• A sinister conspiracy to inform
  
  Yet more utter nonsense from the UK eurosceptic media.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• CHART: How many popes are alive at any given time?
  
  Misses out the Copts, and various schismatic interludes.
  (tags: Pope )
• The troubling things I learned when I re-reported Bob Woodward’s book on John Belushii
  
  The strengths and weaknesses of a famous journalist.
  (tags: Writing )
• Google Reader closing down
  
  My brother looks at alternatives.
  (tags: Internet blogs )
• Making a difference
  
  Reacting to a racist joke sent by a friend.
  (tags: Racism )

• The longer the conclave lasts, the bigger the surprise is likely to be | CatholicHer
  
  But I’d bet on Scola myself.
  (tags: Pope )
• The Papal Conclave May Be the Most Hack-Proof Election on the Planet
  
  Limited electorate, deliberately low-tech voting…
  (tags: Pope )
• The US Senate: Where Democracy Goes to Die
  
  Excellent piece, as is the NYT article it links to.
  (tags: Uspolitics )
• What are the best body hacks that people should know about?
  
  Not sure if I believe all of these!
  (tags: Lifehacking )
• NI Conservatives face humiliation
  
  (tags: Northernireland )

• Review: Trillion Year Spree
  
  Perhaps the most important place for the history of a genre to begin is with defining its topic.
  (tags: SF )
• Under the Influence: Doctor Who
  
  Ryk E. Spoor explains it all.
  (tags: Doctorwho )
• The Straight Dope: Did Renaldus Columbus discover the clitoris in 1559?
  
  In brief: no.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• Harry Weathersby Stamps
  
  A great obituary.
  (tags: deaths )
• It’s Still A Bad Idea To Sell Arms To Somalia
  
  Yes.
  (tags: waronterror war Somalia )

• The Smartest Guy in the Room
  
  "No one, it turns out, can ever really be the smartest guy in the room. For two reasons. First, to make sure that everyone keeps fighting to get in, and stay in. Second, to make sure that everyone who doesn’t get in is kept out."
  (tags: politics economics )
• JN-T: The Life And Scandalous Times Of John Nathan-Turner (review)
  
  "Scrupulously researched… strives for fairness and balance… Yet it’s also a book one hesitates to recommend – you may feel this is one scab you’d prefer not to pick, one car crash you choose not to rubberneck at."
  (tags: books doctorwho )
• Wealth Inequality in America – YouTube
  
  Everyone’s linking to this, but it is really worth watching if you haven’t already.
  (tags: uspolitics economics )
• “Palaeofantasy”: Stone Age delusions
  
  "It is striking how fixated on the alleged behavior of our hunting-and-foraging forbearers some educated inhabitants of the developed world have become."
  (tags: science )

The Space Pirates is missing. But in a way, it has to be. These gaps are as much a part of what Doctor Who is as the TARDIS or the Daleks – something that is not just a DVD set for obsessive 21st century fans, but that has been a living, breathing part of every year since 1963. Without stories like The Space Pirates that flicker on in an imagined 1969 we can never reach, a vital part of the show’s magic would be lost.

I occasionally go and dip into Phil Sandifer’s excellent blog, but have not read as much of it as I would like to. I find the individual essays fascinating, but in the whole just a little too long for my preferred reading time; and more worryingly, they tend to leave me simultaneously wanting to read more and wishing there was better internal navigation to the blog than simply following Sandifer’s stream of consciousness (even though that is largely aligned with the broadcast order of the series, subject to diversions).

These problems are largely resolved by packaging the posts in book form, so that you can leaf back and forth at will, making annotations if you feel like it, but also with all the advantages of traditional dead tree reading rather than squinting at the screen. It is also nicely packaged, with a lovely mosaic cover picture of Patrick Troughton playing the recorder. And the content is of course still excellent.

The core of the book is the series of essays on each of the 21 Second Doctor TV stories (with extras at the end including The Two Doctors and also The Massacre, left out of Volume One). These add to the standard vade mecum approach some hard data on what was in the charts and in the news at the time each story was originally broadcast, and also Sandifer’s own personal opinions, particularly where he diverges from fandom. I often found myself wishing I could have expressed my own views as eloquently where we agree, for instance on why The Power of the Daleks is a better story than Evil of the Daleks, or why The Dominators is so very bad. But I also found our points of divergence interesting – why The Enemy of the World is a classic, or why it may not be such a bad thing that The Space Pirates is lost, both perhaps cases where I would probably have argued the opposite but can now see Sandifer’s point.

The story-by-story write-ups are leavened with another dozen or so essays roughly equally divided between other Whovian topics (spinoff literature, UNIT dating, racism) and other media of the same era (Cathy Come Home, The Prisoner, the moon landings). I found the latter on the whole more interesting than the former, since in general I knew much less about the topics, though I agree with Sandifer’s disgust at The Prison in Space and Big Finish’s reconstruction of it. Sandifer’s style is engaging, and for someone who has lived mostly in the USA and was born after all of these stories were broadcast, he has done a remarkable job of contextualising these stories. Now I must go and get the first volume.

Incidentally Sandifer lives in Newtown, Connecticut, and wrote this in December last year.

• Iraq war anniversary: What went wrong reconsidered, 10 years later
  
  Carne reminisces about paths not taken.
  (tags: carneross iraq waronterror )

• Morocco refuses entry to 4 EU lawmakers on trip to Western Sahara
  
  "It was humiliating. It was absolutely unacceptable. It was a demonstration of totalitarian disregard of decency and democratic standards."
  (tags: Westernsahara )

The results (hat-tip to Alan on Slugger, previous results here)

Francie Molloy (Sinn Féin) 17,462 (46.9%, -5.1%)
Nigel Lutton (Independent) 12,781 (34.4%, +1.7%)
Patsy McGlone (SDLP) 6,478 (17.4%, +3.1%)
Eric Bullick (Alliance) 487 (1.3%, +0.3%)

Turnout 37208; Spoilt 223 (0.6%)

There is not much to be said. Everyone has reason to celebrate.

Molloy was always going to win, and his problem was to get voters who already knew that to turn out in bad weather; 46.9% is at the lower end of SF expectations, but it’s on rather than off the scale (in fact, only a hair lower than Martin McGuinness got here in 2005).

The united Unionist vote is above my expectations. I was fooled by Lutton’s apparent weakness as a candidate, but of course not being on the ground I could not see how he was doing on doorsteps. I also could not see how effective the combined Unionist ground game was.

At any rate, the proposition that a united Unionist candidate will always get a lower vote share has now been disproved. But a 1.3% increase is not exactly seismic, and as with the Shinners, the result is much the same as DUP and UUP combined in 2005.

McGlone’s vote share is exactly what he got in 2005. The SDLP’s direction of travel from recent nadirs appears to be upwards, but there is still quite a long way to go.

When I was involved with Alliance in the mid-90s, the party had but a handful of members in Magherafelt and none at all in Cookstown. Again, a percentage increase – indeed, an actual increase in real votes, from 395 to 487 – is cause for celebration but doesn’t signify much else.

These results, if replicated in an Assembly election, would deliver three seats for SF, two Unionists and one SDLP, just like every other election since 1998.

As with the West Belfast by-election in 2011, SF hold one of their safest seats with a reduced majority and lower turnout, and there are no surprising shifts in popular support. (Actually, West Belfast was more interesting last time because of the performance of the People Before Profit candidate.)

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Here, from 23:56 to 24:20.

• How we made the Rocky Horror Picture Show
  
  Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley reminisce.
  (tags: films )
• The tragic story you may have never heard of
  
  Christiane Amanpour on #WesternSahara
  (tags: westernsahara )
• Morocco bars four MEPs
  
  …because they intended to travel to the Western Sahara.
  (tags: westernsahara )

Non-fiction 0 (YTD 5)

Fiction (non-sf) 1 (YTD 2)
The Red and the Black, by Stendhal

sf (non-Who) 5 (YTD 8)
Matilda, by Roald Dahl
Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett
London Falling, by Paul Cornell
Empty Space: A Haunting, by M. John Harrison
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Doctor Who 6 (YTD 12)
The Menagerie, by Martin Day
Original Sin, by Andy Lane
The Turing Test, by Paul Leonard
Snake Bite, by Scott Handcock
The Silurian Gift, by Mike Tucker
The Nameless City, by Michael Scott

Comics 1 (YTD 2)
Slaapkoppen, by Randall C.

~3,400 pages (YTD 7,600)
1/13 (YTD 5/29) by women (Bujold)
0/13 (YTD 0/29) by PoC

Rereads: 0 (YTD 2)
Acquired 2011 or before: 5 (The Red and the Black, Matilda, The Menagerie, Original Sin, The Turing Test) – YTD 9
Acquired 2012: 3 (Dark Eden, London Falling, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance) – YTD 10
Acquired 2013: 5 (Empty Space: A Haunting, Snake Bite, The Silurian Gift, The Nameless City, Slaapkoppen) – YTD 10

Also started:
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod
The Unfree French, by Richard Vinen

Coming next (perhaps):
The Castle, by Franz Kafka
The Lady and the Unicorn, by Tracy Chevalier
Swallows And Amazons, by Arthur Ransome
1632, by Eric Flint
The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi
Doors Open, by Ian Rankin
The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple
A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil MacGregor
The Peoples of Middle-Earth, by Christopher Tolkien
Toward the End of Time, by John Updike
Daystar and Shadow, by James Weldon Johnson
The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century, by Brendan Bradshaw
Starship Fall, by Eric Brown
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner
World Game, by Terrance Dicks
Sky Pirates!, by Dave Stone
Endgame, by Terrance Dicks
Fugitive, by Tony Lee
Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

• What was the Leaning Tower of Pisa for?
  
  We all know the answer, but worth reading for the joke at the end.
  (tags: Architecture )
• Giant camel fossil found in Arctic
  
  Just one of those classic headlines.
  (tags: Science )
• Why US foreign policy keeps failing
  
  Summary of what sounds like an interesting lecture by Stephen Walt.
  (tags: uspolitics war )

Ivan drew a long breath. “Tej. Will you marry me?”
“What?” she said. It wasn’t a thrilled sort of what? either, that ought to greet such a proposal, more of a have-you-lost-your-mind? what. Ivan cringed.

This is a very welcome return to familiar territory for Bujold, as the bumbling cousin Ivan Vorpatril of the Vorkosigan sequence of stories finally gets his own narrative, one that includes lots of nods to the books’ internal continuity though with new twists to Barrayar’s history, perhaps because of the different viewpoint character. It starts off as a damsel-in-distress tale and then turns into a heist story; it’s all done tremendously vigorously, and the image of a large building sinking gracefully into the ground will stay with me for a while. I think this would be a good starter book for those have not yet read any Bujold, and as a convinced fan, I loved it.

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I am behind with posting these – actually up to first series of SJA now.

Back in the far-off days of March 2007, New Who had pulled off a regeneration of the main character but not yet of the companion. (By contrast, Old Who wrote Susan out after a little more than a year, and Ian and Barbara after less than two.) So it’s interesting to watch now, several companions later, to see how RTD pulls out all the stops to make Martha Jones acceptable to an audience still reeling from the departure of Rose. (Well, maybe not reeling after nine months and Catherine Tate had passed. But still.)

Points that I noted particularly from Smith and Jones this time: i) Martha’s leitmotif is a bit overdone, I think, for a first outing. ii) Martha is very brainy, the brainiest companion since Nyssa (yeah, I know Mel was computery but it never seemed to make much difference). iii) Having said that, Martha screams in one of her earliest scenes; I can’t remember Rose ever screaming at all (though perhaps my memory is at fault).

The Doctor is consciously auditioning for a new companion here without wanting to admit that that is what he wants. Actually this plot line didn’t work first time round for us fans who knew that Martha was staying through to the end of the season. But for the not-we viewers it maybe works better. (Big Finish did the auditioning-for-a-companion quite explicitly in Situation Vacant, which I didn’t like much on first listening but then realised fitted beautifully with a much longer story arc.)

It is also nice that Martha has a family, even though Adjoa Andoh, certainly the best known of this season’s semi-regulars, is criminally underused. And it should be noted that the Judoon, introduced here, is among the most successful of the New Who monsters. (Plus the Haemophile – gratifying nasty!)

One of my uncompleted projects is to do a Doctor Who/Shakespeare crossover fanvid. This project faces many obstacles: the fact that there are several Who audios and books which feature Shakespeare as a character and are utterly irreconcilable in terms of canonicity (if you have heard The Kingmaker, you will know what I mean), the fact that Who, like so much English-language drama, owes such a deep and pervasive debt to the Elizabethan pioneers of the genre; and most particularly, the fact that there is an entire episode featuring Shakespeare in New Who.

I had not re-watched The Shakespeare Code since its first broadcast, which was before I did a marathon listen-through of the Arkangel series of Shakespeare audios (which incidentally feature one David Tennant in the title role of all three parts of Henry VI). Now, I got a lot of the Shakespeare in-jokes – in particular the references to Love’s Labour’s Lost, a slightly odd play which indeed calls out for a sequel, and the various other references to how time-travellers might interact with Shakespeare – a comedy trope with a venerable history and well executed here. I am not so sure about the aliens, but Dean Lennox Kelly is very good as Shakespeare, and it is fun. (Apart from the Bedlam scene, which is not fun but is effective.)

The Ceann Comhairle is the Speaker of the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish Parliament. The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is the highest official of the established religion north of the Tweed. In Gridlock the son of the then Ceann Comhairle plays a giant cat and the star of the show is the son of a former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Sticking with the religious theme, since this episode includes both The Old Rugged Cross and Abide with Me, there is now a social media campaign to recruit Ardal O’Hanlon’s best known character to fill a senior ecclesiastical vacancy that is currently open.

This is an episode where the core narrative is perfectly decent if a little implausible, and a fannish box is unexpectedly ticked by bringing back the Macra (now much larger than in 1967), but the most important bits are actually the development of the story arc for the season and for the Doctor’s mythos. The Face of Boe’s peculiar statement is obviously a set-up for future stories; but the brilliant bit is the Doctor finally telling Martha about Gallifrey, a conversation he never had with Rose as far as we know. New Who is gradually getting more comfortable about looking back. In the first season, continuity was basically Daleks, Autons and the Tardis; the second season brought back Sarah Jane Smith, Cybermen, and referred at least to UNIT; and now the Doctor is not just a lonely hero coming out of nowhere, but someone with a rich personal history only gradually being unveiled.

Alas, the Daleks’ return to New York for the first time since The Chase, in Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks, is my least favourite story of this run, and possibly my least favourite story of the entire Tenth Doctor era. (A couple of the season finales are worse, but tend to come after much better penultimate episodes which are part of the same story.) There is a fatal combination of things: Sec’s hybridisation plan is baroque even by Dalek standards, and was anyway done better in Evil of the Daleks in 1967; the Central Park scenes don’t look at all realistic; the accents all grate; none of the poor whites of Hooverville seem to have a problem with an African American leader; gamma radiation is not likely to be guided through a lightning conductor, even one made of Dalekanium. I have no quarrel with the acting, apart from the accents, but the rest of this should have been done much better.

The Lazarus Experiment brings us back to contemporary Earth for only the second time this season. We start with more Doctor/Martha angst – indeed, Martha’s anguish at being abandoned by the Doctor is rather painful; as has often been noted, Ten’s treatment of her is pretty awful. But then we are into a jolly good mad scientist plot. Lazarus’s PR and security arrangements are pretty eccentric, as is apparently his funding relationship with the government, but Gatiss makes up for these improbabilities with world-class pouting and also being transformed into a CGI giant insect. The climactic scenes in the cathedral (Wells posing as Southwark) are excellent, and the closing scenes with Adjoah Andoh and Saxon’s aides a neat teaser for what is to come.

I wanted to like 42 as much as I did The Lazarus Experiment on rewatching, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to. It looks generally fantastic – the spaceship internals are particularly good, and the visuals of the ship falling into the sun are compelling, and the acting is great, particularly Tennant who is on form, and guest star Michelle Collins as Captain McDonnell – but I kept noting engineering problems; the 42-minute deadline is implausibly precise, the ship is very implausibly designed to be able to make a quick getaway at the last moment, and the subplot of the escape pod detaching itself and then reattaching without major consequences for angular momentum and velocity does not seem to have been thought through. (Also, general knowledge questions as security measures in that sort of situation???)

A somewhat mixed start to Season Three, then, with a couple of rather duff stories and a not paricularly charming dynamic between oblivious, grieving Doctor and besotted, disempowered companion. But there is better to come.

< 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

• Obama’s ‘Jedi mind meld’ reference ridiculed by sci-fi fans
  
  President mixes up Star Trek and Star Wars, losing geek credibility.
  (tags: uspolitics sf )
• Athelas
  
  On choosing rulers. (Also, must see that film – loved the book.)
  (tags: religion politics films Netherlands )
• “Why are there so many songs about rainbows[,] and what’s on the other side?”
  
  What do these words actually mean?
  (tags: songs )
• What would happen if the UK withdrew from the European Court of Human Rights?
  
  "Politically, the UK would be sending a clear signal to states which lose far more cases in Strasbourg, such as Russia and Turkey, that it no longer had confidence in the ECHR system. Whether you think that is a bad thing probably depends on your underlying theory of international relations and whether you think international institutions work in regulating the behaviour of states."
  (tags: ukpolitics humanrights )
• How to live through hives/urticaria
  
  Dealing with illness.
  (tags: health )

• A Marta to the cause
  
  Andriessen vs UKIP. (I sort of hope they will both lose.)
  (tags: eu )

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Snake Bite, by Scott Handcock

The Doctor threw him a look. “How do you know that?”
“I read a lot of comics when I was a kid,” explained Rory sheepishly. “A lot of comics.”
The Doctor smiled.

This is the very last Rory/Amy audiobook (unless we return to them in future flashbacks), featuring the old (ie 2010-12) version of the theme tune, with the three turning up on a giant space station called Jörmungandr after the Midgard Serpent; lots of snakey creatures and references, with wormholes and cobra-like aliens. It is surprisingly slow paced for a New Who story (which I don’t mind; frenetic doesn’t always work for me), and Francis Barber reading it stumbles occasionally over the names (though does a fine rendition of the characters), but it is competent stuff.

The Silurian Gift, by Mike Tucker

“The Myrkas will provide the means to bring the humans to their knees! We can wipe out the rest of these primitives with ease!”
“No! I will not allow it!”

The latest of the BBC’s Quick Reads series, we have Eleven travelling on his own, and being called in to investigate mysterious happenings on an Antarctic base. The plot is thoroughly rooted in (which is to say largely copied from) the Old Who stories, particularly Warriors of the Deep, and Tucker seems to be consciously following Malcolm Hulke’s style in his novelisations, but these are not intrinsically bad things and in fact it is done rather well, if fairly obviously aimed at a younger reading audience. Who would have thought that the Myrka could actually be resurrected without embarrassment?

Though I was deeply annoyed by one grammatical point – “its” was frequently though inconsistently spelt as “it’s”. I know that this usage is found in the Declaration of Independence, but its time is past; it’s not what we do now.

The Nameless City, by Michael Scott

The older man stuck out a leather-gloved hand. ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’ He smiled through a neat, grey-flecked goatee beard, his eyes dark and curious beneath heavy brows. ‘I’m Professor Thascalos.”

That was the moment on page 5 when I punched the air and thought, I’m going to enjoy this one. And indeed I did; it’s the second in the series of eleven one-off Puffin ebooks by well-known authors to be released on the 23rd of each month this year (I downloaded and drank it in the day it was published), far far better than the first in this series, with Michael Scott pulling in references to Old Who, particularly the Second and Third Doctor eras (with a nod to The Doctor’s Wife), and also especially to H.P. Lovecraft. I am a sucker for Lovecraft/Who pastiches in general and I loved this one too, the Second Doctor and Jamie being transported in the crippled Tardis to the Nameless City by the operations of the Necronomicon, and having to deal with eldritch horrors by whatever means they can. It is very short (40 pages) but great stuff and gives me hope for the rest of this series. (Interesting to note that the first two authors to write for this series are both Irish.)

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

• Iraq: the story of my testimony
  
  Carne on the origin of the war.
  (tags: War Carneross )
• Mike Nesbitt over the last twelve months
  
  The UUP leader’s flexible rhetoric.
  (tags: Northernireland )

A journalist friend has been commissioned to write a piece on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (35th anniversary of first broadcast coming up on 8 March) and would like to interview a fan; he is especially interested in reflections on the multi-media nature of the Hitchhiker’s phenomenon, but I think will basically take any quote he can get. Anyone interested? ZZ9 spokesbeings would be particularly welcome. Contact me by comment here or email to my personal address nicholas.whyte@gmail.com and I’ll pass you on to him. I haven’t asked but I suspect it’s for the largely web-based newspaper New Europe, as that is his main beat. His deadline is Wednesday.

With B and F at the Three Tumuli of Grimde earlier.

The Tumuli are three first- or second-century graves on the outskirts of the town of Tienen; one is known to have been the tomb of a Marcus Probius Burrus. Excavations in 1892 produced among other things a cameo of a young man, assumed to be the Emperor Augustus, which was sold to the Rothschilds, stolen by Göring, and eventually tracked down in Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, in 2007.

B and F did not care about that, and B was in an exceptionally good mood and seemed unusually lucid, though it is always hard to be sure. It was a lucky strike, in a way; the church I usually take her to was closed for some reason. We looked in on Our Lady of the Stone as well; it’s only a few hundred metres away from the Tumuli.

• Why the United Nations won’t make bold proposals on climate change.
  
  "I’ve been to plenty of depressing UN meetings, and this was possibly the worst."
  (tags: carneross un climatechange )
• The Wiki Game – ‘Wikipedia Game’ – Explore and race through Wikipedia!
  
  Strangely fascinating and frustrating
  (tags: games wikipedia )
• Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of SF and Fantasy, edited by Janet Brennan Croft, reviewed by Liz Bourke
  
  "perhaps I wrong the contributors to this volume by suggesting that half of them were either phoning it in or just bloody bad at writing."
  (tags: writing sf )
• The New EU Foreign Policy Architecture: Reviewing the first two years of the EEAS
  
  "How has the European External Action Service (EEAS) functioned in the EU institutional architecture in the first two years of its existence?" Indeed.
  (tags: eeas eu )
• Promoting a Comprehensive Approach to EU Foreign Policy
  
  @StefanLehne: "Today, two years after the EEAS became operational, the record is uneven"
  (tags: )
• Relax! You’ll Be More Productive
  
  "Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity."
  (tags: work lifehacking )
• Circoncentrique performs Respire (trailer)
  
  Saw the whole 50-min performance last night – excellent.
  (tags: acrobatics theatre dance )

But as for the rest – the events I lived through in those strange last months of the conflict – nobody except Greene knows about them, and perhaps the American, Heller, for some of it. And the Doctor. Of course, the Doctor.

Three grumpy book reviews this evening, the effects of post-Gallifrey jetlag (or timelag?) I suppose. But once again I wasn’t wild about this one. The book is told in the first person by, in turn, Alan Turing, Graham Greene and Joseph Heller, as they one by one accompany the Doctor from Oxford through occupied France to Dresden in 1944, on the trail of some presumably alien signals. The Turing part is rather good, even if the author must heavily insist on Turing’s crush on the Doctor; the Greene and Heller sections totally fail to catch the styles of their ostensible narrators, and the plot is not in fact resolved. Reading the ecstatic fan reviews I realise that I am clearly in a minority.

If she saw it she would recognise it. Something awful had happened, or was about to happen, the last time she was there. We never went back, she told herself. I know that. We were too afraid.

I thoroughly bounced off the first of the Kefahuchi Trilogy when I read it back in 2004, and read the third book in the sequence because it has been nominated for the BSFA Award. I found it a little more to my taste than Light, but that is not saying much; apart from Anna Waterman (the “she” of my quote above”) I found the characters unengaging, and I had difficulty following the plots and grasping how or why they intertwined. No doubt this was due to too much transatlantic flying, but I won’t be ranking this one high on my ballot.

Au séminaire, il est une façon de manger un œuf à la coque, qui annonce les progrès faits dans la vie dévote.
In the seminary, there is a way of eating a boiled egg which reveals the progress one has made in the life of devotion.

One of the classic nineteenth century novels which I had not read, written and set in the years leading up to 1830. The ambiguous protagonist, Julien Sorel, while training as a priest and confidential secretary, seduces the wife of one employer and the daughter of another; and a book that started off looking a bit like a cross between Middlemarch and Casanova ends up like L'Étranger as Julien takes romantic victimhood to its conclusion.

I have to say that while it was well written, I didn't really like any of the characters much, nor really understand why they felt compelled to play roles rather than be themselves. I had a similar frustration with The Catcher in the Rye.

Because I know you care:

	Goodreads		Librarything
	number	average	number	average
Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed	1664	3.60	195	3.55
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson	1644	3.42	285	3.51
The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin	1257	3.86	74	3.48
Ironskin, Tina Connolly	867	3.40	74	3.48
Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal	706	3.75	107	3.85
The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan	424	3.95	80	4.11

Full shortlist (including short fiction, Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book) is here.

• Five Days in North Korea
  
  Andrew in one of the world’s more mysterious places.
  (tags: northkorea )
• Thoughts on the Hagel Filibuster and its Political Implications
  
  Or, how broken is the US Senate?
  (tags: )

“So,” a voice crooned smugly in the darkness, “you return again to our little planet, Doctor, with a new face and a new friend. You must find us very interesting indeed. Almost as interesting, perhaps, as I find you.”

Andy Lane has rarely disappointed me, and this New Adventure, introducing new companions Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej, is up to his usual standards, with lots of good ideas – mollusc-like aliens resenting their recent defeat by humanity; a peculiar radiation that induces homicidal psychosis in its victims; a richly imagined array of settings, including a bootleg medical centre in the former church of St James Garlickhythe; and the rather glorious return of an old enemy who has been very active behind the scenes for centuries – all disciplined reasonably well.

“Footballers who score hat-tricks against West Ham do not always die in suspicious circumstances, but … they often do. More often, statistically, than they should.”

In London Falling, a team of police detectives find themselves pursuing an evil entity around London – a being whose fascination with the fortunes of West Ham turns out to be rooted in ancient and tragic history. It has a bit of a slow start but is otherwise brilliantly done, a fantastic run combining police procedural (including the complex details of the coppers’ private lives intertwining with the details of the case) with eldritch magic. Particularly interesting to read it so soon after Neverwhere, which I think does not execute the concept of London as an occult city half as well; Cornell’s London is much less whimsical than Gaiman’s in its threatening aspects, and much broader in terms of physical and human geography; and the mystery is resolved leaving enough thread hanging for more to be written in this universe. Good stuff.