The last couple of times I've been to New York I have been fortunate enough to stay on Washington Square itself, but I was actually prompted to get hold of this classic after learning that the amazing Fanny Kemble had inspired James to write it. It is a short, vivid, sad story of a father and daughter who fail to communicate emotionally, and an aunt who communicates far too well with her niece's unworthy lover, set in the much smaller New York of the 1840s (published in 1880). There's lots of beautiful character observation (at least of the central four personalities; the others are a bit marginal) and a vivid sense of time and place. Strongly recommended.

Like a lot of people, I was enchanted by The Name of the Rose, baffled by Foucault’s Pendulum, and ignored Eco’s subsequent work, but picked this up cheap a while back and have now got onto it. I’m glad to say that I mostly enjoyed it; Eco’s protagonist starts the novel with amnesia and must reconstruct his own memories by revisiting his family’s country retreat and going through his own souvenirs of youth before and during the Second World War, a process that brings back adventures with the local resistance as well as his teenage love interest. It is beautifully illustrated and for most of the book appears to be going somewhere interesting but unfortunately peters out at the end.

One of the newer original single-CD audiobooks in the Who range, read by Alexander Armstrong (whose accent is occasionally a bit surprising – his “stall” sounds like “stool” which doesn’t quite have the same meaning). All but completists can safely skip this one; the setting is a future-kitsch 1950s public school which turns out rather pointlessly to be In Space, and the Doctor compassionately tells the victim of bullying that he should ruddy well get over it; that will be very helpful to any young (or older) listeners who find themselves in that situation.

In general I have very much enjoyed the Torchwood novels, and I would have enjoyed this one as well, if the ending had not turned on the convenient disposal of an autistic child’s life. That just makes me sick.

Yet another of the Arthur C. Clarke award nominees, and one which really failed to impress me. Bear is regarded as one of the hardest of hard sf writers, but even so he has managed to create characters I actually cared about in other books of his that I have read. Perhaps I was wrong to try and read this during my travels at godawful hours of the morning last week, but I found little to recommend in this novel.

Another of this year’s much-discussed shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, this time set in a near-future America where a relatively affordable immortality treatment abolishes death by aging (though disease, accident and homicide remain). Our narrator spends very little time pondering the immense psychological and philosophical consequences, and much more watching those around him die of disease, accident or homicide; he becomes a paid killer, first of voluntary suicides and then of those the state deems worthy of death; he is obsessed with a woman who he eventually finds in melodramatic circumstances. I was disappointed that having taken up the medical development which is key to the situation, the plot then did not go much beyond the techno-thriller format.

By odd coincidence, in both The End Specialist and Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which I was reading at the same time, the narrator is obsessed by Solara, though in this case Solara is a tall blonde woman rather than a country estate.

I am gradually getting towards the end of the many Tenth Doctor novels, this being another one from the companionless era (ie 2009). Set in 12th-century Worcester, it presents the Krillitane very differently from School Reunion, actually being exploited by alien geneticists who are much nastier than they are. Some very good concepts, not executed quite as well as they deserved.

Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but this was his only actual novel, published in 1900 when he was 26. Savrola is the liberal opposition leader in the small western European republic of Laurania; once it becomes apparent that the dictator’s wife is secretly in love with him, you know how the story is going to work out, but Churchill tells a good yarn, in particular with some brilliant descriptions of the street-fighting as the revolution takes place, only marred slightly by a rushed last couple of pages.

It’s impossible to read the book without bearing in mind the author’s future career. The dictator is wrong because he has trampled over ancient rights and freedoms in the name of stability; the radicals on the other hand want to take the revolution toward repression and socialism, and Savrola has to steer a course between them. I was particularly attracted by this early passage in which Savrola writes the speech which will kickstart the revolt:

His speech – he had made many and knew that nothing good can be obtained without effort. These impromptu feats of oratory existed only in the minds of the listeners; the flowers of rhetoric were hothouse plants.

What was there to say? Successive cigarettes had been mechanically consumed. Amid the smoke he saw a peroration, which would cut deep into the hearts of a crowd; a high thought, a fine simile, expressed in that correct diction which is comprehensible even to the most illiterate, and appeals to the most simple ; something to lift their minds from the material cares of life and to awake sentiment. His ideas began to take the form of words, to group themselves into sentences; he murmured to himself; the rhythm of his own language swayed him; instinctively he alliterated. Ideas succeeded one another, as a stream flows swiftly by and the light changes on its waters. He seized a piece of paper and began hurriedly to pencil notes. That was a point; could not tautology accentuate it? He scribbled down a rough sentence, scratched it out, polished it, and wrote it in again. The sound would please their ears, the sense improve and stimulate their minds. What a game it was! His brain contained the cards he had to play, the world the stakes he played for.

As he worked, the hours passed away. The housekeeper entering with his luncheon found him silent and busy; she had seen him thus before and did not venture to interrupt him. The untasted food grew cold upon the table, as the hands of the clock moved slowly round marking the measured tread of time. Presently he rose, and, completely under the influence of his own thoughts and language, began to pace the room with short rapid strides, speaking to himself in a low voice and with great emphasis. Suddenly he stopped, and with a strange violence his hand descended on the table. It was the end of the speech.

The noise recalled him to the commonplaces of life. He was hungry and tired, and with a laugh at his own enthusiasm sat down at the table and began his neglected luncheon.

I think we can safely assume that Savrola’s method of speech-writing was much the same as his creator’s. (I wonder if they also shared Savrola’s private passion for astronomy?)

I had been a bit underwhelmed by the last few Eighth Doctor novels I read, but this one has restored my confidence. It’s one of the few Who novels which I could easily imagine as the basis for a TV story; the Tardis crew investigate a dubious company doing genetic engineering on a convenient planet, the two companions going undercover, with all the personal conflicts that involves, and the Doctor taking on the bad guys directly. Fitz continues to be one of the best spinoff characters, and for the first time I actually found Compassion interesting (in, what, her third or fourth book). Well above average for this range.

• Hasan Abazi Faces Month in Custody
  
  Outrageous behaviour from Milosevic-era minister.
  (tags: kosovo serbia )
• Voice of Choice
  
  Turning the tables on protesters who go too far.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• Girls Around Me
  
  The dark side of the Facebook and Foursquare APIs.
  (tags: internet facebook )
• Supreme Court May Be Most Conservative in Modern History
  
  With groovy graphs.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• Quick Christopher Priest Follow Up – Whatever
  
  SFWA President Scalzi on Priest on Clarke Award
  (tags: sf )
• Dereliction of Duty, Ctd.
  
  Another Priest / Clarke Award roundup.
  (tags: sf )
• fiction_theory: How NOT to gain readers and influence bloggers
  
  Bizarre and offensive marketing by self-published author.
  (tags: books )
• Religion and Doctor Who: Time, Space, and Faith
  
  Proposed book of essays seeks papers.
  (tags: religion doctorwho )
• While Average Lifespans Increase, 114 Remains A Stubborn And Mysterious Upper Bound. Why? | Singularity Hub
  
  (tags: health )
• 4 Things To Do in Grad School To Prepare for a Non-Academic Career
  
  (tags: careersadvice )

Bumped up from a comment in Slugger, re the next European Parliament elections in Northern Ireland:

There is zero chance of two Nationalists winning. Last time round Alban Maginness was more than 18,000 votes adrift of Diane Dodds, and taking the undistributed surpluses into account the real difference was probably 24,000 (Nicholson ended with a 11,000 surplus, de Brún with 5,000) and the 7,500 non-transferables from Allister are probably a high-water mark for hardline plumpers. The total Nationalist vote is consistently 5-10% behind the total Unionist vote, and Unionists are better at internal transfers; there is absolutely no reason to expect 2014 to be any different.

There is also zero chance of Nationalist transfers deciding which Unionist candidates get elected. This would require the total Nationalist vote (impossibly) to fall below 37.5%. At every election since SF came into the system, the trailing Nationalist party has survived to the last count without being eliminated.

Even in the (impossible) Nationalist meltdown scenario, while it is wrong to say that no Shinner will ever vote DUP or vice versa, the numbers that do are likely to be too few to make the difference. The one occasion when something like this happened at a European election was in 1979, when Bernadette McAliskey was eliminated, and 81% of her votes did not transfer, failing to help Oliver Napier close the gap with Jim Kilfedder (let alone with Harry West or John Taylor).

If I were the DUP I would run two candidates in the hope of squeezing out the UUP. Jim Nicholson will be 69 by the time of the 2014 election and will have served five terms, so I would not count on his running again, and it’s difficult to see who the replacement would be (but then again few of us predicted either Allister or Dodds as a DUP candidate for Europe). The DUP have comfortably outpolled the UUP in every election in the last ten years except the last Euro-election. In both Assembly elections they got more than twice the UUP total.

But I am not the DUP, and I think they will run only one candidate. The fact that the one election where the UUP finished ahead of them (after transfers) was the last European election will certainly play into their preparations for the next one. Also the DUP have shown a commendable caution about over-nominating in recent years, even where their candidate might have had a good chance on the numbers. My impression is that internal discipline is strong enough that running two candidates would not be a big issue, but the party’s political aims are served more effectively by winning one seat safely than by scraping (or worse possibly failing) to win a second.

I'm way behind on book write-ups from my just-concluded trip (which involved one flight departing at 7 am and another at 4 am; and I rarely sleep on planes), but for the record here is my tally for the month of March.

Non-fiction 0 (YTD 14)

Fiction (other than sf) 4 (YTD 8)
Beggars Banquet, by Ian Rankin
Desolation Island, by Patrick O'Brian
Savrola, by Winston Churchill
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, by Umberto Eco

SF (other than Who) 7 (YTD 21)
The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
The War of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Waters Rising, by Sheri S. Tepper
The Testament of Jessie Lamb, by Jane Rogers
The End Specialist, by Drew Magary
Hull Zero Three, by Greg Bear

Doctor Who etc 8 (YTD 24)
Almost Perfect, by James Goss
The Plotters, by Gareth Roberts
Strange England, by Simon Messingham
Frontier Worlds, by Peter Anghelides
The Krillitane Storm, by Christopher Cooper
Borrowed Time, by Naomi A. Alderman
Into the Silence, by Sarah Pinborough
Darkstar Academy, by Mark Morris

Comics 0 (YTD 2)

Running totals
~6,000 pages (YTD ~20,600)
4/19 (YTD 16/69) by women (Tepper, Rogers, Alderman, Pinborough)
0/19 (YTD 1/69) by PoC (must do better)
Owned for more than a year: 7/19 (Frontier Worlds, Beggars Banquet, Strange England, The Plotters [reread], The War of the Ring, Desolation Island, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana)
Other rereads: 0 for total of 1 (YTD 4/69)

Big 2012 reading projects:
March 31 takes me to Book V, Chapter VII of War and Peace, and the end of 2 Samuel in the Bible.

Also started:
A History of God, by Karen Armstrong
Washington Square, by Henry James
Rule 34, by Charles Stross

Coming next, perhaps:
The Godmother's Apprentice, by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Moon and the Sun, by Vonda N. McIntyre
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
The Great Wall of China, by Franz Kafka
Among Others, by Jo Walton
The Word in the Desert, by Douglas Burton-Christie
The Great O'Neill, by Sean O'Faolain
Tickling the English, by Dara O Briain
The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, by Thich Nhat Hanh
The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant
Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, by Van Wyck Brooks
The Best Science Fiction of the Year #4, ed. by Terry Carr
Sphere, by Michael Crichton
A Good Hanging and other stories, by Ian Rankin
Invasion of the Cat-People, by Gary Russell
Sauron Defeated by J.R.R. Tolkien
Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks
First Frontier, by David A. McIntee
Parallel 59, by Natalie Dallaire
The Taking Of Chelsea 426, by David Llewellyn
Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding
(struck through = read in March)

I am on the road this week, and am therefore overdue bookblogging entries for (as of right now) abour half a dozen books. One of those is Savrola, the only novel of future British Prime Minister Winston Specncer Churchill (as opposed to the much better-known-in-his-day American novelist Winston Churchill). Savrola is the story of a liberal revolutionary leader overthrowing a dictatorial ruler; the latter at one point experiments with whipping up popular support by picking a fight with the British, and reflects as follows:

“I think,” said the President, “that the English Government also have to keep the electorate amused. It is a Conservative ministry; they must keep things going abroad to divert the public mind from advanced legislation.”

Well done , and .

• Hull 0, Scunthorpe 3 | Christopher Priest
  
  Why the Arthur C. Clarke shortlist is WRONG.
  (tags: sf )

We shall stick it out
to the end, but we
are getting weaker of
course and the end
cannot be far.

It seems a pity but
I do not think I can
write more.
      R. Scott.

Last entry.
For God’s sake look
after our People.

I read the first two Aubrey/Maturin books many many years ago, and while I enjoyed them I never quite got into the habit of pursuing the series. A couple of years back I picked up Desolation Island from Bookmooch (which seems incidentally to have lurched back into activity in the last month or so, which is good news) and have now submitted to various people’s urgings in my last couple of what-shall-I-read-next-year posts and digested it.

It is a cracking good read. There’s an awful lot packed in here; apart from the basic plot of Aubrey commanding a mission both transporting convicts and recsuing Bligh (of Bounty fame) and Maturin finding his personal and political allegiances increasingly tangled as the War of 1812 looms. Loads of the ship’s crew are killed by violence or disease. The high point of the book is an engagement with a Dutch ship, brilliantly described from Aubrey’s point of view as a testing to destruction of both vessels; the victorious but severely damaged British limp to what we now call Kerguelen Island, the island of the title of the book, and have a diplomatically tricky encounter with an American crew while they are there. O’Brian’s sensitivity to language and nuance is rather lovely, and I shall try and develop this habit a little more.

Extract from a novel published in 1900; who wrote it?

“I think,” said the President, “that the English Government also have to keep the electorate amused. It is a Conservative ministry; they must keep things going abroad to divert the public mind from advanced legislation.”

And no sneaky Googling!

• War Over a One-Horse Town – NYTimes.com
  
  Why Badme matters (though nobody knows where it is).
  (tags: war eritrea ethiopia )
• That Was TRIIIIIIPPY: Time-Lapse Of Ocean Currents | Geekologie
  
  Amazing.
  (tags: maps )
• How our election cycle screws up our foreign policy
  
  #fb US election campaigns: too long, too costly, too exploitable by foreigners.
  (tags: uspolitics )

• The Appliance Of Science
  
  @nine_below gives me marks for prediction (4/6).
  (tags: sf )
• Sean in Mali: Living and Tweeting the Coup
  
  African mutineers take over capital; Twitter reacts.
  (tags: twitter mali )

All strength to Sheri S. Tepper! She will turn 83 this summer (she was born seven months after Philip K. Dick, three months before Ursula Le Guin) and keeps on turning out works dancing on the borderline of fantasy and science fiction, with deathly earnest political purpose. Her works repeatedly test Clarke’s Third Law to destruction, which is why it is appropriate enough that this latest novel has been nominated for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award.

I don’t think it will win. There is a brilliant concept behind it all of the future of humanity in a world where environmental catastrophe will swallow the land, and some impressive description and also misdirection of the reader as to where the focus of the plot really is. But I’m afraid there is also too much infodumping in the early chapters. Still the overall vision is daring – how will the first post-human children be born? – and well executed after the early glitches. And it is good to see a writer who I think has not received her due appearing on the shortlist even at this late stage of her career.

As Martin Lewis has mercilessly chronicled, I correctly predicted four of the six shortlisted novels for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Just to update the table I posted then, with the 1 March figures in parentheses:

Though it may not be immediately obvious, the big relative winner in the last three and a half weeks is Drew Magary's The End Specialist, which has 15.6% more entries on Goodreads and 8.2% on LibraryThing, comfortably ahead of the field in both cases. However in absolute terms, Embassytown is still far ahead, accounting for 45-46% of all copies of any of the six books, surprisingly consistently whether you count books registered as of 1 March, or registered as of today, or registered between the two dates. Rule 34 is also still ahead of The End Specialist in absolute numbers, and so is Hull Zero Three among LibraryThing users. The Testament of Jessie Lamb and The Waters Rising remain far behind. (The Waters Rising posted a big relative gain among LibraryThing users but from a very low base.)

I'm behind on reviewing (and have a busy week ahead, so it will be some time before I catch up); so far I have read Embassytown, The Testament of Jessie Lamb and The Waters Rising, and have made a start on Hull Zero Three and The End Specialist. I shall make a considered judgement when I have finished them all, but for me Jessie Lamb is way ahead so far.

• How an independent Scotland would work in the EU
  
  much more mundane than anyone wants to admit.
  (tags: scotland eu )

It was interesting to read this Seventh Doctor novel at the same time as the new Fourth Doctor audio The Renaissance Man, in that both involved Victorian-ish settings which turn out to be in some way representations of an inner space. This was apparently Messingham’s first book, but it’s a good combination of insect horror, worlds within worlds, and a new figure from the Doctor’s Gallifreyan past which casts a new light on his motivations. Ghost Light with mind projections, perhaps. One of the more memorable ones.

Kay has written some amazing books, but unfortunately this isn’t one of them. In Under Heaven he has moved away from his usual fantasy European setting and gone for a barely fictionalised account of a real incident from Chinese history, and for once I felt that his fidelity to the original facts got in the way of telling a good story. The plot is one of political, military and sexual tension; there are a couple of small fantasy elements which are so marginal that it hardly seems worth including them; and there is a poet who, thank god, does not inflict too much poetry on us. It’s not a bad book, but disappointing in the context of Kay’s earlier heights of achievement.

• The Way the Future Blogs: The Reunion at the Mile-High
  
  Alternate Asimov!
  (tags: sf )
• The settlement of Madagascar: Thirty lost souls | The Economist
  
  The thirty founding mothers of the Malagasy.
  (tags: migration )
• Bir Tawil – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  
  The one part of Africa that no state claims as part of its territory.
  (tags: maps sudan )
• Olympus 2012 – Programme
  
  I am on three panels. What about you?
  (tags: sf )
• Can A Town Divided Against Itself Stand? – NYTimes.com
  
  Nicosia, Jerusalem, Mitrovica…
  (tags: kosovo cyprus maps )

• UN rights body presses Sri Lanka war crime probes resolution
  
  #fb “credible probes into alleged crimes committed by both sides are an important step for justice and equality in post-conflict Sri Lanka.”
  (tags: humanrights srilanka )
• Does misinformation demobilize the electorate? Measuring the impact of alleged “robocalls” in the 2011 Canadian election (PDF)
  
  Evidence that the Canadian government *stole* its majority in the last election. Yes, *stole* it.
  (tags: canada elections )
• Searching for a false middle instead of learning to tolerate difference.
  
  “…we liberals need to avoid demonising conservatives as homophobic bigots. But conservatives need to avoid demonising liberals as Godless heretics. And those of you in the middle need to avoid demonising those of us at the poles as crazies who don’t care…”
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• NASA – Dawn Sees New Surface Features on Giant Asteroid
  
  Pretty patterns, young craters!
  (tags: astronomy )
• Zurich James Joyce Foundation at centre of a row over publication of new Joyce letter. – swissinfo
  
  Apparently someone copied the text by hand from Joyce’s unpublished archives, and then somehow it reached the Dublin publisher. A legal grey zone, but surely rather clear ethically!
  (tags: copyright )
• A few partial replies to Charlemagne from Jon Worth on the European Parliament
  
  As usual, I agree with all of this.
  (tags: eu )
• Are motorways rational from slime mould’s point of view? (PDF)
  
  “slime mould approximates best of all the motorway graphs of Belgium, Canada and China”
  (tags: mathematics )
• Alex. Kane on the fall of Ulster Unionist Party leader Tom Elliott
  
  Insider analysis from a partisan but well-informed source.
  (tags: northernireland )
• EU to back strikes on Somali pirates
  
  Shore attacks planned.
  (tags: somalia eu )

I woke up this morning to find an amusing blog entry from my old friend and former colleague Mark Mullen. Mark runs the local branch of the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and he was posting online his carefully thought-out response to the EU's request for "your views on the future policy of the EU with regard to support to Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in development".

Basically Mark feels that soliciting input via email in a public policy consultation is a mistake, and it would be better to set up on-line forums as a more interactive, interesting and productive use of time. He concludes, a little cynically,

Increasingly, “email us your thoughts and ideas” is being used by those who don’t really want those thoughts and ideas but want to say they have asked, so participation will continue to shrink as others are warmer to the idea of encouraging a conversation.

and then throws in an optimistic final thought,

I know that is not the case with this effort, but it may apear that way to some.

The kicker to all of Mark's carefully thought out argument is that the email address given for input into the European Commission's consultation actually bounces.

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed.
DEVCO-CSO-CONSULTATION@ec.europa.eu
Final-Recipient: rfc822;DEVCO-CSO-CONSULTATION@ec.europa.eu
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1

I thought this was sufficiently interesting that I immediately posed Mark's blog entry on Twitter and Facebook. Mark is very well known in the small circle of those who care about Georgia, but I suspect that only I and the Georgian Ambassador are reading his blog in Brussels. I'm glad to say that I immediately got a response from the head of the European Commission's office in London:

Antonia Mochan ‏ @euonymblog
@nwbrux noted and brought to attention of relevant people.

Of course, what she didn't know, and Mark didn't know, was that this afternoon at 2pm I actually was scheduled to meet the relevant European Commissioner whose underlings had put out this rather bogus call for input. I was to be the most junior member of a delegation which was meeting him on another topic entirely, so I doubted that I would have a chance to bring the subject up, but I found the coincidence amusing.

Well, would you believe it: at 1.55 pm, I was actually waiting in the lobby of the Berlaymont for the rest of my group to arrive when I was notified by text message that the Commission had determined that my presence at the meeting was not desired. As I said before, I was the most junior member of the delegation, and if one person was to be shed, it was always going to be me. But I do wonder if this may also have been partly the result of my earlier tweet being "brought to the attention of the relevant people".

Coincidence or retribution? You decide.

• To the EU: How not to hold a consultation « mmmullen’s Blog
  
  “Increasingly, “email us your thoughts and ideas” is being used by those who don’t really want those thoughts and ideas but want to say they have asked” – esp if the email address in question bounces!
  (tags: eu )
• Met Police lose 2005 rape handling report « Complicity
  
  London bobbies mislay evidence of own incompetence.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
• The Eyjafjallajökull Event – Research on Complex Systems
  
  Beautiful pictures, must read carefully to see what it means.
  (tags: mathematics )
• Elections in Georgia: Degrees of control | The Economist
  
  ‘As a farmer in central Georgia recently told a friend of mine: “I have cows and pigs. Why should I vote? I have enough shit in my life already.”‘
  (tags: georgia )