Classic children’s books, which I had first read many years ago long before I got to know and love Berlin, the city in which it is set. It’s a very basic but charming story of the young and smart and good getting together to defeat the old and evil, and has not lost its charm – so popular that it was the only book by Kästner to escape the book-burning of May 1933. I had forgotten the scene-setting dramatis personæ at the beginning, and also Kästner’s insertion of himself into the story at the end. Great fun.

I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t convinced by W. Martin’s new translation, supposed to appeal to the young reader of the twenty-first century. Berlin and Germany are foreign places anyway, and the 1920s a far-off time; why bother to rebrand our hero, Emil Tischbein as “Emil Tabletoes”? It seems if anything more jarring; surely kids even in these unenlightened times can cope with the notion that people in a book set in Germany might have German-sounding names? And rather than try to translate street names, I would have preferred a map showing where they all are (the Nollendorfplatz where the story climaxes is now in Berlin’s gay district; that is optional information for the younger reader).

Having said that, there is a very nice introduction to this edition by Maurice Sendak, who had read an early (and possibly better) translation at the age of 10 in 1938.

I’d had this on my list for years as a fantasy book set in a disguised Ireland. It isn’t really; there’s Irish, Welsh and Norse bits and pieces all jumbled up in a quest tale where I didn’t really get very interested in the central character and the setting was much the same as many other fantasy novels. First of a trilogy but I won’t get the other two.

I bought this a month ago in Broadstairs, and am now able to share with you both the exciting two-page documentary on the making of The Dæmons and an exclusive Doctor Who comic strip story.

Here’s the documentary:
Page 59
Page 60

And here’s the (untitled) comic strip:
Page 66
Page 67
Page 68
Page 69
Page 70
Page 71
Page 72
Page 73

Enjoy!

Two years ago I was at the DiscWorld Convention in Birmingham, and was drawn for a place in a kaffeeklatsch with Stephen Baxter, who had just begun his Long Earth collaboration with Terry Pratchett, but whose work I have known and (often but not always) enjoyed for many years. I suppose I can summarise my feelings about Baxter’s writing by saying that I always appreciate the breadth and scope of his vision – the commitment to sensawunda if you like – but that he doesn’t always succeed in communicating it in a human way to me. The cold emptiness of the vast deserts of space and time sometimes need a personal dimension beyond empty vastness to make them interesting.

So I was surprised and perhaps a little apprehensive when Baxter revealed over that coffee in 2010 that he had also been commissioned to write a Second Doctor novel by the BBC. He waxed lyrical about The Mind Robber (demonstrating his good taste) and about the Jamie/Zoe era in general, which went some way to reassuring me. But then last year we had Michael Moorcock’s bending of the Whoniverse to write a Jerry Cornelius story, and I began to wonder if an established SF author could ever adapt his or her style to written Who. Still, I tracked the publication schedules and was set to put in an order for the book when it came out next month.

And then I spotted it in a Belfast bookshop last week and grabbed it off the shelf. There have been various interruptions to my schedule over the last few days, but I managed to finish it on the train to work this morning. (Holiday over, dammit!) As the Belgian fields whizzed by me I was transported to the moons of Saturn, courtesy of S. Baxter. It was a warm day today in Belgium, so I was glad of the icy relief.

And, basically, I was relieved in all ways. This is a good Who novel, and a decent Baxter novel. The vast emptinesses are tempered both by the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe’s experiences (and all three get some excellent stretching as characters) and by the internal dynamics of the human colony (a classic Troughton-era base under siege, with added marital discord and stroppy teenagers). Yet at the same time he has ancient, weird aliens, and a mystery stretching across millions of years, which entirely convince the reader that this is a Stephen Baxter novel. There are also various pleasing references both to Who continuity and to Baxter’s other work, none of them crucial to enjoying the book. Much much better than the last Who book I read set in this corner of the Solar System, and recommended both to Who fans and readers who find Baxter interesting; and indeed to SF readers generally.

(Though I must point out that “The Wearing of the Green” is not a Jacobite tune. Wrong island, and more than half a century out.)

Many years ago, when this book originally won the Nebula, I read it and was distinctly underwhelmed. But that was in the days before my bookblogging became serious; now that I am almost finished working through the Nebula winners, I felt I owed it to the book (and to its author, who engaged with me very gracefully and decently over my criticism) to give it another try.

Well. In fairness the novel itself is not all that bad, just very ordinary; our viewpoint character is a beautiful aristocrat bred for a submissive personality (which she is able to overcome just sufficiently for the needs of the plot); she is loved by another aristocrat who is from a different planet and conceals a heart of gold under his rugged exterior and alcoholism; and a third aristocrat envies them and tries to break them up by raping her. Our heroine then goes to her lover’s home world where they discover a lost city which his people had carelessly forgotten about. Also the nice aristocrats are locked in conflict with the evil Earth people. Then we find out in an afterword that the entire novel is a metaphor for quantum scattering theory and the three characters should really be considered as elementary particles (I am not making this up).

I guess the kindest thing that I can say is that this sort of thing is simply not my cup of tea; and I think on reflection that among Nebula winners The Quantum Rose is not quite as bad a novel as Robert Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment, and roughly as bad as The Gods Themselves.

I have read four of the other Nebula nominees for 2000 – A Storm of Swords, by George R.R.MartinThe Collapsium, by Wil McCarthy; Declare, by Tim Powers and Passage, by Connie Willis. The last of these is also pretty ordinary, but any of the other three would have been a more comprehensible winner – my memory is that The Collapsium is a bit disorganised but fun. The other nominees were The Tower at Stony Wood, by Patricia A. McKillip; Eternity’s End, by Jeffrey A.Carver; and Mars Crossing, by Geoffrey A. Landis. I don’t think I have heard much about any of these. The Hugo for the relevant year (2001) went to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with the other nominees being A Storm of Swords again, two other good books – Ken MacLeod’s The Sky Road and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight RobberPowers, by Ursula Le Guin.

A single-frame joke stretched out to fill two short books. The two that really made me laugh were the Fatal Attraction riff in the first book and the Doctor Who joke in the second.

A couple of years back I read one of Stok’s more recent albums, Nu We Toch Hier Zijn and enjoyed it; this is her first collection, a series of autobiographical stories in comic strip format, set around her student days between the Hague, Amsterdam and her native Groningen. It’s all nicely observed, self-deprecating humour; the first two-thirds of the book chronicles several love affairs and her first orgasm (a great laugh-out-loud moment); the rest is slightly more disjointed journeyman work (though the pancake shaped like an armadillo is a high point). My memory is that Nu We Toch Hier Zijn has a more even pace, but it’s also a more mature work. Unfortunately I don’t think her work is available in English but I heartily recommend it to nederlandstaligen.

• United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn’t Care – Bob Sutton
  
  The title says it all.
  (tags: usa )
• Next Westminster Election in NI – Early Preview
  
  No boundary changes; so what changes are possible?
  (tags: northernireland )
• The Trail of TV Money Tells Us Where the Presidential Battlegrounds Are
  
  The very few states where votes actually matter.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• Leader Of Anti-Semitic Party In Hungary Discovers He’s Jewish
  
  Glorious!
  (tags: eu race )
• Foreign Policy Conservatives – Just So Naive
  
  Republicans and the Resolve Fairy.
  (tags: waronterror waro uspolitics )
• The Incredible Shrinking GOP Foreign-Policy Expert
  
  Romney/Ryan weakest GOP ticket since 1948 on foreign affairs. (My question is answered.)
  (tags: uspolitics )

Another Lovejoy book with a particularly implausible plot, allowing Gash to place his hero in Hong Kong (not contemporary 1980s Hong Kong, but the 1960s city that the author clearly knew well and loved) for fun with organised crime, sex work and inventing a previously unheard-of Chinese Impressionist painter. The antiques scam itself is as beautifully detailed as Gash’s description of the city, and Lovejoy is clear that the criminality in which he becomes enmeshed is a consequence of capitalism rather than ethnicity or culture. But the mechanisms for getting him to Hong Kong in the first place, and then out again in the end, are hopelessly contrived. Generally good fun though.

I’m working through this excellent manga series about the difficulties of raising an autistic child in contemporary Japan; in this volume, Hikaru Azuma finishes elementary school and moves on to junior high, his mother Sachiko dealing with the problems of a new and tremendously unsympathetic special education teacher in his old school and with the insanity of the system for choosing the next step – is there any country that gets this right? They also have to deal with bullies from a neighbouring school and also help Hikaru’s fellow students (and their parents) with other difficulties: the dyslexic kid, the ADHD kid, and also the kid whose father gets drunk and beats her mother. The elementary school years end fairly triumphantly with Hikaru participating in the graduation ceremony in his own particular way, but then the last three installments are a bit disjointed as we establish the junior high setting. Still a gripping read, though.

• Romney’s Not So Bold Choice
  
  “By choosing Ryan, who has little foreign experience and who despite, like most of the people on the planet, being more exciting than Romney, is hardly an inspiring figure or great orator, Romney did not help himself”
  (tags: uspolitics )

This is the eighth of the original 14-volume Oxford History of England, originally published in 1936 but revised in 1959. I can’t very easily count the number of books I have read recently about Elizabeth right now; this is one of the major attempts to summarise what was then known about her. I was disappointed in Black’s treatment of Ireland, squashed into the last chapter and a half and very much treated from an entirely English perspective. However, I found some welcome strengths: in particular, I haven’t seen as good an exploration anywhere else of the English policies of Spain, France, Scotland and the Netherlands. (It still seems odd to me that nowhere further east seems to have mattered much.) The chapter on constitutional theory, and the first hald of the chapter on literature, were also helpful. I’m still on the lookout for a good book about the Elizabethan (or indeed Tudor) court as a phenomenon.

My Elizabethan work, such as it is, is now going on hiatus until September 2014 for reasons which are already partly public and will be revealed in more detail in a couple of weeks. But I will keep up my reading.

Having moved through the process of revisiting the compilation of The Lord of the Rings, the History of Middle-Earth now starts into Tolkien’s later working through of his mythology. I found a lot of this material very interesting and it is a shame that more of it did not find its way into the published Silmarillion, particularly the “Annals of Aman” which brings much more detail to the early days of relations between the Valar and the Elves. Tolkien also gave a lot of thought to the question of Elvish death and immortality; there’s a series of reworkings of what happened to Finwë’s first wife Míriel, and also a long dialogue between Finrod and an early wise-woman, Andreth (Beren’s great-aunt), about these issues. There’s also the series of hints about Elvish sexuality which are nicely summarised in this classic essay, and some interesting speculation about the origin of Orcs. Binding the whole thing together is the question of Morgoth/Melkor’s means and motivation; the title Morgoth’s Ring is supplied by Christopher Tolkien, basically to suggest that the impact Morgoth’s creative power had on Middle-Earth was similar to that of Sauron on the Rings of Power – Middle-Earth itself is therefore Morgoth’s Ring in a way.

It is unusual that one could say this of the tenth book in a series of twelve, but I think I would actually recommend Morgoth’s Ring rather strongly to Tolkien fans who have not tried any of the History of Middle-Earth series and are interested in giving one of the volumes a try.

• Declassified Photos Reveal CIA’s Deep-Sea Rescue of a Spy Satellite
  
  Old news, but fascinating.
  (tags: technology )
• Huge pumice ‘island’ floating in Pacific
  
  Extraordinary.
  (tags: )
• Sport in schools: the debate
  
  With comments from prominent martial arts practitioner and ex-ambassador.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Adam Roberts on Anathem
  
  Read down for the glossary: “HARI-PARTER. Committing a form of tekstual suicide by increasingly expanding the parts of an ongoing tale until they reach such size that the guts of the story split open and spill all over the ground (see Rowmbling). Painful and grisly.”
  (tags: sf )
• Georgia: The Rose Revolution Fades
  
  “A decade of rule by Saakashvili has left the country more divided, and its democracy more endangered, than at any time in its post-Soviet history.”
  (tags: georgia )
• Sting op exposes Andrews over FF Twitter rants
  
  Tracking down a fake tweeter in the Dublin suburbs!
  (tags: twitter ireland )

This classic book is fifty years old; it was first published in 1962. Young F absorbed it with enthusiasm a few months back, and now I have reread it properly; of course I first read it when I was almost as old as Meg, some time in the late 1970s, and was a bit bemused by what I now see as a nicely observed family dynamic, but also able to relate to both Meg and Charles Wallace as geeks. (An odd coincidence: my grandmother’s name was Margaret Murray.)

Reading it now, I was more interested to identify a political agenda than I had been in 1979. But L’Engle escapes easy categorisation here (my memory is that the later books in the series are a bit more didactic). The hellish world of Camazotz inflicts equality through conformity on its inhabitants; a naïve reader might see this as a commentary on Communism as perceived in the hottest period of the Cold War, but I see it as equally applicable to 1950s America (which is in fact the particular hell to which the Camazotzians are condemned). It’s also notable that the motives of the US government (strictly, Meg’s father’s employers at Cape Canaveral) are not questioned at all. L’Engle preaches individualism but also a loving compassion for others; this is how Meg defeats IT. She also of course has angelic beings sweeping in to help, but with limitations; they provide transport and guidance, but Meg has to find her own way in the end.

Anyway, a book that deserves its reputation and well repays re-reading.

• How Your Sweet Valley High gets made
  
  Ghostwriter tells all!
  (tags: writing )
• Close Obama ally rated worst ambassador in the State Department
  
  How not to be an ambassador!
  (tags: southsudan usa )
• Georgian Opposition Claims Repression
  
  …government getting too nervous to be subtle?
  (tags: georgia )

• Georgian politics: Bread and circuses
  
  Opposition footballer’s assets frozen by democracy-loving government t.
  (tags: georgia )
• Pigs! And! Communists! Freddy and the Men from Mars
  
  I remember this fondly from when I was 7. Or maybe 6.
  (tags: sf )
• Talking cars could save your life
  
  My brother working on future tech!
  (tags: technology )

The problem with books like this is that they so quickly go out of date, a particular shame in this case, where Tribe has assembled in internal chronological order all of the stories of New Who up to Last of the Time Lords (ie starting with The Fires of Pompeii and ending with Utopia) including Attack of the Graske and The Infinite Quest, and brief explanations of Old Who stories which are mentioned in New Who (plus a few other tantalising references, eg to the Animus on p 7), but no coverage of Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures or the New Who books and comics (let alone the Australian K9). For the diehard fan, or the TV Who fan who wants to explore more of the Whoniverse, Lance Parkin’s Ahistory has more to offer, but this is beautifully produced and comprehensive for what it covers. (And I realise that I have not actually seen The Infinite Quest.)

• What will you have: tea or chai? « Cultural Geography « GeoCurrents
  
  (tags: maps linguistics )
• Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1978
  
  Andrew Hickey’s tribute to Mary Tamm.
  (tags: deatg doctorwho )
• BBC News – Website warned over MMR claims
  
  ASA stands up for science.
  (tags: autism )

A rather nasty thriller about a senior Flemish legal official whose estranged wife is being exploited by Opus Dei, filled with cynicism about the Francophone gerontocracy which supposedly runs the country, boosted by authentic flashes of local colour (notably the expensive restaurants which are all real). None of the characters is at all attractive, and the author gives no indication that he does not share their sexual and ethnic chauvinism.

This was recommended to me by and , and they made a good call. Set five years after Return of the Jedi, Luke, Leia and Han Solo are intimately engaged in consolidating the New Republic, and get enmeshed in an attempt by an imperial admiral to bring it all down. There is a very real sense that this book builds on and respects the cinematographic canon, but also dares to add a few more elements – in particular, a new more military female protagonist who helps balance Luke and Han. A very satisfying read.

A Penguin collection of extracts from Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Polybius, showing the start and early evolution of historical writing. As I am less familiar than I would like with the historical background, a lot of this sailed over my head (I would have liked more footnotes and maps), but I appreciated the raw approach of Herodotus, the critical attitude of all of them to other writers (not that this stopped them making stuff up themselves) and the closing passage from Polybius comparing the Roman constitution with the constitutions of less successful states (he singles out Rome’s institutionalisation of religion as a key factor).

• The four things you need to do right now to avoid getting hacked.
  
  Read it. Do them.
  (tags: internet )
• How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
  
  Read this. Awful warning for us all.
  (tags: internet )
• Who Is Really Doing Russia’s Bidding in Tbilisi
  
  Measuring outcomes rather than rhetoric.
  (tags: georgia )
• Readercon: Public Statement
  
  How to apologise.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality sf )
• It’s a rich man’s world: How billionaire backers pick America’s candidates—By Thomas Frank (Harper’s Magazine)
  
  The USA’s democratic deficit.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• The Elephant in the Map Room
  
  The Border Between Israel and Palestine – a short history.
  (tags: middleeast maps )

Now that I’ve finished the Rebus books I am working through Rankin’s other stuff. Watchman starts off very John Le Carré, with the dejected middle-aged spy protagonist in a dead-end career and failing marriage, and then lurches rather unexpectedly into an action adventure in Ireland with a rather implausible IRA plot thread (this is 1988 or so). Rankin is not really at his ease when playing away from home, and the best bit of the book is the final dénouement set in Edinburgh (for no terribly good plot-related reason). Minor stuff really.

A collection of 14 sf short stories, published in 1965; all of them are by men, and most are from the early sixties, but the two standout pieces, “The Marching Morons” by Cyril Kornbluth and “Barrier” by Anthony Boucher, are both a bit older (1951 and 1942 respectively). It may just be the editors’ taste, but an awful lot of these seemed to be set in future dystopias with a strong distrust and dislike of the common herd. The collection is prefaced by an interview with C.S. Lewis conducted by Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss.

I was really impressed by this historical account of religious fundamentalism (well, of Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism) over the centuries up to 1999. I have not always been convinced by Armstrong’s approach of parallelling changes in different cultures that happened at the same time, but this worked really well for me, disposing breezily with the importance of balancing logos and mythos, tracking the different religions’ responses to the Enlightenment and modernisation, and then exploring the parallel rise of hardline fundamentalist reaction in all three traditions during the late twentieth century. For the most recent period, Armstrong also restricts her geographical focus down to the USA for Christianity, Israel for Judaism, and Egypt and Iran for Islam, which means of course that all kinds of interesting material from elsewhere is simply omitted. But those are all fascinating countries, and I found her analyses of the religious politics of Israel and Iran particularly illuminating.

Writing in 1999, Armstrong thought that fundamentalism was establishing a new equilibrium after a period when it had appeared insurgent and had then suffered a series of defeats in the 1980s and 1990s. I think she would now agree that we have seen a distinct rise in the strength of fundamentalism in all three traditions in the years since. In the last few pages she looks at how the rest of us should deal with fundamentalism. Repression does not work, she points out, and indeed makes these movements stronger; we must remember that they are based on fear and incomprehension. Rather we should challenge fundamentalists on their own ground, on their lack of compassion for their fellow human beings; this is where they miss a crucial core value to all three of the religious traditions. Definitely worth reading if you are interested in understanding the extremists.

This is another welcome manifestation of the new BBC policy of commissioning Doctor Who books from authors who are well known outside the sub-genre. Colgan is the author of a dozen or more chick-lit novels (I think I actually have read her first, Amanda’s Wedding), but here she has served up a tense and well-written story of Eleven-on-his-own landing in the tenth century in the north of what we now call Scotland, and encountering a fiery alien menace as well as Vikings. There are some brilliantly vivid descriptive passages and some nice character moments for the Doctor, as well as a decently handled romantic subplot which is not allowed to take over the story. In general the new run of Who books by other authors is proving pretty successful.

C.S. Lewis: “The starting point of the second novel, Perelandra, was my mental picture of the floating islands. The whole of the rest of my labours in a sense consisted of building up a world in which floating islands could exist. And then of course the story about an averted fall developed. This is because, as you know, having got your people to this exciting country, something must happen.”
Kingsley Amis: “That frequently taxes people very much.”
Brian Aldiss: “But I am surprised that you put it this way round. I would have thought that you constructed Perelandra for the didactic purpose.”
C.S. Lewis: “Yes, everyone thinks that. They are quite wrong.”

(From a fascinating discussion between the three a few months before Lewis’s death in 1963, published as “Unreal Estates” in the Spectrum IV anthology. As the fiftieth anniversary is coming up, perhaps someone might reprint it in full?)

• Trivial Fact of the Day with Olivia Newton-John
  
  Max Born and Rudolf Hess.
  (tags: history )
• I’m breaking up with eBooks (and you can too)
  
  A librarian’s perspective.
  (tags: ebooks )
• The writing of E. Nesbit, by Gore Vidal
  
  From the December 1964 NYROB.
  (tags: literature writing )
• Ari Ratner: Can Lessons From the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Help Solve Washington’s Deadlock?
  
  Short answer: probably not. “…conditions on the ground continue to deteriorate, the world grows ever more tired of our endless fighting, and hope for a solution grows ever more dim.”
  (tags: middleeast uspolitics )