• The Way the Future Blogs, an online memoir by science fiction writer Frederik Pohl » Blog Archive » Sri Lanka, War and Collaboration
  "So, not without a few tears, I threw away some twenty thousand words of perfectly good copy about the Sri Lankan civil war…"
  (tags: war sf)

Hmmm, a politician who I vaguely knew died yesterday. I knew him in two different international jobs. In the first he was one of a team of three dealing with a particular conflict resolution process; the other two were much more talented than him, and he had notorious difficulty understanding the local accent. In the second he was on his own, and allowed the situation he had been put in charge of to deteriorate to the point of near disaster. The obituaries will be full of his wonderful achievements in a long career of public service, but I’m sorry that the two points at which I met him were so obviously (and in the second case, lethally) beyond his talents.

• peterbirks: Why it isn't just a matter of confidence
  Pete speculates about the crisis.
  (tags: eu economics)
• touchdownpossum: Doctor Who: Black & White Monsters
  fanvid of monsters from the black and white era of Doctor Who.
  (tags: video doctorwho)
• 31 Essential Google+ Resources
  Maybe not all 31 are genuinely essential, but one or two look useful.
  (tags: internet)

In this chapter, Peter the Hermit preaches the crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Turks; the Pope and the western European rulers pick it up; Alexius Comnenus, the Byzantine Emperor, succeeds in channelling the Crusaders’ energies to Syria and Palestine, where they carve out a set of new Christian kingdoms. See also notes on Islamophobia, Anna Comnena, whether the Crusades were a just war, the Celts among the crusaders, cannibalism, the Holy Lance and the Assizes of Jerusalem.

Anyone who knows Armagh at all well will be familiar with the architectural legacy of Richard Robinson, who was the Church of Ireland archbishop there from 1765 to his death in 1794, and built the archbishops’ palace, the old library and the observatory, the latter intended to be the nucleus of a university which never came into being. In this short book Malcolmson deconstructs Robinson’s record, pointing out that after the first twelve years of his almost three decades at the top of the Irish ecclesiastical tree, he did almost nothing, lingering in England for the sake of his health; and also cruelly pointing out that given the resources available to him, both financial and architectural, one could reasonably have expected something more substantial and interesting to be done for Armagh – the great Francis Johnston was involved but only at the very start of his career. Malcolmson is also critical of Robinson’s political apathy; having reached a key position in the Irish scene at a relatively early age, he then did nothing with it but block his rivals, and even lost interest in doing that after 1779.

It’s an entertaining bash of a little-known figure. I do think it’s a little unfair. Robinson’s buildings in Armagh are still pleasing elements of the townscape over two centuries on, and he also built the Canterbury quad at his old Oxford college, Christ Church. Given the poisonous politics of the time I think silence in public discourse is a perfectly defensible strategy. And even by Malcolmson’s account, Robinson remained moderately active in public life until after his seventieth birthday, at a time when male life expectancy was half of that. It’s fair to say that he was more mediocre than I had realised but he had never been a particular hero.

An excellent narrative of the chain of events by which Samuel Pepys was imprisoned in the Tower of London as part of the Popish Plot hysteria of 1679 – a truly horrible moment of witch-hunting against Catholics and suspected allies of the Duke of York, the heir to the throne, who had been exiled from England because of his religion. Faced by false accusers who had powerful political allies, Pepys’ life was clearly in danger; but he cooly assembled evidence in his own defence and was able to hang on until the political wind changed in his favour. A very nice micro-study of how a well-known set of political events affected a well-known figure of the time. Particularly nice to have detail on Pepys’ main accuser, an adventurer who had got enmeshed in the politics of Connecticut, Long Island, and New Amsterdam (which had recently been captured by the British and renamed after the Duke of York).

I watched the 2003 TV play, The Private Life of Samuel Pepys, starring Steve Coogan in the title role last week, but it really didn’t work for me – Coogan is too tall (Pepys was only 5’1″, 155 cm) and the part was written too awkwardly and naively – the real Pepys was always outwardly confident, especially with women. This book, published 5 years later, is much better.

This is the second in the Chroniques de fin de siècle, written in 1985 but set in 1993 shortly after the breakup of Belgium and the subsequent invasion of Wallonia by the French; I read the first, Autonomes, a couple of months ago. There’s not a lot about Belgium here, in fact, apart from the first few pages where Prince Laurent, installed as puppet king of Wallonia (wartime fascist collaborator Leon Degrelle having been recalled as geriatric prime minister) by the French, gets frisky with his German wife. (In reality Prince Laurent married an Englishwoman some years after this is set, and is in disgrace with the rest of the royal family at present.) The main plot is about Bernard Duval, a randy champion motorcyclist, recruited by the friends of Gérard Mordant, the hero of the first book, to go and find him in the devastation of the nuclear disaster at Creys-Malville in Burgundy. Despite the fact that Duval skips most of the mission briefing due to having a quick shag with one of his fellow activists, he manages to track down Mordant in the contaminated wastelands, and just by coincidence Mordant has hooked up with an Irish terrorist ex-girlfriend of Duval’s in the meantime. The artwork is rather good but the plot and the politics, particularly the sexual politics, rather tiresome. (And although we are obviously supposed to think that the nuclear disaster is a black op by the Chirac/Le Pen regime, we don’t really get the payoff here.)

I’m getting near the end of my rewatch of Old Who now, and I wondered to myself if I could have tried reading the various Doctor Who novels, novellas and annuals in parallel with watching the shows, in such a way that I could follow the continuous narrative all the way from An Unearthly Child to Survival. (I did in fact slot the annuals from 1966 to 1986 into my reading schedule as I watched the old stories.)

Using the chronology here, and stripping out short stories, comics, and (with a slightly heavy heart) Big Finish audios, but adding in the annuals (and Who Killed Kennedy?) as best I could, I came up with the list below (which hopefully includes all separately published books featuring the Doctor which were not based on TV stories, though excludes all other spinoff material and anything set after Survival in the Doctor’s personal timeline).

I’ve come to the conclusion that it would actually be quite difficult to both rewatch Old Who and read all the relevant books in parallel. The books tend to get bunched at narratively convenient points of continuity – look at the groupings between Season 1 and Season 2, between Power of the Daleks and The Highlanders, towards the end of Jo Grant’s time, towards the beginning of Leela’s and Peri’s times, and particularly immediately before and after the Trial of a Time Lord. It simply wouldn’t be possible (even for me, and I read very fast) to read those books in continuity order without disrupting your rewatching schedule significantly.

So while I hope the list below will be helpful to those who want to track down books set in a particular era – and I have linked to all the ones I have reviewed – and it could be the basis for a re-read from Frayed through to the point before the New Adventures begin, I fear it demonstrates that its original purpose is unachievable.

(NB that Heart of TARDIS is listed twice, but Cold Fusion only once because the Seventh Doctor timeline is set after Survival.)

First Doctor TV stories and books
Frayed Telos Novella 11
Time and Relative Telos Novella 01
An Unearthly Child 4 episodes
The Daleks 7 episodes
The Edge of Destruction 2 episodes
Marco Polo 7 episodes
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Missing Adventure 12
The Keys of Marinus 6 episodes
The Aztecs 4 episodes
The Sensorites 6 episodes
The Reign of Terror 6 episodes
Farewell Great Macedon Script published, dramatised by Big Finish
The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance Script published, dramatised by Big Finish
The Masters of Luxor Script published 
Campaign Unofficially published novel
City at World’s End Past Doctors Adventure 25
The Witch Hunters Past Doctors Adventure 09
Planet of Giants 3 episodes
The Time Travellers Past Doctors Adventure 75
The Dalek Invasion of Earth 6 episodes
Venusian Lullaby Missing Adventure 03
The Rescue 2 episodes
Byzantium! Past Doctors Adventure 44
The Romans 4 episodes
The Eleventh Tiger Past Doctors Adventure 66
The Web Planet 6 episodes
The Crusade 4 episodes
The Space Museum 4 episodes
The Plotters Missing Adventure 28
The Chase 6 episodes
The Time Meddler 4 episodes
The Empire of Glass Missing Adventure 16
Doctor Who Annual 1966
Galaxy 4 4 episodes
Mission to the Unknown 1 episode
The Myth Makers 4 episodes
The Daleks’ Master Plan 12 episodes
The Massacre 4 episodes
Salvation Past Doctors Adventure 18
The Ark 4 episodes
The Celestial Toymaker 4 episodes
The Gunfighters 4 episodes
Bunker Soldiers Past Doctors Adventure 39
The Savages 4 episodes
The Man in the Velvet Mask Missing Adventure 19
The War Machines 4 episodes
Doctor Who and the Invasion From Space Separately published novella
Doctor Who Annual 1967
The Smugglers 4 episodes
Ten Little Aliens Past Doctors Adventure 54
The Tenth Planet 4 episodes

Second Doctor TV stories and books
The Power of the Daleks 6 episodes
Invasion of the Cat-People Missing Adventure 13
The Murder Game Past Doctors Adventure 02
Dying in the Sun Past Doctors Adventure 47
Wonderland Telos Novella 07
Doctor Who Annual 1968
The Highlanders 4 episodes
The Underwater Menace 4 episodes
The Moonbase 4 episodes
The Macra Terror 4 episodes
The Roundheads Past Doctors Adventure 06
The Faceless Ones 6 episodes
The Evil of the Daleks 7 episodes
The Tomb of the Cybermen 4 episodes
Heart of TARDIS Past Doctors Adventure 32
The Abominable Snowmen 6 episodes
The Ice Warriors 6 episodes
Dreams of Empire Past Doctors Adventure 14
Combat Rock Past Doctors Adventure 55
The Enemy of the World 6 episodes
The Web of Fear 6 episodes
Twilight of the Gods Missing Adventure 26
The Dark Path Missing Adventure 32
Doctor Who Annual 1969
Fury from the Deep 6 episodes
The Wheel in Space 6 episodes
The Dominators 5 episodes
The Mind Robber 5 episodes
The Invasion 8 episodes
The Colony of Lies Past Doctors Adventure 61
The Indestructible Man Past Doctors Adventure 69
Foreign Devils Telos Novella 05
The Krotons 4 episodes
The Seeds of Death 6 episodes
The Final Sanction Past Doctors Adventure 24
The Space Pirates 6 episodes
The Menagerie Missing Adventure 10
Doctor Who Annual 1970
The War Games 10 episodes
World Game Past Doctors Adventure 74

Third Doctor TV stories and books
Spearhead from Space 4 episodes
Doctor Who and the Silurians 7 episodes
The Ambassadors of Death 7 episodes
Inferno 7 episodes
Doctor Who Annual 1971
The Eye of the Giant Missing Adventure 21
The Scales of Injustice Missing Adventure 24
The Devil Goblins from Neptune Past Doctors Adventure 01
Terror of the Autons 4 episodes
The Mind of Evil 6 episodes
Deadly Reunion Past Doctors Adventure 63
The Claws of Axos 4 episodes
Who Killed Kennedy Missing Adventure 21.5, not numbered, may as well go here
Colony in Space 6 episodes
The Dæmons 5 episodes
Day of the Daleks 4 episodes
The Curse of Peladon 4 episodes
The Face of the Enemy Past Doctors Adventure 07
Rags Past Doctors Adventure 40
The Sea Devils 6 episodes
The Mutants 6 episodes
The Time Monster 6 episodes
Doctor Who Annual 1973
Verdigris Past Doctors Adventure 30
The Three Doctors 4 episodes
The Wages of Sin Past Doctors Adventure 19
Carnival of Monsters 4 episodes
The Suns of Caresh Past Doctors Adventure 56
Frontier in Space 6 episodes
Planet of the Daleks 6 episodes
Doctor Who Annual 1974
Catastrophea Past Doctors Adventure 11
Nightdreamers Telos Novella 03
Dancing the Code Missing Adventure 09
Last of the Gaderene Past Doctors Adventure 28
Speed of Flight Missing Adventure 27
Doctor Who Annual 1975
The Green Death 6 episodes
The Time Warrior 4 episodes
The Paradise of Death audio, later novelised
Invasion of the Dinosaurs 6 episodes
Death to the Daleks 4 episodes
The Ghosts of N-Space audio, later novelised
The Monster of Peladon 6 episodes
Amorality Tale Past Doctors Adventure 52
Island of Death Past Doctors Adventure 71
Planet of the Spiders 6 episodes

Fourth Doctor TV stories and books
Robot 4 episodes
The Ark in Space 4 episodes
The Sontaran Experiment 2 episodes
Genesis of the Daleks 6 episodes
A Device of Death Missing Adventure 31
Revenge of the Cybermen 4 episodes
Wolfsbane Past Doctors Adventure 62
Doctor Who Annual 1976
Terror of the Zygons 4 episodes
Planet of Evil 4 episodes
Managra Missing Adventure 14
Pyramids of Mars 4 episodes
The Android Invasion 4 episodes
The Brain of Morbius 4 episodes
Evolution Missing Adventure 02
The Seeds of Doom 6 episodes
Doctor Who Annual 1977
System Shock Missing Adventure 11
The Masque of Mandragora 4 episodes
The Pescatons audio, later novelised
Doctor Who Annual 1978
The Hand of Fear 4 episodes
The Deadly Assassin 4 episodes
Ghost Ship Telos Novella 04
Millennium Shock Past Doctors Adventure 22
Asylum Past Doctors Adventure 42
The Face of Evil 4 episodes
The Robots of Death 4 episodes
Drift Past Doctors Adventure 50
Last Man Running Past Doctors Adventure 15
Corpse Marker Past Doctors Adventure 27
Psi-ence Fiction Past Doctors Adventure 46
Match of the Day Past Doctors Adventure 70
The Talons of Weng-Chiang 6 episodes
Eye of Heaven Past Doctors Adventure 08
Horror of Fang Rock 4 episodes
The Invisible Enemy 4 episodes
Image of the Fendahl 4 episodes
The Sun Makers 4 episodes
Underworld 4 episodes
Doctor Who Annual 1979
The Invasion of Time 6 episodes
The Ribos Operation 4 episodes
Tomb of Valdemar Past Doctors Adventure 29
The Pirate Planet 4 episodes
The Stones of Blood 4 episodes
The Shadow of Weng-Chiang Missing Adventure 25
Heart of TARDIS Past Doctors Adventure 32
The Androids of Tara 4 episodes
The Power of Kroll 4 episodes
The Armageddon Factor 6 episodes
Doctor Who Annual 1980
Destiny of the Daleks 4 episodes
City of Death 4 episodes
The Creature from the Pit 4 episodes
The Romance of Crime Missing Adventure 06
The English Way of Death Missing Adventure 20
Nightmare of Eden 4 episodes
The Horns of Nimon 4 episodes
Shada 6 episodes, Incomplete
The Well-Mannered War Missing Adventure 33
Festival of Death Past Doctors Adventure 35
Doctor Who Annual 1981
The Leisure Hive 4 episodes
Meglos 4 episodes
Full Circle 4 episodes
State of Decay 4 episodes
Warriors’ Gate 4 episodes
Doctor Who Annual 1982
The Keeper of Traken 4 episodes
Logopolis 4 episodes

Fifth Doctor TV stories and books
Castrovalva 4 episodes
Cold Fusion Missing Adventure 29
Four to Doomsday 4 episodes
Kinda 4 episodes
The Visitation 4 episodes
Divided Loyalties Past Doctors Adventure 26
Black Orchid 2 episodes
Earthshock 4 episodes
Time-Flight 4 episodes
Empire of Death Past Doctors Adventure 65
Arc of Infinity 4 episodes
Doctor Who Annual 1983
Fear of the Dark Past Doctors Adventure 58
Zeta Major Past Doctors Adventure 13
The Sands of Time Missing Adventure 22
Snakedance 4 episodes
Goth Opera Missing Adventure 01
Mawdryn Undead 4 episodes
Terminus 4 episodes
Enlightenment 4 episodes
The King’s Demons 2 episodes
The Crystal Bucephalus Missing Adventure 04
Doctor Who Annual 1984
The Five Doctors
Warriors of the Deep 4 episodes
Deep Blue Past Doctors Adventure 20
The Awakening 2 episodes
The King of Terror Past Doctors Adventure 37
Frontios 4 episodes
Resurrection of the Daleks 2 episodes
Lords of the Storm Missing Adventure 17
Imperial Moon Past Doctors Adventure 34
Planet of Fire 4 episodes
The Ultimate Treasure Past Doctors Adventure 03
Blood and Hope Telos Novella 14
Superior Beings Past Doctors Adventure 43
Warmonger Past Doctors Adventure 53
The Caves of Androzani 4 episodes

Sixth Doctor TV stories and books
The Twin Dilemma 4 episodes
Doctor Who Annual 1985
Attack of the Cybermen 2 episodes
Vengeance on Varos 2 episodes
Grave Matter Past Doctors Adventure 31
Shell Shock Telos Novella 08
Burning Heart Missing Adventure 30
Synthespians™ Past Doctors Adventure 67
The Mark of the Rani 2 episodes
Players Past Doctors Adventure 21
The Two Doctors 3 episodes
Blue Box Past Doctors Adventure 59
Timelash 2 episodes
Revelation of the Daleks 2 episodes
The Nightmare Fair Missing Story novelised by Target, dramatised by Big Finish
The Ultimate Evil Missing Story novelised by Target
Mission to Magnus Missing Story novelised by Target, dramatised by Big Finish
Slipback audio, later novelised
Doctor Who Annual 1986
State of Change Missing Adventure 05
Palace of the Red Sun Past Doctors Adventure 51
The Mysterious Planet 4 episodes 
Mindwarp 4 episodes 
Terror of the Vervoids 4 episodes 
The Ultimate Foe 2 episodes
Time of Your Life Missing Adventure 08
Killing Ground Missing Adventure 23
Mission: Impractical Past Doctors Adventure 12
The Shadow in the Glass Past Doctors Adventure 41
Business Unusual Past Doctors Adventure 04
Millennial Rites Missing Adventure 15
The Quantum Archangel Past Doctors Adventure 38
Instruments of Darkness Past Doctors Adventure 48
Spiral Scratch Past Doctors Adventure 72

Seventh Doctor TV stories and books (up to Survival)
Time and the Rani 4 episodes
Paradise Towers 4 episodes
Delta and the Bannermen 3 episodes
Dragonfire 3 episodes
Remembrance of the Daleks 4 episodes
The Happiness Patrol 3 episodes
Silver Nemesis 3 episodes
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy 4 episodes
Battlefield 4 episodes
Relative Dementias Past Doctors Adventure 49
Ghost Light 3 episodes
The Curse of Fenric 4 episodes
The Hollow Men Past Doctors Adventure 10
Survival 3 episodes

I am behind on the current series of Torchwood – did watch the first episode but have let it slip since then. I will hope to catch up when on holiday later this month.

I guess I am also way behind with the books published to accompany the first two series of the show. I listened to the audio version of this, the first Torchwood novel, three years ago, and didn’t quite get into it – John Barrowman’s audio skills have come on a lot recently but he didn’t really engage me in the story when I was listening to it. The dead trees version, however, had me gripped – lots of good Torchwood stuff, a body-hopping alien, a spaceship which endangers Cardiff, a former lover of one of the team (Owen in this case), all against a gloomy backdrop of awful weather littered with variously dead bodies. I tried this one as an experiment, but now I think I’ll get through the entire sequence – I have read the next three, Border Princes by Dan Abnett, Slow Decay by Andy Lane and Something in the Water by Trevor Baxendale, and greatly enjoyed the Abnett and Lane, which is not a bad strike rate. Next up therefore is Trace Memory by David Llewellyn.

• The Doctor Who Tube Map
  For the two of you who are interested and haven't seen this yet!
  (tags: doctorwho maps)
• A Black Sea voyage
  Taking a ferry from Ukraine to Georgia.
  (tags: ukraine georgia)
• Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core
  Yet more appalling behaviour by Amazon.
  (tags: amazon)
• How do you solve a problem like maria?
  The best headline I've seen for this widely-posted story.
  (tags: astronomy)
• 50 Fun Things for Professors to Do on the First Day of Class
  This got quite a lot of comments when I posted it elsewhere, but for some reason forgot to list it here.
  (tags: funny)
• Seven types of troll: a spotter's guide – Telegraph Blogs
  Particularly entertaining because the author's views are so peculiar that I could easily mistake him for a troll in some circumstances. But he gets the taxonomy about right.
  (tags: internet)
• Sex in Space
  An exhaustive list of literary treatments of this important topic.
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender space)

Am grateful to James Heald for giving me this, the first of Dunnett’s fifteenth century series of thick dynastic novels, set in Western Europe between Bruges, Geneva and Italy. Twenty-five years ago or more I read Dunnett’s King Hereafter, about Macbeth (who she reckoned was also known as Thorfinn of Orkney) and greatly enjoyed it. Now I’m a bit older, I can appreciate the good points of Dunnett’s writing – she is great at the behind-the-scenes plot threads coming together, and very good, almost theatrical, at setting out a tableau of characters in action and conversation; I didn’t feel quite so confident in her sense of geography, climate or linguistics, but I enjoyed it enough that I will read the next book in due course and perhaps get onto the series as a whole. Slightly irritating that though the characters have many discussions about going to and from Louvain/Leuven, we never actually see them there – the Belgian locations are Bruges, Sluys and a field near Genappe.

So, last week I had lunch with my former colleague K. I left the organisation some years ago; meanwhile K has prospered and is now in a position to hire the successor to my former manager, who is retiring. I immediately expressed an interest, and a couple of days later I sent K a formal application for the job.

I checked in with K on Tuesday, and he confirmed that he had received my application, with less than ten others; he would get around to looking at them properly early next week, he thought.

I was a bit dismayed yesterday to see the job advertised on one of the Brussels job sites with an application deadline of 31 August. Had K changed his mind about the timing of the process? Had one of his minions put the wrong date for the deadline, or made one up? Had K decided that none of the applications were good enough? My mind was
racing.

And then a further twist came in the evening with a save-the-date email unprecedentedly inviting me to K’s birthday party in October. I guess this means he thinks we will still be on speaking terms by then, at the very least…

• lotherington: The Littlest Wizard
  A true story of real-life Harry Potter fan-fic.
  (tags: sf children awww)
• Half of European men share King Tut's DNA | Reuters
  Of course, this is only stating that 70% of British men and 50% of European men have a common direct male ancestor with Tutankhamun in the last 9500 years. In fact taking all lineages into account we are probably all descended from any of his close relatives who have any living descendants at all. (King Tut himself is believed tpo have outlived both his own children, even though he died at 18.)
  (tags: biology genealogy ancestry)
• Back Then…: Smuggling coffee in the 70s while in Sudan » Naples Daily News
  Smuggling coffee into Sudan
  (tags: sudan)

To note three BBC dramas and a documentary I have been listening to recently.

Voyage, a series of five half-hour episodes, based on Stephen Baxter’s novel where NASA goes for Mars rather than the Space Shuttle, adapted, produced and directed by Dirk Maggs, is not taxing listening. One twitches a bit at some of the accents, but Laurel Lefkow as the lead character, Natalie York, is consistently believable. The third episode, which covers the testing of the Nerva rocket, is particularly good, but the fifth and final one, covering the eventual landing on Mars, rather rushes the actual journey. But it is satisying enough.

Marc Almond’s documentary, Behind the Brel, deeply annoyed me until well into the first of its three half-hour episodes by consistently referring to Jacques Brel as a French musician – not just as a French-language performer but actually French. I wonder if this is a widely held perception in France? (Does the average British TV viewer realise that Terry Wogan and Sandi Toksvig are in fact from another country?) Anyway once Almond admitted that Brel was Belgian, and indeed gave some time to some of his more Belgian songs (Mai 40, qui ramenait sa belgitude, for instance) I was prepared to forgive him. There was perhaps an inevitable concentration on the English translations rather than the French originals (but, gosh, compare Le Moribond with Seasons in the Sun).

Staying with Belgians for a moment, The Face of the Enemy, a radio play adapted from Amélie Nothomb’s novel Cosmétique de l’Ennemi by Adam Thorpe, is a story of a bloke waiting for a plane who is accosted by a stranger who turns out to have intimate knowledge of his personal secrets. I wasn’t hugely impressed, but I think Nothomb may simply not be for me. The play could easily have been compressed to a half hour rather than a full hour. I did like Charlie Norfolk as the protagonist’s dead wife though.

I greatly appreciated Carlo Gébler’s ninety-minute play Charles and Mary, about the Lambs who wrote the Tales from Shakespeare. I had sought it out partly from coming across the Lambs’ story in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and also because their Tales are quite high on my reading list at the moment. And you inevitably wonder what exactly is going through the mind of an author, who himself has a famous mother, who writes a play in which the protagonist stabs her mother to death in a moment of delirium. But I must say that, having gone through the experience of committing a member of my own family to permanent residential care, the play struck home in a way I had not expected, and I cheered for the Lambs’ literary and personal success in adversity. Out of these four audios this is the one I strongly recommend. 

• HOW TO BUILD A NEWSROOM TIME MACHINE « journoterrorist
  I'm glad to say that by the time I was a sporadic student journalist, computers had already taken over. But my teenage fanzine publications were a different matter…
  (tags: history)
• hawkida: Why I'm sticking with LiveJournal AND posting elsewhere
  One person's solution, well argued, with boxes ticked.
  (tags: internet)
• National Centre for Geocomputation Online Atlas Portal
  Provides access to two online historic atlases : The Irish Famine Population Data Atlas 1841-2002 and The Atlas of Irish Famine Data 1841 – 1851. Fascinating stuff.
  (tags: ireland history)

In this book, Gould appeals to us to consider the full range of complexity in systems, rather than concentrating on the outliers. His overall point is that while human beings may be particularly complex life forms, that doesn’t in itself make us the destined end-point of evolution, which will quite naturally increase the number of more complex organisms because all in all they are not as likely to become less complex.

He bolsters this argument with a rather moving personal testimony about being a cancer survivor, and an excessively lengthy section ( a quarter of the book!) about why baseball will never again see anyone achieve a batting average of 0.400 or better, in which the term “batting average” is nowhere explained, which makes it pretty uninteresting for those of us who know little of baseball. But the other three quarters of the book are good.

Today was a lovely day in central Brussels. I bought my lunchtime sandwich and gravitated towards the Cinquantenaire park (I normally go to the Ambiorix park which is nearer my office, but fancied a change).

And I found my attention caught by the closed, dilapidated pavilion beside the mosque:

Its a strong neo-classical building, one of the early works of the great architect Victor Horta, but firmly locked up so that the Belgian public cannot see what is inside it.

And what is inside it? A huge sculpture by Jef Lambeaux, depicting the Human Passions. There are varying stories as to why it is locked away from public view. Some say that Lambeaux himself was dissatisfied with the way the light fell on it, and demanded it be closed off. Some say that the subject matter was too scandalous for the public of 1889 to cope with, and popular outcry demanded that it be locked away. The building itself looks rather insecure these days and probably it is no longer safe to enter.

Of course, in these days of the internet you can get photographs of the whole thing taken on the few days per decade that it is open:

(Picture by Travis Nelson)

But not having Wikipedia with me at lunchtime, I had to fantasise from the flash of scandalous sculpture that I could see through the keyhole:

I almost hope that they don’t succeed in restoring it and opening it to the public. It is interesting to have a huge but mysteriously hidden work of art within five minute’s walk of the centre of the EU.

Programmed reads: 12 books from 13 lists
b) Terre des Hommes (non-fiction by popularity on LT)
e) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (non-genre fiction by popularity on LT)
f) The Decameron (non-genre fiction by popularity on LJ poll)
l) Conundrum (New Adventures in sequence)
m) Revolution Man (Eighth Doctor Adventures in sequence)
n) Doctor Who: Aliens and Enemies, The Glamour Chase (New Who books by LT popularity)
o) State of Change (other Old Who by popularity)
p) The Lost Road (History of Middle Earth in sequence)
r) Faerie Queene essays (Tudors and Ireland)
s) Invisible Man (books by PoC in order of entry)
t) The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish (books on the shelves at end 2005, otherwise not accounted for, going backwards in LT entry order)
v) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (books I have already read but haven't reviewed on-line, ranked by LT popularity)

Coming next, possibly:
Full House, by Stephen Jay Gould (started)
Niccolo Rising, by Dorothy Dunnett (started)
Western Shore, by Juliet E. McKenna
Last Call, by Tim Powers
Timescape, by Gregory Benford
Tales of Shakespeare, by Charles Lamb
Old Goriot, by Honore Balzac
The Plot Against Pepys, by James and Ben Long
The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, by Bessie Head
The Naming Of The Dead, by Ian Rankin
Jewels of the Sun, by Nora Roberts
The Little Book of "Thunderbirds" (if I can find it)
2nd Interzone Anthology, ed. by John Clute
Primate Robinson: 1709-94, by A.P.W. Malcomson
A New History of Ireland, Volume III: Early Modern Ireland 1534-1691, ed. by T. W. Moody 
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
George Herbert, Priest and Poet, by Kenneth Mason
Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
Lords of the Storm, by David A. McIntee
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
No Future, by Paul Cornell
Dominion, by Nick Walters
The Return of the Shadow, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Nuclear Time, by Oli Smith

Must try harder on diversity.

Yeah, I know they happened three months ago; but I have now updated the summary page with full first preference votes, and also projected the local council votes onto the boundaries of each constituency.

I had not realised that both the UUP and SDLP did significantly better in the council elections than in the Assembly election held on the same day. One would normally expect it to be the other way round – there is often a bigger choice of candidates for the council elections, and in a second-order election voters may be more inclined to vote adventurously. But the UUP did two whole percentage points better, 15.2% rather than 13.2% at local level, and the Stoops got 15.0% rather than 14.2%.

The biggest anomalies for the UUP are:

East Londonderry – up 7.2% (15.6% in local elections, 8.4% in Assembly where they lost a seat)
Foyle – up 4.2% (4.2% in local election, no candidate in Assembly)
North Antrim – up 4.2% (15.9% in local elections, 11.7% in Assembly)
North Down – up 3.9% (14.3% in local elections, 10.4% in Assembly where they lost a seat)
Fermanagh and South Tyrone – up 3.8% (23.1% in local elections – more than the DUP! 19.3% in Assembly)
West Tyrone – up 3.6% (14.0% in local elections, 10.4% in Assembly though they did gain a seat)
East Belfast – up 2.9% (12.6% in local elections, 9.7% in Assembly)
South Down – up 2.7% (13.3% in local elections, 10.6% in Assembly)
South Antrim – up 2.5% (21.3% in local elections, 17.8% in Assembly)
Mid Ulster – up 2.4% (12.7% in local elections, 10.3% in Assembly)
Lagan Valley – up 1.9% (22.3% in local elections, 20.4% in Assembly)
North Belfast – up 1.1% (9.3% in local elections, 8.2% in Assembly where they lost a seat)

The first two of these are due to peculiar local circumstances, and the last two may be mistakes in my projection, but the others look pretty sound to me. It looks as if a significant number of voters were prepared to continue supporting UUP councillors and candidates at local level, but were put off by the poorly messaged and poorly managed Assembly campaign. It is noticeable that the party leader’s constituency is in the first half of the table.

For the SDLP, the pattern is less clear:

Fermanagh and South Tyrone – up 3.1% (12.7% in local election, 9.6% in Assembly where they lost a seat)
West Tyrone – up 3.0% (11.5% in local elections, 8.5% in Assembly where they too gained a seat)
Mid Ulster – up 2.0% (16.7% in local elections, 14.7% in Assembly)
South Antrim – up 1.5% (12.1% in local elections, 10.6% in Assembly where they lost a seat)
Foyle – up 1.4% (36.7% in local elections, 35.3% in Assembly)
Upper Bann – up 1.3% (12.7% in local elections, 11.4% in Assembly)
Strangford – up 1.2% (9.7% in local elections, 8.5% in Assembly where they failed to gain seat)
East Belfast – up 1.0% (1.8% in local elections, 0.8% in Assembly)
West Belfast – up 0.9% (14.1% in local elections, 13.2% in Assembly)
North Antrim – up 0.2% (9.3% in local elections, 9,1% in Assembly where they lost a seat)

For all the complaints against Margaret Ritchie, who apparently may face a leadership heave later in the year, this looks more like a problem of organisation west of the Bann (and there were mitigating circumstances in West Tyrone). The Strangford figure is suggestive but unreliable because of the boundaries. The lower three barely register (though note the loss of over half the SDLP’s core electorate, such as it is, in East Belfast). The one that I don’t have an explanation for is South Antrim.

It happened to the other parties too, but less systematically.

For Alliance:

East Belfast – up 3.4% (29.7% in local elections, 26.3% in Assembly) – Dawn Purvis effect, perhaps?
North Belfast – up 1.8% (8.1% in local elections, 6.3% in Assembly)
Strangford – up 1.6% (16.0% in local elections, 14.4% in Assembly)
South Belfast – up 0.7% (20.5% in local elections, 19.8% in Assembly)

For the DUP

Upper Bann – up 2.3% (29.4% in local elections, 27.1% in Assembly)
West Belfast – 1.1% (8.6% in local elections, 7.5% in Assembly where UUP actually had a candidate)

And for other parties:

PUP in East Belfast up 1.3% (5.9% in local elections, 4.6% in Assembly where they lost a seat) – the Dawn Purvis effect again

SF in Lagan Valley up 1.6% (5.0% in local elections, 3.4% in Assembly where they lost a seat) – again I put this down to specific local circumstances regarding the Assembly campaign, and given the difficulty of making the projection of the Dunmurry Cross vote it may not be all that real anyway.

No doubt there are other local circumstances that I’m not aware of.

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It is here at last – the fifth volume in Martin’s epic Song of Ice and Fire series, taking the dynastic struggles around the realm of Westeros on, with yet more journeys of destiny, hidden heirs appearing, viewpoint characters meeting untimely and painful ends, and horrible violence of every variety. And the end of the book does seem to be setting us up for a climax in the next volume, though don’t read this one expecting a lot of resolution. Spoilers below the cut, but see also ‘s spoiler-free review in The Independent which pretty much nails what’s good about the series.

S

P

O

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My biggest problem with A Dance With Dragons was the sudden appearance of Aegon out of nowhere. Did I miss all previous references to him and to Jon Connington’s continuing career in previous volumes? Or is my suspicion correct that there weren’t any, and he is a new element? If so I feel it is a big narrative weakness, when so much else has been ominously foreshadowed, to suddenly discover that Daenerys’ nephew, who has a superior claim to hers, has been alive all along. (And it’s a bit of a coincidence that Tyrion and Quentyn just happen to end up in the same boat.)

So, two viewpoint characters get multiply stabbed to death in the closing chapters. Kevan Lannister is the fourth Hand in King’s Landing to be killed since the start of the story (counting Jon Arryn) – I think only Tyrion has survived, so a messy death more or less goes with the job. But do we take it that Varys has been plotting all along (with Littlefinger?) to put Daenerys on the throne? This is fairly explicit in the TV series, but I don’t remember it being so clear in earlier books. It seems to me rather uncharacteristically daring of Varys to invest so heavily in a young woman who he can never have met (and he would have had to have been investing in Viserys until he died) unless he has motives and resources that we don’t know about.

And poor Jon! Often when Martin leaves us with his viewpoint characters apparently about to die, there is a chance that they may reappear (most obviously Brienne and Catelyn). However, it looks like it’s all over for Jon Snow. And it seemed shocking but fair to me; he turns out to have been an unreliable narrator, but the clues that his command of the Watch had terminally slipped away were all there.

But what of the battle outside Winterfell? Did it even happen, or was Bolton lying in his message to Jon? I was partly hoping for Stannis to pull off yet another surprising and undeserved military victory, but I was hoping even more that we would actually see what was happening, rather than move from Asha’s reunion with Theon (and how would Stannis deal with Jeyne/”Arya”?) to a reported but unseen battle. I hope there turns out to be a good narrative justification for leaving us hanging, though I worry we may be left like Brienne in A Feast for Crows.

Having said all that, I still love the series. I lost patience with Robert Jordan after one of the volumes where the central characters did little more than pointless epic voyaging. There’s a lot of epic voyaging here, too, but it all seems fairly pointful – Daenerys, Tyrion, Asha, even Jon Connington, all are closer to a conclusion by the end of the book. Kevan and Jon don’t go anywhere and consequently snuff it. (Though the Stark sisters survive despite relative immobility, and Quentyn dies at the end of his own very foolish errand.) And part of the joy of the journeys is the scenery: at first I was a bit miffed that so little of the book is set in Westeros itself, but it’s entirely fair to explore the neighbouring continent in more detail.

And I am speculating wildly about how it will all end. I had wondered if Jon and Daenerys would eventually get together, but that seems a bit unlikely now. (Daenerys and Tyrion for the future, perhaps?) I had thought that Arya as trained killer would return to King’s Landing to wreak vengeful havoc, but it looks like that will happen without her. (Maybe she will hook up with Jaime at the end?) Maybe I’m completely wrong, and rather than a happy ending, Martin is going to leave us at the end of the series with a devastated and chaotic Westeros and no resolution other than death. It would certainly be consistent with what we have seen so far…

Back in the days when the internet was less than half its present size, ie the mid-noughties, I did an annual survey linking to online reviews of all the Hugo nominees in the written fiction categories (see my efforts for 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006). It would be very difficult to repeat such an exercise now; a lot of online material is difficult to search, locked behind the walls of Facebook or indeed in podcasts.

However, it is still feasible to survey how bloggers have announced their intentions of voting, and therefore I have done so. This is of course not a scientific poll: it’s a snapshot of the preferences of a few individuals who have bothered to broadcast their thoughts. There may be grassroots majorities in favour of “Ponies”, “”The Jaguar House, In Shadow”, “The Maiden Flight of McCarthy’s Bellerophon” and (very probably) Blackout/All Clear who will vote for their preferred stories but don’t see the need to tell the internets all about it.

There are two or three times as many surveys of the short fiction categories this year than when I last did this exercise, five years ago. No doubt this is partly due to the excellent practice of making all the short fiction available in the Hugo Voter Packet. (Most are also available online separately, links here.) On the other hand, I had to scrabble a bit to find rankings of the novels this year (no doubt partly because of the awful length of one of the nominees), and in the end several of the lists I post in the category are more my reading between the lines of individual reviews of the novels than a formal ranking.

If any of those linked to below feel that I have mischaracterised them (or even worse, mis-identified them) in any way, please get in touch; I will attempt to alert all to this post by email and blog comments.

I have not tried to carry out this exercise for the other Hugo categories, and won’t, though I very much encourage others to try.

Short stories

Rankings

SF Strangelove: 1) The Things, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) Amaryllis, 4) Ponies
Steve the Bookstore Guy: 1) The Things, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) Ponies, 4) Amaryllis
Nick Bate: 1) The Things, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) Ponies, 4) Amaryllis
Matt Hilliard: 1) The Things, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) Ponies, 4) Amaryllis
Pete Miller: 1) The Things, 2) Amaryllis, 3) For Want of a Nail, 4) Ponies
Shawn, Steve the Bookstore Guy’s friend: 1) The Things, 2) Amaryllis, 3) For Want of a Nail, 4) Ponies
Abigail Nussbaum: 1) The Things; [my interpretation] 2) No Award, 3) For Want of a Nail, 4) Amaryllis, 5) Ponies]
Andrew Hickey: 1) The Things, 2) Ponies, 3) For Want Of A Nail, 4) Amaryllis
Me: 1) For Want of a Nail; 2) The Things; 3) Ponies; 4) Amaryllis
Stephanie S: 1) For Want of a Nail, 2) The Things, 3) Amaryllis, 4) Ponies
Pam Phillips: 1) For Want of a Nail, 2) The Things, 3) Amaryllis, 4) Ponies
“The Gregarious Loner”: 1) For Want of a Nail [no other preferences]
Ryan: 1) For Want of a Nail [no other preferences]
Alan Heuer: 1) Amaryllis, 2) The Things, 3) For Want of a Nail, 4) Ponies
Timo Pietilä: 1) Amaryllis, 2) The Things, 3) No Award, 4) For Want of a Nail, 5) Ponies
Boris Keylwerth: 1) Amaryllis, 2) For Want of a Nail, 3) The Things, 4) Ponies

Comment

A fairly clear aggregate here: eight out of sixteen favour “The Things”, and five of the other eight put it second. In the middle, ten out of sixteen put “For Want of a Nail” ahead of “Amaryllis”, and on first preferences the score is five to three for Kowal. Nine out of sixteen put “Ponies” last, and four of the other seven put it second last. I’m in a minority in putting “For Want of a Nail” first, but “The Things” will be a decent winner.

Novelettes

Rankings

SF Strangelove: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) No Award [no other preferences]
Nick Bates: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) The Emperor of Mars [no other preferences]
Abigail Nussbaum: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) The Jaguar House, In Shadow, 3) Eight Miles, 4) The Emperor of Mars, 5) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made
Pam Philips: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) The Jaguar House, in Shadow, 3) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made, 4) The Emperor of Mars, 5) Eight Miles
Pete Miller: =1) Plus or Minus, =1) The Jaguar House, in Shadow [no other preferences]
Boris Keylwerth: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) Eight Miles, 3) The Emperor of Mars, 4) The Jaguar House, in Shadow, 5) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made
Alan Heuer: 1) Plus or Minus, 2) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made, 3) Eight Miles, 4) The Emperor of Mars, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow
“The Gregarious Loner”: 1) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made, 2) Eight Miles, 3) The Emperor of Mars [no other preferences]
Shawn Steve the Bookstore Guy’s Friend: 1) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made, 2) Eight Miles. 3) The Emperor of Mars, 4) Plus or Minus, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow
Stephanie S: 1) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made, =2) Eight Miles, =2) The Jaguar House, in Shadow. 4) The Emperor of Mars, 5) Plus or Minus
Timo Pietilä: 1) The Emperor of Mars, 2) Eight Miles, 3) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made, 4) Plus or Minus, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow
Ryan: 1) The Emperor of Mars, 2) That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made, 3) Plus or Minus, 4) Eight Miles, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow
Andrew Wheeler: [I interpret slightly: 1) The Jaguar House, in Shadow, 2) Eight Miles, =3) The Emperor of Mars, =3) Plus or Minus, 5) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made]
Me: 1) Eight Miles, 2) The Emperor of Mars, 3) No Award, 4) Plus or Minus by James Patrick Kelly, 5) The Jaguar House, in Shadow, 6) That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made

Comment

This is the most open of the short fiction categories. “Plus or Minus” is the front runner, ranked top or equal top by seven of the fourteen. “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made” gets first preferences from four, but is a polarising story with another four (myself included) ranking it last. Taking all preferences into account I think “Eight Miles” is probably in second place; it got only one first preferemce (cough) but second preferences from six. “The Emperor of Mars” is possibly also ahead of “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made”. “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” is definitely in the rearguard, ranked fourth or fifth by six of the ten who went that far down their ballot paper.

Novellas

Rankings

Ryan: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window [no other preferences]
The Gregarious Loner: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 2) The Sultan of the Clouds [no other preferences]
Timo Pietilä: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Sultan of the Clouds, 4) Troika, 5) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Nick Bates: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, 4) Troika, 5) The Sultan of the Clouds
Abigail Nussbaum: 1) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, 4) The Sultan of the Clouds [no preference for Troika]
Boris Keylwerth: 1) Troika, 2) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 3) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 4) The Sultan of the Clouds, 5) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Stephanie S: 1) Troika, =2) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, =2) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, =4) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, =4) The Sultan of the Clouds
Alan Heuer: 1) Troika, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Sultan of the Clouds, 4) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, 5) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window
Me: 1) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 2) The Sultan of the Clouds, 3) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 4) Troika, 5) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Shawn, Steve the Bookshop Guy’s Friend: 1) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 2) The Sultan of the Clouds, 3) Troika, 4) The Lady Who Plucked Flowers from Beneath the Queen’s Window, 5) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon
Sf Strangelove: 1) The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, 2) The Lifecycle of Software Objects, 3) The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, 4) Troika, 5) The Sultan of the Clouds

Comment

A clear front runner, with “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” ranked top by five out of eleven and second by another two. Second place fairly clear as well: The Lifecycle of Software Objects gets two first preferences and five second preferences. It’s more difficult to tell after that. “Troika”, a polarising story, is ranked top by three and second last by four. I think “The Sultan of the Clouds” nudges ahead of “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” at the end.

Novels

Rankings

Boris Keylwerth: 1) The Dervish House
Lavinia Shadows: 1) The Dervish House, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
SF Strangelove: 1) The Dervish House, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 3) No Award
Pete Miller: 1) The Dervish House, 2) Cryoburn
Timo Pietilä: 1) The Dervish House, 2) Feed, 3) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 4) Cryoburn, 5) No Award, 6) Blackout/All Clear
Me: 1) The Dervish House, 2) Cryoburn, 3) Feed, 4) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 5) No Award, 6) Blackout/All Clear
Alan Heuer: 1) The Dervish House, 2) Blackout/All Clear, 3) Cryoburn, 4) Feed, 5) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Andrew Wheeler: 1) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 2) Feed, 3) The Dervish House, 4) Cryoburn, 5) Blackout/All Clear
Rachel Neumeier: 1) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 2) Blackout / All Clear, 3) Feed, 4) Cryoburn, 5) The Dervish House
“Married, Four Cats”: 1) Feed, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The Gregarious Loner: 1) Feed, 2) Cryoburn, 3) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Stephanie S.: 1) Cryoburn, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms 3) Feed

Comment

The Dervish House is a clear winner, rated top by seven out of twelve (and two of the other five had not actually read it). The ordering of the rest is pretty clear too: The hundred Thousand Kingdoms in second place, Feed third, Cryoburn fourth and Blackout/All Clear ranked last by three of the five who ranked it at all.

I have found this an interesting exercise (and I hope you did too): it is surprising and sometimes enlightening to see how intelligent people can react completely differently to the same texts. All but three of the nineteen nominees found someone who was prepared to put them top of their ballot paper; all have their detractors as well. If you have time I encourage you to read some of these posts, particularly the ones you may disagree with.

One of the earlier spinoff books from New Who, this pulls together the monsters of the new series and some of the best remembered opponents from Old Who – the Axons, the Zarbi, and many in between including the Rani and Omega, but not the Master specifically, though he is given a sidebar under the Dæmons. It is an interesting example of firmly branding Old Who as part of New Who continuity, and is nicely put together, if rather short.

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A splendidly creepy story of the Doctor, Amy and Rory (set between the wedding and the opening of Season 6) at a Swiss sanatorium in the late 18th century where almost nothing is as it seems. James Goss varies from entertaining to excellent as a Who writer, and this is a particularly inventive novel, told from the points of view of various narrators, including the Doctor, Amy and Rory, all of whom turn out to be unreliable in one way or the other. As with any Who-related work by Goss, this is strongly recommended.

I started it by listening to the audio version read by Clare Corbett and then realised I had the paper copy of the book, so read the last two thirds in dead tree format, really because I am a quick reader and wanted to find out what happened; Corbett’s reading, and in particular her characterisation of the different first-person narrators with their varying accents, is excellent.

Getting to the end of the books about how the Silmarillion was (and wasn’t) written now, this volume includes several interesting insights into how Tolkien’s works reached us. At the core is the rather slim pickings of The Lost Road, the time travel novel which Tolkien began at around the same time C.S. Lewis began his Ransome trilogy. Tolkien abandoned it, and it wasn’t really going in the right direction; what we have here is too episodic to be coherent, and in particular, the framing narrative has a set of slightly odd father-son dynamics going on – Tolkien’s own parents were absent, largely through being dead, and the same is true of most of his more successful characters (Bilbo’s parents are never heard of, he in turn abandons Frodo in the first chapter of LotR, Húrin is a distant captive while his son and daughter fall in love with each other) though there are exceptions (mostly father-figures who are over-controlling – Théoden, Denethor, Thingol).

The importance of father-son dynamics extends also to the making of this book, and I was particularly interested in a passage on page 302 where Christopher Tolkien expresses his regrets that the Silmarillion as originally published was not better; he reflects on the role played by Guy Gavriel Kay in assembling the texts but in the end takes full responsibility for it himself. I was not surprised to read that the story he feels was worst served is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

There’s also a lot of meaty material on the languages – an essay called the Lhammas and a set of Elvish etymologies, which brought home to me that for Tolkien his invented structure was much more than just Quenya and Sindarin, it also included half a dozen other languages spoken by different branches of the Elves, barely mentioned in the stories. I have dabbled enough in
philology to sense the uniqueness of this achievement – very few sf or fantasy writers come anywhere near Tolkien’s level of detail in his invented names and words, and some (eg Robert Jordan) are so bad at it that it’s painful.

Apart from that, we have the Fall of Númenor, and yet another rehash of the main text of the Silmarillion. I am looking forward to the next volume which is about the early versions of LotR.

A former colleague just sent me a link to this Chinese television documentary about him and his parter operating a literary coffee-house in Beijing. A nice story (part of a series about foreigners making their homes and businesses in China today) and also rather salutary to see us Westerners treated as objects of curiosity. (Filip is my former colleague – fluent in about 15 languages, including Mandarin Chinese.)

Next in the series of BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures; Fitz, Sam and the Doctor find themselves caught up in a peculiar Chinese plot to subvert flower power and Take Overr The Wurld by use of a drug grown only by oppressed Tibetan monks. The plot is slightly better than I make it sound, but only slightly. But there are a lot of good character moments for both Sam and Fitz (who briefly gets brainwashed by Maoist cadres but recovers, lucky man), which redeems it a bit.

Once again I’m behind with writing these up, mainly because I found some of these stories rather difficult to watch or to care about writing them up once I had watched them. But things had got better by the end.

I started watching the Trial of a Time Lord season in a rather foul mood. But in fact, rather to my surprise, I found myself warming to The Mysterious Planet – in relative terms, of course; it’s definitely in the lower third of Robert Holmes’ stories, and has a number of plot elements recycled from his previous scripts when he did them better. But there is a sense that the show might be finding its feet again: back to the 25-minute format, and also embedding the season in a narrative arc (which was successful last time it was tried) in which Time Lords up to no good; the basics are actually there, and I think it is the production values that let it down as much as anything. (Though I should admit that the plot is also a bit confusing and over-filled.) The Mysterious Planet is a little dull but it’s not actively bad, unlike most of the previous season.

I hold the unfashionable view that Mindwarp is much the best Sixth Doctor story. Unlike The Mysterious Planet, it is perhaps a little padded rather than crammed, but the performances make up for it – particularly Nabil Shaban and Chris Ryan, with Brian Blessed doing some excellent shouting. Also the framing narrative comes into its own here, with the Doctor as puzzled as we viewers are in some cases.

I was able to forgive many of the flaws of Earthshock because of the killing off of Adric. The destruction of Peri’s brain is a great shock moment which lifts Mindwarp from merely being good to being classic. We are building up to something shocking throughout the story, and it actually delivers; dramatically, this is not just the high point of the season, it’s the high point of the Colin Baker era.

So farewell to poor Peri. Having been listening to her excellent extended adventures courtesy of Big Finish over the last few years (where Nicola Bryant has now started directing stories as well as appearing in them), it’s rather a shock to return to how poorly she was served in the original scripts. The Peri/Six dynamic never comes quite right, and she bears all the hallmarks of being trapped in an abusive bullying relationship. Nicola Bryant is very pleasant to watch, but the same cannot be said for what is done to her character. (Apart, as stated above, from her dramatic demise. Up until the start of this year, my personal fanon was that Peri actually does die, and the story with King Hyrcanos is made up to make the Doctor feel better; but Big Finish’s Peri and the Piscon Paradox has persuaded me that there is more than one satisfactory way to answer that question.)

Apart from the Vervoids themselves, Terror of the Vervoids isn’t all that bad. There are good guest appearances (Honor Blackman being the most remarkable), Mel is a welcome change of tone if somewhat abruptly added to the show, and the plot is a decent claustrophobia / paranoia / base under siege combination. The Vervoids are unfortunately dull, obviously zipped into their suits and not very plant-like, but again they are not the worst of the monsters of Who. Where the story goes off the rails is the framing narrative, where it simply becomes confusing as to how the Doctor has access to future adventures, why he should be on trial now for something he hasn’t done yet, and why we should be particularly outraged if the Matrix has been hacked.

And then The Ultimate Foe is a poor farewell to a misused Doctor. There is little good to be said of it – Eric Saward’s original script for the second episode makes more sense than Pip and Jane Baker’s version as broadcast, but that is not saying much. The Valeyard’s role does become clear, and actually interesting, but the back-story of Time Lord politics simply becomes confusing and the means and motivation of the Master, crucial to what passes for a plot, are even less comprehensible than usual. (And we have the cop-out of Peri’s faked death, which kills the drama of the only interesting development of the entire season.)

When I started this rewatch, Colin Baker was firmly at the bottom of my list of favourite Doctors; I’m afraid he is still there, at least as far as his TV performance goes. The character is simply an unattractive one, and Baker is not able to invest him with sufficient heroism to overcome this (cf Pertwee, who for similar reasons is second last in my ranking, but was able to turn on the charm a bit more often). It’s far from being all Baker’s fault; the decision to have him assault Peri in his very first episode is a disastrous one which taints that story and most subsequent ones for me; the bizarre way in which the camera habitually zooms in on him pulling a funny face as the closing music rolls becomes very tedious very fast; and even what we thought we knew about the Doctor’s background in Time Lord continuity is undermined for no terribly good reason (I think Six has proportionally more stories with fellow time lords than any other Doctor, including One and Four who actually had Gallifreyan companions). Part of this is the mis-writing of the Peri/Doctor dynamic, but then things actually deteriorate in terms of production values and coherence once she has been killed off.

Having said that, Baker does rather well in the Big Finish audios – it’s a cliche, I know, but I do recommend Peri and the Piscon Paradox, Bloodtide, The Doomwood Curse, Brotherhood of the Daleks, Paper Cuts, Jubilee, and The Wormery. I also recommend, if you can find it, Colin Baker’s continuation of Peri’s story, The Age of Chaos.

And suddenly we have a new Doctor, as well as a new companion. Time and the Rani is widely excoriated as the worst of the Seventh Doctor era (coming bottom of the poll I ran a few years back and third last in the DWM Mighty 200 poll) but I don’t quite see that (granted, I have a couple of other heterodox views on this period of the programme). It’s a bit unexciting – the Rani’s evil plan consists more of exposition than action, and the Tetraps are not well executed – but at least one can understand what is going on, and most of the cast seem to want to do it well.

And McCoy’s Doctor is rather a breath of fresh air – once again I find I am watching the show because I want to see what he will do or say next, a feeling I haven’t really had since Tom Baker’s departure. I still don’t think that Time and the Rani is terribly good, but it seems to me unfarily underrated.

And suddenly we seem to have a complete step change with Paradise Towers, a glorious story which merges comedy and horror – Richard Briers dressed up as a Hitler-like bureaucrat; girl gangs with extraordinary slogans; cannibalistic little old ladies; a hero who isn’t terribly heroic; an evil architect and a swimming pool. I don’t know what it is, but there is a sudden injection of energy and confidence into the show at this point that, in my view, lasts for most of the rest of Old Who’s run. The Doctor may not have much of a clue as to what is going on, but we are urging him to work it out and we get there at much the same time as he does. My daily watching of the old episodes has become a pleasure again, rather than a chore.

So, farewell to Six, but ending on a more optimistic note than I have done for a while. Also feeling slightly elegiac in that I know there will be only two more of these posts.

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