• As Swing Districts Dwindle, Can a Divided House Stand?
  
  Nate Silver on the polarisation of US politics.
  (tags: Uspolitics )
• Storm in a teacup as non-native EC eurocrat blogs! (with tweets)
  
  EU comms people missing the point about comms…
  (tags: Eu )

Justin Richards seems to be on form these days; this is another tie-in e-book, intended as a prequel to The Snowmen (though as far as I could tell it was not available outside UKania until after the broadcast), a tale of Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax battling a smoke monster with the assistance of a small boy as viewpoint character. It is a pastiche of Victorian children’s stories with a nod to Leon Garfield (though his Devil-in-the-Fog was set a hundred years earlier), spooky and enjoyable. When we first met Vastra and Jenny, fandom cried out en masse for spinoff stories about them, and I think this and James Goss’s piece for last year’s Brilliant Book shows that fandom was right.

Most of this is excellent, a tale of a specialist assassin who happens also to have a milder form of hæmophilia, trying to find out who organised his latest hit, and of a private detective hired to find and kill him for a previous assignment. The detail of pursuit around the UK and USA, getting entangled in a nasty cult with links to spooky circles in Washington, is very good. But unfortunately I was completely unconvinced by the twist-in-the-tail resolutions of both main plot strands, which spoiled what was otherwise a very enjoyable read. (Not a Rebus book, despite my choice of icon.)

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.

*Strasbourg, France
*Tbilisi, Georgia
*Geneva, Switzerland
Skopje, Macedonia
*Barcelona, Catalonia
Heathrow, England
*Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland
Paris, France
The Hague, the Netherlands
Broadstairs, England
Portslade, England
Kidderminster, England
Letchworth, England
Dublin, Ireland
New York, NY
Cherry Hill, NJ

At 16, that’s more than last year but less than some others. There were a lot of return visits – five to Tbilisi, three to Strasbourg, three to Geneva. Also one overnight flight and two night ferries. Nine countries plus Belgium, plus another three (Austria, Turkey, Ukraine) changing planes and several times changing trains in Luxembourg, which makes fourteen countries this year.

• Digital Agenda for Europe – European Commission
  
  Do you feel incentivised to complete the survey?
  (tags: Eu )
• In an EU referendum, what does NO mean?
  
  @jonworth asks a good question.
  (tags: ukpolitics Eu )
• FreedomWorks tea party group nearly falls apart in fight between old and new guard
  
  Tea Party a front for billionaires? Who’d have thought?!
  (tags: us )

Big collection of sf short stories published in 2007, of which I had read very few – the five Hugo nominees (of which I remembered only three, Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, Stephen Baxter’s “Last Contact” and Elizabeth Bear’s “Tideline”). Several stories new to me that particularly grabbed me: “An Ocean Is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away” by John Barnes; “Sea Change”, by Una McCormack; “Against the Current”, by Robert Silverberg; “Of Love and Other Monsters”, by Vandana Singh; “The Mists of Time”, by Tom Purdom; and “The Prophet of Flores”, by Ted Kosmatka. No turkeys; as usual a good collection.

• Classic TV – Doctor Who | Royal Mail Ltd
  
  2013 will see British postal stamps celebrating the 11 Doctors!
  (tags: Doctorwho )
• Professor Loomis and the NRA: A Story In Which EVERYONE Annoys Me | Popehat
  
  Sometimes there are no good guys.
  (tags: Guns )
• Obituary: Gerry Anderson – Telegraph
  
  I hate the @telegraph’s line on the EU, but its obituaries are often very good.
  (tags: sf death )

This is a detailed and yet very readable survey of the British music hall, from early days in the 1850s to death by competition from cinema and broadcasting after the first world war. I was surprised by both how little I knew about this – I had read about some of the stage magicians, but otherwise it’s basically The Talons of Weng Chiang and my childhood memory of trailers for The Good Old Days and The Black and White Minstrel Show. In particular, the music hall is absent from my distant cousin Frederic’s survey of British (and American) actors of much the same period; he describes the 1860s, when music hall was in its first full burst of vigour, as a low point in British theatrical history. (Major does refer to the classical theatre; it was a rich source of material for music hall, especially parody and impressions.)

I had not fully realised just how rooted British popular culture is in music hall, even today. It was the source of many well-known catch-phrases. Harry Champion sang “Any Old Iron”, “Boiled Beef and Carrots”, and “I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am”. Harry Clifton wrote “Paddle Your Own Canoe”, “Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel”, “Up With the Lark”, and “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way”. Major credits Dan Leno, “the Funniest Man in the World”, with inspiring the surreal stream-of-consciousness humour of the Goons and Monty Python. Basically all later twentieth-century and twenty-first century British comedy draws from this well.

The book is neatly structured, looking at the origins of music hall from pleasure garden, glee clubs and legislative attempts at social control; then at the development of music hall culture, with particular focus on the most celebrated performers (Marie Lloyd gets a chapter to herself, Dan Leno and Little Tich share one), and he looks thematically also at female cross-dressers, comedians, blackface and various other styles of performance. At the end he devotes a short chapter to the career of his own father, who was half of a celebrated double act in the early twentieth century, until his co-star, also his first wife, died as the result of a scenery accident. The book movingly starts and finishes with the death in 1962 of 83-year-old Tom Major, his son and second wife at his side, also surrounded by the shades of his past in spirit and occasionally in body.

Major comments ruefully that “Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children, the talent to entertain was not among them… although I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business.” It is more than twenty years ago that he rose without trace to become prime minister of the United Kingdom, and served seven forgettable years in the job. Yet I always felt that he was probably the only British prime minister of my lifetime who would be genuinely pleasant company in person. and on the evidence of this book he is too modest about his own ability to entertain. It’s a nice little gem of cultural history.

I’ve been giving some thought to the pacing of my write-ups of New Who. When I did my rewatch of Old Who, I chose to group stories in blocks of six, regardless of their overall length and number of episodes. That gave me the neat result of grouping the great Tom Baker seasons together, but was otherwise pretty arbitrary. So far I have written up one standalone spoof and four webcasts with twenty-one episodes as a group.

I think what I will try to do henceforth is to stick to watching/listening to the stories in broadcast order, but breaking at ends and beginnings of seasons, and also probably in between. I don’t want to do entries writing up thirteen different stories at once; around six still feels right, but I won’t adhere fanatically to that number.

For the 2005 Season One, that means a natural break point between Dalek and The Long Game, six episodes and five stories in, seven episodes and another five stories to go. (Later seasons will get more complicated.) So here goes.

Rose is a great beginning to New Who. The mistake made by other reboots was to take for granted that viewers would take an interest in the central character. Russell T Davies turns convention on its head by making this a story mainly about the Doctor’s companion – with the partial exception of the first episode ever, Old Who had precisely one story which was companion-centric, The Massacre, though the Doctor-lite episode has now become a feature of New Who. Rose leads a fairly normal life – dead-end job, mum but no dad, boyfriend who is not quite on her wavelength – and the Doctor arrives to explode her workplace, break her mother’s furniture and drag her across London to face militant plastic aliens. Yet we move from Clive’s suspicions to the point where there can be few viewers who do not cheer Rose’s joyful slow-motion run to the Tardis at the end. One can see why the bat-shippers decided that this was a show about Rose rather than the Doctor.

The two principals are great here, and Ecclestone has some brilliant moments as the damaged soldier trying to stop things going wrong again. There are some minor flaws – Jackie’s seductive fumbling, the burping bin, the sequencing of the climax, the precise nature of the Nestene plans – but it is an excellent bit of television, in which almost the only elements of Who continuity are the Tardis and the Autons. In contrast to The Movie, or Scream of the Shalka (or indeed The Twin Dilemma) you end the story wanting to know what happens to these people next.

And we leap to the far future, to be precise The End of the World, an environment that manages to look like a vast space station visited by a wealth of alien life forms, rather than a Welsh civic building with some people in fancy dress, which itself is a major achievement. We learn more about the Doctor here – he is technically brilliant and saves the day, but he also flirts hilariously with the doomed Jabe. The two really scary bits are the Doctor’s battle with the rotating fans and Rose’s repeated problems with the solar shutters; apart from that it’s enjoyable enough but not too taxing. (And the Doctor barely speaks to the Face of Boe, which is a bit problematic for later continuity, though perhaps they are nattering away off-screen.) Odd fact which I only found out writing this – the rather memorable scene with Rose and Raffalo, who is the first person to die horribly, was a late addition to make up for cutting out a lot of expensive Cassandra special effects.

There’s an interesting survey to be done about the extent to which a Doctor’s second story is indicative of the future. The Daleks – yes. The Highlanders – no (apart from introducing Jamie). Doctor Who and the Sliurians – maybe. The Ark in Space – yes. This isn’t the strongest story of the season but it does at least scratch the sfnal itch; it’s actually the furthest we get from Earth in 2005, in time and probably also in space, until New Earth (another Doctor’s second story).

Though broadcast on 9 April 2005, The Unquiet Dead is very explicitly a Christmas episode, so it was rather nice to be watching it at this time of year. This feels much more solid than The End of the World somehow – it reminds me a bit of how the early Who historicals work much better on the whole than the early Who sf stories. It’s well written, Piper and Ecclestone are on form, and they are supported by a very strong turn from Simon Callow as Dickens and a good start for Eve Myles (though it’s difficult for me now to watch her and not expect her to be Gwen Cooper). It somehow looks better than The End of the World as well – beautifully lit, street scenes which are from a familiar genre but done very well, and excellent special effects for the Gelth. Watching it again I was also struck by the hints of character even for minor parts in the script, and the brief discussion of who and why the Doctor is. I had also forgotten how much the Time War underlies this season – as in Rose, the Doctor is here clearing up unfinished business from the conflict.

I had previously rated Aliens of London / World War Three as the low point of the season (I know that this is heresy; the weight of fan opinion is pretty clear that this honour belongs to The Long Game), but I have revised my views upwards a bit now. I still don’t like the fart jokes, and the topical references have dated (and in some cases, eg Britain needing UN approval to launch a nuclear strike in self-defence, were actually wrong at the time). But here for the first time in Who history we have a companion returned to their home after being thought lost for ever, as so many other companions must have been thought lost in the past; and we have it combined with a rather different alien plot which goes to the heart of government (incidentally, this year’s Autons have abandoned the strategy of replacing senior officials with duplicates, leaving that for the Slitheen). The Downing Street bits are fun rather than plausible. There are some great special effects as well – the initial spaceship crash, the Slitheen suits coming on and off; shame about the chase scenes.

Incidentally in the whole of Old Who there were only two people who appeared playing themselves – the late Kenneth Kendall and Courtney Pine. In this story alone we get the first two of many such appearances in New Who, Matt Baker of Blue Peter and political journalist Andrew Marr.

Dalek was one of the set-pieces that I most looked forward to in 2005, and delivered so well that I felt extra betrayed when later set-pieces were not as good. We wanted some kind of reimagining of the Daleks for New Who, and we got it – but also a fairly harsh light is shone on the character of the Doctor, and we wince for him at the line “You would make a good Dalek.” (Though if you think of the concept of the “good orc”, there may be another layer of meaning here.) When the Dalek finds a certain redemption at the end, it is a prefiguring of the Ninth Doctor’s own doom (as we now know). Ecclestone and Piper again are excellent here, Piper’s Rose now starting to grow up a bit and getting her turn at flirtation. I am less impressed with either Corey Johnson’s Van Statten or Bruno Langley’s Adam, but that’s partly because they look very orange through a peculiarly chosen combination of make-up and lighting.

NB that this is the first TV Doctor Who story, but not the last, which was set in this year.

Highlights of this run: Rose and Dalek, as I expected, and also The Unquiet Dead. Low point is still Aliens of London / World War Three but not as bad as I remembered. I had forgotten both how good Piper is as Rose (memories poisoned by her return in Journey’s End) and also how consistent the theme of the Time War is, to the point that I haven’t even noted it in the later stories above. I had not forgotten how good Ecclestone is in the lead role.

< The Curse of Fatal Death | The Webcasts | Rose – Dalek | The Long Game – The Parting of the Ways | Comic Relief 2006 – The Girl In The Fireplace | Rise of the Cybermen – Doomsday | Everything Changes – They Keep Killing Suzie | Random Shoes – End of Days | Smith and Jones – 42 | Human Nature / The Family of Blood – Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords & The Infinite Quest | Revenge of the Slitheen – The Lost Boy & Time Crash | Voyage of the Damned – Adam | Reset – Exit Wounds

A brilliant book which has been on my reading list for far too long. Hutton looks thoroughly and critically at the records of ritual celebrations in England, Scotland and Wales over the centuries, and comes out with some very revisionist conclusions. I had always assumed, for instance, that the Bonfire Night celebrations of 5 November were direct descendants of ancient Celtic Samhain ritual, shifted by a few days; Hutton shows that in fact the evidence is that Bonfire Night started as a direct commemoration of the events of 1605, that earlier Samhain celebrations are recorded, if at all, elsewhere in the country, and that if there was any calendrical shift it was in the other direction, from the 17 November anniversary celebrations of Elizabeth I’s accession.

Popular ritual seems to have always been in a state of flux and development, with even Morris dancing as a popular phenomenon dating back only to the 1560s. The only celebrations that Hutton ends up crediting with genuinely ancient roots are the solstices; fully the first quarter of the book looks at the changing nature of Christmas, and summer solstice bonfires do seem to go back to Celtic times. Not surprisingly, the Reformation and the flip-flopping of the 1550s seems to have had a very disruptive effect on ancient ceremonies, but that then opened up space for new practices to emerge, Bonfire Night being only the most widespread and visible.

The book is structured in terms of the calendar, allowing Hutton to take individual ceremonies one by one and look both at the records and the historiography. He is very critical of the folklorists of a hundred years ago as historians, including especially Cecil Sharp (who I knew of because of his Clare College connection) and basically anyone who bought the idea that all the rural celebrations were survivals of an otherwise lost pre-Christian past. In his conclusion, however, he finds space to praise them as inventors of a new literary movement which culminated in the development of Wicca. This leaves me with a couple of thoughts: one stat if Wicca works for some people, then it undeniably has its own truth; the other is that this is all happening at exactly the same time as Tolkien is creating his own mythology, as a consciously fictional (rather than wishfully historical) construction to fit more or less the same needs.

Anyway, Christmas is quite a good time to read this book, especially if you have encountered any recent nonsense about traditional Christian Christmas trees.

• Was poet John Milton the father of science fiction?
  
  It’s a point of view.
  (tags: sf )
• How the Queen of England Beat Everyone to the Internet
  
  Elizabeth II as early adopter.
  (tags: royals Internet )
• Kenny vows to back abolition of Seanad in referendum next year
  
  But pathetic @Labour Party backing out of manifesto commitment.
  (tags: Ireland )
• nwhyte: Seanad Éireann (and a bit about the House of Lords)
  
  My Jan 2011 praise for @Labour’s abandoned policy.
  (tags: Ireland )

Another Lovejoy book, from the later end of the series, and operating very much to the formula of richly realised foreign setting (in this case a cruise ship going round the Baltic, with special attention to St Petersburg), with Lovejoy mixed up in a heist most of whose details are incomprehensible (and remain so) and his supernatural sense of detecting genuine antiques a key plot point. The harder edges of the character from the earlier books are considerably toned down, no doubt under the influence of the TV series, and he doesn’t actually manage to have sex with anyone until more than half way through (though then vigorously makes up for the delay). It has been my insomnia book for several weeks (and I guess it is a good thing that it took several weeks to finish on that basis).

Well, I really enjoyed that.

The Old Who fans like me will have been delighted by an origin story for, of all Old Who baddies, the Great Intelligence, in such a way that it All Makes Sense (apart from Downtime, of course).

And Moffat is on form, killing off poor Jenna-Louise Coleman again, and then giving the Doctor the quest of finding out who she really is – a neat contrast to the question “Doctor Who?” which of course we know we will never get fully answered.

Though I don’t think it is nice to mock anyone for their appearance, even Sontarans.

Must get on with cooking boar and sprouts and rosemary apples followed by Christmas pudding, but am very satisfied.

• Changing Depictions of Santa Claus in Science Fiction Magazines and Superhero Comic Book Covers
  
  Flying with Captain Marvel, 1941; arrested by Judge Dredd, 2009.
  (tags: sf christmas )
• Christmas services and Doctor Who
  
  ” From the outside, it looks old and small and pointless. From the inside, it is much bigger than you might have ever expected. Which is why, despite everything, I keep going back.”
  (tags: Doctorwho Christmas religion )
• Nativity
  
  A gallery of photographs from Bethlehem over the years.
  (tags: middleeast )

• Letter of Resignation Sent By Bush to Rifle Association
  
  Bush père resigned from #NRA in disgust in 1995.
  (tags: Guns )
• Scott Lynch recommends “The Lies of Locke Lamora”
  
  “I can safely assure you that it’s a heartbreaking, bittersweet tapestry of life itself and that you’ll promptly re-name your children after the main characters. Also, any copy of the book will cure gout with a touch and can transmute lead into gold once every 24 hours. The eBook version, in any language, has a special feature where 1 in 50 lucky readers will be transported to the Death Zone on Gallifrey and get a chance to play the Game of Rassilon.”
  (tags: sf )
• The Fiscal Cliff: How can Republicans change their minds?
  
  (tags: Uspolitics )

I was really surprised and pleased by how much I enjoyed this book, the novelisation of the webcast story starring Richard E. Grant as the other Ninth Doctor. Perhaps it is partly that, at least in the opening pages, it so consciously draws on the style of the Dicks and Hulke novelisations of the Third and Fourth Doctor stories which meant so much to fans of the same sort of age as the author and me. But also a lot of the sequencing that didn’t quite work for me in the webcast seemed to me to be much better here: the Master’s new situation, the reasons for the Doctor’s emotional coldness, the back story to Alison’s relationship. We do miss out on Conor Moloney’s performance as Greaves, though. Perhaps the last week of work before the Christmas hols was a bad time to watch the webcast; I am certain that if I had read the book before watching it, I would have enjoyed both more.

Some of the similarities between Shalka continuity and New Who are even more noticeable here: that the Ninth Doctor is suffering PTSD after an awful war in which many people he cared about were killed, and that the new companion chooses to travel with the Doctor rather than remain in a (dull) interracial relationship. (As in Rose, there is also a monster leader underground controlling its minions who burst into the normal world to terrify humans, and the Doctor must descend to their lair to do battle, but those are fairly standard plot elements.)

The book also comes with a long afterword – a quarter of its total length – including the original story proposal and the author’s account of how the story came to be made, told with Cornell’s typical enthusiasm, but with first-hand accounts patched in from the production team as well. This may have turned out to be just a sidetrack in Who history but we are lucky that it is so well chronicled, including the story of how Cornell, on honeymoon in New Zealand, had to get a friend to break into his house to transmit the script to the BBC after an email went astray. It certainly adds to what is already a good book for fans to track down.

• The Law of War and The Lord of the Rings
  
  Do the Geneva conventions apply in Middle-Earth?
  (tags: war Tolkien )
• Euromyths and Letters to the Editor: Holiday season bumper Euromyths special
  
  More examples of lies told by the British press.
  (tags: ukpolitics EU Eu )
• Brussels sprouts ‘overdose’ hospitalised man
  
  Of course “too many” sprouts are bad for you – that’s what “too many” means!!!!
  (tags: )
• Mobile Technologies and Empowerment: Enhancing human development through participation and innovation | E-governance and Access to Information
  
  UN: how mobile phones are transforming the developing world.
  (tags: Technology )
• Elizabeth II, Queen of the South Pole
  
  “It’s a question on the minds of many, this gift-giving season: What do you get someone who already has everything? The problem gets a bit more pressing if you’re the British Cabinet, and the Queen is coming round to visit. Their solution? Clever: two gifts – 60 table mats, and a chunk of Antarctica, henceforth forever known as Queen Elizabeth Land. At least on British maps.”
  (tags: royals Maps )

I enjoyed the first of this classic bande dessinée series, and am glad to say that the second volume builds on the strong points of the first. Teenagers Marc and Kim, still struggling to reach the distant metropolis after the destruction of their home village, encounter the mysterious blonde woman who is associated with their enigmatic saviour from the first volume, and Marc finds himself fleeing with her from a sinister dirigible controlled by the government priest Loomis. For the first time our heroes hear that they have grown up under a repressive government, and realise that they have fallen in with a revolutionary group. But apart from the human drama, we can also see that the natural life forms of Aldebaran are in symbiosis with their human colonisers, but inhumanly grumpy about it, and that there must be much more going on under the surface of the planet’s mysterious seas. The flora and fauna again are glorious and surely inspired by Leo’s native Brazil. Very intrigued to find out what happens next.

Locus have published the results of their online poll of the best sf and fantasy novels of the 20th and 21st centuries, and as ever with these things they are a mixture of the expected and the facepalm. I give the lists below, with the usual bold if I’ve read it, italic if I started but did not finish, and struck through if I did not like the book.

20th Century SF Novel:
1 Herbert, Frank: Dune (1965)
2 Card, Orson Scott: Ender’s Game (1985)
3 Asimov, Isaac: The Foundation Trilogy (1953)
4 Simmons, Dan: Hyperion (1989)
5 Le Guin, Ursula K.: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
6 Adams, Douglas: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
7 Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
8 Gibson, William: Neuromancer (1984)
9 Bester, Alfred: The Stars My Destination (1957)
10 Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
11 Heinlein, Robert A.: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
12 Heinlein, Robert A.: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
13 Haldeman, Joe: The Forever War (1974)
14 Clarke, Arthur C.: Childhood’s End (1953)
15 Niven, Larry: Ringworld (1970)
16 Le Guin, Ursula K.: The Dispossessed (1974)
17 Bradbury, Ray: The Martian Chronicles (1950)
18 Stephenson, Neal: Snow Crash (1992)
19 Miller, Walter M. , Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
20 Pohl, Frederik: Gateway (1977)
21 Heinlein, Robert A.: Starship Troopers (1959)
22 Dick, Philip K.: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
23 Zelazny, Roger: Lord of Light (1967)
24 Wolfe, Gene: The Book of the New Sun (1983)
25 Lem, Stanislaw: Solaris (1970)
26 Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
27 Vinge, Vernor: A Fire Upon The Deep (1992)
28 Clarke, Arthur C.: Rendezvous with Rama (1973)
29 Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World (1932)
30 Clarke, Arthur C.: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
31 Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
32 Strugatsky, Arkady & Boris: Roadside Picnic (1972)
33 Card, Orson Scott: Speaker for the Dead (1986)
34 Brunner, John: Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
35 Robinson, Kim Stanley: Red Mars (1992)
36 Niven, Larry (& Pournelle, Jerry): The Mote in God’s Eye (1974)
37 Willis, Connie: Doomsday Book (1992)
38 Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
39 Sturgeon, Theodore: More Than Human (1953)
40 Simak, Clifford D.: City (1952)
41 Brin, David: Startide Rising (1983)
42 Asimov, Isaac: Foundation (1950)
43 Farmer, Philip Jose: To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971)
44 Dick, Philip K.: Ubik (1969)
45 Vonnegut, Kurt: Cat’s Cradle (1963)
46 Vinge, Vernor: A Deepness in the Sky (1999)
47 Simak, Clifford D.: Way Station (1963)
48 Wyndham, John: The Day of the Triffids (1951)
49* Keyes, Daniel: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
49* Delany, Samuel R.: Dhalgren (1975)

20th Century Fantasy Novel:
1 Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Lord of the Rings (1955)
2 Martin, George R. R.: A Game of Thrones (1996)
3 Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Hobbit (1937)
4 Le Guin, Ursula K.: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
5 Zelazny, Roger: Nine Princes in Amber (1970)
6 Lewis, C. S.: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
7 Mieville, China: Perdido Street Station (2000)
8 Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
9 Crowley, John: Little, Big (1981)
10 Adams, Richard: Watership Down (1972)
11 Goldman, William: The Princess Bride (1973)
12 Martin, George R. R.: A Storm of Swords (2000)
13 Beagle, Peter S.: The Last Unicorn (1968)
14 White, T. H.: The Once and Future King (1958)
15 Pratchett, Terry (& Gaiman, Neil): Good Omens (1990)
16 Kay, Guy Gavriel: Tigana (1990)
17 Gaiman, Neil: Neverwhere (1996)
18 Wolfe, Gene: The Book of the New Sun (1983)
19 Vance, Jack: The Dying Earth (1950)
20 Bulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margarita (1967)
21 Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)
22 Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Silmarillion (1977)
23 Leiber, Fritz: The Swords of Lankhmar (1968)
24 Jordan, Robert: The Eye of the World (1990)
25 Donaldson, Stephen R.: Lord Foul’s Bane (1977)
26 Bradbury, Ray: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)
27 Peake, Mervyn: Gormenghast (1950)
28 Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)
29 Powers, Tim: The Anubis Gates (1983)
30 Martin, George R. R.: A Clash of Kings (1998)
31 Bradley, Marion Zimmer: The Mists of Avalon (1983)
32 Hobb, Robin: Assassin’s Apprentice (1995)
33 Pratchett, Terry: The Colour of Magic (1983)
34 Holdstock, Robert: Mythago Wood (1984)
35 King, Stephen: The Stand (1978)
36* L’Engle, Madeleine: A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
36* Pratchett, Terry: Small Gods (1992)
38 Ende, Michael: The Neverending Story (1983)
39 Peake, Mervyn: Titus Groan (1946)
40 Howard, Robert E.: Conan the Barbarian (1950)
41 McCaffrey, Anne: Dragonflight (1968)
42 Orwell: George: Animal Farm (1945)
43 Feist, Raymond E.: Magician (1982)
44 Silverberg, Robert: Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980)
45 Lovecraft, H. P.: At the Mountains of Madness (1936)
46 Swanwick, Michael: The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993)
47 King, Stephen: The Shining (1977)
48 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970)
49 Saint-Exupery, Antoine de: The Little Prince (1943)
50 Hughart, Barry: Bridge of Birds (1984)

21st Century SF Novel:
1 Scalzi, John: Old Man’s War (2005)
2 Stephenson, Neal: Anathem (2008)
3 Bacigalupi, Paolo: The Windup Girl (2009)
4 Wilson, Robert Charles: Spin (2005)
5 Watts, Peter: Blindsight (2006)
6 Morgan, Richard: Altered Carbon (2002)
7 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games (2008)
8 Gibson, William: Pattern Recognition (2003)
9 Mieville, China: The City & the City (2009)
10 Stross, Charles: Accelerando (2005)
11 Mitchell, David: Cloud Atlas (2004)
12 McDonald, Ian: River of Gods (2004)
13 McCarthy, Cormac: The Road (2006)
14 Harrison, M. John: Light (2002)
15* Willis, Connie: Black Out/All Clear (2010)
15* Chabon, Michael: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)

21st Century Fantasy Novel:
1 Gaiman, Neil: American Gods (2001)
2 Clarke, Susanna: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)
3 Rothfuss, Patrick: The Name of the Wind (2007)
4 Mieville, China: The Scar (2002)
5 Martin, George R. R.: A Feast for Crows (2005)
6 Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007)
7 Bujold, Lois McMaster: The Curse of Chalion (2001)
8 Mieville, China: The City & the City (2009)
9 Fforde, Jasper: The Eyre Affair (2001)
10* Bujold, Lois McMaster: Paladin of Souls (2003)
10* Pratchett, Terry: Night Watch (2002)
12 Gaiman, Neil: Coraline (2002)
13 Wolfe, Gene: The Wizard Knight (2004)
14 Pratchett, Terry: Going Postal (2004)
15* Gaiman, Neil: The Graveyard Book (2008)
15* Lynch, Scott: The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006)

One of the things about these polls for me is to spot gaps in my own reading. I have read all but 9 of the 132 books listed above, which is not too bad (and a clean sweep in 20th century SF), but I have some more titles to add to my Amazon wishlist now.

One should not engage in too much analysis of what is basically a poll representing only the preferences of those who voted (I didn’t) and whose voting system is somewhat obscure (“algorithms that reward a 1st place vote twice as many points as a 5th or 10th place vote, but not 5 times or 10 times as many”, which seems to mean two points for a first place and one for every other placing). But I can’t completely refrain from comment.

The 20th century sf list feels rather old-fashioned. The average (and median) year of publication is 1969 (compared to mid-1970s for the fantasy list). But perhaps it is a better reflection of staying power than the other lists. Eleven of the 20th century fantasy list were published after 1990, compared to five of the sf list.

I find it difficult to believe that Old Man’s War won the 21st century sf category. My own problems with this book are well–known, but even putting that aside I cannot understand how anyone could rate it ahead of most of the others on the list. Having said that, this was the list where I struck out fully a quarter of the books on it, so clearly my tastes are out of whack with the times. Also note that most ballots were received in the last four days, and that both Scalzi himself and Tor (whose readers also liked Old Man’s War) published blog posts on 27 November urging people to participate. There is nothing wrong with that, of course; I offer the explanation not as criticism of the self-promotion of Scalzi and his publishers, but as a partial explanation of my own bafflement.

The nine books I have not read are:

Beagle, Peter S.: The Last Unicorn
Bradbury, Ray: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Howard, Robert E.: Conan the Barbarian
Silverberg, Robert: Lord Valentine’s Castle
Swanwick, Michael: The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
King, Stephen: The Shining
Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games
Rothfuss, Patrick: The Name of the Wind
Lynch, Scott: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Any particular recommendations / disrecommendations from among those?

• Return to Gauda Prime
  
  Peter Anghelides was there.
  (tags: Blakes7 )

• Third Gender Books in SFF, or what I’ve been reading lately.
  
  List of “fiction with third gender and or genderqueer characters”.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality books sf )
• Stale tale of two cities – built in the same place
  
  Glenn Patterson compares Belfast to Miéville’s Besźel and Ul Qoma (The City & The City).
  (tags: )
• A referendum on Europe? Bring it on, for all our sakes
  
  Timothy Garton Ash is optimistic about winning.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• Enlightenment pro-EU, versus values based pro-EU – some thoughts about Garton Ash and an in-out referendum
  
  Jon Worth is much less sanguine.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• How to win a referendum on the EU
  
  Simon Usherwood thinks it’s all to play for.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• Britain will be weaker without EU, says USA
  
  “After observing the rise in popularity of Ukip and the rise of anti-European sentiment generally, the issue was raised by President Barack Obama in a video-conference call with the Prime Minister on Tuesday.”
  (tags: EU ukpolitics )
• My New Graphic Novel is a … Terrorist Organization?
  
  US government seizes funds for book about Kony. No kidding.
  (tags: waronterror )

Having recorded my disappointment with The Banquo Legacy, another Eighth Doctor Adventure just a few books earlier in the sequence which shares an author and a vague country house theme with The Burning, I felt that this time Justin Richards got it right; we have a well-realised late Victorian industrial/mining setting, a blasted heath, an alien presence which tempts gullible locals with promises of mineral wealth and military power, and some complex family relations among friends and foe. (Even some Biblical references, which is rare for Who.) The audio Industrial Evolution had a similar setting in some ways, but this is better. My only doubt is about the Doctor’s amnesia – not an immediate fan of that storyline – but there is so much else happening here that one can let it go, and indeed perhaps it makes the book more accessible for non-Who fans.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

• Russian Lawmaker Casts 31 ‘Aye’ Votes, Despite Being Dead
  
  Good to see that even the deceased can expect active representation…
  (tags: Russia voting )

I resolved some time back that if I ever did a rewatch of New Who, i should start with The Curse of Fatal Death and should include all the dramatic presentations, to choose a potentially wideranging term, that fit into the general sequence. Before the glorious return of Doctor Who to the screens in the person of Christopher Eccleston, the BBC experimented with bringing it back as a webcast animation series. Four such stories were produced in 2001-2003, three of them featuring the last three established Doctors – Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann – and a fourth with Richard E. Grant as a new incarnation of the Doctor. My impressions of them at an episode a day are below.

Death Comes to Time (2001) was the first of the four webcasts produced in the first half of the last decade. I have to say that, rewatching it, I'm surprised we got any more. There is lots of portentous music and dramatic declamations, but the plot is rambling with many loose ends from the early episodes and a totally canon-busting ending, jvgu gur Qbpgbe irevnoyl xvyyrq naq Npr genafsbezrq vagb n Gvzr Ybeq. We have one key character rather gratuitously and horribly killed off, and a welcome if confusing return by the Brigadier at the end. By today's standards, or even the standards of Cosgrove Hall's animations for Scream of the Shalka, the visuals are rather crudely done (not to diss Lee Sullivan's artwork, but rather what is done with it). There are some great performances – McCoy, Aldred, Jon Sessions as the villain, Stephen Fry as the Minister of Chance, Kevin Eldon as new companion Antimony, the underused Jon Culshaw, Anthony Stewart Head and Jacqueline Pearce (and indeed Nicholas Courtney) – but this was never going to lead to a grand revival of the show.

See for yourself, starting here.

Real Time is a step forward – not least because the animation is much better. The story feels much more like Doctor Who than did Death Comes to TimeTomb of the Cybermen, but Gary Russell, who rarely gets it wrong, takes it in a direction of parallel timelines where the Cybermen dominate and partially Cyber-ised people, both themes which came back in New Who and Torchwood respectively but were new ground when Real Time was made. And there is more innovation; the Sixth Doctor appears here in a blue suit rather then the canonical multicoloured outfit, along with Evelyn Smythe, the history professor who is very well-known to Big Finish listeners as one of the best of the audio-only companions, but would have been completely new to fans who only knew the TV series. We also have the return of Yee Jee Tso from The Movie, though playing a mysterious Asian scientist who has a sinister secret (*sigh*), and rather bizarrely the comedians Lee and Herring playing a Robert Holmes-style double act of expedition personnel. It has its flaws – there are two very gory scenes in episodes 4 and 5, and I don't think Tso quite nails the character he is meant to be playing – but it is basically OK, if more a good advertisement for Big Finish rather than a new beginning for Who.

See for yourself, starting here.

The webcast version of Shada is the best of these four by some way, so it is unfortunate for the fate of the format that it also is the one story of the four that really looks back rather than forward. Of course, it benefits hugely from Douglas Adams' script, rounded off and updated by both Gary Russell and Nick Pegg; but it also uses the webcast format to full advantage, with some lovely background pieces – the prison planet Shada itself, the Doctor's Tardis from The Movie, and the Cambridge street scenes. The animation is a bit limited – there's a weird sequence of dialogues in the first episode where the character we see in "shot" is the one who is not speaking, and Skagra's face and body are always stretched vertically but not always consistently – but I forgive that for the very nifty animation of the eight Doctors' faces morphing into one another at the episode 1-episode 2 cliffhanger. And the cast are brilliant – Andrew Sachs in particular is superb as a much older, more sinister, more alien Skagra than Christopher Neame's Assange-like portrayal in the TV series. (With one crucial exception: McGann is not on top form, to be honest, and is outshone by Lalla Ward when the script permits. Though he sparks with his future girlfriend Susannah Harker, playing Claire. She is portrayed wearing what looks to my inexperienced eye like a fetish collar.)

See for yourself, starting here.

Scream of the Shalka is the reboot that didn't come off. It is a shame in some ways because it has its strengths – notably the animation, which is far ahead of the other three in quality, Paul Cornell's story-line of alien beings breaking into our world from an unexpected direction, and Sophie Okonedo's performance as one-off companion Alison, and Derek Jacobi, not for the last time, as the Master. (Also keep an ear out for a brief appearance by David Tennant as a minor character.) But the biggest problem is Richard E. Grant's Doctor, a pale and vampire-like presence whose arrogant character lies somewhere between the low point of Pertwee's Doctor and the mid-point of Colin Baker's for likeability. (Which is to say, not very high.) In the last episode we are told – by the Master, no less – that the Doctor is dealing with the scars of some dreadful conflict too awful to describe, an idea brought into NewWho also; and he gradually mellows throughout the story. In the end it feels a bit like The Movie, a false start, which relies a bit too much on continuity and does not do enough to make this about a character you would want to watch another seven, or twenty-six, or fifty years of. (For instance, Old Who fans will be baffled that the Master is now n sevraqyl ebobg; those new to Who will wonder why they are meant to care.) And there is an awful lot of screaming, though of course the clue is in the title.

See for yourself, starting here.

The webcasts tend to be forgotten these days. They started as a lure to get Who fans to explore the BBC website, and even now are only to be found in obscure corners of the Internet. But at the same time a lot of the people involved with the webcasts remained engaged with New Who, including particularly James Goss, who was involved with production of all four of these and has written some of the best New Who and Torchwood fiction. The webcasts may not have been a howling success, but they paved the way for the BBC Wales revival, and possibly demonstrated that there was still some life in the old franchise yet.

And tomorrow, I will watch Rose.

< The Curse of Fatal Death | The Webcasts | Rose – Dalek | The Long Game – The Parting of the Ways | Comic Relief 2006 – The Girl In The Fireplace | Rise of the Cybermen – Doomsday | Everything Changes – They Keep Killing Suzie | Random Shoes – End of Days | Smith and Jones – 42 | Human Nature / The Family of Blood – Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords & The Infinite Quest | Revenge of the Slitheen – The Lost Boy & Time Crash | Voyage of the Damned – Adam | Reset – Exit Wounds

• Six Stories to Watch in Europe in 2013

  @jan_techau looks into his crystal ball.
  (tags: Eu )

• A League of Our Own

  Gun culture: Why Switzerland and Israel are quite unlike the US.
  (tags: Guns )

• Bermudians vote for change

  Opposition wins deciding seat by just four votes.
  (tags: elections )

• Seven Productivity Myths, Debunked by Science (and Common Sense)

  Very reassuring!
  (tags: lifehacking )

2006
The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink
White Eagles over Serbia, by Lawrence Durrell
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
Perfume, by Patrick Süskind
Crooked Little Heart, by Anne Lamott
Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad
Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

2007
Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust

2008
The History of Henry the Fifth, by William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare
As You Like It, by William Shakespeare

2009
The Secret Garden, by Francis Hodgson Burnett
Mr Singh Has Disappeared: A Concussed Novel, by Horst Prillinger
Wild Sweet Love, by Beverly Jenkins

2010
The Falls, by Ian Rankin
Fair Play, by Tove Jansson

2011
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson
Het Boek Van Alle Dingen / The Book of Everything, by Guus Kuijer

December seems to have been a rather sparse month for my non-sf fiction readings in years past. December 2006 was unusually good, but I can’t remember a lot about the novels I read that month – I do seem to have enjoyed them all apart from The Crying of Lot 49.

So I am picking only two novels in particular of the 19 above, but with a particularly numerous field of honourable mentions.

The Secret Garden, by Francis Hodgson Burnett – this was as good as I had hoped it might be, a story of healing from psychological and physical trauma through friendship and gardening.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson – this is for the whole trilogy which was excellent, compelling, absorbing reading for me last year, if not quite Great Literature.

Honourable mentions to Tove Jansson, Marcel Proust and six of the seven from December 2006.

All four of the Shakespeare plays I listened to in December 2008 are excellent, and actually I think in future postings of my past non-genre reads I will omit Shakespeare from this category; it is too much like comparing apples and oranges.

• The European Union and the Habsburg Monarchy
  
  Robert Cooper draws comparisons.
  (tags: Eu )
• Gun control: The gun control that works: no guns
  
  David Rennie, lucid as ever.
  (tags: guns )
• The Role of Sanctions in EU Foreign Policy
  
  Stefan Lehne: “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail… Sanctions are a powerful tool for the EU, but they cannot be the union’s only tool.”
  (tags: Eu )
• ‘Tough line’ on fisheries reform can secure better future
  
  Too little too late, I fear.
  (tags: fish environment Eu )
• Bankrupting our oceans: ministers ignoring scientific advice
  
  The shocking facts about political decisions which defy scientific evidence.
  (tags: fish environment Eu )
• What now? | Rosi’s Blog
  
  A farewell to cagefighting.
  (tags: )
• Scotland and the EU
  
  “all that is certain is that EU law would require all parties to negotiate in good faith and in a spirit of cooperation”
  (tags: Eu Scotland )
• Despite all this, my daughter wants to be a teacher
  
  A teacher is the one who gets shot first.
  (tags: guns )
• The Straight Dope: What is déjà vu?
  
  “I could have sworn I’d answered this question before. “
  (tags: psychology )
• Vastra Investigates
  
  “Heartbreak is a burden to us all. Pity the man with two.”
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Hard to tell unionist parties apart
  
  Alex Kane: “the UUP is now closer to the DUP than it has ever been. Indeed, I can’t actually point to one area or issue in which there is now any significant difference between the two parties.”
  (tags: northernireland )

A New Adventure novel, with the Seventh Doctor and Benny ending up at the awful end of the Albigensian crusade; a rare case of a purely historical story, with the Tardis crew’s presence the only sfnal element.

I rather enjoyed it. I am a Benny fan, and the fact that she gets a decent, if doomed, romance was cause for cheer. (Apparently there are two other McIntee stories featuring her love interest – one audio, one novel. I shall look out for them.) There is a decent effort at gritty and vivid historical detail, and the Doctor gets to solve a locked-room murder mystery. Benny is surprisingly up-to-date with late twentieth-century Earth culture, but she is a woman of many talents after all. And as a partial reboot of the range, after the departure of Ace, who constituted half of the NAs’ continuity with Old Who, it did the job for me.

• Six myths about the Progressive Democrats.
  
  Reports of their rightwingery were exaggerated.
  (tags: Ireland )
• The Web We Lost – Anil Dash
  
  “In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company’s site.”
  (tags: socialmedia Internet )
• E-Christmas card? No thanks
  
  I think I agree -a line of salutation is sufficient!
  (tags: Internet Christmas )
• I am Adam Lanza’s Mother
  
  A gut-wrenching piece about mental illness and parenthood.
  (tags: )
• Chang’E 2 imaging of Toutatis succeeded beyond my expectations!
  
  The asteroid and the Chinese probe
  (tags: astronomy )
• On Being, Or Not Being, Adam Lanza’s Mother
  
  A third-party defence of the piece I linked to above.
  (tags: Disability )