2003
Sandman IV: Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman

2005
Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95, by Joe Sacco

2006
Preacher [#2]: Until the End of the World, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon

2008
Burma Chronicles, by Guy Delisle
Alias vol 4: The Secret Origins of Jessica Jones, by Brian Michael Bendis

2009
Summer Blonde, by Adrian Tomine

2010
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (Scott Pilgrim #4), by Bryan Lee O'Malley
Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, by Bill Willingham

2011
The Crab With The Golden Claws, by Hergé
The Secret of the Unicorn, by Hergé
Red Rackham's Treasure, by Hergé

For other categories of book I have been choosing five to remember out of those I have read since I started bookblogging. With so few comics on the list, I think it's better to just pick two or three, especially because here more than in any other category the part may stand for the whole. So, with that caveat and without too much prejudice to authors whose most significant works I will cover in other months, the ones I'd particularly recommend from this lot are:

Safe Area Goražde, by Joe Sacco – Sacco's visceral yet compassionate take on conflict is generally excellent, and here he rises beyond the usual narrative to give a searing account of life in a forgotten Bosnian enclave during the war.

Alias vol 4: The Secret Origins of Jessica Jones, by Brian Michael Bendis – I'm not a big fan of superhero comics in general, but this sequence about an embittered former costumed crime-fighter turned private investigator really grabbed me. The fourth and final volume takes us throughher personal background, and is a good conclusion to the series.

Red Rackham's Treasure, by Hergé – Can't not include a Tintin book somewhere, but I have written up rather few, and that mostly the bad ones, since I started bookblogging. But I am happy to flag up this, the conclusion of the first two-album story, which introduces Professor Calculus and is apparently the best-selling of the Tintin books.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

• Revenge of the Reality-Based Community
  
  A disaffected conservative writes.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• Why It Sucks to Be a Woman in the Video Game Industry
  
  Background to #1reasonwhy.
  (tags: )
• Ted Chiang’s Story Of Your Life to be filmed
  
  Chiang’s writing, like Philip K. Dick’s, is often very cinematic.
  (tags: films sf )
• Belgians discover 3 new species of bees
  
  …in South Africa.
  (tags: biology )
• Captain Europe
  
  Picture from Monday night’s #EUtweetup.
  (tags: superheroes eu )
• That Was Then, This Is Now – Satire from JFK to Savile
  
  40 years after That Was The Week That Was, where is satire on British TV?
  (tags: ukpolitics television )

As usual, I’m writing these up in continuity order rather than in release order or in the order I listened to them.

Return of the Rocket Men, by Matt Fitton, brings back the Rocket Men of last year’s play by John Dorney, but this time with Steven Taylor rather than Ian Chesterton. I’ve always been sorry that we never find out what happened to Steven after he left the Doctor; here we have a bit of a flashback to what happened before he arrived on Mechanus, the Rocket Men of course fitting very nicely into the space opera sub-genre that is Steven’s home. There’s some timey-wimey stuff and some introspection by Steven, nicely carried off by Peter Purves forty-six years after leaving the programme; I liked it more than the previous one.

The Uncertainty Principle, by Simon Guerrier, is an ambitious tale of Zoe being interrogated by the company psychiatrist (played again by Wendy Padbury’s daughter Charlie Hayes) about an incident with a woman who is both dead and alive and aliens who explode leaving a funny smell behind. It didn’t really grab me I’m afraid. It is apparently the third in a series of four with Zoe exploring her blocked memories, so once the fourth is out I will listen to them all again and reassess my opinion.

Big Finish have provided an absolutely superb end to the story of Liz Shaw in The Last Post, recorded by Caroline John a few months before her death in June this year. It is by James Goss, who I find consistently one of the best Who writers (and yet he has never written for Who on television), and takes us through the year that Liz spent with UNIT, through conversations with her mother, who is played by Rowena Cooper, about the series of mysterious deaths that keep on happening. There are loads of lovely continuity references, not only to Season Seven but backwards and forwards as well, and it’s well-constructed and fascinating. I’m not one of Liz’s biggest fans, but I thought this was a brilliant tribute to her.

Finally, The First Sontarans was a story originally pitched by Full Circle author Andrew Smith for Season 22. but replaced by The Two Doctors. I was a bit dubious about Smith’s previous audio for Big Finish (and was even at the time a little underwhelmed by Full Circle, but this is good stuff, bringing the Sontarans to Victorian England in pursuit of the Caveetch, with Rutans possibly (or possibly not) in attendance as well; it’s a sprawling narrative with a lot going on, plenty of moral outrage from Colin Baker and wrestling with destiny from Nicola Bryant, and an excellent take on the true origin of the Sontarans, with a well-realised soundscape for all of its varied settings. On the one hand, it’s ashame that this never reached the screen; on the other, perhaps it’s better to have the pictures in one’s head rather than the JNT realisation of them.

In summary: Return of the Rocket Men is a decent sf tale which will be accessible to anyone but appreciated more by those who have seen Steven Taylor in action; I was underwhelmed by The Uncertainty PrincipleThe Last Post is excellent but probably for fans only; and The First Sontarans works well but probably also better for those who know and care what the Sontarans are.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

• Future Classics: Readers of 1936 Predict Which Authors Will Endure
  
  Some of these were right, and some were not.
  (tags: books )
• The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
  
  Now online! For free!
  (tags: sf )
• A Psychochronography in Blue: Recursive Occlusion (Logopolis)
  
  Does what it says on the tin.
  (tags: doctorwho )
• How Britain could leave the EU
  
  Realism from the Centre for European Reform.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• The Saakashvili-Ivanshvili tandem
  
  How the new state of affairs in #Georgia is seen in Brussels.
  (tags: eu georgia )
• Former OED editor covertly deleted thousand of words, book claims
  
  Shocking!
  (tags: linguistics )
• Can You Save Diplomacy From Itself?
  
  Profile of @carneross and Independent Diplomat.
  (tags: politics carneross )

Of my father's four books, this was much the least successful; rather than addressing a concrete issue in Irish history or politics, he attempted a wide survey of the extent to which Catholics were organised as such, in a rather small set of countries – those European or European-descended states that had enjoyed democracy since the second world war and actually had enough of a Catholic population to write about (Spain and Portugal exluded on the first criterion, the Nordic countries on the second and Greece on both).

The paradigm he sets up is potentially interesting: that on the one hand, you might find a "closed" political catholicism where Catholics all join a Catholic party, are only in Catholic civil society organisations (including trade unions) and where the Church regularly intervenes in politics; on the other, you might find an "open" Catholicism where Catholics are no more or less likely to join particular parties than anyone else, there is no specifically Catholic civil society, and the Church is silent. Neither of these has ever actually happened in reality. Continental Europe on the whole veered closer to "closed" Catholicism than the Anglosphere, and much more in the years immediately before and after the second world war than earlier or later, but there are exceptions all along the way (and in an appendix he looks at Malta, which had strong clerical intervention in politics but was otherwise much more "open").

I can see why the book did not do well though. By the time it was published, in 1981, Catholicism was changing out of all recognition; I think there would have been much more in common in what Catholics did and thought between 1950 and 1850 than between 1950 and 1980. There are lots of nice numbers of election results, censuses and opinion polls to try and quantify who thought of themselves as Catholics and who they voted for. But the economic aspect is largely omitted; surely the question of why Catholics tend(ed) to vote more leftish in some countries and more rightish in others can be answered to an extent by how well off they are/were? And concentrating on the numbers alone, useful though they are, means losing focus on the actual topics of debate, which are mentioned only really in passing.

The most interesting question raised but not really answered in the book is to what extent the Catholic Church as a whole, or regional elements within it, ever really aspired to restore the total control of society that the church liked to think that it enjoyed in the middle ages. The evidence from the book is, not very much, and not very successfully to the extent that this was so (with occasional exceptions). That then would lead on to a potentially much more interesting discussion about what the Church can reasonably think it is doing as a political actor at all. But for that one would have to look elsewhere.

• p.o.v. – A Danish Journal of Film Studies – Number 14, December 2002
  
  Fourteen essays about Casablanca.
  (tags: )
• Casablanca :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies
  
  Roger Ebert on Casablanca, first shown 26 November 1942.
  (tags: )
• Matthew Bell: As time goes by, a night in Rick’s Café means more than ever before
  
  A view from the Independent
  (tags: casablanca )
• Casablanca (1942) – Memorable quotes
  
  Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
  Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
  Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
  Rick: I was misinformed.
  (tags: casablanca )

I was totally startled to reach Book V of The Faerie Queene and encounter Talus, a servant given by the goddess Astræa to the young knight Artegall:

His name was Talus, made of yron mould,
    Immoueable, resistlesse, without end.
    Who in his hand an yron flale did hould,
With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth vnfould.

Talus goes around following orders and smiting the unjust (ie non-Christians, Catholics, people who look at you funny) with great vigour, and then drops out of the narrative at the end of the book.

He’s not the only metal human I have encountered in pre-Čapek literature (cf Homer’s animated tripods and robot women) but they are rare enough to be worth noting.

I just found this on YouTube – a fifteen-minute extract from the 1944 film Time Flies starring Tommy Handley, which includes some elements which are also found in "An Unearthly Child", the first episode of Doctor Who, from 19 years later. Note bemused police, four people unwittingly transported back in time, collapsing incapacitated to the floor as they go at around 11:00 in. Note also that Evelyn Dall is far better than Handley, the ostensible star.
(Previous discussion here, here and here.)

This is one of the curiosities of the English language, a long poem written in its own peculiar verse structure in which archetypal figures based on myths of many different origins contend for mastery of spoils, women and virtue in a fantasy landscape which resembles the north of County Cork. Some of the allegory is pretty straightforward, as when Prince Arthur springs to the defence of the cruelly oppressed lady Belge; other parts are more layered and/or obscure.

It has taken me five months to read this. I found I could not proceed faster than one canto every day, and on many days I did not manage any cantos at all; and there are 74 of them, plus the proems and the two concluding verses. It’s not that it is particularly difficult to read, compared even to Shakespeare; the style is generally consistent, and a good edition (mine is the Longman edited by A.C. Hamilton) helps you through the more obscure words or usages. But it’s dense and moves both rather slowly and rather fast at the same time.

I found that one of the biggest barriers to my understanding of the poem was Tolkien. Spenser writes of elves and dwarves in a parallel fantasy world, but these are not Tolkien’s separate races; the elves are effectively just a fantasy nationality, and the dwarves just short guys (who tend to appear as servants). I was also subliminally expecting some Big Bad villain, but in fact we have a chain of more or less loosely connected stories, with the main linking character Prince Arthur, who is intended to be King Arthur (and yet didn’t fit for me too well into my own vision of Arthurian legend). So I found myself unnecessarily distracted by my attempts to fit it into fantasy genres with which I am more familiar.

What does come over with extraordinary vigour is Spenser’s love of the Irish landscape. Subsequent history shows him as one of the many adventurers who descended on Munster to occupy land confiscated from the Desmonds and their affiliates, who then lost it all in a subsequent rebellion; it’s worth being reminded that from Spenser’s point of view, he had come to stay, and expected his descendants to live on at Kilcolman for many generations. County Cork was his home and the focus of his imagination. It’s not too difficult to believe that he died essentially of a broken heart after losing it all.

As for the actual meaning of it all: I think it is possible to over-analyze. Sometimes the allusions are pretty obvious, or indeed the description may be pretty much what it appears to be (thinking for instance of the house whose chambers correspond to organs of the human body, or the personified rivers of Britain and Ireland). The only one of the six virtues where Spenser has much interesting to show about the virtue itself, for my money, was Courtesy; I felt he let his pen wander aside from the point as his fancy took him elsewhere. The best character in it is Britomart, who is obviously the model for George R.R. Martin’s Brienne of Tarth.

And there’s a robot, but that needs a separate post.

• Radicals threaten Salmond and Scottish independence campaign
  
  Iain Banks stirring up trouble!
  (tags: sf Scotland )

I was starled this morning to receive this text from a lady friend:

Bonne journée mon chaton adoré. Te miaouuuuu mucho mucho mucho

All was explained a few minutes later with another text from the same source:

Sorry i sent you a text for my husband

Theirs is a Spanish/French-speaking household.

As you all know, it was the 49th anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who yesterday; so I am picking up where I left off in August 2010, with the first televised Who story since The Movie, also the first televised script written by Steven Moffat. Purists may complain that it is not "canon"; I included both Dimensions in Time and the nauseating one with Jimmy Savile in my previous rewatch, and The Curse of Fatal Death tells us some interesting things about how Old Who regenerated into New Who. If you haven't seen it, the whole 20 mins are on YouTube.

What struck me about the first half is that Jonathan Pryce's Master actually gets a lot more to do than Rowan Atkinson's Doctor or Julia Sawalha's Emma. Perhaps the Master's role is more flexible, in a way; we know what to expect of the Doctor and the companion, and in 21 minutes we don't need a lot of explanation of their roles. Pryce has to combine pantomime villain and homicidal seeker of vengeance, and do this with huge sinister whoops of laughter, and manages it well.

Atkinson and Sawalha do not look like themselves at all. Both have completely different hairstyles to their usual screen personas, so for the viewer who knows them there is a shock of both the familiar and the unfamiliar. Sawalha's considerable talents are barely called on, other than as a foil to Atkinson, whose Doctor is closest to the fourth Blackadder in personality (dressed a bit like McGann's Doctor, who was still the most recent version). But the production succeeded in making this a show about Doctor Who which happens to have Rowan Atkinson in it, rather than a Rowan Atkinson sketch about Doctor Who.

I wonder if doing the entire thing with just two sets was a strategic choice in partial homage to the production constraints of yesteryear? There is a very definite homage in the first regeneration scene, where Rowan Atkinson's gurning is a direct reference to McCoy in The Movie, while the music from Logopolis plays in the background. One continuity element which is dumped even at this early stage of the Moffat era is the thirteen regenerations rule – the Master says "This is only his ninth body. He has many, many more" which sounds like more than four, and the death of the Hugh Grant incarnation is due to the power of Zectronic energy rather than because it is the last regeneration – which it wouldn't be anyway, as if Atkinson is Nine, Hugh Grant is Twelve and Lumley Thirteen.

There are also elements here which we did not see in Old Who but will see more of in New Who, for good or ill: the Doctor in a romantic relationship with his female companion; the Doctor getting married; the shiny glowy regeneration effect; characters going through long waiting times off screen to end up where we last saw them; fart jokes. But at the time this was made there was every reason to think that it would be the last televised Who story ever, and it's difficult not to see Emma's lament as a farewell to the 1963-96 show:

Doctor, listen to me. You can't die, you're too… You're too nice. Too brave, too kind and far, far too silly. You're like Father Christmas! The Wizard of Oz! Scooby Doo! And I love you very much. And we all need you and you simply cannot die! … He was never cruel and never cowardly, and it'll never be safe to be scared again.

I would have posted this yesterday but my phone seems to be on its last legs. Anyway, onwards with the webcasts of Death Comes To Time, Real Time, Shada and Scream of the Shalka before I start on the Ecclestone era.

< 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

• Maps as War by Other Means
  
  “Maps are an excellent propaganda weapon against a (geo)political enemy. We trust cartography instinctively to ‘show us the right way’, and thus be truthful; but maps always reflect the mapmakers goals”
  (tags: middleeast maps )

Foolishly assuming that the EU summit would be over by dinnertime, I arranged to meet eight friends at the 1898 Brasserie after work.

Three of us got there at about 6 pm, to discover that it was closed due to being too close to the EU summit – the entire Schuman Roundabout was closed.

So we found another venue, the branch of Fatboys at the the corner of Avenue de Cortenbergh and Rue Stevin, but despite alerting people via email, Facebook and SMS, only three of the other six were able to join us.

One has to admit that it is pretty good that with today’s communication technology I was able to redirect half of the people who weren’t physically with me at the start of the evening to an alternate venue which none of us would otherwise have even thought of going to. (They briefly had a live band who were so awful they were told to stop after a very few minutes.)

Still, I’m annoyed about not seeing the other three! And if there had not been an EU summit today we could probably have all got together.

• False Friends – English and Dutch words that look identical but have a different meaning
  
  Just for reference.
  (tags: language dutch )
• New world, same old Israel
  
  “Every nation is entitled to defend itself. But unless violence is part of a political strategy, it rarely creates real security.”
  (tags: middleeast )
• The Pacific island that never was
  
  “when marine scientists arrived at the island in the Coral Sea off Australia they were in for something of a shock: it didn’t exist.”
  (tags: maps )

When I realised that I was getting to the end of the Nebula winners, I began to consider my next SF reading project. Apart from the Hugos and Nebulas, the only other awards that really interest me are the BSFA award, the Arthur C Clarke Award and the Tiptree Award. I had been vaguely planning to read each of the long fiction winners of each award in the order in which they were established, starting with the BSFA and finishing with the Tiptree.

But as I looked down the lists of past winners, I realised the shocking fact (which probably everyone else knew) that the BSFA Award has been a very male affair. Women have won the BSFA Best Novel Award precisely twice since it was instituted in 1969. (Men have won 40 times, and no award was made for 1972.) It is already over a decade since the last time a woman won.

The whys and wherefores of this are for the BSFA to evaluate. But I like to try and build in a certain diversity to my plans, and prioritising BSFA winners alone would actually reverse that by emphasising male writers.

So I have decided to combine the three lists, including the retrospective winners of the BSFA and Tiptree awards, and will go through those in chronological order, skipping any that I have read in the last ten years or so (basically since I started bookblogging in late 2002). It still ends up being a rather masculine assortment, and I’ll try to compensate for that in other ways. In the list below, BSFA winners are in green, Arthur C. Clarke Award winners in blue and Tiptree Award winners in red, with attempts to mix and match the colours for winners of two or three of the awards. Bold indicates that I have read the book at some time in my life, and underlining should take you to an online review of some kind, and also probably indicates I won’t reread the book as part of that sequence.

1958 retrospective: Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss

1969: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
1969 (1996 retrospective): The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

1970: The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner

1973: Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

1974 (1996 retrospective): Motherlines by Suzy McKee Charnas
1974: Inverted World by Christopher Priest

1975: Orbitsville by Bob Shaw
1975 (1996 retrospective): The Female Man by Joanna Russ

1976: Brontomek! by Michael G. Coney

1977: The Jonah Kit by Ian Watson

1978 (1996 retrospective): Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas
1978: Collection: Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison
1978: A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

1980: Timescape by Gregory Benford

1981: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

1984: Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

1986: The Ragged Astronauts by Bob Shaw
1987: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

1987: Grainne by Keith Roberts
1988: The Sea and Summer by George Turner

1989: Unquenchable Fire by Rachel Pollack
1988: Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock

1990: The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman
1989: Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

1991: A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason
1991: White Queen by Gwyneth Jones
1990/1991: Take Back Plenty by Colin Greenland

1992: Synners by Pat Cadigan
1992: China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
1991: The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

1993: Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
1993: Body of Glass by Marge Piercy (published as He, She and It in the U.S.)
1992: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

1993: Aztec Century by Christopher Evans
1994: Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer
1994: Vurt by Jeff Noon

1995: The Memoirs Of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Theodore Roszak
1995: Fools by Pat Cadigan
1995: Waking The Moon by Elizabeth Hand
1994: Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks

1996: Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley
1995: The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter

1997: Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey
1997: The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh
1996: Excession by Iain M. Banks

1996/1997/1998: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

1999: The Conqueror's Child by Suzy McKee Charnas
1999: Dreaming in Smoke by Tricia Sullivan
1998: The Extremes, by Christopher Priest

2000: Wild Life by Molly Gloss
1999: The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod
2000: Distraction by Bruce Sterling

2001: The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto
2000: Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
2001: Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

2002: Bold As Love by Gwyneth Jones
2002: Light by M. John Harrison
2001: Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds

2002/2003: The Separation by Christopher Priest
2003: Set This House In Order: A Romance Of Souls by Matt Ruff

2003: Felaheen by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
2004: Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo
2004: Camouflage by Joe Haldeman
2004: Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

2004: River of Gods by Ian McDonald
2005: Iron Council by China Miéville

2005/2005/2006: Air by Geoff Ryman

2006: Half Life by Shelley Jackson
2006: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente

2006: End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
2007: The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
2007: Nova Swing by M. John Harrison

2008: Filter House by Nisi Shawl
2007: Brasyl by Ian McDonald
2008: Black Man by Richard Morgan
2008: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

2009: Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod
2009: Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales by Greer Gilman
2009: Ōoku: The Inner Chambers by Fumi Yoshinaga (Vol 1, Vol 2)
2008: The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

2010: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic
2009/2010: The City & the City by China Mieville

2011: Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston
2011: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
2010: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

2011: The Islanders by Christopher Priest
2012: The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers

That should keep me out of trouble for a while. This list was also the basis for this poll.

NB that Wikipedia has Ishiguro winning the Clarke Award in 2006, but that is wrong and I cannot be bothered to fix it.

• A LOVER OF LIBRARIES BRINGS “BIG IDEA” BOOKS TO GEORGIANS IN THEIR LANGUAGE
  
  What @TxTbUk has been up to.
  (tags: georgia books )
• UN Mediator Presents New Macedonia ‘Name’ Proposals :: Balkan Insight
  
  Here’s hoping….
  (tags: macedonia )
• Medieval Robots: Nate Silver’s Medieval Ancestor
  
  Gerbert of Aurillac (aka Pope Sylvester II).
  (tags: historyofscience )
• Remember that scary undersea “bloop” noise? At last we know what caused it.
  
  (tags: science )
• How experts see UK role in EU
  
  Genuinely diverse set if interviewees, though a fairly consistent set of answers.
  (tags: uk eu )
• Terry Pratchett: Sex, death and nature
  
  @terryandrob interviewed by @pennyred.
  (tags: sf )

“And for a Christian it’s never enough to say ‘I don’t trust you’, unfortunately, because if St John is right, the next question is how do I put trust – and how do I become trustworthy?

“So I hope that connections will go on being made and deepened in that sense, in that context.”

This is an attempt to tell the story of Beowulf from the side of the monster, an experimental early 70s novel (with super illustrations by Emil Antonucci), which obviously ends with Grendel's death, though his mother and the dragon are there in the background.

It's always tricky to think through the motivation of the villain (especially when the villain is an inhuman monster), The original poem introduces Grendel thus (using Seamus Heaney's not-quite-literal translation):

The original Grendel is evil by nature, but is driven to homicide by sounds of revelry. The 2007 Robert Zemeckis animated version actually stuck fairly closely to this motivation, though there is the extra wrinkle that Hrothgar turns out to be Grendel's father; the 2005 Beowulf and Grendel, starring Gerard Butler, has Hrothgar killing the young Grendel's father and thus providing a motive. John Gardner reimagines Grendel as a philosophical monster both attracted and repelled by the world of humans; he reminded me very much of Meursault in L’Étranger, except that I think he would have made a more entertaining dinner companion (as long as you weren't on the menu yourself).

I didn't spot the astrological references at the start of each chapter until tipped off by Wikipedia. Indeed, in general I felt this novel was too clever for me, but it is mercifully short with some passages done in interesting styles; and Grendel himself comes off as a believable character.

• UK’s ‘last typewriter’ produced
  
  End of an era.
  (tags: technology )
• Vittoria, la petite fille que l’on voit grandir au Parlement européen
  
  The youngest participant in European Parliament sessions, now aged two.
  (tags: cute eu )
• Gaza abacus
  
  The Economist looks at the numbers.

  Number of Israelis killed by fire from Gaza between January 1st 2012 and November 11th 2012: 1
  Number of Palestinians in Gaza killed by Israeli fire during the same period: 78
  (tags: war middleeast )

• Monty Python fans block women directors
  
  The General Council of Monty Python have today rejected moves to enable women to become directors of Monty Python films. This comes twenty years after it was agreed that women could attempt to tell jokes on screen, but were not allowed to ascend to the position of director.
  (tags: funny religion )
• Un Namurois créé une application qui comptabilise les trains en retard
  
  On iOS and iPhone, waiting for the Android version…
  (tags: nmbs-sncb travel belgium )
• The Neglected History of Women in the Early Church
  
  “One of the best-kept secrets in Christianity”.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality religion )
• George Eliot writing desk stolen from Nuneaton museum
  
  (tags: crime writing )

• Justice Atlas of Sentencing and Corrections.
  
  Fascinating.
  (tags: maps crime )
• 3 Ladies of the Tardis
  
  @thenicolabryant, @Sophie_Aldred & @Lou_Jameson (with @SylvesterMcCoy and @tuckerspatch, sort of)
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Poul Anderson, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick and me
  
  How and why Lem’s honorary SFWA membership was revoked.
  (tags: sf )
• Taliban Spokesperson Accidentally CC’s Entire Mailing List
  
  Oops.
  (tags: waronterror internet )
• Husband of Savita objects to inquiry members
  
  Difficult to see how Galway hospital can independently investigate itself!
  (tags: savita )
• The Incredible, Shrinking Modern Military
  
  More expensive – less economically viable?
  (tags: war )

• Does chocolate make you clever?
  
  The correlation between chocolate consumption and Nobel prizes.
  (tags: nobel mathematics )
• Let’s imagine our lives without a bailout
  
  Reporting the imminent economic disaster facing Cyprus.
  (tags: cyprus )
• Abortion in the Ancient World
  
  Review by David Noy of book by Konstantinos Kapparis.
  (tags: abortion )
• No-one’s going to believe Labour is “hard-headed” about the EU, and it’s wrong anyway
  
  @jonworth is right, again.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• #Savita Halappanavar’s death may stir Ireland to change over abortion
  
  How the story was broken.
  (tags: savita )
• World Toilet Day is today
  
  And it’s no joke.
  (tags: health )

After the US election, there was much comment on the fact that the Democrats had outpolled the Republicans in the elections for the House of Representatives, by 49% to 48.2%, but ended up with a significant minority of the seats, 201 to 234. The question is, was this achieved by gerrymandering? I've been browsing through the data provided by the Guardian to make up my own mind.

It's not all that unusual for results in a tight two-party race to be perverse, ie for the losing party in votes to win more seats. Well-known examples include the 2000 US Presidential vote, the first 1974 British election, the 1951 British election and (for us STV fans) the 1981 election in Malta. It is unusual for such a tight race to deliver a seat benefit to the losing party, and that is worth investigating further.

First of all, we should be clear that not all 435 seats were contested in a straight fight between Republicans and Democrats. 21 seats had only one candidate, and another 24 saw only one of the two main parties represented. Had there been a contest in every seat, the Democrats would I think still have been ahead in the national vote total, but even more narrowly, and of course it's a reasonable assumption that the seat total would have been the same. The proposition that the overall result did not really reflect the will of the voters survives the hypothetical challenge that too many seats were uncontested to tell, since the uncontested seats were fairly evenly split (25 Republicans, 20 Democrats). Having said which, 10% of seats being uncontested is not really a sign of a healthy democracy.

Looking at the 410 seats that were contested between the two parties, it becomes clear that there is some systematic disadvantage for the Democrats somewhere. In the 191 seats where they beat the Republicans, they averaged 67% of the vote; Republicans averaged only 61% of the vote in the 209 seats where they beat the Democrats. In other words, more Democrat votes were in areas where they had a large majority, and more Republican votes were in areas where they were comfortably smeared out to just beat the Democrats. On a uniform swing from this year's results, Democrats will need to lead the Republicans by more than 7% nationwide to win a majority in the House, which is a pretty colossal differential (and very unlikely to be achieved in 2014, given the tradition of mid-term swings against the White House).

The question is, to what extent is this an imbalance inevitable consequence of the geographical concentration of Democratic voters, and to what extent is it the result of human design? There are seven states where human design for the House is irrelevant because they elect only one representative (two Democrats and five Republicans). Looking at the other 43 states, there were 23 where Republicans got more votes and 20 where Democrats got more votes as a total in the state House races. Since the electoral districts are designed separately by each state (there is a handy table of procedures here) it's not all that surprising that the 23 states where Republicans won should over-deliver Representatives for the GOP, and that this has a greater effect than the 20 states which the Democrats won. However, the margin of the GOP victory remains surprising.

What is a bit more surprising is that there were five states where the 'wrong' party won, where despite winning fewer votes the party in question won more seats. They were Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In Arizona Democrats won 5 seats and Republicans 4, despite being behind by 43% to 53%, on boundaries drawn by a bipartisan independent commission.

In the other four states, Republicans controlled the redistricting process.

Wisconsin voted very narrowly for the Democrats, by 50.5% to 49.0%, but Republicans won 5 seats to the Dems' three. That is possibly a fluke which cancels out Arizona.

In Michigan, Democrats won 50,9% and Republicans 45,6%, but the GOP won 9 seats to the Dems' 5.
In North Carolina, Democrats won 50,6% and Republicans 48,9%, but the GOP won 9 seats to the Dems' 4.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats won 50,2% and Republicans 48,9%, but the GOP won 13 seats to the Dems' 5.

In those last three states, where the Republican control of redistricting delivered a large majority of congressional delegates despite a majority vote for the Democrats, the GOP won 31 seats and the Democrats 14, a difference of 17; that accounts for more than half of the congressional majority of 33 right away.

Republicans were also able to draw the boundaries to deliver a bigger majority of seats than their vote share would have indicated in Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Florida and Ohio, and got clean sweeps of the nine congressional seats from Oklahoma and Kansas with vote shares in the lower 60s in each state. Against this one must set New Hampshire, where despite full Republican control of the process the Democrats won both seats by slender margins. One should also consider the states where Democrats controlled the process: they won all seven seats in Massachusetts on two thirds of the vote, and Illinois and Maryland both over-delivered on a substantial Democratic majority of the popular vote. However West Virginia returned two out of three Republicans, and Arkansas four out of four, suggesting that for whatever reason no successful gerrymander was implemented there by the Democrats.

I come away from this exercise not completely convinced that the Republicans owe their majority in the House to systematic gerrymandering, but that it certainly accounts for more than half of it, possibly much more. When you have a single-seat electoral system, it's not unusual even for fairly drawn seats to lead to a systematic imbalance in favour of (or more often against) particular parties. The creeping increase of constituencies in Wales, with consequent benefits for Labour, is my favourite example of this. However it is actually on the record that the seats in almost half of the 50 states are not fairly drawn, but designed for partisan advantage.

Just because gerrymandering may not have the decisive factor in the unequal outcome in the House vote doesn't mean it isn't a problem. I think it is a problem that gerrymandering is institutionalised; I think it is a problem that one race in ten is not contested by both major parties; and I think it is a problem if the election results fail to reflect the will of the voters.

Big Finish produced a very strong trio of Seventh Doctor plays earlier this year, featuring Sophie Aldred as Ace, Philip Olivier as Hex and a little bit of Sylvester McCoy (his availability has been limited due to filming The Hobbit in New Zealand). Each of the three takes a particular text as its basis, but I think they are all accessible even if you have not read the texts in question (which are, in order, When The Wind Blows, Raymond Briggs’ classic graphic novel of nuclear war; BeowulfThe Curse of Fenric). They are not as accessible individually, and the three stories really need to be listened to together, and also it helps but is less necessary to have some inkling of the back-story of audio companion Hex, for whom this is a valedictory sequence of plays. An associated Companion Chronicle, Project: Nirvana, gives us some back-story for two of the other characters.

Protect and Survive, by Jonathan Morris, brings Ace and Hex (the Doctor mysteriously absent) to 1980s Britain where they encounter an elderly couple (marvellously played by Ian Hogg and Elizabeth Bennett) building a fallout shelter in anticipation of nuclear war. Our time travellers know, of course, that there was no global nuclear war in 1989, and are therefore astonished when the bombs duly fall at the end of the first episode. From there on we appear to be in Raymond Briggs territory, awfully familiar for those of us who remember the 1980s, except that of course there is a lot more really going on than has first appeared, with time loops, Elder Gods and the Seventh Doctor at his most manipulative. Even when the wrenching narrative has been resolved, there is then a surprise twist at the end leading us into the next story. (Oddly enough the BBC produced an Eleventh Doctor audio about a 1980s nuclear war at almost the same time as Big Finish released Protect and Survive, but it is not as good.)

In Black and White, relative newcomer Matt Fitton brings Ace and Hex, and new fellow travellers Lysandra Aristides (Maggie O’Neill) and Sally Morgan (Amy Pemberton), who have both appeared separately in previous BF plays, to the mysterious land inhabited by Beowulf – at two different time periods corresponding to the two different phases of the poem. Fitton doesn’t stick religiously to the original’s narrative sequence but it gives him a framework for an excellent story, with standout performances from Sophie Aldred in particular and also from Stuart Milligan, who played Richard Nixon on TV Who last year but here plays a wonderfully camp alien called Garundel. There’s lots of timey-wimey stuff going on, and one can’t really say much more about it without spoilers, but it’s really very clever and well done.

Finally, Gods and Monsters, by Mike Maddox and the usually reliable Alan Barnes, rounds off not only this trilogy but several different strands of Seventh Doctor continuity from Big Finish and the TV stories, with the Doctor and his four companions finding themselves interacting with Fenric on a massive mystical chessboard, where they encounter Wayland/Volund the smith of the gods, Hurmzid (sic – presumably Hormizd was meant), son of the Persian Emperor Shapur I, and loads of Haemovores and Elder Gods. I found it satisfying but not superb. The writing is epic and the cast rise to the occasion, especially Philip Olivier in what we must assume is his last regular performance as Hex for BF; but there is if anything a little too much crammed in, with as a result some fairly important bits being rushed – for instance, I only worked out what happened to Hurmzid on the third time of listening. Having said which, it’s unusual for me to eagerly listen again to a BF play to work out what was going on. It’s a decent conclusion to the trilogy, and is just slightly overshadowed by the previous two stories.

Alongside these three, BF also released Project: Nirvana, a Companion Chronicle by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, which gives us some of the backstory of Aristides and Morgan engaging in a raid on behalf of the Doctor which turns into complex timey-wimey stuff. I still bristle a bit at the Companion Chronicles being used as a vehicle to support other bits of BF continuity rather than their original purpose, which was to do stories about those Doctors who were not available or willing to perform using their companions instead, but I guess that argument is lost. I also found Project: Nirvana a bit annoying in the way it switched between drama format and narrated story format, and the timey-wimey stuff meant I sometimes wasn’t sure which version of which character was speaking. (And one other minor whinge is that the eastern European geography didn’t really check out.) It’s decent enough, but really only for completists who have already listened to the main trilogy.

To summarise, this trilogy is one of the strongest sequences of stories BF have done for some time; I should also have said that the soundscapes of nuclear war, Beowulf’s swamps, and Fenric’s chessboard are tremendously well realised. But I don’t think they are a particularly good gateway into the BF audios; this particular sequence really starts as far back as the 2001 Sixth Doctor audio Project: Destiny, also by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, and while I imagine the new listener who had only seen the McCoy/Aldred TV stories might just about make sense of it, it is really more of a reward for us long-term BF fans.

• Lord Alderdice on The Psychology of Terrorism
  
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  “…the concept of abortionist saints is unique to Ireland, with no similar stories appearing in other European hagiographical texts.”
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  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• Trying to Keep Your E-Mails Secret When the CIA Chief Couldn’t
  
  Not easy. (And what is the “GPG” system?!)
  (tags: internet )

A few years back I very much enjoyed Brenda Clough's two short stories about the revival of Captain Oates, of Scott's Antarctic expedition, by researchers in 2045, and when I bumped into her last weekend at PhilCon I made sure to let her know. Oh, she said, did you realise that I adapted them into a full-length novel, available online? Oh, I said, I didn't, and went off to download it.

My memory has faded of the details of the previously published stories, which you may not have read anyway, so I can't really detail the changes. The novel as it is now takes Oates through his culture shock at the gender and ethnic emancipation of the twenty-first century, through a passionate love affair and then a daring rescue of his lover from an alien planet. It is actually much better than that makes it sound, with Clough's memorable depiction of Oates as fish-out-of-water the best part of the book, though her alien intelligence is unusual and memorable also.

I did wonder whether Oates could have been as emotionally inexperienced as Clough depicted him. He died on or about his 32nd birthday, having fought in the Boer War, and it seems rather improbable that he had never encountered female intimacy beforehand. Recent research suggests a very different, much more sordid story though with admittedly little evidence. Of course, Clough's story is about her imagined Oates rather than a historical reconstruction; and my own family of that generation had plenty of British army officers of that age who married late or not at all – my own grandfather, born like Oates in 1880, and who fought also like Oates in the Boer War (though had the dubious pleasure of living on to fight again at Gallipoli) met and married my grandmother at the age of 47; only two of his eight brothers ever got hitched, as far as we know, though several others survived to adulthood.

It's a bit surprising that no paper publisher has picked up on Revise the World. Thanks to the internets it is available from Book View Cafe here. I'm also sorry that Clough didn't keep the excellent title of the original Hugo- and Nebula-shortlisted novella, "May Be Some Time", for the novel-length expansion. It is a book that deserved to be better known.

• NOAA Climate: October Was 332nd Straight Month With Above-Average Temperatures
  
  If you were born after March 1985 you have *never* lived through a colder than average month.
  (tags: climatechange )
• What’s the moon worth?
  
  “To sadly summarize: while the theoretical value of the moon may be countless zillions, today it’s not worth jack.”
  (tags: economics astronomy )
• Not a love poem
  
  @RozKaveney’s sonnet for Savita.
  (tags: savita )

These are the Doctor Who books that I have read in the month of November, each year since I started bookblogging:

2005
(8th Doctor, EDA) Genocide, by Paul Leonard
(8th Doctor, NA) The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin

2006
(1st Doctor, nov) Doctor Who – The Reign of Terror, by Ian Marter
(1st Doctor, nov) Doctor Who – The Rescue, by Ian Marter
(2nd Doctor, nov) Doctor Who and the Enemy of the World, by Ian Marter
(2nd Doctor, nov) Doctor Who – The Dominators, by Ian Marter
(2nd Doctor, nov) Doctor Who – The Invasion, by Ian Marter
(4th Doctor, nov) Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, by Ian Marter
(4th Doctor, nov) Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment, by Ian Marter
(4th Doctor, MA) Evolution, by John Peel
(4th Doctor, nov) Doctor Who and the Ribos Operation, by Ian Marter
(5th Doctor, nov) Doctor Who – Earthshock, by Ian Marter
(9th Doctor, NSA) The Clockwise Man, by Justin Richards
(9th Doctor, NSA) The Monsters Inside, by Stephen Cole
(9th Doctor, NSA) The Stealers of Dreams, by Steve Lyons
(Companions) Harry Sullivan's War, by Ian Marter

2008
(1st Doctor, annual) The Doctor Who Annual 1966
(7th Doctor, NA) Theatre of War, by Justin Richards
(8th Doctor, EDA) Interference II, by Laurence Miles
(unofficial) Campaign, by Jim Mortimore

2009
(1st Doctor, script) Farewell Great Macedon, by Moris Farhi
(6th Doctor, MA) Time Of Your Life, by Steve Lyons
(6th Doctor, MA) Millennial Rites, by Craig Hinton
(6th Doctor, PDA) Spiral Scratch, by Gary Russell
(Bernice Summerfield) Beyond The Sun, by Matthew Jones
(Torchwood) Border Princes, by Dan Abnett

2010
(4th and 8th Doctors, PDA) Wolfsbane, by Jacqueline Rayner
(4th Doctor, annual) The Doctor Who Annual 1976
(4th Doctor, MA) System Shock, by Justin Richards
(4th Doctor, annual) Doctor Who Annual 1977
(7th Doctor, NA) Lucifer Rising, by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
(7th Doctor, NA) White Darkness, by David McIntee
(8th Doctor, EDA) Placebo Effect, by Gary Russell
(11th Doctor, NSA) The Coming of the Terraphiles, by Michael Moorcock

2011
(2nd Doctor, PDA) Dreams of Empire, by Justin Richards
(2nd Doctor, script) The Prison In Space, by Dick Sharples, ed. Richard Bignell
(8th Doctor, EDA) Autumn Mist, by David A. McIntee
(11th Doctor, double) Heart of Stone, by Trevor Baxendale / Death Riders, by Justin Richards
(Torchwood) Pack Animals, by Peter Anghelides

My personal top five from the above list, in the order that I read them:

Doctor Who – The Rescue is the best of Ian Marter's ten Who novelisations and one of the best novelisations full stop. He takes a fairly slight two-part story which was basically a vehicle to introduce a new regular character, and invests it with vastly more detail and context, to make a particularly satisfying read for the range. It was the last book he finished before his death.

Farewell, Great Macedon is an extraordinary story that was never made, which would have brought the original Tardis crew to the deathbed of Alexander the Great. The book also includes a one-episode story of an alien who dies for love of Barbara. Big Finish recently did a decent audio adaptation of both, but the script book has lots of interesting detail.

I've only read two Bernice Summerfield novels, and one of those was before I started bookblogging, so Beyond The Sun stands as an enticement to an entire range of Who books of which I know very little. It's an excellent yarn of alien threat and psychological differences among a small team, perhaps consciously modelled on Colony in Space but an awful lot better.

The Torchwood novels in general were very good; Border Princes was the first I actually read rather than listening to, and I found it a witty and clever reflection on the first season – taking the plot of the Buffy episode Superstar and transferring it to Cardiff.

Finally, to actually include a novel from one of the major runs, I much enjoyed Dreams of Empire which takes the Second Doctor and team to what appears to be the last fortress of a dying Roman-style imperium, though of course it turns out that there is a lot more going on; intricately and engagingly plotted.

Honourable mentions:

The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin
Evolution, by John Peel
The Doctor Who Annual 1966
Campaign, by Jim Mortimore
The Coming of the Terraphiles, by Michael Moorcock

One to skip – the story we should be glad was never made – the misogynistic Prison in Space.

A classic children’s novel, and a lovely heart-warming book about a young boy evacuated from an abusive mother in London to the English countryside as war gets under way in 1939, and how he and the widower on whom he is billeted find love, happiness, sadness and personal growth. One more or less knows what is going to happen from the setup, but there were a few unexpected twists, and some lovely lyrical set-pieces towards the end when the main narrative starts to slow down – thinking particularly of the seaside holiday chapter, and the introduction of the new art teacher in the supposedly haunted cottage. A real page-turner as well – I found myself lost in it, without necessarily racing through it. Strongly recommended.