• Top Cat: The Movie – review
  
  “Top Cat! Do you remember it? Top Cat! Well, they’ve dismembered it.”
  (tags: films )
• Big Finish Produces Doctor Who Audio Plays with Brains, Heart and Humor
  
  A good primer on where to start with BF.
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Javier Bardem Advocates for Western Sahara at the European Parliament
  
  (Ignore the bloke standing against the wall at 0:44.)
  (tags: westernsahara )
• Bardem says Spain should take the lead in Western Sahara conflict
  
  (Ignore the bloke wandering around the back between 0:04 and 0:11.)
  (tags: westernsahara )

Slightly sad to say that this is the last of the main sequence of Tenth Doctor novels for me to read. It’s not a bad one, though my favourite remains Gary Russell’s Beautiful Chaos. (It’s also set partly in 2012, as was The Shadows of Avalon which I read earlier in the week.) Blythe brings back the Autons with a proper reboot, updating them to the new century in a way that wasn’t possible for the TV episode Rose (which also rebooted the Autons, but much else besides) and actually paving the way slightly for the new wrinkles to the Autons that we saw in the first Matt Smith season. Lots of decent action, though the gruesome deaths don’t quite fit with the general impression of Who novels of that year of writing for a younger age group.

NB also an odd mention of my adopted land on page 40:

The Doctor raised his eyebrows at the wild lurches the train was giving. ‘The speed this thing’s going…’ he muttered to himself. ‘The brakes must be the size of Belgium!’ He knew the ride was meant to be exciting, but from the start something about it had left himwondering if it was meant to be taken at quite such a pace.

I guess a bit of a reference to Time Crash there.

Not an outstanding novel from Banks, and one that I felt was perhaps twice as long as it needed to be – had warned of some of its deficiencies and his criticisms are valid. The bits I enjoyed most concerned the story of the indentured slave Lededje Y’breq, unexpectedly liberated and preparing vengeance on her former master – the “surface detail” of the title appears to refer both to the tattoo that was the mark of her indenture and the new one she acquires from the Culture. But too many of the other plot strands were pursued at greater length than they could really bear before fizzling out.

(I have logged 18 books in total for May. Two friends sent me manuscripts of their unpublished books – one an sf novel, the other a historical Northern Ireland-related topic – and happened to get me at the right moment, so I am tallying those as well for my total.)

This is surely one of the better Eighth Doctor Adventures, in a series that I was somewhat losing confidence in a few volumes back; by odd coincidence, it is set in 2012. We start off with a good chunk of the novel exploring what's happened to the Brigadier recently (last seen, from his own point of view anyway, in the very first Eighth Doctor novel, The Dying Days) and the peculiar dimensional opening between present day England and the magical parallel world of Avalon, where humans and the reptiles sometimes known as Silurians struggle for mastery of the land, and the British Army and two meddling Time Lords get caught up in the local power politics. The opening section is absolutely gripping; it settles down a bit as it goes on, but never lost my attention. The book also brings up the concept of a person becoming a Tardis, and vice versa, which is of course picked up and developed by Neil Gaiman in The Doctor's Wife.

Depending on how one counts Minuet in Hell (and I'd rather not), this is actually the last appearance of the Brigadier in the Doctor's personal timeline, though he remains a constant point of reference and appears in several spinoff stories (including an SJA episode) right up until his departure is reported on-screen in last year's series. It's a good way for the character to bow out.

A wise choice of Christmas present from , this is another in the sub-genre of books about the English and Englishness also pursued by Jeremy Paxman and Bill Bryson (and to an extent Stuart Maconie). It struck home particularly for me because Ó Briain is an Irish man married to a very intelligent Englishwoman, a situation with which I am not unacquainted, and because I like Ó Briain's sense of humour and occasional bafflement at the surrealism of life in general. (We also have a vague personal connection via the Byrne family.)

The framework of the book is Ó Briain's tour around England (with short excursions elsewhere, particularly to Dublin but memorably also to Jersey), with anecdotes of his interactions with the crowd on each show and reflections on local history and various aspects of Englishness, including race and diversity . There is also a rather moving conversation with Ken Dodd (the inventor of the tickling stick referenced in the title). His main conclusion is that the English actually rather like being gloomy; that England / the UK is fairly consistently about fifth in everything, but mourns not being top. Tho that he adds that the English have a peculiar paranoia about their young people (ASBOs, etc), and some very trenchant observations about the differences between England and Ireland (the contrast between St George's Day and St Patrick's Day is particularly telling).

Looking at on-line reviews I see several who are baffled because they don't get the Irish bit (some of whom are even more baffled because they don't know much about England and had hoped in vain to learn the basics here). I see others who know Ó Briain's work too well and are disappointed that the book reflects his stage show too closely. Fortunately I am in neither category and thoroughly enjoyed it. Paxman's book is probably better (and Bryson's certainly worse) but this is the most fun.

I can be absolutely certain that I have never voted in this category before, because neither has anybody else. I'm not a big podcast listener – my audio enjoyment tends to be Big Finish plays, Doctor Who-related audiobooks, and the odd documentary or drama from the BBC. I did listen to the Big Finish podcasts regularly at one point but have lost track of them recently.

I'm therefore judging the Best Fancast entries largely – but not entirely – on the basis of what's in the Hugo voter packet – a single release from each of the series, though a more informed voter would have been listening to all of them all year and would be able to judge on the basis of the sequence as a whole. I'm therefore aware that judgements on the particular episodes in question may not be fair when applied to the entire series. But I'm afraid that's the breaks.

As with the Best Fan Writer category, I'm going to list them from top to bottom of my ballot paper.

1) Galactic Suburbia – specifically Episode 32 – worked really well for me; three Australian women discussing what they enjoy within the genre with tremendous humour and enthusiasm; also generally decent production values (only StarshipSofa is better on that score), and a varied and interesting agenda. If I take up podcasts as a habit I will start here.

2) SF Squeecast – specifically Episode 7. Very nearly as enjoyable as Galactic Suburbia, but slightly more difficult to listen to, and the discussion with five people all talking from different places gets a bit confused in places, reminding me of work teleconferences (and not really in a good way). Still, good fun.

3) The Coode Street Podcast – specifically Episode 65, included with the Hugo Voter Package, and Episode 77, which I listened to shortly after it was first released. Both feature the two regular hosts with a female interviewee, in one case author Jo Walton, in the other the ten-year-old daughter of one of the regulars. While the conversation is interesting enough, having a single guest means less variety of topic, and also less entertaining banter than one gets between a regular cast of contributors. Also the sound quality in the Walton interview was not always great (she is perfectly audible but her interviewers aren't).

4) The SF Signal Podcast – specifically Podcast #26 on e-book publishing, a subject which I have seen discussed much more satisfactorily in on-line formats (where one can easily link to supporting evidence and statistics rather than appear to be randomly quoting them). I felt it was using new technology to replicate the experience of being at a convention panel, which seems a bit like reinventing the wheel; the others listed above exploit the possibilities of the podcast format much more imaginatively. I note that the episode description says that the Podcast had "given our regular panelists the night off" and wonder if they might have been better advised to submit an episode which included the regular panelists for the Hugo Voter Package.

5) StarShipSofa – specifically Episode 201, which features a monologue by a biologist, a reading of half of a Geoffrey A. Landis story, and an interview with an author I hadn't read; much the longest of the files in the Voter Packet at 86 minutes. StarShipSofa won the Hugo for Best Fanzine two years ago, and it is basically an audio version of a fanzine, rather than a podcast, and really seems made for a different decade than the other nominees. The audio quality is better than any of the other nominees by far, perhaps because (apart from the interview) it consists of recorded sequences of single speakers put together. I was frankly disappointed – I had listened to the StarShipSofa interview with Fred Pohl and Jack Vance in 2010 and hugely enjoyed that, but this really didn't do much for me. 

But if the Hugo voters want audio fanzines and/or audio versions of convention panels, then I guess my preferences will be outvoted.

See also: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Writer | Best Fan Artist

I'm a bit concerned that my write-ups of the Hugo nominations so far have been too grumpy. Perhaps it's due to my listing the nominees in reverse order of preference; writing about the ones I didn't like puts me (and possibly my reader) in a bad mood before I reach the ones I did like. So for the next few lists I'm going to apply the principle of listing the nominees in the order I intend to vote for them, and hope to say more nice things as a result.

Once again, Best Fan Writer is a category I don't think I have ever cast a complete ballot in previously. As someone whose fandom experience is largely on-line and occasionally in-person, I know three of the nominees as people rather than as writers, and had not read much by the other two at all. So I'm basing my vote entirely on the contents of the Hugo Voter Packet, rather than on any of their other writings that I may have seen, because with the exception of Steven Silver's livejournal entries, I haven't seen any. Anyway, I found it pretty straightforward to rank the candidates as follows:

1) Claire Brialey. Four solid pieces, three about fannish subjects, and one about last summer's riots in England. All well written and well presented, and felt to me like they described parts of my fannish and personal universe. Easy decision to give her my top vote. (NB that Brialey is the only female nominee in this category.)

2) James Bacon. One standout piece – "Hurt: A Dog Day Afternoon" – which is a brilliant and moving meditation on being a dog-loving train driver, the best single item of any of the nominated pieces. The other two pieces, on military sf and Irish-language sf, grabbed me less and had some imperfect editing.

3) Jim C. Hines. The only nominee whose entries are mostly blog posts. Best is the one on Jane C. Hines. Others include a parody of a song I don't know, complaints about genre-bashing, and dealing with sexual harassment.

4) Steven H. Silver. Three very short pieces (of which the best is the Anne McCaffrey obituary from The Drink Tank #299) and also the June 2011 news posts from SF Signal. All presented as a single document.

5) Chris Garcia. Four short pieces presented as a single document. The best is "The City of LA: A Love Story" from The Drink Tank #300. Other topics covered are the film Rollerball, what it feels like to win a Hugo, and the museum in one's head.

All entirely subjective, of course, and I think reasonable people can disagree about any of these rankings. I note, though I think it is coincidental, that the two writers I ranked last were the two whose writing is represented by single documents rather than by separate files for each article.

See also: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Artist

• Independent councillor joins, then quits, UUP
  
  Another glorious political triumph.
  (tags: northernireland )
• Woman Who Couldn’t Be Intimidated by Citigroup Wins $31 Million
  
  In case you thought the banks had learnt anything.
  (tags: economy )
• Stuxnets are Not in the US National Interest: An Arsonist Calling for Better Fire Codes | Atlantic Council
  
  The normally hawkish Atlantic Council disapproves of state use of cyber attacks. And rightly so.
  (tags: cyberspace )
• A Look at the Conduct of Graham Linehan and Steven Moffat on Twitter
  
  Excellent piece on the hierarchy of social media.
  (tags: twitter socialmedia )

• Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil
  
  Brilliant speculation!
  (tags: sf tolkien )
• What Are The Hardest Languages To Learn? [INFOGRAPHIC] | Voxy Blog
  
  I am surprised by some of these – the South-East Asian languages in the ‘Medium’ rather than ‘Hard’ category, and Arabic categorised differently from Hebrew. Also absence of German a bit puzzling.
  (tags: languages )
• The fish fingers that weren’t fish fingers.
  
  Coconut? Yuck!
  (tags: doctorwho )
• A very reluctant Yes on the Fiscal Stability Referendum
  
  By the time this appears in linkspam we will probably know how the referendum went.
  (tags: euro eu ireland )
• Jockeying for space
  
  Adrian on “Alien”.
  (tags: sf )
• Monday 31 May 1669
  
  The last entry in Pepys’ diary.
  (tags: pepys )
• Round and round with Hardy and James
  
  Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James hated Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
  (tags: books )
• Your Print Off and Keep Guide to Following Tally Information in the Irish Stability Pact Referendum
  
  How to follow the results.
  (tags: eu ireland )

One of my reading challenges at present is to get through the entire Bible in a year. (This is not actually all that tough as an assignment – yer average Bible has around 1400 pages, so we're talking 4 pages a day.) I have to say that some of it has been a bit of a slog, even at that pace, particularly the one-sided propaganda of the history books and then the not terribly profound fables of Tobit, Esther and Judith. (I am reading the Catholic version, so I get these extras that Protestants miss out on.)

And then you hit Job. And gosh, it's a breath of fresh air in some ways. For the first time in the Bible, we have a structured dialogue between several different philosophical viewpoints, without the person who is wrong being smitten by fire from heaven. I think you have to ignore the framing narrative (the first two chapters, and most of the last), and just jump in at Chapter 3, on the basis that Job is a person to whom awful things have happened, and he doesn't really understand why. Job's three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, attempt to get him to accept that the bad things that have happened to him are his fault, divine punishment for something he did wrong, and Job steadfastly refuses to accept that he deserves it, while describing his own mental state of suffering in eloquent detail. Chapters 32 to 37, an obvious later insertion, introduce a new character, Elihu, who argues that Job should accept that sometimes suffering happens to the innocent as part of a bigger divine plan. Elihu then shuts up and is not heard from again.

And then God speaks directly to Job from the whirlwind, or from the storm (מִן הַסְּעָרָה in the original, min ha-sə‘ārāh), and says: there is a bigger picture. Consider the wonders of nature and of the universe (it’s a very astronomical book), and measure the problems of your own life against those. Try to get some perspective. This isn’t a cuddly personal incarnated God speaking soothing words of love and compassion; this is the somewhat impersonal guiding force of creation, briefly given voice to speak to someone who foolishly thought they knew what was going on in the world. The answers aren’t comfortable. There is no magic solution. Bad things happen in life, but there is a bigger picture. (God’s argument here is a bit like Elihu’s earlier, but doesn’t insult Job or the reader by claiming that there is a Loving God Behind It All, and is also better written.)

It’s not a comfortable answer, and it’s not a comfortable book. (Apart from the obviously grafted on ending.) But it is at least an intelligent and well-crafted discussion of the philosophical problem of why bad things happen to good people, and perhaps the earliest such discussion, dating from about 2,500 years ago.

Non-fiction 6 (YTD 22)
The Word in the Desert, by Douglas Burton-Christie
The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, by Thich Nhat Hanh
How to Sharpen Pencils, by David Rees
The Great O'Neill, by Sean O'Faolain
Tickling the English, by Dara O'Briain
Unpublished manuscript

Fiction (non-sf) 0 (YTD 11)

sf (non-Who) 7 (YTD 32)
Leviathan Wakes, by "James S.A. Corey"
Deadline, by "Mira Grant"
The Moon and the Sun, by Vonda McIntyre
Countdown, by "Mira Grant"
Silently and Very Fast, by Catherine M. Valente
Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks
Unpublished manuscript

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 33)
The Taking of Chelsea 426, by David Llewellyn
Bay of the Dead, by Marc Morris
Invasion of the Cat-People, by Gary Russell
St Anthony's Fire, by Mark Gatiss
Shadows of Avalon, by Paul Cornell

Comics 0 (YTD 3)

Running totals:
~5,700 pages (YTD 30,800)
5/17 (YTD 25/101) by women ("Grant"x2, McIntyre, Valente, author of unpublished manuscript)
1/17 (YTD 2/101) by PoC ( Thich Nhat Hanh)
Owned for more than a year: 7 (The Moon and the Sun [reread], The Word in the Desert, The Shadows of Avalon, St. Anthony's Fire, Invasion of the Cat-people [reread], The Great O'Neill, Tickling the English)
Other rereads: 0 for a total of 2 (YTD 7/101)

Big 2012 reading projects:
May 31 takes me to Book VIII, Chapter VII of War and Peace, and the end of the Book of Job in the Bible.

Also started:
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
Autonomy, by Daniel Blythe

Coming next, perhaps:
Habibi, by Craig Thompson
Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
The Flowering of New England 1815-1865, by Van Wyck Brooks
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, by Selma Lagerlöf
The Best Science Fiction of the Year #4, edited by Terry Carr
Sphere, by Michael Crichton
Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand
A Good Hanging and other stories, by Ian Rankin
Sauron Defeated, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Lust, Caution: And Other Stories, by Eileen Chang
Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding
Elizabeth I, by Alison Plowden
The Bible: The Biography, by Karen Armstrong
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
The Orthodox Church, by Timothy Ware
Three Theban Plays by Sophocles
Postscripts, edited by Peter Crowther
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
The Stories of Colonel Twit, by Will Powell
Parable of the Talents, by Octavia E. Butler
Dying in the Sun, by Jon De Burgh Miller
Falls the Shadow, by Daniel O'Mahony
The Fall of Yquatine, by Nick Walters
The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, by Harriet Ann Jacobs
Code of the Krillitanes, by Justin Richards
(struck through = read in June.)

Ӝӧккышет тазьы вӧлдӥсько, пиосме возьмасько
Котэм нянь буй-буй будэ, сюлэмы керектэ

Party for everybody! Dance!
Come on and dance! Come on and dance!
Come on and… Boom! Boom!

Корка тыр ик нылпиосы, бертӥзы, мусоосы
Корка тыр ик нылпиосы, бертӥзы, мусоосы
Вож дэремме дӥсяло но горд кышетме мон кертто
Вож дэремме дӥсяло но эктыны пото

Кырӟалом жон-жон-жон, мӧзмон мед кошкоз али
Кырӟалом жон-жон-жон ваньмы ӵошен

(source)

NB that the letters ӝ, ӥ, ӟ and ӵ are used only in the writing of the Udmurt language. The Cyrillic ӧ is used in Altay, Khakas, Komi, Mari, Udmurt and the Cyrillic version of Kurdish.

On the night I tweeted that the Estonian entry was brave in using a language with only 1.1 million speakers; but the Russian entry was actually twice as brave, in that Udmurt has only 550,000 speakers. (Though of course significant parts of the Russian entry were also in English.)

It should be added that the Бурановские Бабушки are not the only famous musicians from Udmurtia; Tchaikovsky was born there in 1840.

I remember starting this book when I was a sixth-former, the memorable opening chapter introducing us to the fragile Prince Myshkin (the ‘idiot’ of the title) returning to St Petersburg by train after long years of ill health abroad. He finds himself at the centre of other people’s familial and romantic intrigues; as an innocent, he rarely looks for dishonesty or manipulation and is forgiving when he encounters it. I got a bit tired of some of the other characters (especially the other men, who are almost all pretty unpleasant) but enjoyed it through to the ambiguous end.

Interested to note that the only French-language periodical mentioned by name as circulating among the top salons in Russia is L’Independance Belge.

My reading of this year's nominated fiction for the Hugos did not end particularly well. Although I very much liked my favourite in this category, I was disappointed by the other five and indeed found three of them rather poor.

7) “Kiss Me Twice” by Mary Robinette Kowal. I really hate stories with cute anthropomorphic artificial intelligences, and this one has a police computer that thinks it is Mae West. And when it gets captured by bad guys in the first couple of pages, the police department does not treat it as a class one emergency, mobilising all resources to regain its most strategically valuable piece of equipment, but leaves it to our hero’s lonesome plodding to solve the mystery. There is an interesting twist at the end but I had lost sympathy long before.

(I would add, though this did not much affect my view of the story, that the ebook version was also rather sloppy, preserving original page headings and numbers from the magazine publication which interrupted the text.)

6) [May Books 12] Countdown, by “Mira Grant”

This is a prequel to the zombie apocalypse trilogy whose first two volumes got Hugo nominations last year and this; here we have the story of how the zombie infection came to pass. Apparently some stoned activists drove across two states to vandalise a secure laboratory. One of them, while being held in protective custody by the police, is interviewed by an investigative journalist. I’m afraid the story lost plausibility for me on those two points. (Also I thought that Grant’s zombie virus couldn’t manifest in mammals weighing less than forty pounds, so the infected raccoon at the end of the story must be an impressive specimen.)

5) “The Ice Owl”, by Carolyn Ives Gilman. I’m sorry about this, because I really liked the first 90% of the story, a coming-of-age tale of an immigrant girl in a future city of an alien world and her elderly tutor who turns out to have both a sinister past and a set of present enemies. But the ending completely ruined the story for me; the heroine’s rapid turnaround in her attitude to her mother, and her mother’s unnerving ability to be in the right place at the right time, fatally eroded the emotional (and astronomical) parameters of the narrative for me and was a crushing disappointment after such a good start. Without the ending, I might have put it in second place.

4) No Award. I might wobble this up or down a ranking on mature reflection.

3) [May Books 13] Silently and Very Fast, by Catherine M. Valente. More anthropomorphic artificial intelligences, but at least these are not meant to be cute, but re-enacting various foundational human myths in their efforts to become more than human. Lots of lush description, but there did not seem to be much going on and I did not warm to any of the characters.

2) “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” by Ken Liu. As discussed earlier, this is a tremendously detailed and sparsely emotional tale of second world war atrocities which did not quite work for me as an sf story, educating rather than entertaining or enlightening. Still better than most of the others.

1) “The Man Who Bridged The Mist”, by Kij Johnson. This won the Nebula Award earlier this month, and as five of the six nominees were the same, I suspect that the Nebula voters made the right choice. I thought this was a brilliant story of a world not quite our own, with a hero-engineer dealing with the challenges of a river of deadly mist and of facing up to his own emotional needs – an odd but effective mixture of immersive fantasy and basic technology. Excellent stuff, which I really hope wins the award.

So, that’s it for the written fiction categories. But I see that vast amounts of new material in the other categories has just been posted to the Hugo Voter Pack site, so this will not be the last post in this series.

See also: Best Novel | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Artist

An enjoyable book in the New Adventures series, with the Doctor and Bernice Summerfield getting involved in an ancient dispute between two groups of lizard-men and Ace embroiled in the external force which may destroy their planet. Benny gets some particularly good character moments.

I have nearly finished my reading of the Hugo nominees in the fiction categories, and reached Ken Liu's fascinating story, "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" (available here in PDF). It is a sparsely told but emotionally wrenching tale of a Japanese-American/Chinese-American couple who develop a technology that allows one to experience historical events, and use it to allow relatives of the victims to revisit the horrors of Unit 731, where Japanese scientists performed horrible experiments on Chinese and other human subjects during the second world war. It's an effective piece of writing, but I tripped over two details and one big issue.

First detail: Liu has a diplomatic wrangle between Japan and China over who has exploration rights over what was then the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. In fact, it's pretty clear that any reasonable extrapolation of current international law and practice would conclude that Japan would not have a leg to stand on, having recognised the People's Republic of China as having jurisdiction over the present day site since 1972 (coincidentally the same year as the UNESCO convention to which both are party, China since 1985 and Japan since 1992). No doubt a rhetorical case would be made in internal Japanese media commentary and political debate on the issue, which would then be reflected inaccurately in international coverage especially in China and America, but the legal situation is crystal clear.

Second detail: Liu's scientists quite deliberately choose to send only victims' relatives rather than professional historians or journalists. The point of this in the context of the story is to illustrate the flawed decision-making of the central characters, under the awful pressure of an awful history. But it's unrealistic from many points of view, particularly that of the victims' families. Having been involved around the edges of a number of such situations, what I observe is that victims want a) the opportunity to testify and to tell their own stories and b) independent documentation as a confirmation from an authoritative, possible even neutral source that the evils to which they were subjected actually happened. What Liu's scientists offer doesn't really satisfy either of these requirements. There are other reasons to find this plot element unrealistic – would the Chinese government really allow American scientists such a free hand in choosing the people who would experience the time-travel technique? – but for me the killer is that I can't see that many of the people most concerned would be really attracted by this approach.

But the big point is this: I'm not sure that a story about time-travel is really an appropriate or tasteful way of dealing with atrocities like Area 731. I have nothing against the principle of being educated while I am entertained, but I think that there are also boundaries that can be crossed and have been in this case. I felt the same about Terry Bisson's Nebula-winning story "macs", which took a real-life tragedy and monstered the victims' relatives to make a point about capital punishment; though I agreed with the point, I thought it was done in very bad taste. Back at Eastercon, a panel on the potential range of settings for Doctor Who stories agreed that the Tardis can never visit Auschwitz (see also Rebecca Levene on "Let's Kill Hitler"). I would add that on screen it has never even been to Ireland. No doubt like many other readers, I learned about Area 731 for the very first time from this story, but I fear that presenting those awful facts in a work of speculative fiction potentially undermines their importance as facts. So while I applaud Liu's detailed research and imaginative transposition of the events of Area 731 into a narrative of scientific research and personal tragedy, I won't give it the top vote on my Hugo ballot.

This is another category that I don't think I have ever voted in before, but the Hugo Voters Package has enabled me to educate myself. I found this very difficult to choose; while I didn't much care for any of the Don Dos Santos pieces, each of the others had submitted at least one work that I found breathtaking, and I rearranged the order of my top four several times. In the end, my ranking is as follows:

5) Don Dos Santos. Four sexy people looking more or less combative. My favourite was the slightly improbably dressed heroine of J.A. Pitts' Forged in Fire. I found the zombie girl with a cigarette a bit disturbing and the other two a bit derivative. Nothing very surprising in any of them.

4) Next up is Bob Eggleton, who has won eight times before, presumably because he tends to deliver what the punters want; this is from the Analog cover illustration for Brad Torgersen's story "Ray Of Light", and whatever the other faults of the story and editorial process, the front cover did it proud. The cover for Heinlein's Starman Jones is also excellent, though I was less convinced by the monsters and dinosaurs of the other two entries.

3) John Picacio. Three interesting pictures of people, two of them illustrations of two of the Stark kids for the GRRM Song of Ice and Fire calendar, and also this excellent cosmic front cover for a Poul Anderson collection, Admiralty. (I did not much like the other piece, a cluttered cover for Ian McDonald's Planespinner.)

2) Michael Komarck's pieces are all about people either readying themselves for combat or actually fighting. But they are beautifully done of that sub-genre, with lavish attention paid to the protagonists and both foreground and background detail. I've chosen the cover from the new edition of Wild Cards II: Aces High, which has the only woman and the only urban setting of the submitted works, but the other three are all good action pieces with misty backgrounds and swirling debris.

1) Stefan Martinere. There's a good bit of sensawunda and fantastic detail in all four of Martiniere's peices; this is his cover for the Nelson / Rutti comic Rage, where an inverted alien and a young woman seem to accept each other's presence in a sparsely realised structure. Two of the other pieces feature vast futuristic machines; the last shows the hero of Diane Duane's Omnitopia series contemplating his lot. I'd be tempted to buy all of them based on the cover art, which I guess is the key test. (Martiniere has won once before, in 2008.)

So, once again I have been educated by the Hugo Voter Package and will vote in a category I would previously have left blank..

See also: Best Novel | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Fan Artist

Like most kids growing up in Catholic Ireland, I “did” some of O’Faolain’s short stories at school. I guess I hadn’t appreciated how big a figure he was in the (admittedly small) world of the arts in mid-century Ireland, constructing the literary self-image of the new state as it found its way to becoming the Republic. This book was his third history book in five years, coming after his edition of Wolfe Tone’s autobiography in 1937 and his biography of Daniel O’Connell in 1938; he claims not to be attempting a serious academic history, but this is disingenuous; he must have realised that a book on such a subject by a writer of his profile would establish received wisdom for decades to come.

I’m more interested in the subject than the writer. O’Neill was the leader of the Irish side in the last struggle between the old Gaelic order and the London government; surrendering after nine years of war in 1603, he slipped away to exile in Rome and died there. For O’Faolain’s purposes, he is of course a hero in that he tried but failed to establish an independent Irish state. But there were a couple of interesting slants which prevent it from being a hagiography.

Hiram Morgan has disproved one of the key planks of O’Faolain’s narrative, that the young O’Neill was fostered in England, and Morgan is rather better on the overall politics and culture of the era. It’s a bit of a shame, actually, because O’Faolain is big on the importance of communication and even compromise with the English, and O’Neill’s (fictional) early life in England equips him to be the right man for this job. Where O’Faolain does better than Morgan is on the human level. His sixteenth-century Ireland is a rather sexy place (certainly in comparison to the repressed de Valera / McQuaid state). O’Neill’s marital history is explained in great detail, including the elopement with Mabel Bagenal, the daughter of one of his regional English rivals. O’Faolain is fairly neutral rather than scandalised about this; I guess that he hoped his readers would draw their own conclusions.

And his account of the end of the war is rather good, though here he does slip into moral lessons from history a bit. Though a proud Cork man himself, O’Faolain admits that Kinsale was practically the worst place for the Spanish to land; had they come anywhere in the north or northwest coast, O’Faolain reckons they would have won the war fairly quickly. As it was, a less good English leader than Mountjoy could easily have screwed up the siege. But it’s impossible to find a positive description of the way the arriving Irish soldiers blundered into a catastrophic and decisive defeat, and O’Faolain goes into splendid descriptive detail about it. O’Neill is in the end the victim of a bad Spanish decision, unusually good English command, and a lack of discipline among his own supporters and allies. My memory is that Cyril Falls, writing only a few years later and as an avowed Unionist, is actually a bit more even-handed in his assessment.

Anyway, not an essential book for historical understanding of the period, but an important book for understanding more recent perceptions of the events. And quite a good read.

Russell is generally one of the better writers of Who spinoff fiction (the novelisation of the TV movie, the Torchwood novel The Twilight Streets, the Tenth Doctor / Wilf novel Beautiful Chaos) but this early Missing Adventure is not a hit. Aliens who look exactly like cats plan to tear the earth in half, as you do, but are stymied by the fact that continental drift has moved crucial equipment out of alignment over a few dozen millennia (when continents would only have drifted by about a kilometre). Some nice descriptive passages, especially about Cumbria and Polly, admitted by the author to be particular interests in the foreword, but otherwise the narrative is confused and cluttered. You can skip this and I did not really need to reread it.

• Why are pound and ounce abbreviated “lb.” and “oz.”?
  
  A straight answer to a straight question.
  (tags: )
• The Wheel of Ice, new Doctor Who book by Stephen Baxter.
  
  Coming in August.
  (tags: )
• Gorgeous Georgian: Now we can enjoy the cuisine of Russia’s fiery neighbour nearer home
  
  …if in London, that is.
  (tags: cooking georgia )
• Why You Can Be a Bible-Believer or Anti-Abortion, but not Both | Ken Watts | the daily mull
  
  Part one of a six-part series concluding the the Bible is in fact pro-choice rather than pro-life.
  (tags: religion sexandgenderandsexuality )

Only two minutes, but great fun:

And it looks like Rebecca, Emily and Libby join this list.

Once again, thanks to the Hugo Voters Packet, I have been able to read the five nominees in the Best Novelette category and decide how to rank them.

6) “Ray of Light”, by Brad Torgersen. This actually has a better plot than my last-place picks in the Best Novel and Best Short Story categories – the Earth has been largely destroyed by aliens who arbitrarily block out the light of the Sun, and our hero is part of a small underwater community surviving on geothermal heat from continental rifts – but is delivered in excruciatingly basic style with occasional solecisms. It is the only story in this category that fails my embarrassment test.

5) No Award. I might not agree with people who vote for three of the other four, but I could at least see that there are points in each that are worthy of merit.

4) “Fields of Gold”, by Rachel Swirsky. I feel a little sad at putting this fourth, because I did quite enjoy it. The central character, having died, finds out the truth about his wife and his other past lovers from the superior vantage point of the afterlife. However, I couldn’t decide whether or not we were supposed to think it was funny – perhaps a mis-match between American humour and that of the rest of the world; the line about President Garfield particularly struck a dissonant note for me. So into fourth place it goes.

3) “The Copenhagen Interpretation”, by Paul Cornell. I had read this for the BSFA Awards (which it won) and read it again this week. This is mostly jolly good fun, with a gonzo reinterpretation of scientific and political history, centred around a British intervention in Denmark in a steampunkish universe with folding spacetime. Lots of Stuff Happens, though not to a completely satisfying conclusion. Still, I enjoyed the ride.

2) “What We Found”, by Geoff Ryman. This won the Nebula in this category last weekend, against much the same competition, a story of a Nigerian scientist who discovers a scientific effect whereby your experiments basically stop working, amid much more detail about his extended family. Judged as a piece of prose, it is probably the best of the nominees. I mark it down, however, because the sfnal element is actually rather minimal – the narrator’s researches are barely counterfactual and I did not really feel they were crucial to the family history. Great style, not quite so sure about the substance.

1) “Six Months, Three Days”, by Charlie Jane Anders. Sometimes I am an unashamed romantic, and I just loved this story of two people in contemporary New York who are both attuned – but perhaps differently so – to the passage of time throughout their entire lives, and whose love affair lasts for six months and three days. It may be thirty years since I last read F.M. Busby’s “If This Is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy”, whose protagonists are in a similar (but not identical) situation, but it remains a vivid memory for me of time travel and lost love. Anders has I think successfully updated that brilliant tale for the 2010s, including giving the same name to her female protagonist. The lovers’ personal dynamic also reflects different philosophies of predestination, choice, and responsibility, and grabbed my heartstrings. An enthusiastic first preference from me.

See also: Best Novel | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Fan Artist

Hilarious!

A couple of extracts from this Hugo-nominated novelette for your enjoyment. At one point our narrator writes of:

…risking my life and the old sub to chase a wild hair through the vast, dark ocean.

This would be a jarring enough metaphor if "hare" had been spelt correctly, as a waterlogged animal would not get very far once submerged in the vast dark ocean. With the incorrect spelling of "hair", the entire sentence is nonsensical.

Later on, when we first encounter the ray of light of the title of the story, it appears thus:

…there was a gloaming light in the very far distance. Only, gloaming wasn't the right word.

Indeed it wasn't; "gloaming" is not an adjective, but a noun which means "twilight", often more specifically "dusk". The narrator / the author may have meant "dim" or "gleaming".

This one will not be at the top of my ballot paper.

• Caviar Diplomacy: How Azerbaijan silenced the Council of Europe
  
  29 pages, PDF, excellent report.
  (tags: azerbaijan )

I am alarmed to discover that Google has 51 hits for the phrase "chase a wild hair [sic]" but only 39 for "chase a wild hare", which, it should go without saying, is very obviously the correct spelling. Life is very strange.

Edited to add: Per in comments I tried again and got 403 hits for "hare" and 59 for "hair". Which is a little more reassuring.

• The Deadly Assassin
  
  Andrew Hickey gives his views.
  (tags: doctorwho )
• Angela’s Choice.
  
  “Support for European unity runs far deeper in the political structures of most continental countries than we grasp. British eurosceptics constantly remark that the euro was a political project, as if that is a killer argument. It was. It was supposed to be…”
  (tags: euro eu )
• 10 things about British Politics as observed by an Irish political anorak.
  
  Jason speaks.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Harry Potter and the 800 lb Gorilla
  
  How the Rowling / Warner machine treats translators.
  (tags: languages sf )

• Hayek and the Welfare State, Yet Again
  
  Do get any acquaintances who take Hayek seriously to read this.
  (tags: economics )
• Eurovision 2012- what you see and don’t see (VIDEO)
  
  @arzugeybulla ‘s Storify summary.
  (tags: eurovision azerbaijan )
• #Azerbaijan: Turning Over a New Leaf? – International Crisis Group
  
  I was too optimistic, back in 2004.
  (tags: azerbaijan )
• The Fortsas hoax
  
  A peculiar bit of literary history.
  (tags: belgium )
• #Azerbaijan: Authorities Violently Disperse Peaceful Rallies
  
  @HRW release quoting my old friend Giorgi Gogia.
  (tags: azerbaijan )
• #Azerbaijan journalist blackmailed with sex video
  
  How to deal with dissenting voices.
  (tags: azerbaijan )

• I give up
  
  Jon Worth decides that he cannot bear the prospect of running for the European Parliament as a Labour candidate in the UK.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• Blue Peter is Who I Am
  
  The difference one TV programme can make.
  (tags: autism television children )

I don't think I have ever voted in this category before, but after last year's debacle when I failed to vote for Randall Munroe of xkcd, and he missed winning the award by a single vote, I have decided to educate myself thanks to the Hugo Voters Package. There are five artists in this category (none of them Randall Munroe, for some reason) and I have heard of only one, so I am judging the others purely on the basis of the four pieces submitted for the Package; if they have done better (or worse) work over the last year I'm not aware of it.

Edited to add: I now realise that Randall Munroe is in fact a nominee but that none of his work has been included in the Hugo Voter Package. He is getting my top vote anyway, and I have revised the others down a place.

Without very much hesitation, I rank them as follows:

6) Steve Stiles. Three of the pieces submitted are weak jokes; the fourth is more interesting, a bloke looking out of the frame with a screaming face reflected in his sunglasses. But not interesting enough to shift him from the bottom spot on my ballot.

5) Brad Foster. This was the one artist whose work I did already know, in that he provides cover cartoons for Ansible. Nothing seriously wrong with any of the pieces but they are pretty basic. The best is the logo for last year's CONDFW, excerpted here.

4) I hesitated a bit about Taral Wayne, because the first two pieces are a gnome joke and a jack o'lantern leering at a furry creature of some kind. But the other two are both rather good, a planetscape crowded with fannish references and a lovely long-focus landscape, nicely realised, with a trademark furry explorer. I like both better than I like any of the Foster or Stiles pieces, so Wayne goes above them.

3) We are in a slight chalk and cheese situation with Spring Schoenhuth, whose medium is metalwork rather than graphic art. The jewellery photographs we have been given to judge her work on are all beautiful pieces which one would like to own; there's a sense of consistent attention to detail. It may be slightly quirky of me, but I put her third.

2) That brings us to Maurine Starkey, three of whose four pieces impressed me as having a story to tell; I was underwhelmed by her Close Encounters fanzine cover, but her Sherlock Holmes homage, her skeleton resting in flowers, and especially the weird children on the cover of Askance #24 would all make me want to pick up whatever they adorned and also look for more from that artist.

1) Randall Munroe. A consistent cause of delight and entertainment, and occasionally education and enlightenment.

So, the Hugo Voter Package has successfully educated me about the Best Fan Artist category, though slightyl misled me by the absence of one of the nominees' work. More to come.

See also: Best Novel, Best Short Story, Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)