one more than last year. Also two overnight transatlantic flights. Nine countries in the above list, with a day trip to Geneva, and passing through Luxembourg en route to and from Strasbourg, taking the total to eleven countries this year. Five trips to London, of which three were entirely Worldcon-related and some Worldcon business was done during both of the other two.

Previous years: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006.

Certainly thirty years since I last read this, and I’m old enough to remember the 1977 BBC adaptation with Patrick Troughton as Israel Hands. A total Bechdel fail, with precisely no named female characters (I suppose Jim’s mother is Mrs Hawkins, but we’re never actually told that); note also that Long John Silver gives, as the reason for his wanting to leave Bristol, that his wife is a black woman, and is believed. And surely the bloke who actually found and dug up the treasure might have been entitled to a larger share of it? Or was he bought out with a block of cheese?

However, it’s still a jolly good adventure story, with plucky young hero having the good fortune to save the day for his elders and betters on several occasions. Long John Silver is actually quite a fascinating character and successfully plays several games at once, deceiving absolutely everyone (except, possibly, his wife; in retrospect, it’s clear that he is lying about his motivations for leaving Bristol). The shifting geography of power in the temporary human community of the island is well portrayed. I can see why this one has lasted.

One of the earlier Virgin Missing Adventures, which piqued my interest when I realised that a substantial chunk of the plot revolves around a conflict bordering Morocco and Algeria, a situation to which I have a professional connection. However there’s one important difference – Leonard’s fictional country of Kebiria is on the Mediterranean coast rather than the Atlantic. The plot is actually rather similar to the last Eighth Doctor novel I read, in that actors in a local conflict find that they have potential alien allies, but those alien allies actually have their own agenda. But I liked it a lot more, partly because setting a story like this in the firm anchorage of the Third Doctor and Jo Grant UNIT era gives Leonard a good stock cast for this sort of thing, all of whom he does well by (apart from Yates who is unsalvageable anyway), and also partly because his aliens do a neat line in dopplegangers, which I always enjoy, and body-horror, which I like when it’s done right. Last month’s set of vintage Who novels didn’t really do it for me, but this month’s are off to a good start.

• The dignity and grace of Nelson Mandela.
  
  My former boss, Gareth Evans, remembers.
  (tags: madiba li )
• People’s review of the WCA: further evidence
  
  An update on the UK govt’s war on the disabled.
  (tags: ukpolitics disability )
• Why are Upworthy headlines suddenly everywhere?
  
  What’s really going on with Facebook and Twitter.
  (tags: internet Socialmedia )
• NSA surveillance: tech companies demand sweeping changes to US laws
  
  Industry challenges the securocrats.
  (tags: internet uspolitics )

I’ve enjoyed every other book I’ve read by Octavia Butler, so I’m sorry to say I thoroughly bounced off this one. A future human culture combines psychic slavery with an ongoing struggle against the non-human (or post-human) invaders; I found the conformity of the enslaved, despite their immense supernatural powers, rather implausible, and didn’t really follow what was going on politically. Maybe I just wasn’t concentrating.

• In 1994 I voted for Mandela over a thousand times
  
  True story from my old friend @TxTbUk.
  (tags: elections )
• Planet Has Been Discovered That Should Not Be There
  
  A world in the wrong place!
  (tags: astronomy )

(If you’re wondering what happened to December Books 1 and 2, they were unpublished manuscripts that I read for a friend. Both are strongly recommended, but they are not out yet.)

Apart from Brave New World, the only other Huxley novel I had read was Crome Yellow back when I was a student (and I remember very little about it). Eyeless in Gaza combines some fairly brutal commentary about lefties in British politics in the late 1930s, but tells the story in a narrative which is sliced up between decades, several different strands interlacing. There are some particularly grim scenes, involving a dog, an amputation, and a suicide, which are a striking contrast with the theoretical philosophising of the main character. I thought this had some of Huxley’s better women characters as well, with a frank depiction of shifting relationships among a group of friends. Nothing sfnal to see here, but recognisably from the same source as Brave New World.